No kidding! Not only that, but as our psycho-analysts will hasten to tell us, it is our primitive inability to accept it that prevents us to taking the first step to recovery! ;-) What is interesting also to me is the issues of ownership of the narrative or perhaps rather the foundation (the ideas, the words, etc -- such as what medicine is, what 'racism' is, and so on). In another thread, you have a few folks talking about people in other parts flocking to religious extremism when given a chance at democracy, followed by ruminations on whether democracy is possible for these people at all, etc. Having lost outright physical ownership of the brown or black human the thrust seems to be to retain control in the mental realm (of thought and expression: we know what you are *really* thinking, and this is what you are *really* saying, etc).
Joanna writes:
>
> What is interesting to me is that neither side can see a reason to
> make an effort to find out what actually happened. One side deems the
> call for an investigtation "racism" and the other calls it "treason."
> I hear noise both ways.
>
Perhaps this is because the two sides are not only trying to shout each other down so much that they are committed, consciously or unconsciously to binary (bipolar?) positions and to using noise as a tool (I would do the latter too, probably, if I had to deal with the right on a regular basis!). When the right uses particular devices or wordplay to divert the issue we are able to see their action for what it is. But when "we" introduce more subtle elements of psycho-analysis and motive-hunting *at the cost* of the ongoing, unresolved, rational issues, we too are clouding the issue. Perhaps this is what pisses some philosophers off about pomo (Paul Feyerabend refers to Derrida as an obscurantist ;-)). We saw examples of this in the prior thread on "alternative" medicine where most of the challenges (on fact and reasoning) were not addressed.
--ravi
P.S: though Joanna mentions calls for an investigation, as I have made clear multiple times, no such was implied in my original post (though, at a philosophical level, money and time permitting, re-investigation of theories is mostly a good idea), which was a simple question of where my reasoning was missing or what bit of my data/assumptions was wrong.
P.P.S: I do not usually fork threads into meta-discussions of the original thread and/or its participants, but it seems the best way to counter such misappropriation.
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