daswig

Correct. But where the problem comes in is that people have forgotten that civil disobedience carrys a pricetag. "Disobedience" is synonymous with "breaking the law", and that does indeed carry penalties. What cheeses me off are the younger generation that think they can commit acts of civil disobedience without getting smacked by the repercussions, and that such lack of consequences is their RIGHT.

If you decide to practice civil disobedience, that's A-OK by me. But you should expect to get your ass beaten and thrown in jail, and not bitch about it when it happens. Hey, if it was good enough for MLK, it's good enough for you.

Mephisto2

Did John Edwards really say that? I presume it was before Reeve died, but all the same...

Silly person.


Mr Mephisto

daswig

yeah, John Edwards actually said that. It's not even a paraphrase, it's a direct quote.

Mephisto2

Wow. Imagine that!

A politican who says something stupid. It's a good job that doesn't preclude you from being President, eh?



At least we agree it was a silly thing to have said.


Mr Mephisto

thefictionweliv

This is just a rebuttal to the tired argument that "if you think we have it bad go to __(insert 3rd world country)_________". Just cause they have it worse/we have it better does not make it right. Bush and Kerry are both lesser of two evil candidates, the victor doesn't become right when he wins. Say as we inch closer and trad on a little liberty everytime something happens we will eventually end up in the fire. You don't jump into a swimming pool if you don't want the shock of realizing how fucking cold it is. You ease your way in until your all the way there and its normal and find. So we are going to tread on a little liberty at a time to the point where we are soaked in a pool of government regulation that runs every facet of our life.

That may be the day you envy a third world country. With the technology and resources of the United States it would certainly make some militant junkie keeping you in your home. In the US with the amount of media we have it would be an endless stream of shit shoved into your head, the technology to track your every move. They won't even need the guard at the corner. It will infest your home and your life.

This is not where we are at now, but a future possibly. Its The Patriot Act now. Maybe Communication Regulation for Freedom Act next, the Public Disarment for Liberty Amendmant, and the Embedded Identification Act of 2025.

thefictionweliv

If cival disobedience didn't have consequences it wouldn't be very disobedient now would it o.0. Non violent disobedience is a productive form to institute change. I mean what is a night in jail is nothing really when it comes to supporting a cause you are passionate about. While you are violating the law civil disobedience isn't looked at as inherently wrong by society as rather a welcome part of it weather you are involved or not.

hammer4all

Yeah, taken out of context to change its meaning...

"If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again," Edwards said.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...rds.stem.cell/

irateplatypus

roachboy,

this really isn't a literary criticism thread... but the perspective given in 1984 seems to be different from the typical dickens method. the reader isn't given much of any information except the protagonist's direct experiences. i wouldn't go as far as you did to discount our ability to recognize orwellian constructs as they happen.

for those who have been following this thread... i think 1984 has not provided a very good outline our progress (or regress). while it's an interesting piece of fiction, Huxley produced a novel far more relevant to postmodernity.

quite honestly, i think it's a copout to discount so many critical observations based on the idea that truth in such social situations is not knowable like cthulu and roach appear to do. that kind of argument is always employed to temper the propositions of another, never a lense in which ones own opinions are viewed. although i won't begin to refute the concept in its entirety (i believe it to have real validity), the application of such principles are often too crude.

__________________
If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

~ Winston Churchill

daswig

How does that extra clause change it's meaning? Edwards is saying that if John Kerry is elected President, the crippled will walk.

hammer4all

The subject of the sentence is "the work" (i.e. stem cell research), not John Kerry. This is the stuff you learn in 2nd Grade.

daswig

Heh. All you've got is a sentence diagram argument? Edwards said that if Kery is elected president, the crippled will walk. That's bullshit. If Bush or Cheney said the same thing, you'd be all over it.

hammer4all

No, I wouldn't. Evidently, I put a much higher value on intellectual honesty than you.

cthulu23

Although your assumptions about my own beliefs are quite incorrect (I apply my beliefs to my own life more so than anyone else's), I think that you're missing the point. Given that that the concept of "reality" is a relative social construct it becomes easier to understand how forces of dominion or authority can be accepted without any concious understanding that these forces exist at all. This is "true" regardless of whether one lives in a totalitarian state or a relatively free democratic society.

roachboy

irate:
on genre policing (this is not a literary criticism thread)---given that the whole thread was spawned around an attempt to use orwell's novel as a metaphor for understanding (rather, beginning to understand--staging might be a better word) something of the conditions that obtain in the states right now, it seems fair game to talk about the text from which that metaphor is derived. if you cannot do that, then the metaphor is worthless as an analytic device, the activity of mapping from one genre to another a waste of time.

what i meant when i equated orwell to a dickens novel is that it is told in more or less classic realist fashion, with you are a reader put in the position of transcendent spectator made privy to orwell's staging of oceania and his reason for doing so at once. so you are outside the main action, having it interpreted for you as you move through the text. your relation to that text as a reader and your relation to the political evironment in which you find yourself is therefore fundamentally different...at which point my argument would converge with cthulu's immediately above.

in a better, more democratic space, it would be obvious that politics is a variant of fundamental philosophy--it can and should involve consideration of yourself, your relation to the world and the modes of posing questions to and about any and all of the relations implied by these terms. trying to limit the kinds of questions that can be posed and the type of materials used to pose those questions is symptomatic of the impoverished state of discourse in the states--which itself is an index of and device for legitimating (by making critique difficult to impossible for many) of precisely the domination that we are talking about.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Mephisto2

Well, I'm afraid I'm actually with Hammer on this one. The quotation, or actually misquotation, is entirely misleading.

In the sig it is started with a capital "When Kerry is President...", implying a complete sentence.

I shouldn't really be surprised at this kind of blatant dishonesty on the part of Bush-lackeys... And to think that I took this quote at face value. Silly me.


Mr Mephisto