``...recent material on this list has been interesting: the wonders of ... democracy. the shooting of an innocent person by ...."accident" ... male feelings of impotence as a primary cause of the london bombing...'' ravi
``Sometimes, one voice, or set of voices, gets a bit louder making it easy to feel the mood has shifted in one direction or another. But, this isn't necessarily the case.'' .d.
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IMO, it isn't the list, it's the state of the country, and the state of political discourse in general. We've been swamped for years on end with the ideological propaganda machine of the Right and it has distorted our perceptions, insights, and ability to think---or at least it has done so to me.
My own reaction has been extreme hatred of the Right and anything American in general, which of course destorys my ability to think. Nevertheless, I keep trying to figure out the process---how I arrived at such an impass.
Here's my answer.
The political arena has been made un-inhabitable through a basic (and Nazis) technique that is deeply related to ad hominem attacks. The technique shifts the terms of rhetorical confrontation from the ideal of an enlightened argument between political adversaries over how to change material conditions based on facts, to a pitched battle of values v. facts. With the introduction of values, most argument quickly leaves the terrain of fact behind and draws down on which of the two combatants are good or evil (the ad hominem part).
The Right has manufactured and promoted a value scheme that they claim represents Traditional America Values, and so any attack on their position is by default anti-American and therefore evil. The liberal progressives and the left continue their usual mode of critique of the status quo with more and more facts, reports, statistics and concrete descriptions of material conditions, but all to no avail. No statement of empirical fact can defeat a statement of value and no pronouncement on values will erase concrete facts because the two realms of discourse are rationally incommensurable.
We see this process or something similar to it, intuitatively used here on lbo over vegetarian diets. The arguments so far have made limited reference to human physiological facts and have tended toward a value laden discourse. There is the ever present possibility that the discussion could quickly descend down to an opposition of values: good v. evil. Plants = Good, Meat = Evil. (This is almost straight out of the Pythagorean school, despite the Enlightenment inspired anthropological nuances to naturalize it.)
Of course evil meat eating killers v good plant eating lovers of peace and harmony is a cartoon or theater. But it helps illustrate how political discourse is literally turned into a theater production.
The merging of news media with theater and the two together blended into mass propaganda is fundamental to the way mass political ideologies are promolgated and manipulated by all political and economic interests everywhere in the world. In this mass garbage disposal blend, nobody needs to know or understand the facts of any controversey, event, or condition. All they need is an opinion in order to render judgements and critiques---as if they were living in a grand theater production. Of course everybody has an opinion or they can come up with one in a hurry as long as the news provides the general contours of who is Good and who is Evil. You can tell who is Evil because they always appear first and then are defeated by Good who appears second and has the last say in any storey.
Another interesting aspect to this process of making political discourse un-inhabitable by reason, is that in a fundamental sense there can not be an opposition of facts. If there is an opposition of two facts, then logically one of them or both them are not true. Facts unlike characters in a drama are not right or wrong, good or bad. They are either true or not true. You can have an opinion about a fact, but that opinion has no truth value that can add to or degrade the status of a fact as true or not true. The blurring through rhetoric rather than rational argument of the distinction between fact and value, makes it possible to erode the truth of fact by the promolgation of mere opinions.
In the rational obverse, there is no such thing as a true or false value, just as there is no such thing as a true or false opinion. Values and opinions are liked or disliked, held or not held, agreed to, or disagreed with as matters of judgement. You can't agree or disagree with a fact. You either believe a fact is true or not true. Just because you believe a fact is not true, doesn't make it not true. You have to come up with another fact and explain how its validity displaces the fact you wish to disprove.
The lead up to war, its execution, and the current status of on Iraq has been a classic example of what happens to a polity when facts and values are set in opposition as if these were interchangible comodities. The rightwing US government automatically assumed that the value of making war on Iraq could, would and did supersede any rational appaisal of facts and material conditions. The obvious fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, al qaeda, or jihadists, had no WMD, and had little or no reason to threaten the US---and couldn't even if it wanted to---were all irrelevant. The fact that the US military invasion force was tiny and completely inadequate compared to the potential resistance that could be mounted against them also meant nothing. These are mere facts and we all know facts are stupid things. If truth (as in facts on the ground) is the first causality of war, and war is politics by other means, then obviously truth is also the first causality of the politics of war.
So, ultimately we get to the bottom of political discursive degredation where the horror ridden facts of torture and murder in Abu Ghraib are made completely irrelevant by the overwhelming value, the greater Good, of bringing democracy to Iraq.
By following the trace of fact v. value we arrive at how the Right through its insistance that values are more important than facts, has succeeded in convincing the US polity that their ideology is traditional, mainstream, and democratic.
The rational work of reading, understanding, apprasing facts and narratives on material conditions, and arriving at a conclusion that may involve re-adjusting thought and perception to accord is all work and no fun. It is the rational work of citizenship in an enlightened democratic society. Most people don't do it. However, almost everybody has an opinion or a quick and dirty view on matters at hand based on stereotypes and common sense as long as a brief dramatic sketch is provided by mass media in the form of propagandistic theater. So then it follows since most people don't bother with a well reasoned thought gained from considering matters of fact, that such thought is elitist and anti-democratic thought. It is in short a liberal thought and obviously represents an elitist minority view. Few people do it, so it must be elitist. It is all to the greater good that such elitist views should never persuade those who hold opinions derived solely from that great well spring of creativity, the Right's Traditional American Values.
The great privilage of Traditional American Values follows from mythological reasoning in which the greater good is plain in its truth, absolute, easy to understand, and knows no nuance, whereas evil, dark and vile thoughts are complexity itself, not entirely absolute, difficult to grasp and are interpenetrated with endless nuances of meaning. In other words, un-American values come from multiculturalism, relativity of values, and the discordant, siren voices of chaos and disorder.
Since everybody has an opinion, and holders of clear opinions out number those who have some knowledge of facts, it is a first principle of Democracy that such opinion holders should rule. So, then anyone who claims to represent holders of such opinions will speak for a majority and such representatives can legitimately claim they are greater believers in democracy, since they represent majority opinion holders, rather than the elitist minority, those awful liberal fact checkers.
As the US mass media has discovered all quietude, order, light, good, and harmony from singing OM to capitalism and the US Nazis Right.
(I gotta post this before I finish reading the Vegetarian thread. Just hilarious...)
CG