>>> jf noonan <jfn1 at msc.com> 05/24/00 03:20PM >>>
On Wed, 24 May 2000, Charles Brown wrote:
>
>
> >>> Rob Schaap <rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au> 05/24/00 12:35AM >>>
> G'day Charles,
[snippage]
> misrepresented to us (I mean why should North Korea be any
> different?), but North Korea's polity is an outrage against
> Marxist principles no less than it is against Brad's liberal
> ones.
>
> ___________
>
> CB: You are begging the question. What you assert in your
> last sentence is the issue in dispute, which you cannot
> settle by merely asserting your position.
So would you like to explain what is good about North Korea's polity? Particularly the bit about how it is true to Marxist(tm) principles?
)))))))))))))))))))
CB: Basically, it has kept the imperialists out. That's a major democratic plus right there.
Otherwise , isn't there a big thread going on right now in which Tim Shorrock is giving lots of answers to your question. For example the following:
By the way, the 'historical process' that led to the deployment of the US army was first and foremost the Cold War and had nothing to do with what was happening on the ground in Korea. At the time, given the all-out US support for Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese colonialists, anybody with any sense of nationalism or even pride in Korea was a leftist or communist simply because there was nowhere else to go. Cumings' work in The Origins of the Korean War give graphic accounts of this period, including the still-hidden history of the 1946 US-led counter-revolution on the island of Cheju, where tens of thousands of South Koreans were killed because they refused to disband their independent government (a search on Korea Web Weekly provides deep background on that period as well).
> CB: Natch, you are both kinda liberals, why wouldn't you
> agree all the time ?
It's nice the way you have such a neat taxonomy of everybody. I'm sure it comes in handy for you to be able to decide who is a liberal and who is a ________.
___________
CB: Lets see , sarcasm. No, my categories are not simpler than yours in the sense that my analysis would be less sophisticated, nuanced , creative, alive, alert, and complex than yours. In other words, no you do not think about these issues more intelligently than I, nor is your analysis more realistic.
On the other hand , I don't have unnecessary complexity.
So, for example the political spectrem includes liberals etc.
Thinking in categories ( your "taxonomy") is fundamental to logical thought. So, what you say above is a false caricature of my ordinarily logical approach. I mean what are you talking about ? Are you in favor of sloppy, instead of "neat" thinking ? Duh.
Repeat , you don't have a more complex, subtle, unsimplistic , or creative approach. You are the one with dogmatic thinking compared to my thinking.
CB
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