> ideological claims are empirical claims and as
>empirical claims they stand or fall as the empirical evidence shows
the
>truth or falsity of the claim. I know of no other way of proceeding.
>Consider the statement "the URNG provoked the Guatemalen Army into
>committing genocide against sectors of its own population. The
genocide
>in Guatemala was thus the fault of the URNG and not the military."
This
>political/ideological claim is an empirical claim. The empirical
evidence
>show that it is false. Given that it is false, why is it being
>disseminated by the intelligentsia and why is it believed when all
>evidence points to the contrary?
another example would be - and it's still my favourite one: 'by the year 2050, 80% of the Australian population will be asian'. now, the empiricist riposte to this has been: 'no, this is wrong. all estimates show that by the year 2050, only 30% of the Australian population will be asian'.
leaving aside for a moment the obvious problem with this reply - that if someone is a citizen of australia they are Australian; it has always struck me that to respond to the empiricism of the claim with another empiricism would be to leave the racism of the first claim intact, namely: that it would indeed be a problem if 'asians' were in australia. the issue then becomes how many 'asians' does it take to change 'our way of life'.
that is, this is a lie, but it is more than that, which is why it is repeated, in the form of different (if less menacing, but nonetheless repeated) calculations.
and, we all know that the claim of the victim provoking the murderer only really works if those who are victims have shifted from being the affable, mute victims that the 'west's' gaze is prepared to sympathise with, to active refusers of victimhood. those who say 'basta!' are no longer worthy of sympathy, since they couldn't even have hoped for empathy. (which is why the hunger strike by jennifer (I can't recall her surname) was astute.)
angela