Strange Famous

I dont want to thread jack.. but the terms would have meant very different things to Churchil than they would mean to a modern American. Still, perhaps you are right, after all Churchill was a member of both the liberal and conservative party, although ideologically they are very close.

Still, to back to the thread's main point - at the end of the day to be brainless rather than heartless is a choice I make. Maybe when I pass 30 I'll think different!

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"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

ARTelevision

SF - you put that very well. And there is something undeniable about the polarities. All my refeferences to context do indicate that I take public positions in relation to history and the positions of my colleagues - if I see a groundswell in one direction, I work to stake out the validity of an opposing position because I think the best directions must be combinations of the polarities involved - especially as regards the opinions of good people.

If we were entrusted with legislative positions, you and I, it would be incumbent upon us to work out agreements toward mutually agreeable progress.

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create evolution

roachboy

i wonder about how some segment of people have shifted from opposition (political and/or cultural and/or affective) to cheerleading the order they once opposed---maybe one thing that happens is that the spaces bundled in parentheses get split apart along the way, or the notion of opposition gets reconfigured, or maybe something just happens that disillusions---the narratives would always be particular---but i wonder about how people who have made this shift think about their psychological and political trajectories, either as they are doing it or after the fact.
it is a complex transition, i imagine--i wonder how folk rationalize it.

one thing for sure--winston churchill has nothing of interest to say about it.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

I watched my friends and colleagues – radical, anarchist, ultra-liberal, intellectual, creative individuals move unchanged from decade to decade. I saw that as quite the oddity, as the world changes daily.

In addition, I came to doubt my own life-long convictions because I could not separate those instilled in me by decades of so-called “alternative” media, which in time, I saw become the assumptions of mainstream media because the biases of my friends, peers, and colleagues were carried along with them directly into it.

At some point, I decided that my identity was my essential aesthetic creation. Since then, I have consciously crafted it and it exists as does any other text – in a constant state of evolution, flux, and re-interpretation.

My convictions today are the result of life-experience, introspection, and the creative application of aesthetic principles.

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create evolution

roachboy

interesting--in my case i became more politically radical as i got older--but the political aspects move and have moved along a line seperate from making sonic chaos...the two paths chatter back and forth to each other, but they dont have any more direct link that i can determine.
alot of the above has to do i think with finding the effects of growing up in a small new hampshire town were much deeper than i had imagined, and that a political awareness, for me at least, had to wait until fighting against that inherited frame of reference played itself out. things started as inchoate rebellion, gradually that dropped away, eventually was replaced by a much different kind of relation to the world around me.

the diversion in the thread might be interesting--once it became a kind of metaconversation, i started thinking about the conditions that inform problems with talking constructively (or keeping that inmind as a possibility when things turn polemical) and realized that the complications that come up are probably symptoms of the ways in which people come to fashion political positions/worldviews (politics as a way of extending local experience outward, of framing it, as a mode of trying to process the world)--and that the discussion seemed from there to lead to questions of how people make these positions for themselves, where they moved from, where they moved to, what prompted the shift, how they see their own pasts, etc.

and the same thought lead to a consideration of limits on how self-aware people might be on this kind of shift--not that people do not know, but that they look at their positions from the inside...but it would seem less an inevitable relation for folk who have shifted more across their lives.

so discussion about discussion seems to lead to trying to talk about the kind of relations that structure discussion. dont know if this is the best place to pose this order of question--but i would be interested to see what came of it, should folk react here or in another thread....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

Yes, roachboy - do us the honor if you would, of posing this sort of thing in a thread of its own. Some might say it is philosophy, but the philosophy of politics belongs here in this forum, as far as I'm concerned, because there is a real need for it here.

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create evolution