Thinking It Through?
Roundtable: The Future of Liberalism
=================
Three magazine editors -- Peter Beinart, Michael Tomasky and
Katrina vanden Heuvel -- were invited to discuss and debate
the present state of liberalism in America, and its future.
Edited Transcript
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/books/review/006LIBERA.html?8bu
Audio Selections
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/libe-popup.html
Recommended Reading on Liberalism
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/books/review/06LIBE-READ.html?8bu
..................................
The above will appear in tomorrow's Sunday NY Times Book Review. It is focused on our current political game that from my perspective as a social/political/legal philosopher is maiming American democracy by re-directing attention away from problems needing to be solved by any modern society to the nastiness of derogatory name calling. This game goes back to the ancients -- Socrates/Plato despised virtually all of the sophists of their day who used rhetoric to distort and distract from the truth.
Rhetoric as it was called then, propaganda as propounded by the Nazis and other totalitarians, and simplistic reductions of arguments to ad hominems today -- "He/she is just playing politics!" "He/she is just an X or Y!" -- unfortunately works. As the Nazis and Stalinists taught us, the Big Lie cons the unwary when it is repeated often enough. Distort and distract seems to be the game of our major for-profit hate media -- ranging from Clear Channel Communications Inc. to Murdock's gutter press and Fox News. I am even made uncomfortable by Air America, although I tend to agree with most of its criticisms of Republican tactics and aims as well as appreciating its provision of information that one may otherwise only find embedded in blogs or lower down in the columns of our reputable newspapers and journals -- or sometimes on NPR.
What is wrong with all this information distortion is that the problems we are facing are REAL ones and are increasingly adding up to crises for us and future generations -- our children and grand children are at terrible risk. What are some of these crises in the making?
1) Limited resources are dwindling precisely at a time when the world's population is rapidly expanding and increasing demand for what will not be there when needed -- oil, clean water:
The Bush Team's Abortion Misstep
The American delegation embarrassed itself at a recent U.N. conference on women's equality with a burst of anti-abortion grandstanding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/05/opinion/05sat2.html?th
Shame on us for sabotaging efforts to confront such problems squarely!
2) We are polluting our environment and spreading diseases (asthma, AIDS, bird Flu?) that are compounding our health problems on a global scale.
3) The divisions of poverty and wealth are widening, which will lead to increasing resentment of the haves by the have nots -- both within and between nations and cultures. We saw on 9/11 how very simple it was for citizens of one of our 'allies' (15 Saudis plus 4 other odds and ends guys) to devastate our American economy -- with 19 box cutters as weapons! Desperate and depressed people are the most dangerous weapons of all times -- suicidal destroyers. All the military might in the world cannot forestall what may turn out to be catastrophic attacks on our homeland that will make 9/11 look like a minor, if tragic, local disaster.
4) The reconversion of Afghanistan to the destitute opium/heroin supplying capitol of the world is a bellwether of what our U.S. military strategies have accomplished.
5) What chaos may emerge in the Middle East from Bush's current crude calls for democratization there that may set traditional enemies once again at each others' throats -- Lebanon? Iraq? Egypt? Algeria? Iran? Syria? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? Turkey?
This constant "right/left" chatter is dangerous -- it constitutes a major block keeping us Americans from doing what Dr. Carlos Russell, one of my former Brooklyn College colleagues:
http://www.wlib.com/dr-russell.htm
calls "thinking it through."
Comments?
=================
Three magazine editors -- Peter Beinart, Michael Tomasky and
Katrina vanden Heuvel -- were invited to discuss and debate
the present state of liberalism in America, and its future.
Edited Transcript
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/books/review/006LIBERA.html?8bu
Audio Selections
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/libe-popup.html
Recommended Reading on Liberalism
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/books/review/06LIBE-READ.html?8bu
..................................
The above will appear in tomorrow's Sunday NY Times Book Review. It is focused on our current political game that from my perspective as a social/political/legal philosopher is maiming American democracy by re-directing attention away from problems needing to be solved by any modern society to the nastiness of derogatory name calling. This game goes back to the ancients -- Socrates/Plato despised virtually all of the sophists of their day who used rhetoric to distort and distract from the truth.
Rhetoric as it was called then, propaganda as propounded by the Nazis and other totalitarians, and simplistic reductions of arguments to ad hominems today -- "He/she is just playing politics!" "He/she is just an X or Y!" -- unfortunately works. As the Nazis and Stalinists taught us, the Big Lie cons the unwary when it is repeated often enough. Distort and distract seems to be the game of our major for-profit hate media -- ranging from Clear Channel Communications Inc. to Murdock's gutter press and Fox News. I am even made uncomfortable by Air America, although I tend to agree with most of its criticisms of Republican tactics and aims as well as appreciating its provision of information that one may otherwise only find embedded in blogs or lower down in the columns of our reputable newspapers and journals -- or sometimes on NPR.
What is wrong with all this information distortion is that the problems we are facing are REAL ones and are increasingly adding up to crises for us and future generations -- our children and grand children are at terrible risk. What are some of these crises in the making?
1) Limited resources are dwindling precisely at a time when the world's population is rapidly expanding and increasing demand for what will not be there when needed -- oil, clean water:
The Bush Team's Abortion Misstep
The American delegation embarrassed itself at a recent U.N. conference on women's equality with a burst of anti-abortion grandstanding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/05/opinion/05sat2.html?th
Shame on us for sabotaging efforts to confront such problems squarely!
2) We are polluting our environment and spreading diseases (asthma, AIDS, bird Flu?) that are compounding our health problems on a global scale.
3) The divisions of poverty and wealth are widening, which will lead to increasing resentment of the haves by the have nots -- both within and between nations and cultures. We saw on 9/11 how very simple it was for citizens of one of our 'allies' (15 Saudis plus 4 other odds and ends guys) to devastate our American economy -- with 19 box cutters as weapons! Desperate and depressed people are the most dangerous weapons of all times -- suicidal destroyers. All the military might in the world cannot forestall what may turn out to be catastrophic attacks on our homeland that will make 9/11 look like a minor, if tragic, local disaster.
4) The reconversion of Afghanistan to the destitute opium/heroin supplying capitol of the world is a bellwether of what our U.S. military strategies have accomplished.
5) What chaos may emerge in the Middle East from Bush's current crude calls for democratization there that may set traditional enemies once again at each others' throats -- Lebanon? Iraq? Egypt? Algeria? Iran? Syria? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? Turkey?
This constant "right/left" chatter is dangerous -- it constitutes a major block keeping us Americans from doing what Dr. Carlos Russell, one of my former Brooklyn College colleagues:
http://www.wlib.com/dr-russell.htm
calls "thinking it through."
Comments?
posted by Ed Kent at 12:23 PM
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