At 11:16 PM 9/17/2001 +0800, Titoy wrote:
>Of course there has to be a limit to OT discussion. But the recent disaster
>in New York is just to big for most to ignore. Not to see remarks here would
>seem unreal. Let us agree on a reasonable cool down afterwhich all agree to
>carry on discussion off list. Or just make a new list for OT? In the
>meantime, we just need to bear it giving tolerance to the max otherwise we
>see a degree of intolerance that does sometime leads to the violence we see
>now.
Well said, Titoy. New York and the Pentagon isn't an "event"; it's an
*****EVENT!!!***** I'm not at all surprised that there's a great deal of
discussion about it, even on Lists which are ostensibly about other things. If
we were all meeting in a big bull session over beers (as opposed to over our
keyboards in cyberspace) you can bet the discussion/arguments/rants would be
going on for days, weeks even.
That being said, there's plenty on this List that I've disagreed with over the
past few days -- most of which I've kept silent about. Why? Well, because
partially we're arguing about ideological differences, and ideologies have
(largely) replaced religion as the modern mental map by which we try to
understand the world. Attachment to ideology is largely arational and
irreducible, *regardless* of whether it's liberal, conservative, dynamist,
technocratic, environmentalist, feminist or whatever. I learned this
twenty-five years ago when I did Master's level studies of how interpretive
frameworks are formed and adhered to. When someone's diametrically opposed to
your interpretive matrix, there's almost no way to even successfully
*communicate* with them, much less convince them of your position. Arguing
under such circumstances is largely a waste of breath, and pretty much
guaranteed to piss all parties off.
Like it or not, small-L liberalism (and the moral equivalency arguments it
espouses) is the ideological 'god' which has been extremely badly damaged in
the light of September 11th, 2001 -- and those who still espouse it sense the
damage, even if they're unwilling to articulate it and it dismays them
immensely. For some (such as myself), that particular 'god' is essentially
dead, and I'm in the process of weaving a new interpretive matrix for my
world-understanding. It's much less pretty than the old matrix, and I'm not
sure precisely where I'll end up landing with it, but for me at least, it
causes a lot less cognitive dissonance.
And that, of course, is the political issue, as well as the moral one.
Peace, everyone, regardless of whether you like what I've just written. Let's
hope for a world, however it's brought about, where we can get back to arguing
over which camera system is the best (or whether Ansel Adams truly is a
deity... ;-) ).
Garth
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