The last couple of days some arguments have arisen here that suggest we may have some fundamental and irreconcilable differences among us. I think that this either is, or is not the case and it is not clear to me which is true. I do believe now that it is possible however. If it is true, I don't shy away from learning that, and I think it is better to know it then to not know it, and it is better to know it sooner rather than later. I don't have a prejudice about this. I don't demand that it be one way or the other. Real world opportunities for organizing around and advocacy for working class issues and concerns are clamoring for attention – it is becoming a roar that I can't indefinitely ignore. There are many groups outside of liberal and Democratic party activist and theorist circles – way outside of them - who are already there on the the foundational ideas of the struggle between the haves and the have nots, the fight against police state tyranny, the immediate and serious threat to Constitutionally guaranteed liberties and other life and death real world issues. I had hoped that leadership could emerge from the liberal and Democratic party followers, but if not, events will move ahead without them. In the immigrant community, the Black community, the farming community, people are ready to move forward in the real world, and are not lost in theory d or in point-counterpoint arguments about positions on issues and fine points of various doctrines.

I don't give a damn about Islam - for or against? or military for or against? There are credible and not so credible arguments on both sides of each debate. The debates themselves seem petty and mostly peripheral and irrelevant to me. The overwhelming and undeniable feature of modern society is that the few are prospering at the expense of the many. As the few prosper, the many have less rights, less freedom, less opportunity, and more misery and suffering. I have come to the conclusion that this dynamic - class struggle – is the root cause of all of the social ills we discuss. This is the flood that threatens to take out all of humanity, and who is clinging to what piece of flotsam and jetsam and arguing that their piece of floating debris is the ”right” piece, seems distracting at best and dangerous at worst.

I am applying that understanding of class struggle – to the best of my limited ability - as the over-riding and most important context for these various issues. I don't care about guns, for instance, and never owned one. So I don't talk about the issue according to what I “like” or “don't like.” I am not ion the side of the gun nuts nor the gun grabbers, and I believe that both exist. I see support of the RKBA as consistent with support for the working class. So shoot me why don't you? (Poor attempt at humor there). Likewise, an attempt – however clumsy or poorly stated - to apply class analysis to the discussion formed my opinions about the military and Islam. I may be doing a bad job of applying class struggle to these, I may be in error about my conclusions, and I am willing to have my errors pointed out, but I am no longer willing to abandon the principles of class struggle for the sake of a cause that is presumed to be more important – like peace, or opposition to people being killed by guns, or “tolerance” for Moslems. That is not because I am against peace, or for persecution of Moslems, or in favor of people being gunned down on city streets.

But we don't discuss the proper, accurate and most useful application of class analysis to the phenomenon of historical global Islam – we argue as though it were “Arabs. Are you tolerant of them or you just another racist bigot?” We don't argue about the proper, accurate and most useful application of class analysis to the gun control issue – we argue “guns! Do you like 'em or not?” and those who are presumed to “like 'em” therefore being on the “side” of those favoring wanton violence. In like fashion we argue every issue - two sides, and only two sides, with the ridiculous hope that somehow a political movement can be built on a collection of certain rigid and doctrinaire positions on hundreds of issues, each of which is analyzed by a different criteria with no over-arching and all inclusive set of principles and ideals let alone a coherent and shared political philosophy. When the republicans were funding Jihadists, we were against them. Now that the current Republican administration claims to be fighting Jihadists, we can say no critical word about Islam and are for them. That is because not being for them would be “intolerant” and the notion of “tolerance” takes precedence over class struggle or any set of principles and ideals.

I reject the polarization. I reject the hair-splitting and nit-picking hyper-sensitivity that is dictating the direction of the conversation. I reject having to watch every word you say for fear of someone taking a hint from it and casting you into the category of the evil ones. It does come right down to a single word often. Since we have apparently abandoned any hope of actually being able to communicate like human beings and with any order or structure, we go by little signals and hints and clues, always alert to who may be the enemy. The use of a single word by a person, and we suddenly act as though we know everything we need to know about the person, and then can bring full artillery to bear against the heresy.

If we are unable to defend 1st, 4th and 5th amendment rights without that being heard as “gun nut propaganda,” if we are unable to discuss the historical trend of institutionalized state sponsored Islam as a reactionary force operating against the aspirations of the common people and the working class or defending the people who have gone into service to their country and gotten their asses shot at without being seen as anti-Arab bigots or Bush supporting xenophobic warmongers, then what possibility is there for intelligent conversation, let alone rebuilding a socialist coalition along the lines of the FDR New Deal working class coalition?

Pop Indy may inevitably be part of the endless Balkanization process that is happening to what passes for the Left in this country. It may be just another splinter of a splinter of a splinter, with an even yet more restrictive and sensitive doctrine dictating the proper positions to take on each and every issue - on each and every word or phrase. The allure of this drive for purity, the seductiveness of it, may be too string and therefore impossible to counter. Perhaps it is for the best that the so-called Left splinters into a million fragments, each represented by 2 or 3 people (no exaggeration! It is very difficult to get even 2 or 3 people to agree for very long on anything, and each disagreement threatens to smash apart the entire coalition) so that the logjam can end and the dead wood in our minds get cleared out.

I don't know which way Pop Indy is going. I don't care about being popular or in succeeding. I have watched dozens of efforts to build a coalition based on how people feel, or who is popular, or who seems to be the winner, fail miserably and devolve into either a cult of true believers in vague and inconsistent doctrines, often held together by brute force and authoritarianism and hero worship, or else a milquetoast pablum of feel good fluff that drowns out any sane voices. Often, both happen.

I decided that if I couldn't speak from the heart and be completely frank, for fear of offending people or hurting the effort, then the value of the effort had to questioned. Get along is not getting it. That has been tried for the last 6 years and the net result is a steady slide farther and farther to the Right. As people on the Left splinter onto smaller and smaller groups, the Right moves in for the kill. Witness the Kucinich board or DU today compared to 4 years ago. Free market promoters, personal responsibility advocates, and control freak authoritarian zealots are running amok as never before with little or no challenge, and the membership is less able to defend the principles of the Left than they were 4 years ago. Each and every splintering is another opportunity for right wingers to drive wedges. We are going backwards why in our endearing but fatal myopic way we are seeing that as progress.

I am going to sate my position, and before I do that I want everyone to know that I have no intention to enforce, coerce or impress my view on anyone. I am the nominal leader, but Pop Indy will go the direction that you the members decide it should go without any authoritarian coercion by me or any bannings or ostracizing or other heavy handed tactics. I do hope to persuade you, but if that is not possible, so be it.

If we are to say that the enemy is those people over there who have the incorrect positions on issues, or the wrong awareness or feelings, or insufficient sensitivity or the wrong spiritual values or lifestyles or who have made the wrong choices – then count me out. If, on the other had we are to say that the enemy is those people over there controlling all of the wealth and power in the country to the detriment and destruction of the working class, then count me in. If we are to say that our friends and allies are those people with the correct positions on issues, with the correct theory and the ability to express it, with some mojo goin' for them and successfully moving through society, respected and credentialed, with the right spirituality and the right good feelings and making the right personal choices – then count me out. If, on the other hand we are to say that our friends and allies are the downtrodden, the poor, the struggling and suffering, the imprisoned, the “wrong” people, the cast aways and forgotten, the unwanted and the unloved, the ugly and the failing, the nobodies and the have nots regardless of their spiritual awareness or political correctness – then count me in.

I don't know the answer.

My major problem with you and Wolf lately is the same problem I have with people saying "democracy" when they mean "private-profit capitalism". "Islam" has a well-defined meaning, and it's not "a faux-religious political movement aimed at world domination". So if you want to rip a strip off the political movement that's fine and I'll help.

But don't call it "Islam"! That's misleading and insulting, just as using "Christian" to refer to the tv scoundrels is misleading and insulting to the memory of, e.g., Dorothy Day. The arseholes scheming for domination are not even "Islamic fundamentalists". They're not Islamic anything. They're wearing Muslim-suits, just like Foulwell is wearing a Christian-suit. It's a disguise.

The historical Muhammad (sawa) was very clear in his teaching about people like that, just as the ahistorical Jesus was. And it was the same teaching: people who interfere with other people while claiming to be muslims/christians are ill-advised at best, authentic Limbs of Satan at worst. "He is not of us who does to another what he would not wish done to himself."

When we refuse to see through the disguise, we foreclose any chance at solidarity with the real people of faith who struggle all their lives to follow the teachings and who understand that interfering with other people is not part of that. I'm an agnostic bordering on atheist, but I respect those people, and I think they'd be great to make common cause with. Because they don't give up when the road gets steep, and that's exactly the kind of fellow-travellers we need, no?

So that's where I am, Mike: I think you and Wolf are using language divisively, and should clean up your acts. But I have no reason to believe that there's any actual rot. Now, if my saying that convinces you that there's something wrong with me, then for heaven's sake tell me now so I can bugger off and leave you in peace!

The last couple of days some arguments have arisen here that suggest we may have some fundamental and irreconcilable differences among us.
I think that this either is, or is not the case and it is not clear to me which is true. I do believe now that it is possible however.

Of course it is true. It has always been true and always will be. What's mysterious about that?


Real world opportunities for organizing around and advocacy for working class issues and concerns are clamoring for attention – it is becoming a roar that I can't indefinitely ignore. There are many groups outside of liberal and Democratic party activist and theorist circles – way outside of them - who are already there on the the foundational ideas of the struggle between the haves and the have nots, the fight against police state tyranny, the immediate and serious threat to Constitutionally guaranteed liberties and other life and death real world issues. I had hoped that leadership could emerge from the liberal and Democratic party followers, but if not, events will move ahead without them. In the immigrant community, the Black community, the farming community, people are ready to move forward in the real world, and are not lost in theory d or in point-counterpoint arguments about positions on issues and fine points of various doctrines.

Great men of the left having been ever more blatantly shot down and, before then, not thought by everyone to necessarily be the end all, be all anyway (see Ella Baker), are we making a mistake thinking about or, in some cases, aspiring to be leaders?

I see a lot of groups too. I hope to see pop indy be connected to many local and regional and issue oriented groups. And I hope pop indy will discuss them under the auspices of class struggle. I hope that discussion has an effect on those groups' members and makes them more able to network and, when possible/appropriate, to work together at economic reform - from which you and I agree all good things flow.


I don't give a damn about Islam - for or against? or military for or against? There are credible and not so credible arguments on both sides of each debate. The debates themselves seem petty and mostly peripheral and irrelevant to me. The overwhelming and undeniable feature of modern society is that the few are prospering at the expense of the many. As the few prosper, the many have less rights, less freedom, less opportunity, and more misery and suffering. I have come to the conclusion that this dynamic - class struggle – is the root cause of all of the social ills we discuss. This is the flood that threatens to take out all of humanity, and who is clinging to what piece of flotsam and jetsam and arguing that their piece of floating debris is the ”right” piece, seems distracting at best and dangerous at worst.

I am applying that understanding of class struggle – to the best of my limited ability - as the over-riding and most important context for these various issues. I don't care about guns, for instance, and never owned one. So I don't talk about the issue according to what I “like” or “don't like.” I am not ion the side of the gun nuts nor the gun grabbers, and I believe that both exist. I see support of the RKBA as consistent with support for the working class. So shoot me why don't you? (Poor attempt at humor there). Likewise, an attempt – however clumsy or poorly stated - to apply class analysis to the discussion formed my opinions about the military and Islam. I may be doing a bad job of applying class struggle to these, I may be in error about my conclusions, and I am willing to have my errors pointed out, but I am no longer willing to abandon the principles of class struggle for the sake of a cause that is presumed to be more important – like peace, or opposition to people being killed by guns, or “tolerance” for Moslems. That is not because I am against peace, or for persecution of Moslems, or in favor of people being gunned down on city streets.

Who asked that of you? I heard you and Wolf both say you thought Islam was a threat. Then I heard you specify that fundamentalism was a threat. I heard Mairead agree that fundamentalism was a threat, but disagree that religion generally was. I heard Anaxarchos deftly point out the wide range of politics seen in the mass of men who also identify as followers of Islam. I never heard you or Wolf service that.


But we don't discuss the proper, accurate and most useful application of class analysis to the phenomenon of historical global Islam – we argue as though it were “Arabs. Are you tolerant of them or you just another racist bigot?”

Agreed. As no one serviced Anax's comment that those who follow Islam are a varied polity. Some folks did challenge the premise that they are not varied in their politics. Quite rightly, I dare say.


...In like fashion we argue every issue - two sides, and only two sides, with the ridiculous hope that somehow a political movement can be built on a collection of certain rigid and doctrinaire positions on hundreds of issues, each of which is analyzed by a different criteria with no over-arching and all inclusive set of principles and ideals let alone a coherent and shared political philosophy. When the republicans were funding Jihadists, we were against them. Now that the current Republican administration claims to be fighting Jihadists, we can say no critical word about Islam and are for them. That is because not being for them would be “intolerant” and the notion of “tolerance” takes precedence over class struggle or any set of principles and ideals.

I call bullshit on that bolded section. It is a distortion and a fabrication. Your impression is not objective reality. Who says they are 'for Islam'? Who says they were 'not for' Islam back then but now are 'for it', or do you mean not for Republicans yet now for them (an even more absurd point)?

I reject the polarization but not the disagreement. Not at all.

What Wolf said, and what you backed up, describes a group of people in a manner that EXPRESSLY FORBIDS class consciousness and that warrants opprobrium in my opinon. As far as I am concerned that is the inarguable fact. If you are given to compose a retort then I would suggest it be not to my words but to those of Anaxarchos that puts the lie to the very concept of a monolithic Islam.


...the historical trend of institutionalized state sponsored Islam as a reactionary force operating against the aspirations of the common people and the working class

Umm, that's bullshit too. I don't mean to say it may not well be true in some jurisdictions. But the accuracy of your comment is not what smells funny and sprouts mushrooms.

State sponsored Islam since the Ottoman Empire is 100% a creation of the Anglo American empire. I defy you or Wolf to demonstrate otherwise.

So this frightening trend has a helluva lot less to do with the faith than it does other factors, all of them much closer to home. That is why folks take a fundamental disagreement with Wolf on this. And with you. It's why I do.

Now, if we want to discuss movements that may be pro-islamic and populist and leftist and other movements than may be pro-islamic and oppressive and existing by the graces of and at the service of the ruling class, that too is fine. American support for Israel and funding of Israeli apartheid is a bigger issue than the threat of any Islamic faction. That is because, in spades, it is the rallying cry and root cause of their ire. Where it is not Israel, it is America as the perceived source of rapacious multinational capitalism, whether that is wholly accurate or not. This is much the same sort of outcome as the rise of Christian fundamentalism among American suburbanites, as referenced in an Alternet article posted by Mairead.

So yeah, if you or anyone is going to hop aboard the Jews are a threat train, or the Muslims are the threat train, I'd expect to be roundly challenged to defend the view. Merely raising the false monoliths of religion, color, and gender is to undermine class consciousness and analysis. Raising the topics in their full complexity (or at least partial), as Anax did to no avail, is a different matter entirely and constitutes important dialogue - one that falls under the rubric of class as no discussion of false monoliths can.


...or defending the people who have gone into service to their country and gotten their asses shot at without being seen as anti-Arab bigots or Bush supporting xenophobic warmongers

I am afraid I agree completely here. One cannot blame the soldier for keeping his word and following orders. To do so departs from working class values as I perceive them. The institution of the military will be, as it was in Vietnam when in the final years there were over a half million acts of desertion, the next to the last to come around and protest the war. As is quite natural when one reflects on the various exigencies pulling at it. In that dynamic, it is wrong to abuse any one soldier for not having come to the 'right stance' quickly enough.


what possibility is there for intelligent conversation, let alone rebuilding a socialist coalition along the lines of the FDR New Deal working class coalition?

About the same as if Raph had not said soldiers were dummies, if Mairead had not disagreed on monolithic statements about religion, etc. etc. ad nauseum. This discomfort withour inevitable disagreements is more troubling to me than the disagreements themselves. Defend the ideas, not the self and we'll get somewhere. that said, i think the goals are too lofty if they are 'to build' anything very substantial. How much of this discomfort is because this is some kind of hobby taken personally by us rather than anything that is substantial in its practical application?

If farmer Joe wants to come up to me and say some bad stuff about gun control, then fine. I think that is a working class value. If he wants to say something to me about muslims (or blacks, or jews, or how the best immigrants are asians), I am going to challenge him on it. There are only two kinds of people. Them and us. Them is not muslims/blacks/jews or any other cut of humanity. Them is whomever would defend the hegemony of capital, and even then only after attempting to reason that position out of them.


Pop Indy may inevitably be part of the endless Balkanization process that is happening to what passes for the Left in this country. It may be just another splinter of a splinter of a splinter

Of course it is. How to make it touch other splinters to build a bridge forward? That is a conversation worth having. Imagining it is not a splinter or that it could somehow become something other than one is probably a bit grandiose of us.



...with an even yet more restrictive and sensitive doctrine dictating the proper positions to take on each and every issue - on each and every word or phrase.

I hope it is a place that pursues incisive thought and rests on the linguistic precision that serious thought often requires when being exchanged among people. We may endeavor to simplify our points of agreement into a message. We should never endeavor to simplify our message into points of agreement. That is precisely what fucks everthing up. There is no such thing as universal agreement, except possibly on the deliberative process - something no one here seems to want to discuss at any length and something that, if it remains undecided, will be the death knell of this experiment for me.

There will always be contradiction. There will always be disagreement. We can fail at them or succeed at them. We cannot eradicate them.


and each disagreement threatens to smash apart the entire coalition

Not to me.


I decided that if I couldn't speak from the heart and be completely frank, for fear of offending people or hurting the effort, then the value of the effort had to questioned. Get along is not getting it.

I am not offended by anyone who clings to monolithic fictions in the face of reasoned controversion. Puzzled at the lack of comprehension or motive or maybe merely at the position itself, but not really offended. If I say I think you are wrong, and not simply wrong because of the strength of your argument but that instead you are wrong because of the premise you have built it upon, I would hope you do not take offense to that. If you do, it is for want of a clear deliberative process more than for want of a sycophantic stroking, isn't it? Let's hope so.


I am the nominal leader

I guess you are now. Or maybe you were when Megan said you were.



Pop Indy will go the direction that you the members decide it should go without any authoritarian coercion by me or any bannings or ostracizing or other heavy handed tactics.

It's heavy handed to declare differences irreconcilable in the absence of a deliberative process.


I do hope to persuade you, but if that is not possible, so be it.

Persuade us of what? Certainly not of the reality of or political utility of monolithic fictions (neocons' penchant for stoking the flames of foundational myths nothwithstanding, but not worth chasing since I am not interested in conning my way to political success).


If we are to say that the enemy is those people over there who have the incorrect positions on issues, or the wrong awareness or feelings, or insufficient sensitivity or the wrong spiritual values or lifestyles or who have made the wrong choices – then count me out.

Are we still talking about muslims?


Here is where this really got started:


The notion of Islamic aggression is not "my thesis" -- it is history and the consensus of historians as taught in the entire Western World before the suicidal dogma of moral equivalence imposed its infinitely dangerous brand of revisionism from the 1980s onward.
http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... ?p=884#884 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=884#884)


Islamic statism and the jihadist nature that underlies is a post Ottoman experience. Roots date to the Muslim Brotherhood, to Sayid Qutb, to Israel and, later, to Iran. ALL of that is in the milieu of Anglo-American hegemony and cynical, capitalistic manipulation.

To reach back to pre-Ottoman expansionism to try and make a point about what has happened since is, at best, only fractionally relevant.

I think the same can be said of class warfare and after the birth of the modern nazi-infested national security state in 1947.

Before the Brits fucked over the Arabs of Sir Lawrence's milieu, taking their immensely important help to bring down the Ottomans then screwing them into living under the newer, western oriented empire instead of in the promised pan-Arab state, things were different for us all. That was a key moment in modern middle eastern history. Jihadism has only come into being since then. It ain't Islam that has made people fight back in the last hundred years, it is capital. FDR ensured that in his faustian bargain with the House of Saud in '38.


Islam has never given up its insistence on torturing people to death for heresy and other so-called "sins," including extra-marital sex, adultry and homosexuality.

That monolithic fiction is of course also hatefully UTTER BULLSHIT. Dare us consider that we can never discuss politics unless we sit by for the random flinging of such UTTER BULLSHIT? And if we don't then we are breaking the consensus?

More bullshit is this premise:


to deny the Israelies and the Palestinians their own campaigns of mutual murder.

Campaigns of mutual murder? Bull Fucking Shit. How about repression and resistance?

I am ALL FOR discussion of foreign affairs and American foreign policy. I am also all for vigorous disagreement on them.

I am also for the pursuit of disagreement success, something far more realistic that consensus. Further, we should recognize that the merit of the journey - rightly taken - far exceeds the merit of its end, not least because that end that is every bit as ficticious as the monolithic islamic boogeyman.

The accusation is (and it is personal which is why I am defending the person rather than the idea) that what I said is akin to racism or bigotry.

I did not say that "Moslems" are this way, that way, or the other. I did not say that. Yet your last post still assumes that I did.

The significance of this, the reason that it could be a deal breaker, is because I suspect it is a case of putting political correctness above political analysis.

Others here have made a direct and unambiguous connection between the immoral actions of the Pentagon and the individuals wearing the uniform. No such connection was made by me between Islam and the faithful. Yet the first is argued as accurate and valuable - "those soldiers made the personal decision to join the killing machine" - while i am accused of making that sort of unfair, bigoted and prejudicial statement about individuals of the Moslem faith when I made no such connection even by implication.

What could the difference possibly be except this – it is politically correct for liberals to be “for Islam” and “against the military.”

There are only two kinds of people. Them and us. Them is not muslims/blacks/jews or any other cut of humanity. Them is whomever would defend the hegemony of capital, and even then only after attempting to reason that position out of them.
woOOoooo! Sing it, bro! Right ON!

clear language is key to real understanding and agreement? Can we agree on that much?

First in response to Mairead's "Major Question," let me say that while I surely hear your argument, I flatly reject its validity: citing the Catholic Worker Movement (Dorothy Day) and claiming that the Ku Klux Klan and the Inquisition and Fallwell and his ilk are not Christianity is like pointing to the fact the Nazi Party put Germany back to work and gave the nation universal health care and claiming that for these reasons, Hitler and the Holocaust are therefore not Nazism.

Just as there were "good" Nazis in spite of Nazism (e.g., the German official John Rabé, who saved untold Chinese from the Japanese rape of Nanking), so are there "good" Christians in spite of Christianity (e.g. St. Francis of Assisi, who was nearly burned as a heretic for proclaiming his love of Nature).

Thus -- especially since I recogonize that people are typically ensnared in their environments -- I am (and always have been) quite willing to accept individuals even as I reject their ideological commitments.

As to Jesus himself, I suggest you research the suppressed Gospel of the Egyptians, which we know about only through pagan Roman sources. In it, Jesus is quoted as saying, "I am come to destroy the powers of the Female and all her works." Even given the patriarchal sexual politics of Rome, the Church considered this an infinitely dangerous revelation of Christianity's core purpose and -- with unprecedented fervor and fury -- hunted out the gospel and destroyed every copy. As to Christianity's more generalized tyranny and intolerance, contrary to the revisionist myth that has sprung up today, it was THE defining characteristic of this religion from the very beginning: note the works of Galen, Celsus, Porphyry, Julian the Apostate etc. (An excellent text on the subject is by Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Yale University Press, New Haven and London: 1984.) Bottom line, the "love-thy-neighbor" aspects of Christianity are far outweighed by its historical savagery, which the Ku Klux Klan (known throughout the South as "the Saturday night men's Bible-study group") never abandoned, and which today's fundamentalists openly seek to resurrect. (I have ugly personal experience with the Klan; infuriated by my activities on behalf the Civil Rights Movement and later by my anti-Klan reporting, the KKK twice tried to kill me and fatally poisoned an especially beloved dog I had raised from puppyhood. Much of my fierce commitment to RKBA grows from these experiences, including a 1963 encounter I survived only because I was armed.)

"By their deeds shall ye know them" -- another aphorism attributed to Jesus.

As to Islam, I apply to it exactly the same standard I apply to Christianity. Likewise Judaism: though the Hebrews have generally refrained from widespread genocidal warfare since Old Testament times, note for example the depredations of the Chassidim against African-Americans in Brooklyn or Israel's biblically sanctioned behavior toward Palestinians. The ultimate dynamic of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is two self-proclaimed master races -- one chosen by god and the other by Allah -- fighting over the local real estate. To recognize each side's strategic value is merely what Bismarck long ago described as realpolitik; to form an emotional alliance with either one is ultimately to ally one's self with theocratic tyranny.

My position is (and has been for many years) a plague on all their houses.

Nor will I submit to the infinite hypocrisy of being silenced about Islam -- not when I am allowed to speak with semi-freedom about Christianity and encouraged to denounce Israel (and thus implicitly Judaism) at every opportunity.

*********

Next and last, in response to Mike's question, I believe the differences ARE irreconcilable: for example, it is obvious that in the eyes of my detractors, the mandate for ideological conformity (even unto minutiae) trumps any and all other considerations.

But I also believe in what PopI is attempting, and I agree with Mike that whether one holds the politically correct, properly multicultural viewpoint of history (and thus approaches history from the intellectually self-crippling premise of moral equivalence) is hardly relevant in the context of the national socioeconomic and political crises we face. Indeed, like Mike, I really don't give much of a damn whether someone is a Republican or a Democrat or even a Hare Krishna as long as they are willing to work toward restoration of the New Deal (which I believe is -- by the potential power of the examples it would create -- the first step in building the socialist America essential to survive the forthcoming apocalypse).

Alas, my eclectic stance -- not to mention my journalist's commitment to full disclosure -- is obviously repugnant to everyone here but Mike.

Hence -- precisely because I think what Mike is attempting is so important (and in recognition of the fact it is a fool's errand to try to communicate with people of closed minds, no matter whether the closures are by the blinders of Abrahamic fundamentalism or some other brand of zealotry -- I am dropping out of the discussion. As Mike said, "I reject having to watch every word you say for fear of someone taking a hint from it and casting you into the category of the evil ones...I decided that if I couldn't speak from the heart and be completely frank, for fear of offending people or hurting the effort, then the value of the effort had to questioned."

I will watch the site with interest, and I wish the endeavor the very best. But -- knowing that to do so means I will merely end the day wiping virtual spittle off my face -- it will be a long damn time before I contribute again.

The accusation is (and it is personal which is why I am defending the person rather than the idea) that what I said is akin to racism or bigotry.

I did not say that "Moslems" are this way, that way, or the other. I did not say that. Yet your last post still assumes that I did.

No, it assumes he did because HE DID and it rightly takes you to task for defending this position even as you try to refine it into something that is actually defensible.


The significance of this, the reason that it could be a deal breaker, is because I suspect it is a case of putting political correctness above political analysis.

Emphasis added. 'Nuff said.


Others here have made a direct and unambiguous connection between the immoral actions of the Pentagon and the individuals wearing the uniform.

And if anything, Raph was the proverbial lone wolf on that one. It remains incompletely deliberated.



No such connection was made by me between Islam and the faithful.

A backsliding defense has been tho.


Yet the first is argued as accurate and valuable - "those soldiers made the personal decision to join the killing machine"

Yeah, so? It was also argued the other way, if still incompletely.


- while i am accused of making that sort of unfair, bigoted and prejudicial statement about individuals of the Moslem faith when I made no such connection even by implication.

I am accusing you of defending. And crawdadding on Wolf's behalf from a monolithic definition and value statement he made that cannot possibly be accurate nor politically productive nor remotely respective of the entire topic's relative impact on mankind.


What could the difference possibly be except this – it is politically correct for liberals to be “for Islam” and “against the military.”

It's about the topic of Islam not the disagreement with Raph in re the military, which is a separate topic.

It is not necessary nor is it feasible to build a left that it devoid of liberal perspective. Why do you seem to consitently advocate in such a way as to make liberal thought as outsized an enemy as Wolf seems to believe the islamic faith is?

Isn't that in itself a bit exclusionary?

I'm more than willing to stifle the big crap you are trying to take on us about how its our moral duty to go kill som A-rabs.

What is relevant is not who said it but the fact that (A) it completely misrepresents my position (and does so with obvious malice); plus the fact that (B) it clearly represents the majority opinion on this board. Thus (C), the price one pays, even here, for violating the politically correct, multuralculturalist ban on so much as alluding to the negative aspects of Islam: my assertion that we need to acknowledge the Jihadist threat deliberately twisted (by some hateful process of intellectual distortion I cannot imagine outside a divorce court) into a murderous, lynch-mob-agitator's demand "to go kill som (sic) A-rabs."

I rest my case.

First in response to Mairead's "Major Question," let me say that while I surely hear your argument, I flatly reject its validity: citing the Catholic Worker Movement (Dorothy Day) and claiming that the Ku Klux Klan and the Inquisition and Fallwell and his ilk are not Christianity is like pointing to the fact the Nazi Party put Germany back to work and gave the nation universal health care and claiming that for these reasons, Hitler and the Holocaust are therefore not Nazism.

Agreed.


Thus -- especially since I recogonize that people are typically ensnared in their environments -- I am (and always have been) quite willing to accept individuals even as I reject their ideological commitments.

Admirable. Necessary. Alas, not terribly contagious.



The ultimate dynamic of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is two self-proclaimed master races -- one chosen by god and the other by Allah -- fighting over the local real estate.

Defend this claim.


To recognize each side's strategic value is merely what Bismarck long ago described as realpolitik; to form an emotional alliance with either one is ultimately to ally one's self with theocratic tyranny.

..thanks to the funding of Hamas by Israel to divide and conquer the secular leftist PLO, and it stinks of bullshit that you would skip that not insignificant artifact along with the secular leftist peace movement in Israel.


My position is (and has been for many years) a plague on all their houses.

Yours is a politically popular, but ultimately malevolent and ignorant position.


Nor will I submit to the infinite hypocrisy of being silenced about Islam -- not when I am allowed to speak with semi-freedom about Christianity and encouraged to denounce Israel (and thus implicitly Judaism) at every opportunity.

Emphasis added to highlight the ultimate root that is bullfuckingshit therein. Discussing Isreal is in NO WAY tantamount to discussing Judaism or Islam. It is disengenuous for you to present otherwise. This is not a board of kids with 'slow children' signs in front of their homes. We can see through that bullshit and reserve in perpetuity the right to call it what it is - disengenuous and nefarious manipulation of the discussion. If you wish defend your position, I will give full consideration. But you won't be able to hang your hat on the Israel issue any more effectively than Abe Foxman hangs his on anti-semites when indeed these arguments are about policy, not race or creed.


Next and last, in response to Mike's question, I believe the differences ARE irreconcilable: for example, it is obvious that in the eyes of my detractors, the mandate for ideological conformity (even unto minutiae) trumps any and all other considerations.

But I also believe in what PopI is attempting, and I agree with Mike that whether one holds the politically correct, properly multicultural viewpoint of history (and thus approaches history from the intellectually self-crippling premise of moral equivalence) is hardly relevant in the context of the national socioeconomic and political crises we face. Indeed, like Mike, I really don't give much of a damn whether someone is a Republican or a Democrat or even a Hare Krishna as long as they are willing to work toward restoration of the New Deal (which I believe is -- by the potential power of the examples it would create -- the first step in building the socialist America essential to survive the forthcoming apocalypse).

Alas, my eclectic stance -- not to mention my journalist's commitment to full disclosure -- is obviously repugnant to everyone here but Mike.

Eclectic is defined as taking the best from all available sources. I do not think a monolithic fiction represents an article of the 'best' we have available among means of understanding. It is rather grandiose to describe the stance as eclectic. It is strikingly grandiose to proclaim said stance as history and wave off anyone who controverts you as being on a personal attack. The personal attack was on muslims, a figmentary monolith. And I completely fail to see how countenancing that attack is in the service of class consciousness or any other wellspring of local harmony.


Hence -- precisely because I think what Mike is attempting is so important (and in recognition of the fact it is a fool's errand to try to communicate with people of closed minds, no matter whether the closures are by the blinders of Abrahamic fundamentalism or some other brand of zealotry -- I am dropping out of the discussion. As Mike said, "I reject having to watch every word you say for fear of someone taking a hint from it and casting you into the category of the evil ones...I decided that if I couldn't speak from the heart and be completely frank, for fear of offending people or hurting the effort, then the value of the effort had to questioned."

The value of the effort has to be questioned because you got offended? I didn't. Who here got offended? Should we put up a poll?

Again, a METHOD of deliberating these topics would keep all parties from having to self censor and would provide a method to minimize disagreement. As it stands, we seem - wait, YOU GUYS seem so inclined to say 'Oh well, impasse' 'another clusterfuck splintering''I guess I'll take my toys and go home.'

Hey, if you are going to say something that is flat out inflammatory, then be prepared to defend the response it gets. No one is trying to stifle your speech. Your claim to some right to spout that shit without question is not about preserving free speech, it is about stifling it.

It is very much in bounds to say that your interpretation of history does not constitute The History and to further opine that it is a toxic interpretation. Sorry if that makes the proverbial kitchern discomfortingly hot. But that is precisely the kinda cooking you do all the time. I for one always have enjoyed your commentary immensely and will hate it if you feel you need to get away from having to make grounds that irrefutably support your sometimes fantastic claims.

I'm more than willing to stifle the big crap you are trying to take on us about how its our moral duty to go kill som A-rabs.

What is relevant is not who said it but the fact that (A) it completely misrepresents my position (and does so with obvious malice); plus the fact that (B) it clearly represents the majority opinion on this board. Thus (C), the price one pays, even here, for violating the politically correct, multuralculturalist ban on so much as alluding to the negative aspects of Islam: my assertion that we need to acknowledge the Jihadist threat deliberately twisted (by some hateful process of intellectual distortion I cannot imagine outside a divorce court) into a murderous, lynch-mob-agitator's demand "to go kill som (sic) A-rabs."

I rest my case.

Hateful process of intellectual distortion?

Look if there's any hostility here its because you have - what? - 20 posts and are up to your same martyr bullshit and everybody is persecuting you because they are just too fanatical and too narrow-minded to come ride with you on whatever conjured up cloud of epiphany you're currently floating on.

To suggest that you might be mentally locked in to the same shitty ideas you've pushed in the past would only be an intellectual contortion if you weren't actually - y'know- doing just that.

You're point that fundamentalist Islam is a problem and a threat are well-taken. In fact, I'd venture to guess everyone on this site takes it as transparent fact. Your 20-page rants on that topic suggest more than a little bitterness and enmity on your part.

Mike says reading anything ever into what someone says is presumptive, exclusionary, blah blah. I'm not reading anything into this that you don't want me to.

EDIT: and no its not lost on me that you will use this very psot as more ammunition in support of your "crucifixion scenario". Have fun with that.

It is not conducive to meaningful deliberation set in any kind of a context or conducted in any kind of productive manner.

I learned a lot in the last couple of years from it.

But this format is bullshit.

Time to do something else.

Had we been talking about that more and better things would have been accomplished.

How much more time shall we waste before designing a means to have productive dialogue with goals in mind that matter and are, bit by bit, achievable?

Are we prepared to grasp and and build for the reality that we will be in disagreement every step of the way?

First in response to Mairead's "Major Question," let me say that while I surely hear your argument, I flatly reject its validity: citing the Catholic Worker Movement (Dorothy Day) and claiming that the Ku Klux Klan and the Inquisition and Fallwell and his ilk are not Christianity is like pointing to the fact the Nazi Party put Germany back to work and gave the nation universal health care and claiming that for these reasons, Hitler and the Holocaust are therefore not Nazism.

Just as there were "good" Nazis in spite of Nazism (e.g., the German official John Rabé, who saved untold Chinese from the Japanese rape of Nanking), so are there "good" Christians in spite of Christianity (e.g. St. Francis of Assisi, who was nearly burned as a heretic for proclaiming his love of Nature).

It seems to me, Wolf, that it's a bad idea on a number of levels to demonise groups to which good people feel emotional commitment. We have many more degrees of freedom if we say that the bad guys are representative of corruption, revisionism, and counterrevolutionary vileness than if we say they represent the reality of the institution. We can point to the original canons to support us if we take the high road. That wrong-foots the hell out of the bad guys.

Mike has several times made the same point about patriotism. And he's not been the only one, either. As Alinsky among others pointed out, that the rebels in the '60s crapped on the flag was a *HUGE* mistake because it alienated people who might well have been allies otherwise. It's much better on every level to point at the ruling class and say they're the enemies of traditional American ideals. The biggest advantage is that it's TRUE, and can be so demonstrated if it's ever not obvious. It's always the working class that keeps the ideals burning in the window; the ruling class at most pays lip service.

So when we sneer at rather than embrace potent symbols, we're sneering at potential allies too. How smart is that?

The last couple of days some arguments have arisen here that suggest we may have some fundamental and irreconcilable differences among us. I think that this either is, or is not the case and it is not clear to me which is true. I do believe now that it is possible however. If it is true, I don't shy away from learning that, and I think it is better to know it then to not know it, and it is better to know it sooner rather than later. I don't have a prejudice about this. I don't demand that it be one way or the other. Real world opportunities for organizing around and advocacy for working class issues and concerns are clamoring for attention – it is becoming a roar that I can't indefinitely ignore. There are many groups outside of liberal and Democratic party activist and theorist circles – way outside of them - who are already there on the the foundational ideas of the struggle between the haves and the have nots, the fight against police state tyranny, the immediate and serious threat to Constitutionally guaranteed liberties and other life and death real world issues. I had hoped that leadership could emerge from the liberal and Democratic party followers, but if not, events will move ahead without them. In the immigrant community, the Black community, the farming community, people are ready to move forward in the real world, and are not lost in theory d or in point-counterpoint arguments about positions on issues and fine points of various doctrines.

I don't give a damn about Islam - for or against? or military for or against? There are credible and not so credible arguments on both sides of each debate. The debates themselves seem petty and mostly peripheral and irrelevant to me. The overwhelming and undeniable feature of modern society is that the few are prospering at the expense of the many. As the few prosper, the many have less rights, less freedom, less opportunity, and more misery and suffering. I have come to the conclusion that this dynamic - class struggle – is the root cause of all of the social ills we discuss. This is the flood that threatens to take out all of humanity, and who is clinging to what piece of flotsam and jetsam and arguing that their piece of floating debris is the ”right” piece, seems distracting at best and dangerous at worst.

I am applying that understanding of class struggle – to the best of my limited ability - as the over-riding and most important context for these various issues. I don't care about guns, for instance, and never owned one. So I don't talk about the issue according to what I “like” or “don't like.” I am not ion the side of the gun nuts nor the gun grabbers, and I believe that both exist. I see support of the RKBA as consistent with support for the working class. So shoot me why don't you? (Poor attempt at humor there). Likewise, an attempt – however clumsy or poorly stated - to apply class analysis to the discussion formed my opinions about the military and Islam. I may be doing a bad job of applying class struggle to these, I may be in error about my conclusions, and I am willing to have my errors pointed out, but I am no longer willing to abandon the principles of class struggle for the sake of a cause that is presumed to be more important – like peace, or opposition to people being killed by guns, or “tolerance” for Moslems. That is not because I am against peace, or for persecution of Moslems, or in favor of people being gunned down on city streets.

But we don't discuss the proper, accurate and most useful application of class analysis to the phenomenon of historical global Islam – we argue as though it were “Arabs. Are you tolerant of them or you just another racist bigot?” We don't argue about the proper, accurate and most useful application of class analysis to the gun control issue – we argue “guns! Do you like 'em or not?” and those who are presumed to “like 'em” therefore being on the “side” of those favoring wanton violence. In like fashion we argue every issue - two sides, and only two sides, with the ridiculous hope that somehow a political movement can be built on a collection of certain rigid and doctrinaire positions on hundreds of issues, each of which is analyzed by a different criteria with no over-arching and all inclusive set of principles and ideals let alone a coherent and shared political philosophy. When the republicans were funding Jihadists, we were against them. Now that the current Republican administration claims to be fighting Jihadists, we can say no critical word about Islam and are for them. That is because not being for them would be “intolerant” and the notion of “tolerance” takes precedence over class struggle or any set of principles and ideals.

I reject the polarization. I reject the hair-splitting and nit-picking hyper-sensitivity that is dictating the direction of the conversation. I reject having to watch every word you say for fear of someone taking a hint from it and casting you into the category of the evil ones. It does come right down to a single word often. Since we have apparently abandoned any hope of actually being able to communicate like human beings and with any order or structure, we go by little signals and hints and clues, always alert to who may be the enemy. The use of a single word by a person, and we suddenly act as though we know everything we need to know about the person, and then can bring full artillery to bear against the heresy.

If we are unable to defend 1st, 4th and 5th amendment rights without that being heard as “gun nut propaganda,” if we are unable to discuss the historical trend of institutionalized state sponsored Islam as a reactionary force operating against the aspirations of the common people and the working class or defending the people who have gone into service to their country and gotten their asses shot at without being seen as anti-Arab bigots or Bush supporting xenophobic warmongers, then what possibility is there for intelligent conversation, let alone rebuilding a socialist coalition along the lines of the FDR New Deal working class coalition?

Pop Indy may inevitably be part of the endless Balkanization process that is happening to what passes for the Left in this country. It may be just another splinter of a splinter of a splinter, with an even yet more restrictive and sensitive doctrine dictating the proper positions to take on each and every issue - on each and every word or phrase. The allure of this drive for purity, the seductiveness of it, may be too string and therefore impossible to counter. Perhaps it is for the best that the so-called Left splinters into a million fragments, each represented by 2 or 3 people (no exaggeration! It is very difficult to get even 2 or 3 people to agree for very long on anything, and each disagreement threatens to smash apart the entire coalition) so that the logjam can end and the dead wood in our minds get cleared out.

I don't know which way Pop Indy is going. I don't care about being popular or in succeeding. I have watched dozens of efforts to build a coalition based on how people feel, or who is popular, or who seems to be the winner, fail miserably and devolve into either a cult of true believers in vague and inconsistent doctrines, often held together by brute force and authoritarianism and hero worship, or else a milquetoast pablum of feel good fluff that drowns out any sane voices. Often, both happen.

I decided that if I couldn't speak from the heart and be completely frank, for fear of offending people or hurting the effort, then the value of the effort had to questioned. Get along is not getting it. That has been tried for the last 6 years and the net result is a steady slide farther and farther to the Right. As people on the Left splinter onto smaller and smaller groups, the Right moves in for the kill. Witness the Kucinich board or DU today compared to 4 years ago. Free market promoters, personal responsibility advocates, and control freak authoritarian zealots are running amok as never before with little or no challenge, and the membership is less able to defend the principles of the Left than they were 4 years ago. Each and every splintering is another opportunity for right wingers to drive wedges. We are going backwards why in our endearing but fatal myopic way we are seeing that as progress.

I am going to sate my position, and before I do that I want everyone to know that I have no intention to enforce, coerce or impress my view on anyone. I am the nominal leader, but Pop Indy will go the direction that you the members decide it should go without any authoritarian coercion by me or any bannings or ostracizing or other heavy handed tactics. I do hope to persuade you, but if that is not possible, so be it.

If we are to say that the enemy is those people over there who have the incorrect positions on issues, or the wrong awareness or feelings, or insufficient sensitivity or the wrong spiritual values or lifestyles or who have made the wrong choices – then count me out. If, on the other had we are to say that the enemy is those people over there controlling all of the wealth and power in the country to the detriment and destruction of the working class, then count me in. If we are to say that our friends and allies are those people with the correct positions on issues, with the correct theory and the ability to express it, with some mojo goin' for them and successfully moving through society, respected and credentialed, with the right spirituality and the right good feelings and making the right personal choices – then count me out. If, on the other hand we are to say that our friends and allies are the downtrodden, the poor, the struggling and suffering, the imprisoned, the “wrong” people, the cast aways and forgotten, the unwanted and the unloved, the ugly and the failing, the nobodies and the have nots regardless of their spiritual awareness or political correctness – then count me in.

okey dokey

You may wish to re-read your first paragraph. Then re-phrase or eliminate and re-start the engine.

There is a tremendous amount of political confusion 'round a bouts.

It's really pretty simple. What's asked of us is to radically restrucuture every aspect of our existence.

That does mean eliminating the Militaristic programs that run USSA. Yes it does no matter your theory. See documents on need for oxygen and clean water for further reference.

If you thought leadership from liberal or dem leadership were going to step forward you must pass that thing my way so I can have a full appreciation of the hallucination.

And of course if we are trying to raise all boats that means an uninhabitable planet. Better to sink the Mother Ship.

The Constitution, and the entirety of AMERICA, is vastly over-rated.

Sail on Ship of State.

It's really pretty simple. What's asked of us is to radically restrucuture every aspect of our existence.
That will happen one of two ways. Either people will be forced to do that involuntarily and with great suffering and loss of life - which I think is likely - or they will be lead from here to there. Since nothing about “here” can be seen as valid and therefore trustworthy as a starting point, If I am understanding you, then there is no “there” that exists other than in our imagination, or on a limited scale in our personal lifestyle and among a small circle of friends. Perhaps that small circle will inherit the earth?

I choose to pass the remainder of my days attempting to take people from here to there. Not because it is likely to succeed – you often point out the hopelessness of it - but rather because it is my judgment that it is a better way to spend the remaining days. Can't hurt in any case, since I think it is congruent with whatever will be required to rebuild after the collapse. Work to sink the ship if you like. I don't think you can accelerate it any more than I can impede it. It is playing Russian roulette with humanity to suppose that in the post collapse crapshoot something better will emerge, it seems to me.


If you thought leadership from liberal or dem leadership were going to step forward you must pass that thing my way so I can have a full appreciation of the hallucination.
No. I meant the renegades, such as we here. I think I was deluded.

It's really pretty simple. What's asked of us is to radically restrucuture every aspect of our existence.
That will happen one of two ways. Either people will be forced to do that involuntarily and with great suffering and loss of life - which I think is likely - or they will be lead from here to there. Since nothing about “here” can be seen as valid and therefore trustworthy as a starting point, If I am understanding you, then there is no “there” that exists other than in our imagination, or on a limited scale in our personal lifestyle and among a small circle of friends. Perhaps that small circle will inherit the earth?

I choose to pass the remainder of my days attempting to take people from here to there. Not because it is likely to succeed – you often point out the hopelessness of it - but rather because it is my judgment that it is a better way to spend the remaining days. Can't hurt in any case, since I think it is congruent with whatever will be required to rebuild after the collapse. Work to sink the ship if you like. I don't think you can accelerate it any more than I can impede it. It is playing Russian roulette with humanity to suppose that in the post collapse crapshoot something better will emerge, it seems to me.


If you thought leadership from liberal or dem leadership were going to step forward you must pass that thing my way so I can have a full appreciation of the hallucination.
No. I meant the renegades, such as we here. I think I was deluded.

Two points and then you get the last word:

1) You are misunderstanding me, that could be my fault. But your hammering on "lifestyle-ism" (an ugly thing to be sure) when I never had one or understood what that is leads me to believe you are predisposed to that misunderstanding;

2) The Russian Roulette you refer to is already upon us and the rest of the world is suffering quite a bit more than the hosts of Empire. The presumption, and it is a tiresome and predictable thing, is that "their will be great suffering" as if their isn't already amongst and amidst the periphery. Yes the pain will increase in the Empire but The Periphery will breathe a sigh of relief.

In the meantime do what you can.

The hopelessness is only there when you cast about in the same realm which brought about the disease. Looking for some fix within the same construct which brought about the disease is not only futile but sure to prolong the suffering.

You are misunderstanding me, that could be my fault. But your hammering on "lifestyle-ism" (an ugly thing to be sure) when I never had one or understood what that is leads me to believe you are predisposed to that misunderstanding;
Yes, I do struggle to understand you. Could well be me. “Lifestyle” was an unfortunate and ill advised choice of words. Delete that from consideration if you can. Yes, I harp on it. It doesnlt mecessariulky apply here, and I shouldn't have used it.


The Russian Roulette you refer to is already upon us and the rest of the world is suffering quite a bit more than the hosts of Empire.
Yes, I quite agree.

The presumption, and it is a tiresome and predictable thing, is that "their will be great suffering" as if their isn't already amongst and amidst the periphery. Yes the pain will increase in the Empire but The Periphery will breathe a sigh of relief.
Understood and agreed. “Greater” suffering – much greater, I should say. But I am not advocating propping the system up, nor going slow, nor being conservative, not denying the existing danger or the unsustainability of the path we are on.


The hopelessness is only there when you cast about in the same realm which brought about the disease. Looking for some fix within the same construct which brought about the disease is not only futile but sure to prolong the suffering.
Of course. I agree. Where we can't seem to find agreement is on what is and what isn't within or without the construct, and what can and can't be done with which parts of the existing construct. Existing completely outside of the construct seems to me to not be possible.

We are at keyboards. We talk-write. If we all agreed on everything there would be nothing to talk-write-think about. Differences help us to think it through, resolve, problem-solve, read more about, research, learn and it keeps it interesting. If we all agreed on everything there would be nothing but articles posted that no one felt compelled to respond to. Who cares if the issues are controversial or sensitive or politically correct or taboo? That is the great advantage of being here rather than there.

Keep it simple.

aside from the splintering, the views that we unify around are not subject to moral relevancy. Maybe if you defined the initial underlying directive--class struggle, economic unfairness as non-negotiable than disagreements on other issues are just a matter of chewing the fat. For me, anyway, I learn a lot from point-counterpoint. Those are the times when the wheels move. Are you demanding purity from us, mberst?

...direct and unambiguous connection between the immoral actions of the Pentagon and the individuals wearing the uniform

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Defense

How come you are going to sulk off because others aren't in lock-step with your positions?

So much for solidarity.

The complaints you bring to us we could just as easily reflect back to you.

Talk about splintering off.

But I do think that if we can't agree to disagree about subsidairy issues among a handful of people then the entire Big Tent deal is doomed. I'd thought that the point of the whole project was to find the common denominator which unites us, economic justice. With that established, other issues would be resolved in the lens of economic justice. Yet here we are rehashing various hot buttons, just like at the other place. Now I understand that it is all interrelated, and that what I called subsidiary issues are deadly important. But from what I've seen these issues are not being analysed properly, it's the same old passionate declarations without the context which is to be our touchstone. Passion is good, utterly necessary, but without context it can be worse than useless.

Apparently more work is needed on structuring the discussion, perhaps that'll work. Pretty cheeky of me, hardly participating and talking like this. But I'll try to do better if ya'll will.

*originally composed about 4 hours ago, I've been busy!

Apparently more work is needed on structuring the discussion.


Agreed.

It made our disagreements here a breath of fresh air. If we can say nothing else in our defence, we can say with certainty that nobody here can legitimately be compared to Phil Ochs's Love me, I'm a Liberal.

We might go at one another hammer and tongs, but that seems to me to be a helluva lot better than sitting in a circle playing The Syncophant's Two-Step as an endless round.

But I do think that if we can't agree to disagree about subsidairy issues among a handful of people then the entire Big Tent deal is doomed. I'd thought that the point of the whole project was to find the common denominator which unites us, economic justice. With that established, other issues would be resolved in the lens of economic justice. Yet here we are rehashing various hot buttons, just like at the other place. Now I understand that it is all interrelated, and that what I called subsidiary issues are deadly important. But from what I've seen these issues are not being analysed properly, it's the same old passionate declarations without the context which is to be our touchstone. Passion is good, utterly necessary, but without context it can be worse than useless.

Apparently more work is needed on structuring the discussion, perhaps that'll work. Pretty cheeky of me, hardly participating and talking like this. But I'll try to do better if ya'll will.

*originally composed about 4 hours ago, I've been busy!

There are two "issues" that are inextricably linked with class and "economic justice" in America, much more so than any other subject. Both of these are largely artifacts of the unique position of the United States. The first "issue" is race and it has been entirely interwoven with class since the founding of the Republic. Yes, it is an expression of class in a general sense but it is the essential lesson of American Socialism, of any type, that one ignores the centrality of race in the social fabric of America at the price of one's relevance.

The other "issue" was claimed as "related" during the 1960's. The United States inherited the remnants of Empire from all other countries at the end of the Second World War and became the "leading" imperialist country. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has been the only "superpower". The result is that the policy of the United States, more so than any other country, tests the loyalty of conscious working people at home. Is there really such a thing as an American interest or national interest that is not exclusively the interest of American imperialism? Much of the critique of the Democratic Party rises directly from this point.

In truth, both of these "issues" are also integrated in the attitudes of working people... and it could not be otherwise. The question faced by anyone "on the left" is whether these attitudes are to be accommodated, ignored or challenged. Is it to be "working men have no country" (with apologies for 19th century genderism) or is it to be "real Americanism"? And if it is to be the latter, when does that cross the line into social chauvinism?

For myself, I can name that song in 3 notes...

I could give a shit about what people think about religion or guns or abortion, but this is something else entirely.

But I do think that if we can't agree to disagree about subsidairy issues among a handful of people then the entire Big Tent deal is doomed. I'd thought that the point of the whole project was to find the common denominator which unites us, economic justice. With that established, other issues would be resolved in the lens of economic justice. Yet here we are rehashing various hot buttons, just like at the other place. Now I understand that it is all interrelated, and that what I called subsidiary issues are deadly important. But from what I've seen these issues are not being analysed properly, it's the same old passionate declarations without the context which is to be our touchstone. Passion is good, utterly necessary, but without context it can be worse than useless.

Apparently more work is needed on structuring the discussion, perhaps that'll work. Pretty cheeky of me, hardly participating and talking like this. But I'll try to do better if ya'll will.

*originally composed about 4 hours ago, I've been busy!

There are two "issues" that are inextricably linked with class and "economic justice" in America, much more so than any other subject. Both of these are largely artifacts of the unique position of the United States. The first "issue" is race and it has been entirely interwoven with class since the founding of the Republic. Yes, it is an expression of class in a general sense but it is the essential lesson of American Socialism, of any type, that one ignores the centrality of race in the social fabric of America at the price of one's relevance.

The other "issue" was claimed as "related" during the 1960's. The United States inherited the remnants of Empire from all other countries at the end of the Second World War and became the "leading" imperialist country. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has been the only "superpower". The result is that the policy of the United States, more so than any other country, tests the loyalty of conscious working people at home. Is there really such a thing as an American interest or national interest that is not exclusively the interest of American imperialism? Much of the critique of the Democratic Party rises directly from this point.

In truth, both of these "issues" are also integrated in the attitudes of working people... and it could not be otherwise. The question faced by anyone "on the left" is whether these attitudes are to be accommodated, ignored or challenged. Is it to be "working men have no country" (with apologies for 19th century genderism) or is it to be "real Americanism"? And if it is to be the latter, when does that cross the line into social chauvinism?

For myself, I can name that song in 3 notes...

I could give a shit about what people think about religion or guns or abortion, but this is something else entirely.

Race cannot be ignored, overt racism has been declining for decades but in times of stress it will pop up pretty quickly. I think that to a large degree it is associated with upbringing and as the older folks who were brought up in a time when racism was acceptable pass on it will decrease. Younger folks today are mostly much less prejudiced than the previous generations.
As far as the organized hate groups go, and I'm thinking mostly of the Klan here, I think a large part of their membership is more motivated by fear of the other than hate. Those are ours for the taking. As for the rest, the haters, stripped of their numbers they will be minimalized, objects of derision.

Internationalism is to be perferred over nationalism as a matter of principle but a much harder row to hoe given American Exceptionalism and generations of propaganda. Flawed as it was and is our Constitution does have much to recommend it and has the advantage of being American, old and famaliar(in name at least) and thus be a readier gate for regular folks. It is a tactical matter to me and not without dangers.

Blindpig, there are no not button issues being fought over, no right wingers being exposed, and no racism being ferreted out or confronted. People are fighting ghosts in their imagination.

I feel like saying hey, people. Stop. Hello?? This is Mike here. A human being. Look at me. You have known me for months, if not years. I have worked all that time to build trust with you- yet most of you have a brick wall of suspicion in place, and will turn in an instant and join a pack of wild dogs in pursuit of the heretic. Mixed metaphor there I guess.

Both Loren and I, and Lilian, have something in common - we are real people. We aren't merely anonymous cyber beings as the rest of you are. Our identities are known, and we share out real lives with you all. The climate around here is so hostile lately, that I half expect that to be met with jeers and cries of "so what?" I don't know, people, so what? You fucking tell me. If people don't matter, nothing matters. Believe me, it makes a big difference. If you don't think it does, then let's see who you are.

One thing I can say about newswolf for whatever flaws you may find in him. He is real. He is the way human beings are supposed to be - imperfect. It is easy to make a cyber creation perfect. But I know that what I see is what I get - i don't know that about the rest if you. You are all a little too perfect, too mysterious. Kid let's it hang out once in a while, but the PC police will slap him back into his place in short order.

Let's say that we are all a bunch of raving racist homophobic misogynist revisionary closet reactionary bastards. Arghhhhh!!!! Run for your life! Wouldn't it be better to talk about it than to continue sparring from a distance, reading hints and signs, carrying around a shit load of suspicion all the time, with tempers on hair trigger and hyper alert to the slightest offense to the pc gods?

Newswolf may be a POS to you all here, now that you have detected heresy, and bounced accusations, insinuations, and smears back and forth and gained courage and reinforcement from the mob. Hate him if your political correctness demands it. But for me he was the most important, influential member here, and the one who held the key to breaking out of this God awful trap we are in – rigid, dead, over-rationalized, impersonal – talking robots playing a chess game of “ideas” as though we were bored and disembodied brains sitting in a vat of tepid water.

Am I now a POS as well? Does the fact that someone else here valued the member you all have trashed no matter? Have I been outvoted? I would take newswolf over any other100 posters I have met online. I am not looking for “like minded” people, though. I am looking for real people instead of posting zombies.

Here is another thing I am sure of – in a pinch he would have my back. That is the first and most important test on the streets of Detroit, not whether or not someone “shares your political philosophy” – please – and not what someone's opinion is in a single issue, or what you might imagine it to be. Real people with real struggles in the world don't have time for that shit. We will get on the same page politically within a context of friendship and trust. The endless frantic search to establish a shared political context first, all the while staying removed and distant from one another, never leads to being on the same page politically, and we also stay isolated and alone and vulnerable.

He would never turn on me because of an opinion I expressed. That means more than all of the political correctness in the world. Do any of you doubt that it is political correctness that animated this whole sorry affair?

The message from the last few days was as clear as can be – don't count on anyone having your back. Watch your step. Watch what you say. Anyone here can turn in you in an instant, - they have no commitment from them, they could hit and run, they could do real damage to you offline. It sucks. I am calling it political correctness run amok. Don't no if that is perfect – and we have some expert hair splitters and nit pickers here – but it will suffice for anyone who seriously wants to talk like real human beings instead of playing dueling doctoral theses – interspersed with drunken frat house food fights - or whatever the Hell it is that is going on. It is the strangest mixture of pedantic and academic rambling, and thuggish mob rule anti-intellectualism. It is nuts.

You couldn't build a Wednesday night amateur astronomy club in this impersonal and sterile climate of suspicion and fear, mistrust and misunderstanding, with all sorts of hostility right under the surface ready to erupt at any second on the slightest pretext, let alone do what we say we are trying to do.

Blindpig, there are no not button issues being fought over, no right wingers being exposed, and no racism being ferreted out or confronted. People are fighting ghosts in their imagination.

I feel like saying hey, people. Stop. Hello?? This is Mike here. A human being. Look at me. You have known me for months, if not years. I have worked all that time to build trust with you- yet most of you have a brick wall of suspicion in place, and will turn in an instant and join a pack of wild dogs in pursuit of the heretic. Mixed metaphor there I guess.

Both Loren and I, and Lilian, have something in common - we are real people. We aren't merely anonymous cyber beings as the rest of you are. Our identities are known, and we share out real lives with you all. The climate around here is so hostile lately, that I half expect that to be met with jeers and cries of "so what?" I don't know, people, so what? You fucking tell me. If people don't matter, nothing matters. Believe me, it makes a big difference. If you don't think it does, then let's see who you are.

One thing I can say about newswolf for whatever flaws you may find in him. He is real. He is the way human beings are supposed to be - imperfect. It is easy to make a cyber creation perfect. But I know that what I see is what I get - i don't know that about the rest if you. You are all a little too perfect, too mysterious. Kid let's it hang out once in a while, but the PC police will slap him back into his place in short order.

Let's say that we are all a bunch of raving racist homophobic misogynist revisionary closet reactionary bastards. Arghhhhh!!!! Run for your life! Wouldn't it be better to talk about it than to continue sparring from a distance, reading hints and signs, carrying around a shit load of suspicion all the time, with tempers on hair trigger and hyper alert to the slightest offense to the pc gods?

Newswolf may be a POS to you all here, now that you have detected heresy, and bounced accusations, insinuations, and smears back and forth and gained courage and reinforcement from the mob. Hate him if your political correctness demands it. But for me he was the most important, influential member here, and the one who held the key to breaking out of this God awful trap we are in – rigid, dead, over-rationalized, impersonal – talking robots playing a chess game of “ideas” as though we were bored and disembodied brains sitting in a vat of tepid water.

Am I now a POS as well? Does the fact that someone else here valued the member you all have trashed no matter? Have I been outvoted? I would take newswolf over any other100 posters I have met online. I am not looking for “like minded” people, though. I am looking for real people instead of posting zombies.

Here is another thing I am sure of – in a pinch he would have my back. That is the first and most important test on the streets of Detroit, not whether or not someone “shares your political philosophy” – please – and not what someone's opinion is in a single issue, or what you might imagine it to be. Real people with real struggles in the world don't have time for that shit. We will get on the same page politically within a context of friendship and trust. The endless frantic search to establish a shared political context first, all the while staying removed and distant from one another, never leads to being on the same page politically, and we also stay isolated and alone and vulnerable.

He would never turn on me because of an opinion I expressed. That means more than all of the political correctness in the world. Do any of you doubt that it is political correctness that animated this whole sorry affair?

The message from the last few days was as clear as can be – don't count on anyone having your back. Watch your step. Watch what you say. Anyone here can turn in you in an instant, - they have no commitment from them, they could hit and run, they could do real damage to you offline. It sucks. I am calling it political correctness run amok. Don't no if that is perfect – and we have some expert hair splitters and nit pickers here – but it will suffice for anyone who seriously wants to talk like real human beings instead of playing dueling doctoral theses – interspersed with drunken frat house food fights - or whatever the Hell it is that is going on. It is the strangest mixture of pedantic and academic rambling, and thuggish mob rule anti-intellectualism. It is nuts.

You couldn't build a Wednesday night amateur astronomy club in this impersonal and sterile climate of suspicion and fear, mistrust and misunderstanding, with all sorts of hostility right under the surface ready to erupt at any second on the slightest pretext, let alone do what we say we are trying to do.

Mike, of course you're right about this but I'm getting confused. I knew this from the start


I have worked all that time to build trust with you- yet most of you have a brick wall of suspicion in place, and will turn in an instant and join a pack of wild dogs in pursuit of the heretic.

and this:


The climate around here is so hostile lately, that I half expect that to be met with jeers and cries of "so what?" I don't know, people, so what? You fucking tell me. If people don't matter, nothing matters. Believe me, it makes a big difference. If you don't think it does, then let's see who you are.


this too:


this God awful trap we are in – rigid, dead, over-rationalized, impersonal – talking robots playing a chess game of “ideas” as though we were bored and disembodied brains sitting in a vat of tepid water

and:


Real people with real struggles in the world don't have time for that shit. We will get on the same page politically within a context of friendship and trust. The endless frantic search to establish a shared political context first, all the while staying removed and distant from one another, never leads to being on the same page politically, and we also stay isolated and alone and vulnerable.

lastly


The message from the last few days was as clear as can be – don't count on anyone having your back. Watch your step. Watch what you say. Anyone here can turn in you in an instant, - they have no commitment from them, they could hit and run, they could do real damage to you offline. It sucks. I am calling it political correctness run amok. Don't no if that is perfect – and we have some expert hair splitters and nit pickers here – but it will suffice for anyone who seriously wants to talk like real human beings instead of playing dueling doctoral theses – interspersed with drunken frat house food fights - or whatever the Hell it is that is going on. It is the strangest mixture of pedantic and academic rambling, and thuggish mob rule anti-intellectualism. It is nuts.


Here's why I'm confused - you HAD to know these things coming in but you exuded all of this optimism and I couldn't peg where it was coming from. I took it on faith that you would bring me around and show me what I was missing. Instead, it seems we're back hititng the same brick wall again.

On newswolf in particular however, I think you've chosen the most ideological position possible, and have succumbed to a ridiculous degree of hyperbole. Here is why in a nutshell:

On PI, I was quite reticent to even engage newswolf because well, he didn't seem like the type open to other viewpoints. When I did, though, I found him surprisingly willing to engage in two-way conversations and I felt a strong sense of camaraderie even.

However, when he comes over here, refuses to brook even mild suggestions that what he is saying sounds alot like a vestige of his 'past life' that took me back a bit. When he then lumps me in with the slavering PC leftys as though I am just part of the PI riff-raff, I don't know what to say. I felt it was a betrayal, although I am not looking to overdramatize anything.

If it was simply a misunderstanding of what he was saying, I don't believe for a second he would have responded with so much hostility.

Mike, you're fixated on how you or newswolf can't say certain things for fear of instant, vicious reprisal. That is how I felt responding to Loren.

Finally, I think you are trying to draw some link between accepting Loren and accepting the average joe. I tried to ask anax a variant of that same question, but I didn't understand his response. But look, he doesn't represent the man on the street at all (who would regard him as a headcase, incidentally). He is an ideologue to the extreme, moreso even than the others here.

I had reservations about newswolf from the start. I guess you can make that out to be some infernal fore-ordained judgment I made against him or some ulterior sub-conscious motive guaranteeing I would eventually "turn on him". I don't think thats true, but who cares.

I eagerly pushed those reservations aside (which is no easy task since he does come with a shit-ton of baggage). In fact there was a certain stigma attached in the eyes of other people "hey this guys nuts you know, are you sure thats who you want to align with? Maybe you're nuts too.." I had/have no qualms about that.

But if his views are going to vacillate all over the place with the wind, and every time its going to be the "you're persecuting me for not towing the PC line" song and dance, then I'm out. I'm not pushing any PC line, I'm not persecuting him. I feel he needs to stop and do a little introspection before he flings so much shit at everyone (deserving or not). Hes not open to hearing that. There's not a lot of wiggle room there for me.

Further, he is a terrible mix here because he is way too forcefully argumentative, something I thought he sensed by taking so long to migrate over from his blog. People seem to think these things are like debate club or something. All I see it as is an opportunity to read a lot of different takes on the same theme, even if it does mean sifting through an assload of pedantic crap. If I tried to get anymore involved than that, I'm under no illusions that I wouldn't be run off.

Hell, anax got upset that I suggested this site comes across as ambivalent towards the goals its professing. I thought 'ambivalent' was being kind but now you've come out and said most of the things I've just bottled up or let go.

Shouldn't let things bottle up like that--was wondering when you were about to bust.

We are real people too. Sometimes I write about my life. We lost our family home to floods. My mother almost died recently. I work in a library. I guess I don't talk much about my artistic ability, but I guess it is the most impressive thing about me. My father fought in Korea. Often I think I talk too much about myself. Maybe you weren't paying attention. Mairead talks about her life--riding bikes, trying to organize, having some strange kind of work that she feels guilty about. I think Mairead has put a lot of effort into getting this place in gear. You should appreciate her.

Let's say that we are all a bunch of raving racist homophobic misogynist revisionary closet reactionary bastards. Arghhhhh!!!! Run for your life! Wouldn't it be better to talk about it than to continue sparring from a distance, reading hints and signs, carrying around a shit load of suspicion all the time, with tempers on hair trigger and hyper alert to the slightest offense to the pc gods?

Newswolf may be a POS to you all here, now that you have detected heresy, and bounced accusations, insinuations, and smears back and forth and gained courage and reinforcement from the mob. Hate him if your political correctness demands it. But for me he was the most important, influential member here, and the one who held the key to breaking out of this God awful trap we are in – rigid, dead, over-rationalized, impersonal – talking robots playing a chess game of “ideas” as though we were bored and disembodied brains sitting in a vat of tepid water.

Am I now a POS as well? Does the fact that someone else here valued the member you all have trashed no matter? Have I been outvoted? I would take newswolf over any other100 posters I have met online. I am not looking for “like minded” people, though. I am looking for real people instead of posting zombies...

The message from the last few days was as clear as can be – don't count on anyone having your back. Watch your step. Watch what you say. Anyone here can turn in you in an instant, - they have no commitment from them, they could hit and run, they could do real damage to you offline. It sucks. I am calling it political correctness run amok. Don't no if that is perfect – and we have some expert hair splitters and nit pickers here – but it will suffice for anyone who seriously wants to talk like real human beings instead of playing dueling doctoral theses – interspersed with drunken frat house food fights - or whatever the Hell it is that is going on. It is the strangest mixture of pedantic and academic rambling, and thuggish mob rule anti-intellectualism. It is nuts.


Why discuss wolf the person? Why at all? NO ONE made any ad hominem attack on him. The discussion is not about him. It is about his claim the "Islam is a threat."

No one ran him off. He made a claim. That claim has been pretty strongly demolished. I am not here to have anyone's back or to get my ass pinched.

I don't give a good goddamn about some exta measure harmony; no one trashed wolf by trashing his premise. We have harmony. No one tells anyone to go fuck themselves. No one calls names. If he, you or anyone else posits bullshit, then I hope and expect that it not withstand the group's scrutiny. After all, is that not a main reason we are here?

Frankly, your repeated FABRICATION of other premises than that particular foreign affairs perspective is disappointing and destructive to the discussion, far moreso than whatever discord has supposedly been created by correctly identifying an idea as reactionary. And that was and is a correct analysis. If you can controvert that, then do so. Saying 'I am not on a side' is just another method of subverting the discussion that really is SOLELY about that little assertion, whether Islam is a threat. EVERY OTHER THING brought into this about disunity and attacking wolf ad nauseum is fiction and subversion of the discussion of that topic and, apparently, very nearly every other one too.

These premises that we are some kind of mob who think ugly things about you as people are just utter fiction, nowhere appearing until popping up like this:


reading hints and signs, carrying around a shit load of suspicion all the time, with tempers on hair trigger and hyper alert to the slightest offense <-- What tempers? Where?


Newswolf may be a POS to you all here <-- emphasis added to point out the fact that this is utter Fiction,a premise of Your Creation and nothing more.


Am I now a POS as well? <-- No, but you are a fabricator.


thuggish mob rule <-- huh? thuggish agreement by many that the assertion he made was incorrect?

Spare me. Spare us. That is such over dramatic bullshit. I appreciate wolf immensly as you know from our private conversations. Of course that goes for you too. I see no evidence that anyone has attacked wolf or you. Perhaps you can quote some of these things you are asserting that have been said. I have seen no evidence that anyone wants to see the conversation diminished by your absence. Indeed, I fear the conversation could just die without you both. But that don't mean carte blanche to project concepts that must go unchallenged in pursuit of some extra measure of harmony...irreconcilable differences are far more real and frequent than ideological unity. That's a political reality you need to deal with, right here and right now. Just as disagreement with reactionary ideas is a reality wolf needs to deal with in some other manner than running off like a scalded dog, either by adequately defending his ideas, letting loose of them, or saying we will have to agree to disagree.

As far as crafting a message to go out from here with - as far as sharing 'our' message with outside groups, I think it is going to be imperative that we get over this little anthropomorphic problem you are injecting. Why is it that Raph does not go on at length about being made a pariah for unpopular views regarding soldiers? Because Raph is not taking the impersonal as personal. The topic was soldiers, not Raph. And the topic of this dust up is Wolf's assertion that Islam is a threat; it is not Wolf. Not at all.

Whether "Islam is a threat" is IMPERSONAL. It is in the realm of foreign affairs and, as has been demonstrated by the reasoned discussion that followed (despite this disruption and fabrication of a personal problem amongst us), is not even Remotely real life, let alone personal. Deal with it as such.

You want personal? My mother, nearly 60 years old and stuck working a shitty retail job with no health insurance or anything like that, was robbed last night. Again. That's what she has to do for her four hundred bux a week. That's personal.

All this irrelevant drama-making instead of a reasoned discussion slows down any chance we have to try and improve the lives of people like my mom.

That's not personal but it is too bad.

Do any of you doubt that it is political correctness that animated this whole sorry affair?

I reject it out of hand.

Do any of you doubt that it is political correctness that animated this whole sorry affair?
Casting doubt on someone's thesis doesn't constitute "political correctness" under any definition I'm aware of, Mike. Casting doubt on a thesis is an example of scientific correctness, I believe. If you still believe it's pc, could you give us the applicable definition?

(Just for the record, btw, I'll state that if anyone around here qualifies as an intellectual, it's Wolf. I have a great deal of respect for him to the extent I know him as a person, and have said to him directly that I believe he's making a mistake in withdrawing (I also acknowedged that it was his mistake and he was entitled to it if he wanted it, which, regretably, he apparently does))

Well put PPLE

All hate is based in fear. Any negative emotion is based in fear.

Anything positive is based on love.

So if any of you think someone hates you. You could hypothesize that they are afraid of you based on your belief of thier "hating"

If you hate them for that then you are really afraid of them too. So at this point regardless of whether or not someone "actually" hates you; you have now only helped to continue the cycle of fear and the lameness that keeps repeating itself over and over again.

There is no room for the "fear cycle" in a deliberative discussion unless the subject of the discussion is about the fear cycle.

I try to objectify and concentrate on the facts, opinions or real subject matter within the context of the discussion and try to ignore the fear by not creating my own to throw back at others. Being a human being I tend to forget to do this especially when I get passionate about an issue.

About me:

I am a white boy.
I grew up in a small town in Texas.
I was raised on a smallish family farm, cleaning chicken shit, milking goats, etc.
My parents are still alive and together.
I work for the USPS
I code java.
I have a 6 year old step daughter and a wife with a heart of gold.
She is working for her SLP degree and has a 2 jobs doing Applied Behavioral Analysis and waiting tables at the diner across the street.
We have a baby on the way that is due in July.
I have shitty credit.
I drive a POS 89 ford van with a missing window and doors that don't lock and a hole in the dash where someone ripped out my burgieous radio.
I live in the crime capital of the US, St. Louis.
I take the bus/train to work.
I don't march in anti-war rallies.
I give to charities but I won't tell you which ones.
I will only vote in local elections if I ever do at all.
My wife hates it when I play too much World of Warcraft.
I smoke too many cigarettes.
I host this bulletin board pro bono and I love reading what everyone here has to say.

If I saw Mike or anyone fall on the tracks while in the throws of an epileptic fit I would jump down there and save the poor bastard from getting run over just like anyone else who has to balls to do it.

Plug me into your favorite stereotype now or hate me for my charmed life or blast my "lifestyle" but when you do it stop yourself and try to figure out where the fear that is causing you to do it is really coming from. (for me I always look inward first then if I can't find it I then search for the outside source)

Should this trivial crap about me matter to any of you? Maybe you feel like you have a better connection or understanding of me or you think you have some new ammo to load your fear gun with, but in the context of wheter or not Islam is wrong or the fact that the only thing that has ever decreased the amount of terrorist acts anywhere in the world is when the occupying force leaves ~~~ my personal profile really doesn't matter unless you plan to use it against me.

Well put PPLE

All hate is based in fear. Any negative emotion is based in fear.

Anything positive is based on love.

So if any of you think someone hates you. You could hypothesize that they are afraid of you based on your belief of thier "hating"

If you hate them for that then you are really afraid of them too. So at this point regardless of whether or not someone "actually" hates you; you have now only helped to continue the cycle of fear and the lameness that keeps repeating itself over and over again.

There is no room for the "fear cycle" in a deliberative discussion unless the subject of the discussion is about the fear cycle.

I try to objectify and concentrate on the facts, opinions or real subject matter within the context of the discussion and try to ignore the fear by not creating my own to throw back at others. Being a human being I tend to forget to do this especially when I get passionate about an issue.

About me:

I am a white boy.
I grew up in a small town in Texas.
I was raised on a smallish family farm, cleaning chicken shit, milking goats, etc.
My parents are still alive and together.
I work for the USPS
I code java.
I have a 6 year old step daughter and a wife with a heart of gold.
She is working for her SLP degree and has a 2 jobs doing Applied Behavioral Analysis and waiting tables at the diner across the street.
We have a baby on the way that is due in July.
I have shitty credit.
I drive a POS 89 ford van with a missing window and doors that don't lock and a hole in the dash where someone ripped out my burgieous radio.
I live in the crime capital of the US, St. Louis.
I take the bus/train to work.
I don't march in anti-war rallies.
I give to charities but I won't tell you which ones.
I will only vote in local elections if I ever do at all.
My wife hates it when I play too much World of Warcraft.
I smoke too many cigarettes.
I host this bulletin board pro bono and I love reading what everyone here has to say.

If I saw Mike or anyone fall on the tracks while in the throws of an epileptic fit I would jump down there and save the poor bastard from getting run over just like anyone else who has to balls to do it.

Plug me into your favorite stereotype now or hate me for my charmed life or blast my "lifestyle" but when you do it stop yourself and try to figure out where the fear that is causing you to do it is really coming from. (for me I always look inward first then if I can't find it I then search for the outside source)

Should this trivial crap about me matter to any of you? Maybe you feel like you have a better connection or understanding of me or you think you have some new ammo to load your fear gun with, but in the context of wheter or not Islam is wrong or the fact that the only thing that has ever decreased the amount of terrorist acts anywhere in the world is when the occupying force leaves ~~~ my personal profile really doesn't matter unless you plan to use it against me.

This is pure bragging I guess, but my 88 POS E150 (with a hat) has solar panels on mounted on the roof, several last-forever 6-volt batteries cabled together ala a golf cart setup and a 3000 watt inverter. Yes, I can run a microwave in there :)

I had an 89 same as you, but the rearend was set-up for pulling like a motherfucker (so the chumps who drop $30 large on it new could tow..a camper maybe?), and for mpg you really really need a highway ratio back there. That and a fucking 351..the 88 has AOD and gets closer to 20 highway. Which may seem bad until you realize it doubles as a home. I've never had a mobile get that mileage :D

If I ever go back and get it from Dad my 302 will haul my 21ft camper just fine, as long as the tranny holds up.

And no air unit on top - to conspicuous and no way in hell my inverter/batteries will run that thing. True story, I knew a guy during the hurricanes who bought a 10,000 watt inverter to run his 4 ton AC in his house while the lights were out. Said the gasoline cost just about bankrupted him :D

You want personal? My mother, nearly 60 years old and stuck working a shitty retail job with no health insurance or anything like that, was robbed last night. Again. That's what she has to do for her four hundred bux a week. That's personal.
Give your mum my deepest sympathies, would you? That's nothing less than a war-like experience. I hope she applies for worker's comp.

You want personal? My mother, nearly 60 years old and stuck working a shitty retail job with no health insurance or anything like that, was robbed last night. Again. That's what she has to do for her four hundred bux a week. That's personal.
Give your mum my deepest sympathies, would you? That's nothing less than a war-like experience. I hope she applies for worker's comp.

I am sure she'll appreciate that, but this is getting to be old news. It's the fourth time it's happened.

Hell, anax got upset that I suggested this site comes across as ambivalent towards the goals its professing. I thought 'ambivalent' was being kind but now you've come out and said most of the things I've just bottled up or let go.

I didn't get upset, KOBH. I was just warning you not to get carried away. That is the one piece of "personal footprint" or asceticism that I do believe in. Gotta have humility. Won't do to set yourself off from "the people". First, it isn't true and second it'll get you hurt. Start to tailor your views to what you think is your audience, ...or worse, start worrying about metering their "impact", and you get in trouble real fast. That's all. Besides, you're my buds, even if you do suffer from political Tourette’s.

Funny thing is, I don't really get upset on the web. I wasn't really ever mean to anybody on PI (well, maybe I smacked DBCooper once but he had it comin' to him and I fucked with a Hindu-Nazi, but that doesn't really count). I'm thinking that maybe it's because I don't often confuse the Web with a virtual town, full of digital "friends". It's seems more like an interactive journal.

Hey, ya think we just invented "blogs"?

[quote="Mike"]Blindpig, there are no not button issues being fought over, no right wingers being exposed, and no racism being ferreted out or confronted. People are fighting ghosts in their imagination.

If Islam ain't a hot button then what is? Don't know nothin' bout no right wingers., etc, I'm still trying to figure out who's fighting what and why.

I feel like saying hey, people. Stop. Hello?? This is Mike here. A human being. Look at me. You have known me for months, if not years. I have worked all that time to build trust with you- yet most of you have a brick wall of suspicion in place, and will turn in an instant and join a pack of wild dogs in pursuit of the heretic. Mixed metaphor there I guess.

Both Loren and I, and Lilian, have something in common - we are real people. We aren't merely anonymous cyber beings as the rest of you are. Our identities are known, and we share out real lives with you all. The climate around here is so hostile lately, that I half expect that to be met with jeers and cries of "so what?" I don't know, people, so what? You fucking tell me. If people don't matter, nothing matters. Believe me, it makes a big difference. If you don't think it does, then let's see who you are.

Sure, why not? Might as well get this over with. I'm a pawnbroker. Ain't that a kick, this self-described socialist? Suppose that makes me some sort of hypocrite but that's life. This is what happens when you go with the flow: you wash up on a rock. Other than zookeeper never had a trade. Moved south to escape unemployment, textiles collasped , learned useless languages at Tech, took minimum wage job at old family owned pawn shop out of desperation and learned the biz despite myself. When they sold out to a fascist corp I fished around for another pawn job, having 11 years experience and not knowing anything else useful, nothin' there so my oldest bud fronted and signed for the cash minimum to open a mom&pop pawn shop.

Don't take no genius to know that usury sucks. I make no excuse other than there's no other way for a useless person such as myself to make 30K per year that I can manage. All that I can do is treat people as humanly as possible and cut slack whenever possible. I do all I can to be decent but still I hate what I do, playing that Power Ball, no other options.

Say what you will, I know what's going on in the street. Things are worse than ever, make no mistake.

But hey, we recycle !

Got robbed 5 years ago, 15 year old kid with a 9mm in my face. He killed a man 3 weeks later then turned himself in. Serving 30, no parole.

Let the flaying begin.

Tammy & I have been together for 24 years, unmarried, childless and relatively happy. Things could be much worse.

My basement is full of reptiles, mostly pentioners, rescues and those bred by me.

One thing I can say about newswolf for whatever flaws you may find in him. He is real. He is the way human beings are supposed to be - imperfect. It is easy to make a cyber creation perfect. But I know that what I see is what I get - i don't know that about the rest if you. You are all a little too perfect, too mysterious. Kid let's it hang out once in a while, but the PC police will slap him back into his place in short order.

See above.


Hope the above is real enough for you. I feel a bad moon rising.


Look, I got no problem with Wolf, I think his opinion of Islam is overstated and he's bit touchy, but that's no big deal to me.

We got way to much drama going on here, and I probably made it worse. Let the dice fall where they may.

Hope the above is real enough for you. I feel a bad moon rising.
Look, I got no problem with Wolf, I think his opinion of Islam is overstated...

I have no problem with Wolf either, nor anyone else here.

You're lucky to own your means of income rather than being a wage slave. Don't feel bad about what they are. We're all slaves to the system; it can't be helped absent revolution.

I suspect that someone of your political persuasion and profession is a blessing in the community.

That said, I think this personalizing everthing is cool but not remotely germaine to the controversy that erupted from reactionary comments about Islam.

Hell, anax got upset that I suggested this site comes across as ambivalent towards the goals its professing. I thought 'ambivalent' was being kind but now you've come out and said most of the things I've just bottled up or let go.

I didn't get upset, KOBH. I was just warning you not to get carried away. That is the one piece of "personal footprint" or asceticism that I do believe in. Gotta have humility. Won't do to set yourself off from "the people". First, it isn't true and second it'll get you hurt. Start to tailor your views to what you think is your audience, ...or worse, start worrying about metering their "impact", and you get in trouble real fast. That's all. Besides, you're my buds, even if you do suffer from political Tourette’s.

Funny thing is, I don't really get upset on the web. I wasn't really ever mean to anybody on PI (well, maybe I smacked DBCooper once but he had it comin' to him and I fucked with a Hindu-Nazi, but that doesn't really count). I'm thinking that maybe it's because I don't often confuse the Web with a virtual town, full of digital "friends". It's seems more like an interactive journal.

Hey, ya think we just invented "blogs"?

Oh, I see what you meant. I had to go back and find the earlier comemnt and reread it, because I do suffer from skimming stuff which sometimes means I don't digest the whole thing.

Political Tourette's..I like that :)

an interactive journal.

Yes.

I have no objection to doubt being cast on a person's thesis. I objected to the method. I have yet to hear the person's thesis on this, by the way. I saw doubt cast on the person, not on the thesis. Doubt was cast on the person based on the use of a phrase, the phrase being assumed to have a certain meaning. Political correctness may not be the best way to describe that, and I am reluctant to use that phrase since it was invented by right wing propagandists. Better terminology awaits someone smarter than I, and for now it will have to serve my purpose.

Deducing a state of mind in a speaker based upon what they say is political correctness. Making politics a matter of what is on the surface, and coming to conclusions based on that and in such a way that precludes any further consideration or discussion is political correctness. Assuming that all is known, and that there are two and only two sides to each issue, and that a certain set of issues take precedence over all else, is political correctness. Demonizing a person based on something they say that is not congruent with a particular dogma is political correctness. Having a complex and elaborate set of rules for what is OK to say and what is not is political correctness. Operating from a simplistic formula as to who the good guys are and who the bad guys are is political correctness.

There is only a relative handful of people in the country who would deny that there is an omnipresent and highly restrictive injunction against people to watch what they say. This operates against radical politics and against the Left. All a person needs to do is clean up their language and phrasing, and they are presumed to be on the side of righteousness.

We are trying to build a movement made up of people who have precisely the right position on hundreds of issues, and are judging that solely on the words they mouth. A person can be a dedicated Leftist, not use the right language, and be held under suspicion and drummed out. Others, by parroting the right words and phrases, gain full acceptance, yet when push comes to shove it becomes clear that they have absolutely no interest in the Left at all. All of their time and energy went into sounding like a Leftist – saying the right things.

That is political correctness, and the reason it matters is because it is an almost complete and absolute barrier to communication, and that lack of communication is the one and only reason for the dreadful failure of the Left.

We are trying to build a movement made up of people who have precisely the right position on hundreds of issues, and are judging that solely on the words they mouth. A person can be a dedicated Leftist, not use the right language, and be held under suspicion and drummed out.

Again, I reject this premise.

Who is "we?"

... in the context of wheter or not Islam is wrong or the fact that the only thing that has ever decreased the amount of terrorist acts anywhere in the world is when the occupying force leaves ~~~ my personal profile really doesn't matter unless you plan to use it against me.
Good to see you chime in.

No one said "Islam was wrong" by the way. No one disputed that the root cause of terrorism is occupation and exploitation by the western powers of countries that happen to be largely peopled by those of the Islamic faith, especially the US and US corporations. A couple of us said that Islam was a threat. I believe that I can support and defend that. If people are going to continue to mis-characterize my remarks to mean “Moslems are a threat” or “Islam is wrong” then of course I can't defend what I didn't say and also do not agree with.

The right wingers say that is is us versus Islam. Very clever on their part, and we are falling for the central and key lie in that as much as any one.

I question that premise. Islam (the institution and its most powerful political leaders, of course) share the same ambitions with the ruling class here - suppression of the everyday people. All evidence suggests that the supposed enemies - Islam, and the expression of political Islam "jihad" on the one hand and the ruling class here on the other hand - are in fact cooperating and working together.

I believe that "Islam" - the political force that controls our allies in the Middle East and Near East - AND "Bush" - the ruling class here - took down the twin towers.

I believe that the Palestinian and Lebanese and Iraqi freedom fighters, while many of them are Moslem, are opposed by Islam (political Islam, of course, and since we are after all talking about politics and not comparative religions, it seems unnecessary to me to have to keep qualifying "Islam" for fear of people hearing the word "Moslems" every time I say "Islam.")

Hamas has nothing to do with Al Qaeda that I can see. One organization is fighting for the ruling class and the other for the working class. One seeks installation of monarchy and religious law and theocracy. The other seeks democracy and republicanism and civil rights and pluralism. The fact that there are Moslems in both groups, and Arabs in both groups, doesn't make them the same. Lumping them together just because the right wingers do on behalf of the ruling class who want us to be unable to distinguish between the two is much more prejudicial than the remark "Islam is a threat" is. It is also much more important to the war effort, than the racist jingoistic outward supporters are. We reinforce the context - the assumptions - when we don't make any distinctions.

The right wingers say that “they” are bad. In knee jerk fashion we say that “they” are not bad. The ruling class doesn't care if we think “they” are bad or not, they need us all to agree with their ideas as to who “they” is – all people in predominantly Moslem countries. They want us to ignore the power and wealth that IS Islam politically, so that they can continue to conspire with the theocratic and powerful leaders in Islam to suppress the working class both here and there.

The US war is on secular pluralistic Arabic and Persian people - many of whom are followers of Islam. The chief US allies are the ones that represent the political power of Islam. - the feudalistic and backwards societies representing a very small percentage of the Arabic people, most of the power and wealth, and who are very cozy with US ruling class corporate interests.

Islam (the institution and its most powerful political leaders, of course) share the same ambitions with the ruling class here - suppression of the everyday people.

Islam the institution is less centralized and less oppressive than the vatican by a long shot. I don't believe I can accept this premise either.


I believe that the Palestinian and Lebanese and Iraqi freedom fighters, while many of them are Moslem, are opposed by Islam

I don't.


Hamas has nothing to do with Al Qaeda that I can see. One organization is fighting for the ruling class and the other for the working class. One seeks installation of monarchy and religious law and theocracy. The other seeks democracy and republicanism and civil rights and pluralism. The fact that there are Moslems in both groups, and Arabs in both groups, doesn't make them the same. Lumping them together just because the right wingers do on behalf of the ruling class who want us to be unable to distinguish between the two is much more prejudicial than the remark "Islam is a threat" is.

Seems exactly the same to me, at least absent qualifying remaks like this, which for a solid week have been absent. Which of the two groups do you see as working for democracy? I don't really see Hamas very favorably merely because the people voted for them in an act of desparation.

Hope the above is real enough for you. I feel a bad moon rising.
Look, I got no problem with Wolf, I think his opinion of Islam is overstated...

I have no problem with Wolf either, nor anyone else here.

You're lucky to own your means of income rather than being a wage slave. Don't feel bad about what they are. We're all slaves to the system; it can't be helped absent revolution.

I suspect that someone of your political persuasion and profession is a blessing in the community.

That said, I think this personalizing everthing is cool but not remotely germaine to the controversy that erupted from reactionary comments about Islam.

Yeah, don't think it's germaine either, all of this is making me crazy and that was my way of going off, getting all masochistic .:oops:

Thanks for your kind words, I don't know that all will see it that way.

I just don't know, seems the more we talk the worse it gets. If this were a novel a deus ex machina would be in order. But it's not a novel.

I host this bulletin board pro bono and I love reading what everyone here has to say.
I wasn't sure if you wanted this to be known so I hadn't mentioned it. Thanks for the idea for the board and for setting it up.

Bullshit premise etc.
I don't know of you want me to respond to all of your comments or not. We seem to be getting farther apart.

I don't know how to break the impasse. I was suggesting that there were things we should consider and that the range of the discussion was in danger of shrinking.

I suppose if I were just musing on some peripheral or minor matter, then disagreement would be no big deal. But I am talking about the most important things for me, and the subjects that I am most interested in exploring, and those subjects are the only reason I participate in online boards at all. That is why I started the "irreconcilable differences?" thread. I have suspected for a while that we are in a box - by "we" I mean all of those who are discussing liberal, democratic and Leftist politics - that there is no possible way to break out of the box without challenging some fundamental assumptions we are operating under, and that failing to break out of the box dooms us to repeating the same mistakes and suffering from confusion and miscommunication, and that breaking out of that box would change everything and should be the main priority.

I don't think that the recent uproar had anything to do with newswolf. That was just a convenient stand-in for a deeper and more fundamental difference. This is the fourth time I have seen this same drama play out on four different boards, exactly the same way. It happens faster and more dramatically the smaller and the more nominally purely left wing the board is. Each time another fracture happens, my hopes are raised that we can break out of the paradigm that limits the range of discussion and “get into the good stuff” so to speak, yet the opposite happens. It gets worse, and pretty soon the word “we”can't even be used casually. That makes me think that the course that leads us from mainstream political thinking to DU, to Kucinich supporters to PI to PopIndy seems to be going away from my expectations rather than toward them. I think that could be because there is a flaw in our thinking – a blind spot – and the more we distill that down the more in play the flaw is, the sooner it arises and the more confusing and divisive it is when it does arise. Of course, the flaw could be in my thinking, but that is fine and doesn't change anything. The observations that lead me to think that there is some sort of limitation built in to our thinking is what I want to discuss, not push a particular explanation as to why and how that is happening, all of which is speculation on my part.

I suspect that the urge to distill, refine, purify and embrace a particular doctrine is what happens when people get disgusted by the larger groups, and that is the underlying motivation for moving to smaller more focused groups. Something about that, rather than being clarity acts to limit expression. I see that dynamic as being political correctness. As in the case of race, where the use of certain words or certain expressions is seen as racism itself, and a strong stand against racism becomes more aggressive attacks on certain expressions, we get farther away from a deeper discussion about race and less likely to promote or gain any understanding. Such and such a thing is said, that is racist, we are against that and nothing else can be said for fear that if we let go of that we will be back-sliding or compromising or becoming impure or contaminated. Of course, people may well be “right” that the word or phrase indicated racism, but being right about that comes at a terrible price. Being right about it is the booby prize. It isn't of any value. Being right may well be the goal for many people. It certainly is next to impossible to discuss tactics or strategies, plan any action or even discuss planning any action, and reaching out to create a bigger tent or wider discussion always leads to an uproar about fears of contamination or dilution. That leads, in my observation, to a smaller and smaller circle of people and less and less ability to form any consensus on anything.

I am talking about observations, not pushing a point of view. Having an opinion rejected is one thing, but having observations rejected is a different animal. One can change one's opinion, or abide by differences of opinion, but there is no way to stop seeing what you are seeing or to stop talking about what you are seeing. You say that no one is run off, but when a persons observations are invalidated and rejected, and when the most important things they want to discuss are not heard or rejected as not being worthy of attention or discussion, why would they stay? It isn't a situation where one must participate, as in a work or family situation, nor the only way or the only place to discuss things.

I think that newswolf makes a credible case that there are in fact subjects that are not tolerated in discussions and why that would be. I don't know that he is right – I don't know that I am – that isn't the point. I think we are a long way from understanding the phenomenon, and it is certainly not possible to gain an understanding in an adversarial climate. I have tried to approach it from a variety of directions without success.

I am just rambling here. I have lost footing and traction and we are farther away from understanding than ever. I am out of ideas for how to express what I need to say, and everything I try leads us off onto tangents, the most recent being this Islam thing, and once on a tangent it seems impossible to get off it and people dig in and become more entrenched. That is why I suspect that there are some irreconcilable differences involved. The disconnection between what I hear and see in real life and what I hear and see on the boards is so severe and it is getting worse, not better. Connecting the two is the whole point, in my opinion. Newswolf represents, for me, the one link between the two.

What newswolf says and is rejected for – let's not argue whether he was or he wasn't rejected; he thinks he was and at least one other observer, me, agrees – represents the rejection of 100 million people or so. He just says what people are thinking, he just is willing to let his real self come through warts and all. He's too touchy? He's too paranoid? The rest of the population is even more so – so much so that they stay silent. He is reaching for the Left in a more genuine and powerful way than any of us are. But that is not good enough. The warts must be ”confronted” and person attacked. The rejection of newswolf in no way protects the Left. It would, however, protect a certain mindset that is determined to make some people right and the rest of the people wrong, by a more and more hyper-alert and finely tuned set of criteria. I call that political correctness run amok – if the doctrine can be perfected, if the lines of battle more clearly drawn on smaller and smaller evidence and more and more careful vigilance to detect heresy, if we can more quickly identify enemies and more aggressively confront them, that this will advance the cause. I say that the opposite may well be true, not in theory so much, but based on observation of the actual results in the real world.

Here's why I'm confused - you HAD to know these things coming in but you exuded all of this optimism and I couldn't peg where it was coming from. I took it on faith that you would bring me around and show me what I was missing. Instead, it seems we're back hititng the same brick wall again.
Yes, I was very optimistic. Newswolf is expressing in this thread better than I could the basis for that otimisim and why I thought it was important. That is the main thing he is saying, in my opinion, but it has been completely overshadowed by animosity over a relatively minor point or two in his posts.


On PI, I was quite reticent to even engage newswolf because well, he didn't seem like the type open to other viewpoints. When I did, though, I found him surprisingly willing to engage in two-way conversations and I felt a strong sense of camaraderie even.
Agreed. Comb through his remarks, and while they are blunt and unambiguous, the "hostility" people see is in their own imagination. They have no experience with anything outside of two polarized stances, and think that if it isn't one it must be the other. Since most of the people in the country do not match either stereotype, our insistence on placing people into one of the two is the main barrier to communicating with the general public. That failure is the main reason that we have no Left.


However, when he comes over here, refuses to brook even mild suggestions that what he is saying sounds alot like a vestige of his 'past life' that took me back a bit. When he then lumps me in with the slavering PC leftys as though I am just part of the PI riff-raff, I don't know what to say. I felt it was a betrayal, although I am not looking to overdramatize anything.
There was a miscommunication. I don't see that it an all be blamed on one person.


Finally, I think you are trying to draw some link between accepting Loren and accepting the average joe. I tried to ask anax a variant of that same question, but I didn't understand his response. But look, he doesn't represent the man on the street at all (who would regard him as a headcase, incidentally). He is an ideologue to the extreme, moreso even than the others here.

I had reservations about newswolf from the start. I guess you can make that out to be some infernal fore-ordained judgment I made against him or some ulterior sub-conscious motive guaranteeing I would eventually "turn on him". I don't think thats true, but who cares.
Hints of a person being mentally ill are, given the stigma in society, clearly slanderous, Kid.

People in the real world do not regard newswolf nor me as “headcases” - they do however regard PC liberals, expressing the same things that people do here in the same way, as the headcases. I am not saying that newswolf is representative of the average person, I say he is representing the average person.


Further, he is a terrible mix here because he is way too forcefully argumentative, something I thought he sensed by taking so long to migrate over from his blog. People seem to think these things are like debate club or something. All I see it as is an opportunity to read a lot of different takes on the same theme, even if it does mean sifting through an assload of pedantic crap. If I tried to get anymore involved than that, I'm under no illusions that I wouldn't be run off.
I am a terrible mix here, too then. The main difference between us is this - I put a lot of effort into not offending people, and he doesn't. That is not the same as being offensive or not being offensive– I am convinced that it is hyper-sensitivity on the part of the audience. The time I put into carefully phrasing things to prevent people from going ballistic and tgrying to build trust was wasted effort, because it didn't work. The result is the same.

they do however regard PC liberals, expressing the same things that people do here in the same way

This is a supposition about the vox populi followed by the false claim that we here practiced political correctness, which itself is a fabrication by the right meant to effectively shut down reasoned dialogue.

I've not gone back and checked, but I'm fairly sure I'm the one who started this kerfuffle by telling Wolf that he couldn't/can't defend his claim that Islam has a history of being out to get us. I tried, over and over, to point out that "Islam", a well-defined term, does not identify a political institution and therefore has never tried to do anything. My argument was ignored by you, Mike. You worked hard to be supportive of Wolf instead. I admire your loyalty, I honestly do.

Propaganda works. Keep telling the same untruth over and over again and eventually people will believe it. WE SHOULD AVOID SUCH LANGUAGE MISUSE LIKE PLAGUE! We should positively RUN from it, scramble like mad to retract and explain, make the sign of the cross, wear garlic necklaces, whatever it takes to get on the side of precision and clarity. Because if we do anything else, we muddy the water around us, end up steering by our wake, and ultimately run against a rock and sink.

So it's no good trying to explain away what was "really" meant, because meaning is social: it resides as much in the listener as in the speaker. The only useful thing to do --especially here!-- is either try to make a case that it's our shared understanding of what "Islam" means that's wrong---or quickly and openly acknowledge the error and stop using the inappropriate language.

I think our problems right now are nothing but an artifact of that disconnect in language use. Which is hardly an irreconcilable problem unless we want to turn it into one. Do we?

This is a supposition about the vox populi followed by the false claim that we here practiced political correctness, which itself is a fabrication by the right meant to effectively shut down reasoned dialogue.
Yes. I understand that to be your position. This is where the difference lies. It is not so much a case of different opinions, it is a much more basic and profound difference.

I see what I am talking about as careful and extensive observation, not supposition. I am claiming that a certain rigidity and a set of unexamined assumptions - which I am calling political correctness (and "run amok" to indicate that it is larger and more encompassing than the right wing notion of it) for want of a better phrase for it - is holding us back ( by "us" I mean all of those in opposition to or to the Left of the Republican party and right wing.)

While the right wing is off base with their idea of political correctness, it never could have resonated with the public the way that it has if there were not a kernel of truth to it - something there that people are seeing. The right wing propagandists have already labeled that "something" as political correctness, and as I said I was reluctant to use it for that reason. Then it occurred to be that avoiding using it was itself a type of political correctness - the notion that detecting and rooting out any and all little signs or words or phrases that the right wingers have corrupted and co-opted would advance the cause. The average person looks at that argument against the phrase or the concept, and thinks "but there is such a thing. I see it all the time." So certainly they are seeing something, and what they see resembles the right wing idea of political correctness closely enough that our arguments are seen as absurd and out of touch, with the net result that the right wing propaganda is not refuted,, it is strengthened.

While the right wing is off base with their idea of political correctness, it never could have resonated with the public the way that it has if there were not a kernel of truth to it - something there that people are seeing.

Sorry, I reject this premise too.

I appreciate your input.

I've not gone back and checked, but I'm fairly sure I'm the one who started this kerfuffle by telling Wolf that he couldn't/can't defend his claim that Islam has a history of being out to get us.
I didn't think that is what he said, and I still don't.


I tried, over and over, to point out that "Islam", a well-defined term, does not identify a political institution and therefore has never tried to do anything. My argument was ignored by you, Mike.
I didn't, and still don't understand your argument.


You worked hard to be supportive of Wolf instead. I admire your loyalty, I honestly do.
I understand that many here think that I am being loyal to one member, and that this is my motivation. That isn't the case.


Propaganda works. Keep telling the same untruth over and over again and eventually people will believe it. WE SHOULD AVOID SUCH LANGUAGE MISUSE LIKE PLAGUE! We should positively RUN from it, scramble like mad to retract and explain, make the sign of the cross, wear garlic necklaces, whatever it takes to get on the side of precision and clarity. Because if we do anything else, we muddy the water around us, end up steering by our wake, and ultimately run against a rock and sink.
I disagree with this completely. If we accept the notion that we are all nothing but propagandists, that propaganda is a strong and potent force to which we have no way of responding, and that we need to protect ourselves from contamination by it and as you say avoid it like the plague, then the precise problem I am seeing would be the inevitable result. It isn't the propaganda that does the damage, it is the power we give it and the way we respond to it. The right wing propaganda is not primarily geared to the followers, it is geared to the opponents. It is dictating the way we think, the way we view reality and the way we develop all of our speaking, writing and activism. That is the box that we are in and that I am trying (miserably) to describe.

In any case, you described perfectly the thinking that I am talking about and calling “political correctness run amok.”


So it's no good trying to explain away what was "really" meant, because meaning is social: it resides as much in the listener as in the speaker. The only useful thing to do --especially here!-- is either try to make a case that it's our shared understanding of what "Islam" means that's wrong---or quickly and openly acknowledge the error and stop using the inappropriate language.
This is another component of the box we are trapped in. This is what turns us into robots rather than real human beings and makes us so ineffective at communicating with the general public. Putting the proper use of language – as laboriously worked out through a partisan political lens of causes and issues - above consideration for other human beings is what is killing us. It reinforces, validates and solidifies the basic world view of the right wing propagandists by forcing us to define ourselves as a superficial mirror image of what we think they are.


I think our problems right now are nothing but an artifact of that disconnect in language use. Which is hardly an irreconcilable problem unless we want to turn it into one. Do we?
I think it is the other way around. Our problems are not the result of that disconnect, rather the result of seeing that as the disconnect and trying to correct it continually as a prime motivation and non-negotiable position.

I don't expect you to agree with me on my opinions above based on the limited opportunity I have had to explore them – and I don't have the answers, I am trying to recruit help to analyze and understand it -- and only asked that they be considered. My objection has never been that people don't agree with me, since it is not very well formed in my own mind yet, but rather the violent resistance to consideration of the subject.

I also am saying that this represents a profound and perhaps irreconcilable difference, and that this difference could explain the miserable performance of the Left – so poor that it is very difficult ti even get a handful of us to reach consensus on any issue for very long, and that at any instant any and all consensus and solidarity can be suddenly and irretrievably obliterated.

I can tell you that almost everyone outside of the circle of the initiated – those of us who are inculcated with and deeply knowledgeable and close to liberal activism – nods their head in agreement to everything I am saying here. Ignoring that is not possible for me, nor does it seem wise. Since this isn't my opinion that I dreamed up, but rather observation, I have no ax to grind and no win to get out of this and am not attached to being right about it. I don't think I am right, and don't have much of an opinion yet. I was hoping for help here with that. What newswolf and I are representing is almost universally held by the public. I am not saying therefore that the right wingers are right, that we are wrong, but rather I am saying that we are crippled by the fact that we are ignoring a vast area of reality and that playing language police is causing that.

We are looking at two different realities. It isn't an argument over opinions or theories.

I am becoming more and more certain that the ideas I am promoting on this subject hold the key to smashing up the hold the right wing has over the people and restoring a vibrant and successful Left. Obviously, I could be wrong about that. But let me ask you this – put yourself in my shoes. If you did believe what I just said, would you not persistently and passionately continue to argue that the ideas should at least get a hearing and some consideration?

Sorry, I reject this premise too.
Yes. Out of hand. Not negotiable. I understand. That is what I am objecting to.

Sorry, I reject this premise too.
Yes. Out of hand. Not negotiable. I understand. That is what I am objecting to.


The premise I reject:
While the right wing is off base with their idea of political correctness, it never could have resonated with the public the way that it has if there were not a kernel of truth to it - something there that people are seeing.

I am supremely uninterested in negotiating with the Big Lie.

None of this is about liberalism or liberal activism. None of it. The framing of reasoned discussion as 'politcal correctness' is a Big Lie. The people do not fall for the Big Lie because of the kernals of truth that are in it. They fall for it because it is what is foisted on them.

The people do not see something wrong with the left because of failure to accept the Big Lie. The people do not see the left at all.

Language is a vehicle for thought. If people are pedestrian thinkers, there is a need to message them. That way however is not in accepting reactionary statements that obscure any real pursuit of truth.

What was said was reactionary. If you don't think so, then you are supposing he said something with a different meaning than the words he chose. Supposing. Wolf has chosen not to clarify what he said. You've been doing A LOT of supposing in this thread. Wolf, as much or more than anyone I have ever had the pleasure of reading, is equipped to say what he means. He was when he said what he did.

The fact is, the people have to be deprogrammed. There is no consensus to find. There may be some to build. Building it does not mean accepting the confusion that reigns because of the lies of folks' schools, press and pulpit.

"No clearness as to ends is conceivable without correct means; no correctness of means can be hit upon without clearness as to ends." - Daniel DeLeon July 8, 1907

I think our problems right now are nothing but an artifact of that disconnect in language use. Which is hardly an irreconcilable problem unless we want to turn it into one. Do we?
I think it is the other way around. Our problems are not the result of that disconnect, rather the result of seeing that as the disconnect and trying to correct it continually as a prime motivation and non-negotiable position.

There is nothing negotiatiable about a false premise.

It is not a motivation. It is not a position.

We do not get any nearer to the truth by incorrect definitions.

Assertions teach nobody.

That is the system of "giving the dog a name and then killing it."

Those disagreeing with Wolf were not the ones making the assertions.

I am supremely uninterested in negotiating with the Big Lie.
I made that comment in reference to you being willing to consider what I had to say. You respond by calling what I have to say the “Big Lie?”


None of this is about liberalism or liberal activism. None of it. The framing of reasoned discussion as 'politcal correctness' is a Big Lie. The people do not fall for the Big Lie because of the kernals of truth that are in it. They fall for it because it is what is foisted on them.
We profoundly disagree.


The people do not see something wrong with the left because of failure to accept the Big Lie. The people do not see the left at all.
I don't understand that sentence.


Language is a vehicle for thought. If people are pedestrian thinkers, there is a need to message them. That way however is not in accepting reactionary statements that obscure any real pursuit of truth.
“Message them?” I think that those declared to be “pedestrian thinkers” may be a little resistant to that. I wouldn't blame them. I did not say that we should “accept reactionary statements.”


What was said was reactionary. If you don't think so, then you are supposing he said something with a different meaning than the words he chose. Supposing. Wolf has chosen not to clarify what he said. You've been doing A LOT of supposing in this thread. Wolf, as much or more than anyone I have ever had the pleasure of reading, is equipped to say what he means. He was when he said what he did.
I don't think it was. Merely declaring over and over again that it was does not make it so. Even if it were, nothing you are saying would help us do anything but identify enemies. What good does that do?


The fact is, the people have to be deprogrammed. There is no consensus to find. There may be some to build. Building it does not mean accepting the confusion that reigns because of the lies of folks' schools, press and pulpit.
This is scary, and I think is one of the reasons that I feel a strong aversion to the direction things are going here. “De-programmed?” Good God. This cure is worse than the disease. Part of the disease maybe.


There is nothing negotiatiable about a false premise.
That would save a lot of thinking. Declare anything you don't like to be a false premise, and refuse to discuss it because you “don't negotiate with false premises.”


It is not a motivation. It is not a position.

We do not get any nearer to the truth by incorrect definitions.

Assertions teach nobody.

That is the system of "giving the dog a name and then killing it."

Those disagreeing with Wolf were not the ones making the assertions.
Your post here, and your previous posts, are full of assertions. None of these things you aver here are true merely because you assert them to be true.

I appreciate your input.

I've not gone back and checked, but I'm fairly sure I'm the one who started this kerfuffle by telling Wolf that he couldn't/can't defend his claim that Islam has a history of being out to get us.
I didn't think that is what he said, and I still don't.
I understand that, Mike. And you're wrong as these quotes demonstrate:
"The chronic aggressiveness of Islam is one of the major forces of post-Roman history"
"Islam's response to the revitalzation of Westernesse was to re-invade, launching a 300-year, no-quarter war"
"The notion of Islamic aggression is not "my thesis" -- it is history"
"Christianity cannot be blamed for the Islamic invasion of post-Roman Europe in the 600s: this was Islamic aggression (urged on by Muhammed himself) pure and simple"
"The tyranny implicit in Islam is embodied in its very name, which means "submission.""
"the equally undeniable fact of radical Islam's oft-demonstrated and historically proven hatred of Western Civilization"
"Islam's core ethos is every bit as tyrannical as those of Judaism and Christianity -- in fact more so"

Now, you can claim that he didn't mean what he plainly said, but please don't embarrass yourself by claiming that he didn't even say it.



I tried, over and over, to point out that "Islam", a well-defined term, does not identify a political institution and therefore has never tried to do anything. My argument was ignored by you, Mike.
I didn't, and still don't understand your argument.
I'm not sure how much more plain I can make it. "Islam", like "Christianity" and, for that matter, "Art Nouveau", is a system of beliefs. It is not a political institution. It has no flag or army. It's a system of beliefs. That's all! There are political institutions claiming to embody and represent various such belief systems, but I can't think of a single case in which there is only one such political institution. There are always more than one, and they are always in doctrinal conflict with one another. If they can't even agree on doctrine, they can hardly be said to represent anything outside their own political interests. Does the Likud party represent Judaism? It claims to. Does that make it so? If it does, then what do the members of Gush Shalom represent--Catholicism? Who gets to decide--Loren? You? Me? Netanyahu?


[quote:10s3lqok]You worked hard to be supportive of Wolf instead. I admire your loyalty, I honestly do.
I understand that many here think that I am being loyal to one member, and that this is my motivation. That isn't the case.[/quote:10s3lqok]
The way it looks from here, Mike, is that your personal sense of correct politics won't let you let Loren simply be wrong. I can say that Loren is wrong on this subject and still feel certain that he'd be an asset to this community's work. People can be wrong, and that's okay with me. It's part of the human condition. I can argue fiercely against the wrong idea without also demonising the person. I get the feeling that there's some reason you can't do that in certain cases. I can't imagine why otherwise you'd be working so hard to ignore the plain, verifiable reality of what he said.


[quote:10s3lqok]Propaganda works. Keep telling the same untruth over and over again and eventually people will believe it. WE SHOULD AVOID SUCH LANGUAGE MISUSE LIKE PLAGUE! We should positively RUN from it, scramble like mad to retract and explain, make the sign of the cross, wear garlic necklaces, whatever it takes to get on the side of precision and clarity. Because if we do anything else, we muddy the water around us, end up steering by our wake, and ultimately run against a rock and sink.
I disagree with this completely. If we accept the notion that we are all nothing but propagandists, that propaganda is a strong and potent force to which we have no way of responding, and that we need to protect ourselves from contamination by it and as you say avoid it like the plague, then the precise problem I am seeing would be the inevitable result. It isn't the propaganda that does the damage, it is the power we give it and the way we respond to it. The right wing propaganda is not primarily geared to the followers, it is geared to the opponents. It is dictating the way we think, the way we view reality and the way we develop all of our speaking, writing and activism. That is the box that we are in and that I am trying (miserably) to describe.

In any case, you described perfectly the thinking that I am talking about and calling “political correctness run amok.”[/quote:10s3lqok]
Who said we're all nothing but propagandists!?? I damned sure didn't! What I said is that propaganda works. One way to propagandise people is to abuse language by, e.g., over and over saying "democracy" while meaning "Capitalism". Or saying "Islam" while meaning "pseudo-religious psychopaths who go around disguised as muslims".

Do me a favor and read more carefully, would you!?



Putting the proper use of language – as laboriously worked out through a partisan political lens of causes and issues - above consideration for other human beings is what is killing us.
This sounds like you're recycling the classist crap from the '60s that claimed bullshit isn't really bullshit if it comes from oppressed people. That if people from minority (especially minority!) communities say black is white and the sky is green, we should accept that as somehow being a deeper, more valid truth. If that's not what you're trying to say, please try again.




We are looking at two different realities. It isn't an argument over opinions or theories.
No, Mike. No matter what "post-modernism" would have us believe, there's only one reality where we're at. We each perceive a different pattern of figure and ground, but it's all part of the same reality as can be demonstrated by our becoming able to see a different pattern of figure and ground through the process called "learning".

That is the main thing he is saying, in my opinion, but it has been completely overshadowed by animosity over a relatively minor point or two in his posts... the "hostility" people see is in their own imagination.

The animosity is in your imagination.

Bullshit premise etc.
I don't know of you want me to respond to all of your comments or not. We seem to be getting farther apart.


If we seem to be further apart, then that is because of how things seem to you.

Look, no one here decided to make Wolf bashing a tag team sport. If you think that happened, as opposed to the fact that he made a statement that he refused to or could not defend - likely because it was flatly wrong, then that is an agenda you have imagined.

Even before this whole thing started, I repeatedly asked on PI and now too here have asked repeatedly that we examine the STRUCTURE of the discussion. That's too dry and too boring for anyone to bother with, evidently. I know you think you are trying to do that same thing, but you are not. Your rejection of discussing the precision of language is ample evidence for that. I say we need the utmost precision in language and further, we need the utmost precision in HOW we deliberate issues upon which we disagree. Even further, I think we also need the utmost precision in deliberating how we create messages for mass consumption out of the things on which we do agree.

The problems you see on message boards are for want of structure, not for want of purity. I am not a message board veteran. I never participated in forums like this in any substantial way until PI. It is obvious the lack of structure is what causes the problem you are seeing. One can either impose rules by personality-driven and party-driven moderation as at DU - a method that works pretty well on boards I've perused that don't discuss politics. Or one can set up a METHOD of deliberating differences such as those exposed by wolf's comment so that everyone has an input and everyone is shielded from personal attacks (or the possibility of disengenuously killing the argument by claiming they are happening when in fact they are not).

We've not pursued that structure At All. If we had it, we would have proven Wolf wrong - because he is - and we would have done in a way that would have removed all possibility of you injecting this 'mob rule' premise which is Not So, at least not in this instance.

We would have paid a lot smaller price in the discussion's atmosphere were it not for this continuing proposition that something is wrong with US because of rightly and completely controverting his thesis. The only thing that is wrong with us, the body politic, is the degree to which we have internalized all of this reactionary bullshit, most especially including the thoroughly Reich Wing premise of political correctness which is nothing but a barely more cerebral hue and cry than harkening back to the 'good old days' that never existed.

Wolf cries that he is spat upon. That is not deliberation. Going away, well that is his choice. As it probably was for other people who thought we would be here discussing something besides what is being falsely cast, repeatedly, as a personal attack by a mob. I really don't think that what happens on other online political boards is relevant to this discussion. It is certainly no surprise that there are breakdowns on them given that the conversations are equally without structure and the people are almost certainly less thoughtful en masse than the small crowd here.

Your premise that the right tailors its messages it its opposition more than its followers and that they frame the way we think is up for deliberation too. There is no unity among the right. They too are a bunch of 'issues people.' There is a difference though - they are a bunch of issues people cobbled together by faustian bargains, lies, and the everlasting ignorance that comes from failure to deliberate fully and decipher utter BULLSHIT like "Islam is a threat." The right has a Huge split in it - the two parties.

I am not really an issues person. I can lay a lot of that tranformation at your feet, and I thank you for it. I have really gotten down to one issue: economics. I am incredibly ignorant about that issue, but I am convinced it is the only one that transcends every other political issue rather than only a few or none at all.

It is not over-intellectual to demand precision in language. It is not wrong to demand class analysis.

A little structure would go a long way towards sweeping away the bucket load of red herrings you have dropped into this debate. A litttle structure would go a long way towards finishing the discussion of Islam in the world today from a socialist perspective. If Wolf is personally hurt by this, that's too bad. Why? Because that is his doing, that's why. We are here to discuss thinking, not feeling. If there was ever proof of that, it is Wolf's take no prisoners prose itself.

Wolf is wrong on this. You are wrong not to just let that be. You are wrong to intuit that there is some consensus that something is wrong with Wolf, other than perhaps that he is very obviously thinner skinned than he expects his audience to be.

Nothing else is wrong except for the free form of this discussion and its inevitable inadequacy to bring disagreement into full relief and resolution by a process that very clearly precludes all this 'feelings are hurt' bullshit as well as personal attacks or the illusion of them.

We considered his ideas and responded to them in detail. In doing so, his ideas were demonstrated to be wrong. We did not dismiss him as a person.

All of this saying otherwise is really an enormous waste of your time. You are trying to fight an agenda that does not exist. That's why you have a hard time conceiving of the particulars of this mob behavior. Because it did not happen here.

There will never be consensus. There will never be unity.

What there will be someday is local bodies of people who come together in acts of deliberative democracy to run their governmental affairs. Just like in Cuba. Just like is taking shape in Venezuela. That is the outcome of the institution of socialism. The outcomes generated by the local acts of economy and political decision-making involve a process. The methods for accomplishing practical real world things via group discussion should also be employed in any serious online group disucssion. Otherwise, it will not be a serious discussion. It can't be.

If we are really trying to aid the cause of socialism, we must discover and employ those methods. We have at our fingertips a wealth of information concerning the process of deliberative democracy. If we do not want to use the process, then let's just confess that we have nothing serious going on here (i.e no concrete goals), no need to much care who comes or who goes from the discussion, and no need at all for unity. Do we want from pop indy an 'interactive journal' as Anax says he views message boards or do we want to be serious and practical and Do Things that have a real world impact? It appears that you prefer the non-structure of the former while clamoring for the results of the latter.

I want to see local economies and local democracy. That's what I would like to work to achieve in the real world, and that's what I hope this place can be an aid to in the real world.

So can we get on with at least discussing leftist politics if not the structure of the discussion in some way besides trying to figure out how to kindly, gently countenance reactionary right wing falsehoods for the sake of the figment of unstructured "unity?"

I just don't know, seems the more we talk the worse it gets. If this were a novel a deus ex machina would be in order. But it's not a novel.

You mean like when the main player wakes up and realizes it was all a dream?

You're a purty sharp pawn broker, daddio :P

Further, he is a terrible mix here because he is way too forcefully argumentative

Ooh, I disagree with ya there. Gawd, I love his rage. If there were more of that, we'd live in a different and better world.

I was profoundly improved in my thinking by his prose, his thinking, and in particular his gift of the concept of moronation/tinket consumerism. If I thought a little while, I am sure I have more things I could cite that have become a significant part of how I see the world.

Further, he is a terrible mix here because he is way too forcefully argumentative

Ooh, I disagree with ya there. Gawd, I love his rage. If there were more of that, we'd live in a different and better world.

I was profoundly improved in my thinking by his prose, his thinking, and in particular his gift of the concept of moronation/tinket consumerism. If I thought a little while, I am sure I have more things I could cite that have become a significant part of how I see the world.
I'll second that. I'll also repeat something I said earlier: if anyone here is an intellectual, it's Loren.

Does it help to remember that political correctness was originally an in house "Left" term that the Right seized upon like a dog on meat and has owned ever since? I dunno.

Likely I've missed something but it seems that much of this mess started when Wolf's statements were attacked upon ideological basis, I feel this was premature, rather than upon their historical accuracy. I came late to this mess, but here's how I respond to those statements:

"The chronic aggressiveness of Islam is one of the major forces of post-Roman history"

Accurate enough if confined to the Caliphate. Once the Caliphate collapsed there is no longer a 1:1 relationship between the religion and politics of the time.

"Islam's response to the revitalzation of Westernesse was to re-invade, launching a 300-year, no-quarter war"

Two problems with this statement, one is use of the word Westernesse, don't know if the word has any relevance outside of Tolkien but within that context is the implication that the "West" is the source of all good and that opposing it are evil, Sauron, Morgoth, orcs. I know that Wolf knows better. Not absolutely sure what 300 year period is being alluded to here but I guess we're talking about the Ottoman aggression in Europe post Byzantium. The Ottomans were an Empire, pure and simple, they collaberated with Christians when it suited them and made war upon other Moslems likewise.

"The notion of Islamic aggression is not "my thesis" -- it is history"

As is the history of the Christian West. Good for the goose.....

"Christianity cannot be blamed for the Islamic invasion of post-Roman Europe in the 600s: this was Islamic aggression (urged on by Muhammed himself) pure and simple"

True enough, if talking about Hispania or the original Caliphate's attempt upon Constantinople. After that the relation breaks down.

"The tyranny implicit in Islam is embodied in its very name, which means "submission.""

Word play. The concept is common to all of the Abrahamic, sky god religions. Muhammed expressed it in the stark language of the desert.

"the equally undeniable fact of radical Islam's oft-demonstrated and historically proven hatred of Western Civilization"

First of all, here we introduce the adjective radical, which greatly changes the subject. Yes, the fundamentalist hate the new, the different, no news there. But secular Arabs, most of whom considered themselves good Muslims, have long embraced Western concepts such as democracy(at least in theory) and modernization(for good and bad). They have been pretty much crushed and marginalized, by enemies domestic and foreign. Not to say that the fundies now own Islam, but they are ascendent, almost entirely due to Western aggression.

"Islam's core ethos is every bit as tyrannical as those of Judaism and Christianity -- in fact more so"

Don't know about the "more so". Pick a year, pick a place.....

The criticism of Wolf became ideological quickly, Wolf was impatient with such and got his back up, he should have defended his thesis upon historical basis, imho.

Mike, I think I understand your point and I think there is a lot valid there but you really did not do well communicating it well, particularly early on. Your passion is a source of inspiration, your defence of a friend is no less expected on the streets of Baltimore than the streets of Detroit. Whipping out PC was sure to antagonize matters, I understand that the dynamics are central to your point, but you came off harse and accusatory. Man, I know you work hard at this, but you can't hit a home run every time, something I hope we all keep in mind.

There, I've probably pissed off everybody.

There, I've probably pissed off everybody.
Nah. I strongly disagree with your loose/foggy use of the term "Islam" for broadly the same reason I disagree with using "democracy" to mean "private-profit capitalism" etc. It pollutes the water of discourse, making it harder to see through and unhealthy to drink from.

Wolf's statements were attacked upon ideological basis, I feel this was premature, rather than upon their historical accuracy...

The criticism of Wolf became ideological quickly, Wolf was impatient with such and got his back up, he should have defended his thesis upon historical basis, imho.

There, I've probably pissed off everybody.

A very good post. Let me ask though, what is the difference between confronting the dispute from an ideological basis or a historical one? Same result.

The subject you note having been changed by the insertion of the word 'radical' could not have even allowed any detailed look at history had it not indeed been changed. That goes to the very heart of the technical meaning of the word 'reactionary.'

Still, your response from a historical perpsective is indeed important and germaine.

I'd appreciate it if you could expound on what you understand of the larger point Mike trying to communicate.

There, I've probably pissed off everybody.
Nah. I strongly disagree with your loose/foggy use of the term "Islam" for broadly the same reason I disagree with using "democracy" to mean "private-profit capitalism" etc. It pollutes the water of discourse, making it harder to see through and unhealthy to drink from.

I think he was just playing ball in order to make the historical points he saw as he considered and rejected the point. That's somewhere 'round where I got with the program mentally too. I then went and got the technical definition of the word 'reactionary' after an appreciated incitement from Anaxarchos and the lights came on.

You're faster than us. I mentioned the technical definition (as opposed to the pejorative slant, I mean) in my response to blindpig regarding this same post.. I think the right was response was Anax's - that the comments Wolf made were reactionary. That was game over. Time to construct a new, more precise premise and recommence the discussion. That needn't be cause for upset. I'll reiterate that I hope that if any of you catch me making reactionary comments, that you put them to a stop.

The institutional disdain for that sort of a dialogue is the radical reich wing anti-intellectual spin game called "poltical correctness."

Let me turn over the table in the populistindependent temple and recast this politcal correctness for y'all to what I see now:

"We think so little of the average guy's capacity to humbly learn stuff along the way, that we have to protect him by not telling him he is wrong."

That is what Mike is advocating.

Duly, we'll note the peanut gallery is present and the board's - I agree with you, Mairead - most obviously incredibly intellectual member is not.

If I may be so presumptuous as to speak for BP, we think in language (and well, I believe), but we don't think much about language, not with the directness you do. No doubt we do would both respond at the example you make about democracy = capital just as we responded to Wolf's position.

There, I've probably pissed off everybody.
Nah. I strongly disagree with your loose/foggy use of the term "Islam" for broadly the same reason I disagree with using "democracy" to mean "private-profit capitalism" etc. It pollutes the water of discourse, making it harder to see through and unhealthy to drink from.

Huh? I thought I was clear differtiating Islam as a religion(that is, the practitioners of said belief) from the actions of states in the Islamic world. In the time of the original Caliphate they were one in the same, but that ended 1,000 years ago. Of course schism has made it somewhat inaccurate to speak of Islam as a unitary entity, it is a generalization. I don't see that my use in the given context prejudices the issue.

I know you are greatly concerned about the use of language, rightly so. Are you famaliar with "Unspeak", by Steven Poole? Just picked it up at the library. While it seems to have only passing relevence to matters at hand it speaks much of the use of memes to frame the arguement before it starts.

"We think so little of the average guy's capacity to humbly learn stuff along the way, that we have to protect him by not telling him he is wrong."

That is what Mike is advocating.

Yep, that or he's somehow fallen prey to the New-Age-y '60s hunger for gurus, where any alcoholic Indian was at risk of having people start calling him (women are typically underrepresented) a Repository Of Ancient Wisdom.


No doubt we do would both respond at the example you make about democracy = capital just as we responded to Wolf's position.

And it's a comforting certainty to have, too (well, it's comforting to me, at least). It'd be a race to see which of us would be first to make honking noises at the transgressor.

There, I've probably pissed off everybody.
Nah. I strongly disagree with your loose/foggy use of the term "Islam" for broadly the same reason I disagree with using "democracy" to mean "private-profit capitalism" etc. It pollutes the water of discourse, making it harder to see through and unhealthy to drink from.

Huh? I thought I was clear differtiating Islam as a religion(that is, the practitioners of said belief) from the actions of states in the Islamic world. In the time of the original Caliphate they were one in the same, but that ended 1,000 years ago. Of course schism has made it somewhat inaccurate to speak of Islam as a unitary entity, it is a generalization. I don't see that my use in the given context prejudices the issue.

oops. There was supposed to be a line after that saying "But it only makes me very nervous, not pissed-off". I'm doing a Unix build to make a tame webserver and keep running back and forth distractedly.

I think my issue is that even the Caliphate wasn't coextensive with Islam any more than the early Catholic church was coextensive with Xianity. I agree that it can look that way at our current remove in time, but I suspect that's mostly because the victors wrote the history (cf the Apocrypha). Moreover, I'd argue that the religion is NOT the same as the practitioners, just as "Art Nouveau" was/is not the same as Mucha et al. who were its practitioners. Am I making even the faintest bit of sense?


I know you are greatly concerned about the use of language, rightly so. Are you famaliar with "Unspeak", by Steven Poole? Just picked it up at the library. While it seems to have only passing relevence to matters at hand it speaks much of the use of memes to frame the arguement before it starts.

No, but thanks for the pointer--I've give it a read.

Wolf's statements were attacked upon ideological basis, I feel this was premature, rather than upon their historical accuracy...

The criticism of Wolf became ideological quickly, Wolf was impatient with such and got his back up, he should have defended his thesis upon historical basis, imho.

There, I've probably pissed off everybody.

A very good post. Let me ask though, what is the difference between confronting the dispute from an ideological basis or a historical one? Same result.

The subject you note having been changed by the insertion of the word 'radical' could not have even allowed any detailed look at history had it not indeed been changed. That goes to the very heart of the technical meaning of the word 'reactionary.'

Still, your response from a historical perpsective is indeed important and germaine.

I'd appreciate it if you could expound on what you understand of the larger point Mike trying to communicate.

Shit! I got real busy and got timed out. Got to run soon but did manage to copy the longest paragraph concerning your last question:

Best I can tell Mike is concerned with the baggage that we have accumulated by our long association with the so-called left, which does indeed tend to be reactive, automatically assuming that the friend of our enemy is our enemy too. Such an attitude may sometimes be justified but to resort to it in a knee jerk fashion, particularly among friends here, is ungenerous and may preclude communicating with the larger population. This is something I think about a lot, being here in Upstate SC, if I blow off people for the least off hand racist comment then the pickings are going to be pretty slim among white folks(most black folks are already on board). We need those folks, they need us. The way I see it is a process of redefining the situation. First we get agreement on the basics, class analysis(not using those words,but it comes down to the same thing), which I think will be pretty easy, then get the folks to consider other issues from that light.

(added) How wrong am I, Mike?

I'll adderess the rest asap.


















I'll address the rest asap.

Too bad that this conversation couldn't have happened a few days ago and we wouldn't have spun off into never-never land. No doubt the points you make here would have carried the day, sides would not have been chosen, lines would not have been drawn, and the damage would not have been done.


"The notion of Islamic aggression is not "my thesis" -- it is history"

As is the history of the Christian West. Good for the goose.....
That was the point I was trying to make. Not that newswolf was “right”about Islam, but rather that the crime was no greater than similar broad statements about Christianity that almost always pass with no remark, let alone a huge uproar.


quoting newswolf - "Islam's core ethos is every bit as tyrannical as those of Judaism and Christianity -- in fact more so"
That statement may be arguable, but one thing it tells us for sure – that the characterizations here of what newswolf said were wrong. He was attempting to make a historical analysis. He was talking about Islam as a political entity. I am absolutely certain that had people here not gone bonkers, he would have qualified his remarks, he would have added the proper adjectives. You can't write a doctoral thesis in every post, and it is a miserable state of affairs to have to watch each and every word for fear that one slip can end the conversation – and calling a person a racist and a right winger and a head case is guaranteed to end any conversation. People say “we didn't end the conversation, we didn't run him off” and “we didn't actually call him a racist or a right winger” - oh yes they did. They intended to, the message was delivered, and it was delivered with just the right language that is used to deliver just that message.


The criticism of Wolf became ideological quickly, Wolf was impatient with such and got his back up, he should have defended his thesis upon historical basis, imho.
He would have. He always has. But the responses precluded that. Hell, I am only peripheral to it and I can't get anyone to listen to me despite working and working at reaching people. It is all very stressful.

There was a rush to judgment about what newswolf said. Once that happened, it is like a pack of sharks on the scent of blood. People are pounding and pounding, adding insult to injury, “proving” that wolf's remarks were racist and that I am therefore wrong to defend him. That idea is so firmly fixed in people's minds - that this is what is happening – that nothing else will be tolerated or considered. I am told that I am trying to spin things to defend racism, that I am defending a friend and that is skewing my judgment, and on and on.

Best I can tell Mike is concerned with the baggage that we have accumulated by our long association with the so-called left, which does indeed tend to be reactive, automatically assuming that the friend of our enemy is our enemy too. Such an attitude may sometimes be justified but to resort to it in a knee jerk fashion, particularly among friends here, is ungenerous and may preclude communicating with the larger population. This is something I think about a lot, being here in Upstate SC, if I blow off people for the least off hand racist comment then the pickings are going to be pretty slim among white folks(most black folks are already on board). We need those folks, they need us. The way I see it is a process of redefining the situation. First we get agreement on the basics, class analysis(not using those words,but it comes down to the same thing), which I think will be pretty easy, then get the folks to consider other issues from that light.
Yes.

"We think so little of the average guy's capacity to humbly learn stuff along the way, that we have to protect him by not telling him he is wrong."

That is what Mike is advocating.
No I am not. You are arguing against what you think I mean, as evidenced by quotes taken out of context and woven into an indictment, that you concoct on your won, resisting any input form the object of your attacks.

That, in my observation, is a chronic error in methodology that we all make, and is, so far as I am concerned, the subject matter here.

This is my main problem with what went down. You made assumptions about what I was saying, didn't hear anything I said after that except in light of what you have decided my position MUST be - even to the point of defying me to contradict your firm and settled conviction as to what I am saying and thinking - and then continue to argue against what you think I am saying.

The endless (interesting) talk about definitions, etc., all are to prove that if "A" then "B" - if a person says these words, then they are thinking and meaning this - is what I am calling political correctness (again for want of a better descriptive phrase, and I have spent much effort explaining exactly what I mean by using that phrase.)

Even if "A" does equal "B" - and I would caution people about that since it is so destructive to communication - I would still object to the way people are going about its application here.

There is no principle being argued - people are using fancy talk to justify their behavior and to make anyone who objects wrong.

"He said these words, those mean these things (racism. supporting the right wing, American exceptionalism, jingoism, etc.) therefore we are justified in a certain behavior, are alleviated of any burden of actually having to listen to him (or his "defenders") anymore, will brook no criticism of our behavior, and will unilaterally pound and pound on this until we win."

That doesn't work. It just happens to be exactly the behavior that the general public complains about from liberals, breaks down communication, and makes it almost impossible to talk left wing politics with the uninitiated.

People here can argue all day long about how wrong I am, but if the tactics they use alienate and lose me, how on earth can they not be open to the thesis that this will alienate – does alienate – the general population?

automatically assuming that the friend of our enemy is our enemy too. Such an attitude may sometimes be justified but to resort to it in a knee jerk fashion, particularly among friends here, is ungenerous

Can you now expound on this portion a little more as I am not sure I am following you here?

The endless (interesting) talk about definitions, etc., all are to prove that if "A" then "B" - if a person says these words, then they are thinking and meaning this...

Wrong.

It means that the premise being set precludes class analysis.


"He said these words, those mean these things (racism. supporting the right wing, American exceptionalism, jingoism, etc.) therefore we are justified in a certain behavior, are alleviated of any burden of actually having to listen to him (or his "defenders") anymore, will brook no criticism of our behavior, and will unilaterally pound and pound on this until we win."

Wrong. And you should call out the people specifically who did that. I certainly have when I have seen it. KOBH, son that's YOU. Stop It.


People here can argue all day long about how wrong I am, but if the tactics they use alienate and lose me, how on earth can they not be open to the thesis that this will alienate – does alienate – the general population?

Citing reaction is not an out of bound tactic or even the same at all other 'tactics' used here, namely ad hominem. They are not one-and-the-same.

Letting it slide Joe Cracker said some racist shit in small town America so you can reach him fine if that is your milieu. But you cannot build a philosopical house on that squishy ground. Nor does it respect the weight of demographics here in America, and especially not anywhere else in the world.

A reactionary statement at the feed store conversation is materially different than a reactionary statement at populistindependent.com

Bring Joe Cracker to my neighborhood where the talk about Mighty McWhitey is Oh So Much more accurate and politically succinct and you can watch me unspin that too.

Ain't havin' it.

And no one of color is having any of the cracker koolaid either.

I said it the other day, I'll say it again.

We may endeavor to simplify our points of agreement into a message. We should never endeavor to simplify our message into points of agreement.

Wrong. And you should call out the people specifically who did that. I certainly have when I have seen it. KOBH, son that's YOU. Stop It.

No, really, are you out of your fucking mind? How many 1,000 words have you and Mike written back and forth wasting your own time and the time of any one trying to follow your stupid shit about this? There are enough people who think you guys have something to say that they're willing to wade into the middle of this and try to mediate it, even though the whole thing absolutely reeks of self-indulgence.

This site is full of wannabe intellectuals who are probably still fuming (like Wolf incidentally) that they don't have any published 500 page treatise/masterpieces out there. Tinoire was right about your "holier than thou" shit based on how 'ghetto' you are. Its a load of crap, and all the allusions to "class analysis" in the world ain't changing that.

Give me a fucking break, Mike is turning this into a repeat of PI.

EDIT: I guess the point is this. It doesn't matter what you have to say there is a limit to the amount of intellectual jack-off assholery people are going to put up with no matter how psedo-intellectually sophisticated you are capable of sounding. You are guys are WAAAAAAY past that limit. Give me something I can use. Or else stop pretending anyone should give up a fuck what you think.

Wrong. And you should call out the people specifically who did that. I certainly have when I have seen it. KOBH, son that's YOU. Stop It.

No, really, are you out of your fucking mind? How many 1,000 words have you and Mike written back and forth wasting your own time and the time of any one trying to follow your stupid shit about this? There are enough people who think you guys have something to say that they're willing to wade into the middle of this and try to mediate it, even though the whole thing absolutely reeks of self-indulgence.

This site is full of wannabe intellectuals who are probably still fuming (like Wolf incidentally) that they don't have any published 500 page treatise/masterpieces out there. Tinoire was right about your "holier than thou" shit based on how 'ghetto' you are. Its a load of crap, and all the allusions to "class analysis" in the world ain't changing that.

Give me a fucking break, Mike is turning this into a repeat of PI.

EDIT: I guess the point is this. It doesn't matter what you have to say there is a limit to the amount of intellectual jack-off assholery people are going to put up with no matter how psedo-intellectually sophisticated you are capable of sounding. You are guys are WAAAAAAY past that limit. Give me something I can use. Or else stop pretending anyone should give up a fuck what you think.

I am far too lazy to be self indulgently laboring away to end the 'dispute.' I have a goal in mind. I have made it very, very clear what my goal is. I take the utmost umbrage at your characterization and your utter unwillingness to refrain from disussion destroying ad hominem bullshit. Had you not acted in the manner you did to wolf, Mike would not have a scintilla of credibility to stand on in his argument. As it is, the rest of us are fucked into trying to disavow your behavior as we have all been lumped in with your worst comments. Mikes laborious and false premises find their toehold in your actions.

Stop It.

You attacked Wolf personally. You have no fucking idea who he is. Now you have the sheer audacity to do the same to me? Ostensibly as a change of topic from your prior transgression? Outfuckinragious.

You need to wake the fuck up and start trafficking in reality.

Are you feeling me?

Well don't.

Think instead.

Wrong. And you should call out the people specifically who did that. I certainly have when I have seen it. KOBH, son that's YOU. Stop It.

No, really, are you out of your fucking mind? How many 1,000 words have you and Mike written back and forth wasting your own time and the time of any one trying to follow your stupid shit about this? There are enough people who think you guys have something to say that they're willing to wade into the middle of this and try to mediate it, even though the whole thing absolutely reeks of self-indulgence.

This site is full of wannabe intellectuals who are probably still fuming (like Wolf incidentally) that they don't have any published 500 page treatise/masterpieces out there. Tinoire was right about your "holier than thou" shit based on how 'ghetto' you are. Its a load of crap, and all the allusions to "class analysis" in the world ain't changing that.

Give me a fucking break, Mike is turning this into a repeat of PI.

EDIT: I guess the point is this. It doesn't matter what you have to say there is a limit to the amount of intellectual jack-off assholery people are going to put up with no matter how psedo-intellectually sophisticated you are capable of sounding. You are guys are WAAAAAAY past that limit. Give me something I can use. Or else stop pretending anyone should give up a fuck what you think.

I am far too lazy to be self indulgently laboring away to end the 'dispute.' I have a goal in mind. I have made it very, very clear what my goal is. I take the utmost umbrage at your characterization and your utter unwillingness to refrain from disussion destroying ad hominem bullshit. Had you not acted in the manner you did to wolf, Mike would not have a scintilla of credibility to stand on in his argument. As it is, the rest of us are fucked into trying to disavow your behavior as we have all been lumped in with your worst comments. Mikes laborious and false premises find their toehold in your actions.

Stop It.

You attacked Wolf personally. You have no fucking idea who he is. Now you have the sheer audacity to do the same to me? Ostensibly as a change of topic from your prior transgression? Outfuckinragious.

You need to wake the fuck up and start trafficking in reality.

Are you feeling me?

Well don't.

Think instead.

Mike attacked you personally, he just phrased it more amenably so both sides had deniability. Who the hell do you think he was referring to when talked about 'dueling doctoral theses'?

You are so concerned with not incorrectly reading whats written between the lines that you are missing the glaringly obvious and somehow rationalizing away some stuff while declaring other stuff to be reprehensible.

Oh, when Anax called newswolfs stuff "wizard of oz crap" that was attacking the argument not the man but when I point out that alot of people consider him a headcase that is an ad hominen attack.

Call it an ad hominen attack if you want, but you guys definitely need a good solid kick in the ass.

What the fuck is wrong with you people???

For what it's worth, I am not intentionally turning this into a repeat of PI. It surprised me that it headed the same way - uncannily, eerily, really - I didn't see it coming, and have no awareness of wanting to cause it. I pm-ed someone that I felt like an involuntary passenger on the deja vu train to Hell, and have told people that it seemed paranormal or supernatural to me.

The "dueling doctoral theses" I meant as something we are all prone to do, myself included. Everything I have been saying is about a trend, a tendency.

But I don't know. This is one of the weirdest things I have ever witnessed.

For what it's worth, I am not intentionally turning this into a repeat of PI. It surprised me that it headed the same way - uncannily, eerily, really - I didn't see it coming, and have no awareness of wanting to cause it. I pm-ed someone that I felt like an involuntary passenger on the deja vu train to Hell, and have told people that it seemed paranormal or supernatural to me.

The "dueling doctoral theses" I meant as something we are all prone to do, myself included. Everything I have been saying is about a trend, a tendency.

But I don't know. This is one of the weirdest things I have ever witnessed.

I've come to this concluson. The people here are really just a subset of PI. Which is really just a subset of DU. Which is really just a subset of the Democratic Party. You could go further with that logic but I'll stop there.

Most of the posters here desperately should've been mid-level academics where there exists a whole community built around catering to their endless bloviating. I hear more whining and lecturing here (along with the ubiquitous pontificating) than I do resolve or get-to-it-ive-ness. Much of it barely rises above the level of being patronizing.

This is not the place for me, this is the place where dreams of societal change go to die. You already know that too Mike. The reason this is PI redux is that rather than summing it up in three words - c'est la vie - you've chosen to turn this into an endless discussion of discussing how the discussion should be discussed..discussedly. Thats actually the wetdream of some people here, but it in no way provides a compass for effectively changing anything.

Who wants to get bogged down in something like this? Basically you think people are talking over your head here..until you realize they don't have a damn clue what they are talking about. Who has the time to get bogged down in that game? Not me, not anybody else I know.

C'est la vie

Mike attacked you personally, he just phrased it more amenably so both sides had deniability. Who the hell do you think he was referring to when talked about 'dueling doctoral theses'?

You are so concerned with not incorrectly reading whats written between the lines that you are missing the glaringly obvious and somehow rationalizing away some stuff while declaring other stuff to be reprehensible.

If Mike had said that to me very much more clearly personally, you know, like "Rusty, you are playing dueling doctoral thesis and mob rule," I would not have taken it personally. I would have reiterated, as I have - alas yes, repeatedly now - that reaction precludes discussion and that mob rule is a false construct in this matter. I still would not be offended.

You were kicking along pretty good up until that post of his by the way. You lost it just down the page though. I'll address that below.


Oh, when Anax called newswolfs stuff "wizard of oz crap" that was attacking the argument not the man but when I point out that alot of people consider him a headcase that is an ad hominen attack.

And yes there is a material difference. Yours is about the man. And who the fuck is "a lot of people?" Anax is merely being flippant, maybe even a little rude, in saying that the 'marxism' Wolf was flinging was in fact poo.

You make the same mistake Wolf made. Anaxarchos did not say that in a vacuum, nor is your interpretation of what he meant accurate. Go re-read with the remainder of the thought and you'll see it is not remotely personal:


Your views on this subject are the exact opposite of "Marxism"... i.e. you believe in a disconnected ideology/religion developing an independent existence across all of the very real differences of national , social, historical circumstances you "cite" in your "rants"... ending in some "savage tyranny" embracing the "ultimate extinction of humanity", blah, blah. This is about as anti-materialist as you could get. More, when challenged, you google "opiate of the masses" (which every high school kid in Des Moines learns), dismiss the challenge, climb right back up on that high horse, looking down on "petite bourgeoise theory", and just keep going.

I am not saying you need to clean your language up KOBH. That's your deal. I am not exactly careful about my foul mouth. But Anax was indeed talking about Wolf's *stuff* not Wolf. He did not say wolf was a fucked up person, he said his ideology was fucked up.

That is not the same as accusing someone of having a

"persecution complex"
http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... =1084#1084 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=1084#1084)[/quote]
and that the man on the street

"would regard him as a headcase, incidentally."
ibid.

Mike attacked you personally, he just phrased it more amenably so both sides had deniability. Who the hell do you think he was referring to when talked about 'dueling doctoral theses'?

You are so concerned with not incorrectly reading whats written between the lines that you are missing the glaringly obvious and somehow rationalizing away some stuff while declaring other stuff to be reprehensible.

If Mike had said that to me very much more clearly personally, you know, like "Rusty, you are playing dueling doctoral thesis and mob rule," I would not have taken it personally. I would have reiterated, as I have - alas yes, repeatedly now - that reaction precludes discussion and that mob rule is a false construct in this matter. I still would not be offended.

You were kicking along pretty good up until that post of his by the way. You lost it just down the page though. I'll address that below.


Oh, when Anax called newswolfs stuff "wizard of oz crap" that was attacking the argument not the man but when I point out that alot of people consider him a headcase that is an ad hominen attack.

And yes there is a material difference. Yours is about the man. And who the fuck is "a lot of people?" Anax is merely being flippant, maybe even a little rude, in saying that the 'marxism' Wolf was flinging was in fact poo.

You make the same mistake Wolf made. Anaxarchos did not say that in a vacuum, nor is your interpretation of what he meant accurate. Go re-read with the remainder of the thought and you'll see it is not remotely personal:


Your views on this subject are the exact opposite of "Marxism"... i.e. you believe in a disconnected ideology/religion developing an independent existence across all of the very real differences of national , social, historical circumstances you "cite" in your "rants"... ending in some "savage tyranny" embracing the "ultimate extinction of humanity", blah, blah. This is about as anti-materialist as you could get. More, when challenged, you google "opiate of the masses" (which every high school kid in Des Moines learns), dismiss the challenge, climb right back up on that high horse, looking down on "petite bourgeoise theory", and just keep going.

I am not saying you need to clean your language up KOBH. That's your deal. I am not exactly careful about my foul mouth. But Anax was indeed talking about Wolf's *stuff* not Wolf. He did not say wolf was a fucked up person, he said his ideology was fucked up.

That is not the same as accusing someone of having a

"persecution complex"
http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... =1084#1084 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=1084#1084)[/quote:2mm7y90x]
and that the man on the street

"would regard him as a headcase, incidentally."
ibid.

Ummm, I'm sure there is an uber-logical thread to everything you just said but forgive me if I think you are just being a hanger-on here. Oh, anax was just being 'flippant' and 'irreverent'. Oh, mike didn't insult me, he was making a general statement that (according to you) wasn't meant to insult anybody.

That is alot of kissing ass and roundabout thinking to avoid admitting what people really said in plain fucking english.

Anax thinks wolf is full of shit, hes said so about a 1000 times. There is no separation between 'his arguments' and 'the man' on an internet discussion board.

Mike is standing up for this loon and claiming everybody else is knifing the two of them in the back and violating some street code.

The term prima donna comes to mind.

Anyway, you can shelve your 5000 word point-by-point reply, I'm through talking about this its giving me a fucking headache.

I hear more whining and lecturing here (along with the ubiquitous pontificating) than I do resolve or get-to-it-ive-ness. Much of it barely rises above the level of being patronizing.

This is not the place for me, this is the place where dreams of societal change go to die. You already know that too Mike. The reason this is PI redux is that rather than summing it up in three words - c'est la vie - you've chosen to turn this into an endless discussion of discussing how the discussion should be discussed..discussedly. Thats actually the wetdream of some people here, but it in no way provides a compass for effectively changing anything.

Who wants to get bogged down in something like this? Basically you think people are talking over your head here..until you realize they don't have a damn clue what they are talking about. Who has the time to get bogged down in that game? Not me, not anybody else I know.

C'est la vie

Funny, I thought it was going to be a discussion which included very practical application in the real world, founded in historical materialism. And I thought might just might mean a different structure than the board we are on now. I don't even want to start these kinds of talks before laying down a method for having them that keeps all the whining and bloviating and pontificating in check.

I am sorry if I am too verbose in trying to counter Mike's argument that we are a mob who ran off Wolf. I do not mean to be pointificating. I mean to make a solid case, put this behind us and move on in trying to bring to life the seeds of PPLE - post petroleum local economies - in the real world wherever we the members are at. There are practical steps to take to do that. There are other ideological discussions to be had as well.

The ideological discussions need structured to be deliberative, perhaps like wiki pages are the result of a deliberative process in many many cases because the complexity or politization of an issue means that there are deliberations about what is objectively agrred upon as an article on the topic. Why? Because the deliberative discussion is mirrored in the outside world by the socialist ideal - a deliberative democracy, citizen run and citizen owned. Why else? Becuase it would largely preclude this kind of bullshit.

It is not destructive to be pedantic. It is destructive not too.

We can put the hemingway on the messages we hope to put out for popular consumption, but if they are not rooted in truth we will poison them all the more in distilling them into popular messages and frames for the message.

If this is not going to accomodate some real world networking and message making for use in real work activism working in and among the many various groups of the splintered, so-called left, then I don't want to play. I'll go work on my real world plans without wasting my time on this crap either. I was in the real world today. I made a difference. It was confirmed. And the difference I made was in an activist who is relentless. Far moreso than me, nobody special.

My sign at the Dallas micromini version of the DC anti-war parade was after much searching and thinking about how to get the real leftist message out that is what I think is bigger than 'end the war.'


I am tired of hearing what the rich think

The difference I made was in killing the 'Islam is a threat' dead as a doornail with the silver bullet of explaining a tiny bit of history to this young minority single mother who has been in the streets more than just about anyone 'round these parts.

There was a fair size contingent of Iranian Americans, well organized because they have an intact community unlike the isolated, nearly all white and all comfortably 'middle' class individuals at the protest, few of whom knew one another at all.

One of the Iranian immigrants had come by earlier, and I had a good talk with him. The American lady next to me, it turned out, had been married to an Iranian for 30 years. I could see she was surprised and pleased to meet someone who knows and applies the history of the place to current discussion.

Anyway, later on like six or seven of the Iranian immigrant group came over on our side of the street and one had a shirt on with the name and likeness of Mossadegh on it. I said that was probably the most important shirt at the gathering. The young mom and activist asked me why. I explained. She was visibly TRANSFORMED by the knowledge of that history.

I commented after that little epiphany had passed in its intensity that knowing the real history about things makes it a little harder to buy the koolaid they are selling us. She agreed. Strenuously.

Misson Accomplished.

Seen on a blog this morning and useful today, very much so, even if I don't hew to the constitution as the end all be all:

"I would rather be wrapped in the constitution and buring a flag than wrapped in the flag and burning the constitution"

Burning the constitution can be done later, carefully. Burning the nativists' myths and nationalism to crisp now is expedient.

In re practical actions, I hope to hear Chlamor comment on something going on in his backyard. (This is just the sort of thing I am talking about pursuing in the real world. And activating people along the way with messages we craft here that are succinct and effective and true and based in sound book learnin.')

http://www.ithacahours.com/f-eighth.jpg
http://www.ithacahours.com/

Naturally, we would be remiss if we did not also discuss a means to get involved with and similarly message the labor movements in our respective real world areas and out in cyberspace too.

That's stuff I have had in mind. Of course to discuss these kinds of things we first have to be rid of the reaction and the defense of the reaction. You were on that early in the Islam thread and with some purty impressively fancifried thinking of your own to be pissing about me playin' like I'm too learned, you little ranting rager you.

Here is something else I want to pursue when I get a Spanish-speaking confederate and a few hundred bux I can spend to get the ball rolling:


Alternative Economy Internship Program
The Mexico Solidarity Network is looking for students, recent graduates or community organizers who are interested in doing an internship in their city. There is no need to relocate for the internship and you can do it while attending college, high school or even while working another job! The internship program is part of a fair trade/solidarity program organized by the Mexico Solidarity Network in coordination with three Zapatista women's cooperatives and a Zapatista coffee cooperative. During the internship, you will learn about the Zapatista struggle for autonomy and alternatives to the predominant capitalist model. You will also have the opportunity to develop strong public speaking skills. The internship is a paid position, with the amount of income depending on your time and organizing capacity.

Interns will receive material on indigenous rights and fair trade. Each intern will start with a package of fair trade items, including textiles and coffee produced by Zapatista cooperatives. Interns will organize at least one public presentation each week at which you will discuss indigenous rights and fair trade, and sell fair trade items produced in Zapatista cooperatives. You can keep 20% of the income from sales. Interns are expected to devote 3 to 6 hours per week, and can expect to earn anywhere from $50 to $100 per week.

Presentations and sales can be organized at Sunday church services, community events, local universities, farmers markets, etc. For example, you can arrange to make a five-minute presentation at the end of a church service on Sunday morning, then sell fair trade items after the service. Or you can set up a table at university events, such as concerts, public talks or even in the cafeteria. You can arrange house parties where you discuss fair trade and indigenous rights and also sell fair trade items. You can also request five minutes to speak at community events that are already organized, then set up a table at the events. Through this internship you will be part of a growing fair trade movement that supports cooperative-based production in Zapatista communities.

How to Apply: Please complete the following application and return it to MSN@MexicoSolidarity.org. Or call 773-583-7728 for more information.

NAME:

ADDRESS:

CITY, STATE, ZIP:

E-MAIL ADDRESS:

TELEPHONE NUMBER:

WHERE DO YOU ATTEND SCHOOL?

WHY DO YOU WANT TO INTERN WITH THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY NETWORK?

HOW MANY HOURS A WEEK CAN YOU DEVOTE TO YOUR INTERNSHIP?

WHAT POSSIBILITIES EXIST IN YOUR COMMUNITY FOR SELLING FAIR TRADE ITEMS?

WHAT UNIVERSITY, COMMUNITY OR SOCIAL GROUPS HAVE YOU WORKED WITH OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS?

THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY NETWORK IS LOOKING FOR INTERNS WHO CAN MAKE AT LEAST A SIX MONTH COMMITMENT. WE CANNOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FOR COMMITMENTS OF LESS THAN SIX MONTHS. WHAT DATES ARE YOU AVAILABLE?

WHAT IS YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF ZAPATISMO?

WHAT IS YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF FAIR TRADE?

PLEASE PROVIDE TWO REFERENCES:

IF SELECTED AS AN INTERN, THE FIRST SHIPMENT OF SUPPLIES HAS A VALUE OF APPROXIMATELY $700. BECAUSE WE DON'T RECEIVE ANY MONEY UP FRONT FROM INTERNS, MSN ASKS THAT INTERNS PROVIDE A MAJOR CREDIT CARD NUMBER AS A MEANS OF INSURANCE. DO YOU HAVE A CREDIT CARD THAT COULD BE USED FOR THIS PURPOSE?

via mexicosolidarity.org

There, I've probably pissed off everybody.
Nah. I strongly disagree with your loose/foggy use of the term "Islam" for broadly the same reason I disagree with using "democracy" to mean "private-profit capitalism" etc. It pollutes the water of discourse, making it harder to see through and unhealthy to drink from.

Huh? I thought I was clear differtiating Islam as a religion(that is, the practitioners of said belief) from the actions of states in the Islamic world. In the time of the original Caliphate they were one in the same, but that ended 1,000 years ago. Of course schism has made it somewhat inaccurate to speak of Islam as a unitary entity, it is a generalization. I don't see that my use in the given context prejudices the issue.

oops. There was supposed to be a line after that saying "But it only makes me very nervous, not pissed-off". I'm doing a Unix build to make a tame webserver and keep running back and forth distractedly.

I think my issue is that even the Caliphate wasn't coextensive with Islam any more than the early Catholic church was coextensive with Xianity. I agree that it can look that way at our current remove in time, but I suspect that's mostly because the victors wrote the history (cf the Apocrypha). Moreover, I'd argue that the religion is NOT the same as the practitioners, just as "Art Nouveau" was/is not the same as Mucha et al. who were its practitioners. Am I making even the faintest bit of sense?


I know you are greatly concerned about the use of language, rightly so. Are you famaliar with "Unspeak", by Steven Poole? Just picked it up at the library. While it seems to have only passing relevence to matters at hand it speaks much of the use of memes to frame the arguement before it starts.

No, but thanks for the pointer--I've give it a read.

I take your meaning about movements not being the same as the practitioners. It is a common form of generalization, the way people talk. There is an implied understanding between speaker and listener which might not really be there. But how else shall we speak?

It may be that this form of communication, lacking face to face visual cues, hell, maybe even pheromones, is inadequate.(don't mind me, it's late) <---random, unrelated thought.

I take your meaning about movements not being the same as the practitioners. It is a common form of generalization, the way people talk. There is an implied understanding between speaker and listener which might not really be there. But how else shall we speak?

Deliberately. Precisely. Deliberatively. At Sufficient length to say what you just did.

I'm so glad you are here.

Mike's idea.

automatically assuming that the friend of our enemy is our enemy too. Such an attitude may sometimes be justified but to resort to it in a knee jerk fashion, particularly among friends here, is ungenerous

Can you now expound on this portion a little more as I am not sure I am following you here?

Only meaning that I think things got too harsh too fast. We all know Wolf's style and shouldn't have been surprised.. He should have been challenged to support his statements and he should have responded. I don't think that the former happened, at least in a manner that was viable, the latter certainly didn't. If we can't deal with this kind of stuff amongst ourselves then how's it gonna work on the street?

It is to some degree situational. If I'm talking to the guys at the gun swap or the guys from the VFW I'm not going to go ballistic at the first racist comment. I might suggest an alternative explaination for the grief which inspired the comment, make reference to the common ties that he has with the object of his derision, what ever works, but not let it pass. If I have to deal with that fuckhead Grand Dragon down the road from me I'll be civil until he starts talking trash, then he shall get both barrels.(figuratively speaking!).

Only meaning that I think things got too harsh too fast. We all know Wolf's style and shouldn't have been surprised.. He should have been challenged to support his statements and he should have responded. I don't think that the former happened, at least in a manner that was viable, the latter certainly didn't. If we can't deal with this kind of stuff amongst ourselves then how's it gonna work on the street?

It is to some degree situational.

This is why I advocate a deliberative process here, to sweep away the very Real World differences that color our perspectives.

When Wolf made his point, we could and should have been eqipped to say something like "Whoops - time to go to the safety of the deliberative discussion method to clarify this matter," likely resolving it completely by doing so.

I just got my sox knocked off.

http://blog.mu.nu/cgi/blup.cgi?entry_id=213544

We are all caught up in a bunch of presumptions that are breaking down the dialogue.

I think this very well be an opportunity to knock another brick off of the wall Mike has been trying to describe.

That said, I have not even finished reading the piecepiece (http://wolfgangvonskeptik.mu.nu/archives/213544.html) from Wolf I have been waiting for and that these comments reference.