RE: wow - is a "shadow" politician still a politician?

["Chris Blask" <chris () loftyperch com>]

Hi folks!
 
Once more into the breach, dear friends...

> Drsolly [drsollyp () drsolly com]; Wed 8/29/2007 5:28 PM

.d.
> > I am more than a little sick of the popular hobby of using ideals that I hold
> > very dear to insult me and everything I believe in.

> If your ideals are wrong, then that's not too surprising. So, are your
> ideals wrong?

Lost me on that one, mate.  The ideals are simply the use of reason and the realization that human individuals are 
competent.  Hard for me to see how those could be wrong, and the implications of them being correct is the root of this 
entire debate (and in fact imo The Great Debate of Mankind for the last century or so, anyway).  If they are incorrect 
then all the Central Planning branches of philosophy are correct (socialism, genetic aristocracy, dictatorship...), but 
empirical evidence does not seem to support that.

> Again, you've extrapolated from "I'm glad I'm not American" to "tolerant
of all but Americans". You folks really need to get a grip on your socks -
not everyone loves you, and not everyone hates you. Many folks are very
happy to live where they do, in the regime they're used to, in the climate
they're accustomed to, and we're pretty much indifferent to whether
Americans want a dozen guns per family and are willing to put up with the
concomitant level of gun crime. See, it doesn't affect us.

I may have over-pounced on your comment in its context, but as I've noted it was just a nicely placed softball which I 
chose for a variety of reasons to swing at.  You cannot deny all the implications behind the fact that you would make 
such a statement nor that it might be fair to say that you would not make the same statement in regards to a different 
culture.  Regardless, your little aside was just a lapping on the beach amidst an ocean of snide pop-culture commentary 
which begs to have its monotonously predictable rhythm disturbed.
 
Reason and equality demand that I view the universe and what it contains pragmatically to achieve goals.  If I assume 
that other humans are like me and capable of figuring things out on their own then applying arbitrary incapacities on 
arbitrary groups is a failure on my part to make rational choices.  Your comment seems to indicate that you are 
suffering from just that failure, which I believe is a common and worrisome fault in popular thinking.

.d.
> Certainly I can say "The rich history and culture of America". Irony is
something we Brits are good at.

Indeed.  It's precisely the thing that I both most admire and that most frustrates me about modern British culture.  
There can be a tendency to be so good at it to successfully moot efforts at honest discourse, which can be bad.  On the 
flipside, the rational Victorian meme-structure that enables the subtle recognition of irony is both the keel of 
British cultural success and the primary memetic strain passed on to US culture providing much of what makes us what we 
are.  But that aside...
 
The point I may not be making clearly enough is that the current environment of discourse is laden with built-in 
popular filters which impede the ability to solve all the big questions.  Specifically, fixating on one simple cause of 
massive global issues does not lead to any useful answers.  Besides the fact that doing so contradicts the most basic 
tenants of what global popular culture is supposed to be about, it is simply not a fact that the US or Bush, Clinton, 
Putin, the Italian mob (sending IEDs to Iraq) or any other  single force is acting alone in the world.  Acting as if 
that was in any manner the case is foolish.

> >  The fundamental values of equality and reason that I believe are core
> > aspects of my national culture are being used incsincerely by people to
> > justify thier self-satisfying inequitous and irrational views.

> If only.

> At the core of your national culture is a "all men are created equal" 
document written by slaveholders; slavery persisted for several decades
after these principles were "adopted". Talking about "reason", you have a
significant percentage of population (even a majority?) who believe that
the world was created in seven days, six thousand years ago.

The best summation I have seen of the root of the success of Victorian British culture is during a meeting in a tavern 
in Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age".  To attempt to paraphrase while transposing into this context: You are suggesting 
that it is better to have no ideals and to mock those who have ideals but do not always succeed in achieving them, than 
to have ideals that are difficult to achieve and striving for them.
 
No culture in my knowledge has a past of perfection nor is a present paradise.   This obsession with the motes of the 
US at the expense of attention to the beams in any other eyes is maddenly boring and non-productive.  There is no sense 
in putting any living culture in a box apart from all others in a world where we are all connected, and doing so with 
the culture that is currently in many ways the most influential is particularly nonproductive (and also boringly 
inevitable since the dawn of time).  Intelligent discourse requires the participants be more honest about the 
components of the issue at hand than that.

.d.
> > Hey, I'd hate to communicate with you in a way your deeply-held
> > prejudices would not accept.  You know us stupid mouth-breathing
> > Americans are not sophisticated enough to deliver our negative opinoins
> > through oblique references filled with insincere pleasantries designed
> > to let us save face in all possible situations.  Just have to use simple
> > little words to say what we really think and hope those of the Greater
> > Cultures can put up with us...

> Hey, you're really getting better at this irony stuff!

I've been reading the HOWTO...
 
-cheers!
 
-chris 

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