As for Yoshie, although I disagree with her very often (e.g. on Afghanistan) and think she is too ready to see an evil US hand in everything, I think she certainly believes what she says and is very intelligent, and I certainly would not say that she is a bullshitter. I also don't have much sympathy for Pug's self-righteousness.
--- Luke Weiger <lweiger at umich.edu> wrote: On Dafur, I think Daniel Davies' comments are well-worth paying attention to. Yoshie's aren't. This might seem like an odd position given that there's so much overlap between Daniel's and Yoshie's views. The distinction is as follows: Daniel's musings are reflections. Yoshie's are talking points. Many leftists are fond of comparing Bush's fundamentalism with Bin Laden's, and they inevitably find that there are no differences worth paying attention to. Comparisons of this sort are seriously misguided and obviously so--the difference in degree (if perhaps not kind) between Bush's nutty religious fanaticism and Bin Laden's is as large as the gap between an unfortunate child's two front teeth. On the other hand, Bush actually is _just like_ Yoshie in a very important respect. As Colbert frequently pointed out, Bush doesn't really care about facts. Neither does Yoshie. She obviously takes Marx's dictum that the real goal is to change the world very seriously, and when it appears instrumentally useful to misrepresent the world, that's what she'll do. As Harry Frankfurt would recognize, Yoshie's a masterful bullshitter.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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