From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 20:03:21 MDT
Forrest writes
>> A nation's got to do what a nation's got to do to win.
> The phrase is a line from a Hollywood movie. So is the
> tautological "a man's got to do what a man's got to do".
Thanks, I thought you were just raving non-sequiturs.
> Nations do not do anything at all- they are fictitious entities
> devoid of volition and action. Individual human beings cogitate,
> win, lose, or draw irrespective of whatever collective the
> theorist wishes to construct.
Actually, human beings are fictitious entities. Cells, and
ultimately quarks have real existence. (My turn for sarcasm :-)
Well, I believe that nations are real, although they have at
present nowhere near the integrity of people. They're real
in the same way that corporations, communities, and baseball
teams are real. Unlike you, I believe that we all understand
the facts here, but disagree on the semantics (not, of course,
to be confused with mere *terminology*).
> Incidentally, the notion that the ends justify the means is
> a cornerstone of Marxism.
It's also why I through the ordeal of seeing my dentist even
when my teeth don't hurt. I say that sometimes the end justifies
the means, as for example in using force to stop someone from
raiding your refrigerator, and sometimes it doesn't. The ends
that do not justify the means arise most notably when we cannot
as sure as we think we are about the ends.
> Most of the passage above [elided] is a collection of sundry
> hierarchical, totalitarian slogans, i.e. memes, that enjoy
> currency in these despotic United States.
"Despotic"? Don't you find the distinction between the regimes
in the old U.S.S.R., Castro's Cuba, Hitler's Germany, or China
and the US, UK, today's Germany worth anything?
Worse, your choice of words makes it sound as though you think
that current peoples and cultures are capable of a lot more.
I don't. That is, no culture and no people presently residing
on Earth are up to having societies that are a whole lot freer
or more democratic than what we've got. Sad but true. (That
doesn't mean of course that we should stop trying to improve,
only that your language needs fixing.)
> ... is a generalization of "you should try living under the
> despotic regimes in Vietnam or Cuba" or wherever. It is a standard
> crimestop programming technique, a fear tactic (ouster from the
> herd) employed to prevent further analysis. I've been hearing it
> since I was three years old;
yes, and I've been totally ignoring it just as long
> it was quite popular during the Cold War; with a
> variant ("America- love it or leave it") strain
> appearing during the Vietnam invasion.
Okay, so it's (a) silly--it's not an argument (b) utterly
predictable for just the reasons you gave. Nations that intend
to survive very long (pace Singularity) had better be composed
of people who think that the nation really exists and who believe
in the wholeness or integrity of their country. If English and
Russians had not felt the way they did, then they'd have been
overrun by Germany, a nation that did. If the US hadn't
believed in itself, then it would have succumbed to the USSR.
Or is your reading of history completely different from mine?
Lee
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