> [WS:] This conversation, not the first one of this kind I may add,
> goes more or less like this:
>
> Wojtek: Drive carefully, the road is slippery.
>
> Alan: Hey what are you talking about, mister chicken little fed on the
> functionalist fodder? You seem to forget that there are powerful
> atmospheric forces out there, as environmentalists, climatologists and
> global warming scientists told us...blah blah blah
> And all that _you_ can talk about is a slippery road?
>
> Wojtek: Whatever. Just stop and let me out.
>
> Look man, I'll stop pointing out inconsistencies when they stop showing up
on my doorstep so often.
You are right, variations on a theme by this conversation have happened
before and yet you keep
sending us material the self-destructs on investigation. Which makes it all
the less surprising that
- again - you've tsk tsked me rather than address anything I wrote. I made clear why Ravi's position is more attractive to me and where yours struck me as problematic and you have no come back.
If you wanted to beat back the argument I made, the way to do so was to say that Bernal and a lot of those others are too deterministic w/r/t technology and that no single tool need be used either as intended by its makers or have traditional consequences under different conditions.
This, then, would show some nuance, would actually deal with what was said, and would lead you to a different position - one where 1) any particular technology is simultaneously problematic given its production and of potential alternative utility, 2) some technologies are more flush with alternative uses and consequences than others and 3) the key is to be able to discern how political people might come to understand these complexities, operationalize technological potential and simultaneously reconstruct social relations, the production of landscapes, the technologies of production and reproduction and the dynamics of technonatural existence... of course, you'd then have to have some faith in the people, which you have repeatedly stated you don't have.