Skip to main content

Response to alda and margot (25 Dec. 2008)

alda: I agree that wars are never motivated by the motivations we usually ascribe them to, and that the left is on the right track in resisting the conservative rule that, since life is complex, wars must be thought of as the result of a myriad of causes, and instead push on with the singular argument that wars are simply about one simple and awful human motivation -- greed. Still, the idea that wars are primarily about stealing oil and other resources is the left's current way -- their only way -- of understanding war, and I do have some complaints with it.

One, the idea that there are evil, greedy people out there sounds quite Christian, antique; I like that the 20th-century breathed life to so many ways of looking at human motivations that allowed us to see pathology, rather than evil, in human beings.

Two, if we set up our opponents as villains, so that we are right to exult when and if they endure humiliating defeats, do we also blind ourselves to how much we enjoy it when they fall, how much we too are moved by less than desirable motivations, such as hate? Do we "show," by our anger, by our desire for revenge, that we at some level kind of need villains? -- that they might just be, our puppets?

Three, anyone who is a war profiteer would love the way the left currently narrates them: that is, as evil but cunning master manipulators, who require a Herculean populist effort to bring down -- it makes them feel powerful; it's a reward and a reminder to continue on. What they truly hate, is to be made to feel weak and irrelevant. And, to a certain extent, they are weak to those who see the way forward as focussing on those who promote and encourage love in the world.

Margot: You're aware, I gather, that you rather seem to prefer imagining yourself a caged hamster who dreams of soaring hawks and roaring dinosaurs. I like to imagine you as the big-brained mammilian hamster, who can also see in hawks and dinosaurs, great shells and gaped vacuity. That is, as someone "greater than," herself.

Link: The Tyee

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Watch out, liberal extremities!

Watch out, liberal extremities! websmith says: “White people and an increasing number of minorities are tired of being called racists by the true racists and more appalled that this loony bleeding has spread from the heart to the brain." This is what many progressives are going to have to get used to hearing -- that THEY are the true racists! I've said this before but '60's liberalism goes down when enough people have decided that, in sum, it was never truly about what minorities, impoverished people wanted/needed, but instead what certain AFFLUENT WHITE PEOPLE wanted to believe those they ostensibly spoke for wanted/needed. They (progressives) will be made to seem, not the most caring, but the most negligent, most truly self-serving. Of course, most democrats in power will not be too afflicted by this, because they're ready to turn on the ’60s too. Why? Because, sad to say, they're getting in mood to want to see the weak and needy set-up as punishment-worthy a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Conversation about Agulis at the Gene Wolfe Facebook Appreciation Club

James Pepe New Member  ·  20 hrs I’ve been rereading BotNS (this is my second read of it) and I just finished the part where Sev fights Agulis with the avern. I’m interested to hear what people think of the accusations Agilus levels agains Sevarian. Agilus says Sev has wronged him three times. Are we meant to take these accusations seriously? They're very strange. Is this just a last ditch attempt by Agilus to get out of being killed, or is Sev actually guilty of something, either legal, moral, or cultural. Are the powers that Agilus refers to simply that the avern didn’t kill Sev when it wounded him? Here the quote, “First by entrapment. You carried an heirloom worth a villa about the city without knowing what it was you had. As owner it was your duty to know, and your ignorance threatens to cost me my life tomorrow unless you free me tonight. Secondly, by refusing to entertain any offer to buy. In our commercial society, one may set...
Post a Comment
Read more

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more