>But wasn't Doug's response (the challenge) directed at your misreading
>of his 'that's not how it will work' thesis?* He was, by my reading,
>proposing an argument that would grow a movement positive rather than
>one that would grow a movement toward self destruction #
>(Malthusian?<g>).
>(or maybe not)
I'm already way over limit today so I'll be taking tomorrow and maybe the rest of the weekend off.
It's entirely possible that Doug's response was directed at what he felt was my misreading. With regard to that misreading, though, I bracketed it as a misreading of Doug's message "I know it's just a figure of speech" and aimed it at the general conduct of discourse, "what underlies everyone's opinion." You see, my premise is that _every_ reading is in some sense a misreading. Even if you agreed 100% with what I said, you probably didn't but simply elided the part you didn't agree with.
If we can all agree that "you weren't paying attention to what I said" is one of the most common experiences we have in a discussion then maybe we can start to move on to something creative. Recall that one of the subject headings for this thread includes the refrain, "why can't you guys learn to quote and attribute properly". It is, of course, "you guys" who are doing the misquoting, the misattribution, the misreading and the misunderstanding. It's a Rodney King moment, "Why can't everybody just get along?" And precisely what will accomplish nothing at this point is to issue the admonision: "be more respectful in your reading, be more accurate in your quotes" because as everyone knows, they _are_ respectful and accurate, it is the you guys who keep fucking up.
Indeed, Doug was proposing a positive movement rather than a self-destructive one. He was proposing what he defines as a positive movement in contrast to what he defines as a negative direction. And we can all do the same. That's what we've been doing with all of our definitions at odds with each other so all of our conclusions about what is a positive and what is destructive are in conflict. And we can either attribute that inevitable conflict to bad faith or bad data or we can try to be creative about the inevitability of the conflict.
And let's take your parenthetical question as a case in point. (Malthusian) Now it may seem that "we all know what that means". Malthus was some grimy old 19th century misanthrope who did geometrical projections on the back of an envelope and thereby condemned the working class to perpetual poverty. Or maybe Malthus had some other stuff to say that influenced Keynes vis a vis the inoperability of Say's law. Or maybe Malthusian has nothing to do with Thomas Malthus but refers to those wacko Club of Rome tales from the 1970s about the Limits to Growth. Or maybe those Club of Rome tales got it 90% right but all we hear about are the geometrical projections. Or maybe... but you can take your pick and come up with just about any nuance of interpretation you need. Marx, Freud, the Bible. Pick an authority. Pick an interpretation. For or against.
Let's try something a bit more obscure. Jevon's paradox: technological improvement to increase the efficiency of resource use may increase rather than decrease the consumption of that resource. A corollary to that is that localized solutions to global problems may make solution of the global problem more difficult. O.K. maybe there's more to it than that. But the point is that "solving a problem" isn't all that easy even if we all agree (we think) on a way to solve it. So maybe that explains, in part, why it's hard to agree on what the solution is or even what the problem is. In fact, it may be that our biggest problems today are, in essence, the "solutions" that we are stuck with from previously misdefined problems.
If I say the problem may be unsolvable I don't want people to think that is pessimistic. It may be unsolvable because it doesn't really need to be solved as a problem. Maybe we already have everything we need for another way of doing things and we simply have to get through certain illusions about needs we don't really have. And that could be wrong. But then maybe we are more likely to "stumble" onto a solution while we are being creative that we are to "deduce" one from an analysis of the problem, particularly given the difficulty of defining the problem. And if we, on this list can't agree on what the problem is, what is the likelihood we'll be delighted with, say, Dick Cheney's definition of the problem? And even though we'll all be united in our rejection of that definition -- night follows day -- we won't be able to agree on just what about it is most objectionable.
The Sandwichman