>G'day Nathan,
>I'm currently swayed by Counterpunch's thesis:'foreseeable-in-theory-but-
>unforeseen-by-those-rendered-innocent-by-their-reliance-upon-and-trust-in
>American-commercial-media-for-their-view-of-the-world-and-their-nation-stat
e's p
>lace-in-it'.
Yes, exactly the position that the Left uses (as I noted in my last post on syllogism 3) to deny that talking about causality and government responsibility implies any culpability by the dead citizens who voted for that government.
It's a nice theory, but it's obvious problem are the mass numbers of movies and TV shows having to be shelved or rewritten as we speak, because their events too closely resembled Sept 11. Foreseeability of crazy Arabs blowing shit up in the US out of resentment for US policy is one of the things that is emphasized in the mass media constantly. Anyone see THE SIEGE (which actually had both the antiterrorism and the pro-tolerance for Islam message that we've seen these last weeks)?
So it is not foreseeability that is in dispute. It is only and exclusively causality. Did these actions of Sept 11 have a causal relationship to US policy? If they did, then the mass media has fully informed the public of the likely consequences.
So how does the Left defend the virtue of the working class while demonizing its elected leaders?
Nice trick if you can pull it off?
But then I tend to both blame and credit average folks for both the bad and the good policies our government engages in. In war, I hold civilian populations of democracies responsible and therefore am far more accepting of terrorism as a legitimate weapon of war, if done with the same proportionate restraint I think required for any use of military force.
There may be imperfect causal relations between voter desires and who gets elected, but that causal relationship is far stronger than the ones being argued for by the left in the case of Sept 11. So the public's responsibility for its actions is therefore also strong.
The American people don't buy the "oh, poor deluded us" defense for themselves. So they don't buy the Left telling them that. They know corporate interests have too much influence and that the US government does bad things, but most of them vote for the politicians anyways, based on lesser-evil choices. Those with no sympathy for why they make those electoral choices are more comfortable treating them as pawns rather than political actors in their own right.
So the Cockburn line is cute in a sophistic line and may work in conversations among the Naderite purists, but for the other 97% of the population, it's awfully unconvincing.
-- Nathan Newman