Quote from: KoltarJeff , you're making more sense than PseudoP is.

- Ed C.

Fuck.

Me making sense.

If that's not a sign of the Apocalypse, then I don't know what is.

:haw: :haw:

Quote from: jeff37923Obviously when you start talking about specifics the situations are different because they happened at different times in different nations, but when you look at history you can find that there are a repetition of situations and general circumstances that become common to all civilizations because they are composed of human beings.

Which kinda is an ad absurdum argument. If you just simplify enough, repetitions will abound.

Quote from: SosthenesWhich kinda is an ad absurdum argument. If you just simplify enough, repetitions will abound.

Exactly.

To be fair to jeff, the opposite is true.  You can always find a difference if you want to by delving down into detail. It simply depends on at what level of granularity you agree to have the discussion.

Quote from: SosthenesWhich kinda is an ad absurdum argument. If you just simplify enough, repetitions will abound.

Yet it makes sense because the original statement, "that politics has always been about perception, popularity, and strange bedfellows" should indicate by context the level of granulaity to the reader. This is a statement on generalities, obviously. So, also obviously, it will break down when the granulaity of the discussion is high, even though the generality is still valid.

It's hard to get more general than with a statement like that. Using that as a rule, I could take the structure of a cannibalistic prehistoric tribe and apply it to UN politics. The analysis that I'd gain by such an argument is as minimal as the comparison is general, but I'm able to attach all kinds of laden associations to the subject at hand.

Quote from: jeff37923Yet it makes sense because the original statement, "that politics has always been about perception, popularity, and strange bedfellows" should indicate by context the level of granulaity to the reader. This is a statement on generalities, obviously. So, also obviously, it will break down when the granulaity of the discussion is high, even though the generality is still valid.

How is it sound? You haven't proven or demonstrated it, just asserted it. I'm not sure it's even capable of being proved.

Jeff is more right than Pseudo gives him credit for; however this just shows that modern politics, in particular American politics, are less evolved than might be supposed given a general back-slapping belief in progress. Theatre has always been a big factor in politics; the Augustan revolution did have overtones that are echoed in modern fascisms (such as a backwards-looking ideology designed to form & exploit a "national" consciousness in support of political power, concentration of state power--which means a prerequisite is that there be a state--in a single person who draws legitimacy in the name of "the people" rather than traditional kingship, use of the state military--a distinct institution from the citizenry per se--as final guarantor of the dictator's power).

And by the way, Churchill also wrote The River War, reporting first-hand on the anti-Mahdist expedition in the Sudan, highlighting a cavalry skirmish he got himself into during the Battle of Omdurman, and he thrust himself into the Boer War as a correspondent and officer; he launched his early political career off of these experiences and his accounts thereof.

If you want to talk about American politics being fascistic in the abstract, you also have to speak in terms of tendencies and degrees of similarity (and then you really have to define fascism carefully), because we aren't there yet, not by a long shot.

Quote from: David RSomewhere out there John Morrow feels a disturbance in the force

Maybe this explains why I wandered back here when I had some free time...

Congratulations James.  A broader vista of discourse is the only hope for democracy.  Communism espouses some very high and worthy goals, though I've always felt that the idealism behind it makes it an easy target for dictators.

But then I would argue that Fascism survived World War II and is the primary American social doctrine.

That way I can keep my starry eyed capitalist idealism.