On Apr 6, 2005, at 9:16 AM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
--- Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:They've taught me a great deal that helps me resist my natural tendency to criticize. I suspect that you are as aware as anyone of that trait in me, so what do you think? Is this a good thing at the microscopic level of our discussions here, if I am thus better able to refrain from criticizing, instead speaking to the values I hold?
Nick
My worry is that when you "speak to the values [you] hold" you're just asserting something.
Would a rationale for those values help you with that concern?
Since you root all of these in religion, you're asserting the unprovable and unfalsifiable.
Ethics, based in anything, is hard to falsify, isn't it?
You may be right or wrong, but it's essentially impossible to debate. If you then suggest that people who disagree with you are hypocritical or malign - as with the President in the last couple of days, for example - then it becomes difficult to do anything other than say, look, Nick thinks God tells him what to do in Iraq and that since I disagree with him, I'm disagreeing with God. Maybe that's not what you mean to say, but it's certainly what you _seem_ to say.
The flipside of that is that this is precisely the subtext that is coming from the right wingers.
In Wallis's case, it seems to me that all he's really saying is "God agrees with me" - and he pairs that with a pathetic anti-Americanism that goes down fine on the left, but that the other ~90% of the American population (correctly) rejects as something between actively morally malign and just equivocating between good and evil - and Christianity, I think, has something to say about equivocators as well.
Where'd you get the ~90% figure?
Preening seems like a big part of what he does. One could argue that it seems like a big part of the environmental movement as well, for example (why else prevent the use of DDT, for example?
Because DDT thins birds' egg shells. The biggest reason bald eagles are endangered is DDT -- it thinned the birds' shells so drastically that many embryos never survived to full development.
Is that a sufficient reason?
Rich white liberals could demonstrate how moral they were - they were _Concerned_ about the environment - without really giving up anything, because malaria had already been wiped out in their countries, and if poor brown people far away die in order to emphasize their moral purity, well, so what?). If I had to point out the thing that really alienates the left from the rest of the country and makes it difficult for it to win elections, it's that attitude, and I suspect that Wallis will make things worse, not better.
This is fascinating, because it's the rich white conservatives *now* that are ignoring the status of poor brown people, such as those in the Sudan, or the thousands dead in Iraq because of a misbegotten war pressed electively on verified-false data.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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