Hello, you need to enable JavaScript to use this network.
Please check your browser settings or contact your system administrator.
Please check your browser settings or contact your system administrator.
I think people are in shock that John Edwards would sacrifice the Democrats' chance for the White House after eight years of the Bush administration. That shock will keep him in the news. But unli... Continue
Added a post Aug 9
Yes, I was meaning to ask if you were repulsed by his inexperience. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for the answer.
Tagged: jfk, election, presidential, obama, 2008
Added a reply Jul 17
I appreciate the way you've developed this perspective, but I have to disagree, Justin--at least to a certain extent. You're right that the vast majority of our online relationships are so superfic... Continue
Tagged: presidential election, social networks, social networking, myspace, meetup
Added a post Jul 8
Spread the word. Get your own We Op-Ed - A Community for Political News and Civilized Debate badge for your website or MySpace page. (Get Code)
We Op-Ed - A Community for Political News and Civilized Debate brought to you by Weoped LLC © 2008 Report an Issue | Contact Us | Privacy | Terms of Service
Spread the word. Get your own We Op-Ed - A Community for Political News and Civilized Debate badge
Comment Wall (7 comments)
You need to be a member of We Op-Ed - A Community for Political News and Civilized Debate to add comments!
Join this network
After a political season of intense discussions that have often touched on the topic of race, I've come to see the extent to which racial perceptions are not a question of "are they racist?", or "to what extent are they racist?". On the contrary, I don't believe any two people share the same thoughts about race, which undermines even the concept of racism.
We all use race to organize our perceptions of the world. Some critics of the Obamas have concerns that the Obamas' vision of race as a point of divisiveness undermines Barack's rhetoric of unity. Michelle Obama obviously sees the Civil Rights movement as being incomplete and a primary concern. Her critics question her priorities, and particularly their appropriateness for the White House. Barack Obama is a part of a new generation of African Americans, who view race differently than their elders--the ones who started the Civil Rights movement. In other words, even within the African-American community people disagree about how race plays a role in the world.
Some say that Bill Clinton was the first African-American president. Some believe that when Bill Clinton associated Obama's win in South Carolina with Jessee Jackson's success in that state, Bill Clinton was being racist. Some see not only Reverend Wright, but also Barack Obama as racists. When polled, some falsely claim they're going to vote for Barack Obama, only because they don't want to appear racist.
In fact, the word "racist" has been slung a lot during this political season, and the variety of ways in which the term's been used shows us the extent to which we don't view race the same way. How can our different perceptions of race be merely a matter of "are they racist or not?", if we can't agree as to what is in fact "racist"?
That's why I started MyRaceCard.blogspot.com. I want to try to read other people's perceptions without judgment. I want to try to see this complicated subject from a perspective other than my own. And I believe I'm not the only one with this desire.
I encourage everyone not merely to visit the site, but rather to submit your anonymous thoughts about race. Go ahead. Play the race card. Mail a postcard with your thoughts to:
Race Card
P.O. Box 2387
Oxford, MS 38655
If you make the effort, I'll post it. And we'll all learn something about each other along the way.
This statement initiated an interesting conversation that has led to this post. Libertarians are originally both fiscally and socially conservative. However, the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties has caused a lot of liberals to fear big government. Due to the Democratic party's inability to offer a true alternative, many of these liberals have defected to the libertarian party. Meanwhile, a large number of socially conservative Reaganites continue to abandon Bush's party of federal expansion. In other words, the libertarian party has transformed into a political perspective where both social liberals and social conservatives can unite.
When it comes to Obama, this may explain why some libertarians call Obama the Antichrist, while others join libertariansforObama.org. Perhaps due to their lack of options, the latter group is growing:
Douglas Kmiec is former chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and now a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University and a devout Catholic. Kmiec endorsed Obama earlier this year, despite his conviction that Obama "believes in a pretty progressive agenda."
Kmiec said his support deepened after meeting with Obama and other faith leaders last month, during which the busy candidate spent 2 1/2 in a freewheeling discussion with people who differed with him.
"I think he's the right person at the right time to re-establish principles of constitutional governance that have been ill treated by the current administration, and to free us from the tar paper that we know is Iraq," Kmiec said, adding that many Republicans privately agree. "I think he's a man in the market for every good idea he can find, and he doesn't care what label it comes with."
David Friedman, the son of late conservative icon and Nobel economist Milton Friedman, has also endorsed Obama. Calling McCain a "nationalist," Friedman, an economist at Santa Clara University, thinks Obama could turn out like the liberals who deregulated New Zealand's economy.
Personally, I know a lot of Ron Paul supporters who prefer Obama to McCain, but who nonetheless refuse to vote for either. They're wedded firstly to Ron Paul, but secondly to the libertarian party. They're voting for Bob Barr because he has decided to make Bush's destruction of civil liberties the centerpiece of his campaign. They believe that Obama will win, but they want to send a message to Obama with their vote: protect our civil liberties at all costs.
As an Obama supporter, I too want to send Obama that message: protect our civil liberties at all costs. Or the libertarian party will continue to grow.
I don't blame you one bit for choosing the pragmatic path after your Phd. Hardly anyone I heard of got hired for what they intended to be hired for after they finished their doctorate. Your enjoyment of the literature never has to go away.
Hope the advice helps. I got a Masters in English at one point. Wondering what you're focusing on for your doctorate. Great having you on the site.
Justin
Great to have you on Weoped. And already jumping into the debates! Excellent work. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for things you'd like to see on here. Also, you might want to check out our tips for how you can promote Roundhouse Rhetoric on Weoped. You're articles do, in fact, kick ass.
And we'd really appreciate it if you helped spread the word with our Contest Widget (see feature on front page) or one of our other Badges for your blog. Hope you enjoy yourself on here and we're looking forward to reading more of your stuff.
- Justin
Most people typically live in a state of existence that we can call “going with the flow.” Heidegger describes this “going with the flow” as such:
"Being-lost in the publicness of the 'they'[,] Dasein has... fallen away from itself... and has fallen into the "world." "Fallenness" into the 'world' means an absorption in Being-with-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity." (See Macquarrie and Robinson's translation of Being and Time, 220.)
Within its original context, Heidegger's description refers to a manner of human existence ("das Man"). This form of existence enables a person to attend to oneself, others, and the world, but "in a mode of groundless floating" such that attention is "everywhere and nowhere" (221).
As the expression "going with the flow" suggests, the person experiences “the publicness of the ‘they’” as both an extension of the self and a source of agency. In other words, we are dealing with identity politics. The person forfeits personal critical thinking in favor of a collective judgment (222), which results in a “knowing it all” attitude (ibid). For some reason, Bill O'Reilly comes to mind. Heidegger describes this attitude as being a part of an individual’s general movement into an interpretive “groundlessness” (223). However, the social component of "going with the flow" hides the interpretation’s groundlessness (ibid). Moreover, this sense of “common knowledge” endows the person's uncritical movement with an illusion of correctness and stability (ibid).
In "A Pedagogy of Force," Mark D. Halx and L. Earle Reybold make the following observation about critical-thinking skills:
"If learning requires effort, then critical thinking requires absolute exertion. In 1941, Mortimer Adler noted that learning is painful. He also cautioned that thinking is 'fatiguing not refreshing.' Kroll (1992) suggests that students are often more comfortable with 'ignorant certainty' than they are with 'intellectual confusion.' When students first begin to think critically, they often experience discomfort because critical thinking calls for students to reflect; set aside their established assumptions; and consider other, sometimes counter, perspectives. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, students too often enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." (296-297)
According to Heidegger, anxiety (in Halx and Reybold’s terminology, “the discomfort of thought”) causes a person to flee from critical thinking. This anxiety comes from a sense of uncertainty that leads the person to perceive the abstract objective of critical thinking to be totally meaningless (Heidegger 231). In other words, the sense of meaninglessness is the ultimate source of our anxiety.
Subsequently, the person “flees” from the anxiety-producing indefiniteness of critical thinking by adhering to definite entities within the world-- in Halx and Reybold's terminology, "the comfort of opinion." What Heidegger describes—this "going with the flow," this fleeing towards “the ‘at-home’ of publicness” (234)—in fact amounts to the logic behind ideological adherences like Bill O'Reilly's. Ideological adherences reveal a flight from the anxiety-producing indefiniteness of critical thinking in favor of more definite entities within the world (233-234).
We avoid rather than confront the sources of our anxiety, and our current stage in the globalization process is filled with anxiety-producing indefiniteness, particularly on the level of conflicting ideologies (the Western ideological war against terror, conservative vs. liberal ideology, etc.). These ideological conflicts reverberate on the level of identity formation. Globalized media and increased travel, both for work and enjoyment, render a local source of identity as being an insufficient interpretive framework—without providing a more stable, global source of identity to replace it.
As a result, we cling to more definite, often-material entities in the world in lieu of the anxiety-producing indefiniteness of critically negotiating unstable local, national, and global citizenry. After the anxiety-producing indefiniteness of September 11, 2001, many businesses facilitated this movement away from anxiety-producing indefiniteness through identity marketing. According to Markus Giesler, part of what we now consume are definitions of ourselves as we merge with our products on the level of identity. The iPod led that movement by transferring marketing’s focus from the identity of the company to the identity of the consumer. Consumers individualize their personal consumer choices to thematize their pedestrian activities. In the face of the anxiety-producing uncertainty of our current global environment, now many people use their consumer choices to label themselves-- for example, as Christian, conservative, multicultural, or environmentally conscious.
The ideological and material adherences of identity formation do not block the indefiniteness of critical thinking. Instead, the person has to avoid critical thinking first, before that individual can cling to the material statements of an ideological precipice. In this sense, ideological and material adherences are symptomatic of a preexisting repression of critical thought. In other words, they are not the cause, but rather the effect of repressed critical thinking.
Media trends reveal another symptom of repressed critical thinking that is perhaps a response to the stubborn ideological and material adherences of identity formation. There is a growing movement to reject appeals to reason. Since 2000, the Jackass slapstick comedy troop has produced a franchise, complete with spin-offs such as Viva la Bam and Wild Boyz. In addition, the franchise has inspired an all-female version called Rad Girls. The strategy for this style of comedy involves the production of contrived, often physical conflicts for the comedy troop to overcome—not through reason, but rather via physical endurance and laughter (a bodily release of tensions). To facilitate this strategy, the conflicts are always decontextualized and thus deprived of greater meaning. For example, Jackass Number Two's opening dislocates the Spanish cultural practice of the Running of the Bulls—specifically from Pamplona, Spain to suburban America. Deprived of its historical/geographical/cultural content, the cultural practice is reduced to the absurdity of fear and aggression. In other words, the opening to Jackass Number Two portrays a closed-minded and distinctly American perception of the Running of the Bulls: uncritically, we Americans tend to see the Spanish cultural practice in terms of the absurdity of our corralling bulls through our own neighborhoods. The Running of the Bulls scene is not an isolated incident. The movie frequently dislocates and dissembles cultural practices, such as the Indian medical practice of using leeches and the cultural practice of interacting with cobras. The comedic style’s dismissal of reason (both that of our own and others) is in fact a dismissal of interpreting difference, often in an intentional confrontation with that difference. As a scene in the second Jackass movie demonstrates: You in India put leeches in your eyes; I from California will put leeches in my eyes, and from an American perspective we will experience solidarity, because now I am as absurd to my own ideology as you are to my ideology. In other words, the dismissal of reason has an ethical component to it, particularly in the context of our Western ideological war against terrorism. The strategy pursues solidarity, but outside of the realm of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles involved in ideological uses of reason.
The rejection of reason has affected marketing trends as well. For example, the Youtube advertisement for the energy drink Brawndo denies the supremacy of reason in our decisions—namely through statements such as "What are electrolytes? I don't know, but they're extremely awesome." The advertisement instead privileges instincts, and predominantly that of aggression: “Drinking [Brawndo] will make you wonder why you haven’t ever crushed a human skull with your bare hands. But you won’t have to, because you’ll already know that Brawndo tastes how that would feel, which is like having sex with a tractor trailer in a parking lot. Grrrrrrrr.” The source of this aggression becomes more evident when we look at an earlier source of the Brawndo advertisement. The Canadian comedy troop at Picnicface.com won the contract for the Brawndo advertisement by making similar advertisements for a fictional energy drink, Powerthirst. The organizational structure of the Powerthirst advertisement parallels that of the advertisement for Brawndo. However, unlike the advertisement for Brawndo, the Powerthirst commercial portrays an instance of cultural contact. In the Powerthirst advertisement, if you give Powerthirst to your white babies, your white babies will run "abnormally fast"—so fast "that people will think they're Kenyans" and "they'll get deported back to Kenya." The moment of cultural contact is unintelligible. The Kenyans are "abnormal." Rather than attribute normalcy to foreign cultures, the advertisement instead encourages this unintelligibility of "abnormalcy" for ourselves—namely through a suspension of our reason.
It is as if this multicultural tolerance that suspends the logic of difference (your white baby will "get deported back to Kenya") in fact also suspends the conflicts that arise from difference. However, this strategy (the repression of the logic of difference) produces an excessive remainder of aggression. In other words, by repressing reason in the face of globalization's constant cultural/ideological conflicts, we cling to decontextualized, dissembled representations of conflict. The conflict is still there, only irrational—in fact, unrationalizeable. This of course can have the effect of transforming cultural/ideological contact into a contact sport.
If commercials, television shows, and movies discourage reason, and if these media manifestations reflect a greater social demand to which such media appeals, then these factors reveal a growing individual frustration with the inability to reason with others in society. In other words, the two symptoms of repressed critical thinking work against each other. On one side, individuals uncritically “go with the flow” of available subject positions in order to escape the indefiniteness of critical thinking in our current, complex and extremely uncertain phase of globalization. On the other side, individuals avoid intellectually negotiating ideological difference in favor of a suspension/repression of that difference, with the result of a surge in aggression. Rather than embrace the material statements of intellectually “going with the flow,” they embrace the bodily statements (manifestations of instincts) of anti-intellectualism.
Both strategies intellectually deny meaning in the indefiniteness of critical thought. The best way to comprehend this similarity is in terms of sequence. First, a person rejects the indefiniteness involved in critical thinking in favor of “going with the flow.” This produces stubborn ideological adherences. (We can call this the "Bill O'Reilly Syndrome," although the stubborn ideological adherences don't have to be conservative.) With the rise of cultural or ideological contact from globalization, the person represses the resulting increase of ideological differences—with the effect of those differences resurfacing on the level of instinctive drives, namely aggression. (We can call this the "Brawndo Effect.")
What we are dealing with here is split subjectivity. Critical thinking enables a person to experience oneself and the world as an open-source code: our program is never complete, but rather always in the process of becoming. Critical thinking enables healthy, conscious change-- both individually and socially. However, our current phase in globalization has provided too many unintentional changes. We feel the desire to stabilize our perceptions. We ignore aspects of ourselves that don't correspond with those stabilized perceptions. We split from these repressed aspects of ourselves and become Bill O'Reilly on the level of our statements. To the extent that we want to experience solidarity in the midst of unnegotiated difference, we become Jackasses. We experience the Brawndo effect by getting drunk and wrestling our friends after watching Fight Club. After we get that aggression out of our system, we return to our Bill O'Reilly identities and continue ignoring aspects of ourselves and dismissing aspects of others that undermine our stabilized perceptions. And we indefinitely postpone healthy, conscious change.
Bill O'Reilly's is a dangerously debilitating approach to this globalizing world. Globalization requires critical thinking now more than ever before. As Halx and Reybold explain, "Most definitions of critical thinking emphasize a heightened awareness of multiple points of view and context, as well as an evaluation of one's own thought processes before reaching a conclusion. Thus, critical thinking requires the presence of mind to 'assess and scrutinize "knowledge" prior to its consumption.'" Until we can decipher "multiple points of view and context," we won't be able to navigate our globalized world. Until we can "assess and scrutinize 'knowledge' prior to its consumption," we won't be able to navigate conflicting social agendas. Until we can evaluate our own thought processes before reaching a conclusion, we won't be able to bring about healthy, conscious change-- either for ourselves or for each other.
It's significant that the current proponent of change is an African-American candidate named Barack Hussein Obama. For the U.S. and its specific racial and military history, there is no greater image of "the Other from within" than the superficial, nominal persona (not the actual person) of Barack Obama. This candidate induces the Bill O'Reilly syndrome in many of those who oppose him. Such opposition cling to dismissive statements in lieu of real knowledge about the man as if the two were one and the same: Obama's a racist, socialist, anti-American, Hitler-esque, brainwashing, Muslim extremist with terrorist connections. These people hold onto such dismissive statements in lieu of real knowledge in order to justify their irrational suspicion of those who are different from them. Otherwise, if they had to confront their own lack of justification for their irrational anger, they would have to begin the process of self-evaluation that leads to a critical engagement with difference.
This is such a close election with so much time remaining, this self-evaluative process is likely to at least start in quite a few of those who suffer from the Bill O'Reilly syndrome. In other words, whether or not Obama wins the presidency, this election is proving to be healthy for the American people. We should encourage those who insist that their dismissive statements are true to research the actual truth that those statements distort. The objective of such encouragement is not necessarily to promote Obama's candidacy. (Does the mere fact that a candidate is not anti-American mean the candidate is qualified?)
Instead, it's to initiate the self-evaluation necessary for critical thinking, which is a skill Americans need to compete globally.