--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Doug:
> > Man, you are an unsympathetic stiff-necked
> moralist. Is that true of
> > all the Santa Cruz hippies, or are you an outlier?
>
> I think you missed his point, Doug. We are a nation
> of "twinkie defense"
> excuse makers - there is an army of professional
> excuse makers supplying
> every imaginable excuse for every conceivable kind
> of slack, delinquency,
> vice, or dereliction of duty. The bottom line is,
> however, that people
> should be responsible for their actions, whether
> they had to go uphill to
> school both ways or not. It is common sense. What
> is so moralistic about
> it?
The "should" is what's so moralistic. (Common sense, as we know it, is dependent on the social milieu of the time: in 17th century America, it was "common sense" that black people were inferior, and meant to be slaves.) The real question is, in capitalist society, whether people WILL be responsible for their actions. Oprah Winfrey fairy tales aside, the answer is invariably no.
SHOULD Lynndie England have taken a post in the army, following heinous orders, getting harrassed every day, to support her family? Irrelevant. WILL many in the working class do so, when left with few options and massive propaganda favoring a single side of one's "personal decisions"? Absolutely. Surely no one would go so far as to imply that the rank and file of the army, mainly working class, and people of color, and increasingly female, is morally decrepit-- unless you're a liberal or conservative, that is...
Any attempt to divorce Lynndie England as an autonomous individual acting indepent of a socio-historical context is anti-working class.
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