Chuck Grimes wrote: Chuck, thanks for this "rant." I also like your typo, misspelling Schmitt as "Schitt."
>... This denial of the validity of empiricism is a pretty interesting problem. > If you privilage the value side over the facts, you don't need to study the > world, history, or find out what the polity thinks. You don't have to bother > with facts because you know everything you need to in order to do what you > want---and since your intentions are good, we know you will do the right > thing. That same arrogance of power is what got us into the war on terror, > Iraq, and Afghanistan. It helps keep the US linked to Israel and on and on. > In other words, the neocon ideas carried out as foreign policy have brought > death, chaos and ruin to at least hundreds of thousands. Applied to domestic > policies they have eroded the constitution's separation of powers, drained > away civil rights, and re-enforced the national security state through > expansion of executive power. Some of the neocons came from the ex-Troskyist tradition. What a strange set of bedfellows -- Straussians and ex-Trots! In any event, I wouldn't blame Strauss or Trotsky or Schactman (or any specific intellectual leader). These ideas wouldn't have gone far if they didn't fit with the interests of powerful political-economic forces (represented by such non-Straussian, non-Trotskyists as Cheney and Dubya). To blossom into deadly weeds, such toxic seeds have to fall on fertile ground (full of a lot of Schitt). > ... The best weapon against neoliberal theorists are empirical studies with > lots > of statistics, charts, and graphs. In other words the facts of neoliberalism > can be used to break down its supposed Hayekian values in such a system of > thought. while empirical data help, we also need to attack these perspectives on as many fronts as possible. -- Jim Devine / "Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
