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Originally Posted by Toughy
Aj my sister friend.........
It's hard to have a conversation with you sometimes. I completely understand your need to dissect and your need for exactitude; you are a scientist and that is your nature. Those things serve science, but they make back and forth dialogue between people difficult.
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You're misreading me here, Toughy. My desire for exactitude has less to do with my being a scientist and more with my being a leftist. I grew up raised by liberal people who taught us that poverty was an *empirical* question and that racism was an *empirical* question. We were taught that we had to have our facts in order because they assumed--not without justification--that if white people were going to be moved to change the laws because of some deep love of black people, then there would never have been racial discrimination in the first place. So instead, we had to make an argument that discrimination was *actually* happening in the *actual* world and not just in the minds of black people. Those lessons stuck with me. The right-wing may be able to win based upon myths and lies but the left will get nothing done and make no improvements--and for any foreseeable future it's *us* on the Left, folks we can expect no help from the right-wing for at least another generation--without being on the side of truth.
I think we on the left are in a frustrating box of our own making. No better example can be had than global warming. It's happening. It's clear that it's happening and yet, we have a media and intellectual climate that cannot deal with the fact that ~40% of the American populace believe it isn't. Instead of dealing with the false belief as media, popular and intellectual culture all treat the false beliefs as if they might be true and that there is no way of knowing who might be right. It doesn't matter if that is not true, we act as if it were.
What you are saying about the ignorance of the American people isn't an excuse for us asserting things that aren't true, Toughy. How are we going to stand against the right-wing, which has discovered to our detriment that they can lie, on camera, about the fact that the Sun rises in the East and get away with it now? If we don't speak the truth (because people don't know it or might not know it or because we've been suckered into believing that there's no truth) and the right-wing doesn't speak the truth (because it does not serve their ideological agenda to do so) then who will tell the people the truth? Why should they believe us when we are no more interested in accuracy than those on the other side? Why should they trust us if we don't care enough to get it right even when we're only talking to ourselves?
Do I try to use scientific tools in political contexts? Yes, because the tools are powerful. It is extremely potent to ask form a working hypothesis, ask questions designed to see if the real world agrees, and then base explanations off of those observations. But I'm not doing it for scientific reasons, I'm doing it for purely political ones. Look, if the United States has been doing X for 40 years I want to know about it. I also want to look any right-wing apologist for that action (if one exists) square in the eye and be able to say "dead bodies don't lie" and have them not be able to say "well, maybe they're not dead. Or maybe they died some other way just because a bomb was dropped and they were under it when it exploded doesn't mean that they died because of the bomb". Right now, that's where we are, Toughy. Both sides of the American political body are pretty unconcerned about what is *really* happening. They care about that which is happening which fits their narrative and ideological spin but it doesn't matter if it *actually* happened.
Do right-wingers care if Obama was actually born in the United States? No, they don't. The myth that he was born outside of the US serves an ideological purpose and nothing more. They wouldn't *mind* if it were true but the truth of the statement is beside the point. Does it matter to most people of the Left if the United States was bombing Libya? Probably not. What matters is that saying the US bombed that nation for 40 years fits the ideological preferences of the Left and so whether or not it happened is quite beside the point. Everyone likes being right so no one would object if it turned out they were but it doesn't matter if it actually happened.
Caring about whether or not things actually happened probably makes me a dinosaur but I prefer that than to find myself indulging in behavior I think has caused more damage to the United States than ten thousand Bernie Madoffs. If we were still a culture that cared if something *actually* happened then the Bernie Madoffs wouldn't have so many apologists in our country.
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The average American has no idea about US foreign (and domestic) policy, about NATO, about the UN, about any of our treaties and alliances or the importance of those things. Just look at the Tea Party and the Republican debates and your blood should run cold and scared. That was my point about no-fly zones in Iraq. Most Americans did NOT know. Michelle Bachman said recently that it wasn't enough the Obama got us into Libya, he is now taking us to Africa (she said this about Somalia).
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Do you think that promoting myths will help that? Do you think that we of the Left should *exploit* ignorance that for our own partisan ends or try to alleviate that ignorance through education? I prefer the latter. I don't trust my side enough to believe that our noble lies are any better than the other side's noble lies. While the right-wing may believe that the ignorance of the average voter is there to be exploited, I think that it is one of the tasks of the left--whether we want it to be our job or not--to alleviate that ignorance. We have a long road back to the day when politicians will once again fear being caught out in either a lie or a gross inaccuracy. We have to take that road, though, my friend because whether or not there is a functioning civilization in one hundred years probably depends upon our ability to do so.
Cheers
Aj