Posted on 06/28/2005 10:47:46 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
Bullard High School Theater
5445 N. Palm Avenue
Fresno, CA
The motion before the House:
Distinguished panelists include:
PRO:
Victor Davis Hanson, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute
Bruce Thornton, Ph.D., Professor of Classics, CSU Fresno
Stuart Weil, Chairman, Republican Jewish Coalition of Central California
CON:
Jim Bartram, Speech Instructor, Fresno City College
Howard Hendrix, Ph.D., Lecturer, English Literature, CSU Fresno
Richard Stone, Administrative Director, Fresno Center for Nonviolence
ANALYST:
Kevin Ayotte, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Communication, CSU Fresno
MODERATOR:
Vincent Lavery, Board of Directors, Fresno Center for Nonviolence
Hey, I am open to any format of meaningful discussion on this board. There's a reason I became a debater, it's because I was interested in going and researching relevant resolutions and formatting arguments for both sides. Maybe if you could back off and stop repeating yourself we could get somewhere. I was trying to make a point regarding a earlier post, and your continued response is "go away."
I don't know what you have contributed to the world, and I really don't know what I have either. That's not very relevant to this discussion.
I'll throw this one in your court. What would you like to discuss?
Come back in 20 years, by then you will be laughing at yourself.
Accusing Che, a man of high ideals, of being a terrorist is laughable coming from someone that undoubtedly supports acts of state terror being carried out in our name in this so called war on terror. While Che was not a nonviolent activist, the violent acts he carried out pale in comparison to acts carried out by the U.S. and allies. In addition, it is arguable whether his violent acts can be constituted as terrorist at all.
Laughing at myself? Maybe...laughing that I tried to actually genuinely tried to intellectually engage certain people on these types of board to have a free discussion about something meaningful.
Here, how about this one...while I'm wasting my life going to college, looking for questions that need to be asked, and trying to find others who may have the answer, you can sit here and tell every 18yearold boy to go screw themselves.
Laughing at myself? Maybe...laughing that I tried to actually genuinely intellectually engage certain people on these types of board to have a free discussion about something meaningful.
Here, how about this one...while I'm wasting my life going to college, looking for questions that need to be asked, and trying to find others who may have the answer, you can sit here and tell every 18yearold boy to go screw themselves.
Laughing at myself? Maybe...laughing that I tried to actually genuinely, intellectually engage certain people on these types of board to have a free discussion about something meaningful.
Here, how about this one...while I'm wasting my life going to college, looking for questions that need to be asked, and trying to find others who may have the answer, you can sit here and tell every 18yearold boy to go screw themselves.
Btw, sorry for the triple post.
Tag team trolls! What a novel idea! I guess since Che's acts of violence pale in comparison to those of the U.S. that explains why his communist paradise never achieved more than third-world status. You should elevate your level of hero.
In an act of terror the CIA asassinated Che during the sixties. Btw, asassination of political figures is terrorism, you can refer to the U.S. Code for the definition of terrorism
Also, Cuba has the best healthcare system in Latin America(lowest infant mortality, longest life expectancy, lowest death rate, lowest HIV/AIDS rate, best doctor to patient ratios) as well as the highest literacy in Latin America.
Let me drive you to the boat.
I find it a shame that U.S. darling Columbia hasn't accomplished much in the way of improving quality of life. Come to think of it U.S. backed Pinochet in Argentina didnt accomplish much either, except for the murder/kidnapping of countless dissidents
There's no doubt that many communist regimes commited horrible violence against their populations. However, this violence is not specific to communism nor is it tied in directly to its theories or all of its leaders. That is simply essentialist.
This is the same essentialism that constructs "far away evil doers" and "fundamentalists" as the face of the rest of the world, espescially those in the world of Islam. The identity of the citizens of the sovereign nation-state is so entangled with the discoursive construction of the "nation-state" that the sovereign has no problem constructing threats that need to be "secured" against, therefore allowing it to gain greater control over that life and obviously the lives or ideas being secured against. Our leaders like threats, if they don't have one they create it discoursively, or they utilize identity politics to create groups in which are then left to feel the dark, underside of globalization and then made into a viable threat. That threat is then a new tool for the state by which to access greater power relations. This can be noted from the genealogical works of Michel Foucault and David Campbell.
The use of language by political leaders leads directly to violence, including the possibility of an all-out nuclear exchange. Every act of political violence is intimately linked with the use of language to manufacture consent. The language that shapes public opinion is the same language that burns villages.
John Collins, Assistant Professor of Global Studies at St. Lawrence University, and Ross Glover, Visiting Professor of Sociology at St. Lawrence University, 2002 (Collateral Language, p. 6-7)
The Real Effects of Language
As any university student knows, theories about the “social construction” and social effects of language have become a common feature of academic scholarship. Conservative critics often argue that those who use these theories of language (e.g., deconstruction) are “just” talking about language, as opposed to talking about the “real world.” The essays in this book, by contrast, begin from the premise that language matters in the most concrete, immediate way possible: its use, by political and military leaders, leads directly to violence in the form of war, mass murder (including genocide), the physical destruction of human communities, and the devastation of the natural environment. Indeed, if the world ever witnesses a nuclear holocaust, it will probably be because leaders in more than one country have succeeded in convincing their people, through the use of political language, that the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, the destruction of the earth itself, is justifiable. From our perspective, then, every act of political violence—from the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans to the murder of political dissidents in the Soviet Union to the destruction of the World Trade Center, and now the bombing of Afghanistan—is intimately linked with the use of language.
Partly what we are talking about here, of course, are the processes of “manufacturing consent” and shaping people’s perception of the world around them; people are more likely to support acts of violence committed in their name if the recipients of the violence have been defined as “terrorists,” or if the violence is presented as a defense of “freedom.” Media analysts such as Noam Chomsky have written eloquently about the corrosive effects that this kind of process has on the political culture of supposedly democratic societies. At the risk of stating the obvious, however, the most fundamental effects of violence are those that are visited upon the objects of violence; the language that shapes public opinion is the same language that burns villages, besieges entire populations, kills and maims human bodies, and leaves the ground scarred with bomb craters and littered with land mines. As George Orwell so famously illustrated in his work, acts of violence can easily be made more palatable through the use of euphemisms such as “pacification” or, to use an example discussed in this book, “targets.” It is important to point out, however, that the need for such language derives from the simple fact that the violence itself is abhorrent. Were it not for the abstract language of “vital interests” and “surgical strikes” and the flattering language of “civilization” and ‘just” wars, we would be less likely to avert our mental gaze from the physical effects of violence.
Yeah, so?
The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.
The misguided belief that those that believe Cuba or other nations have a few practices we could benefit from (i.e. universal healthcare) should simply shut up and move to those nations is rather tired, not to mention a poor rebuttal . The fact of the matter is, a universal system would save the government money. Currently the U.S. spends more money on healthcare per person than the french and the canadians, both of which have universal systems.
Oh give me a break! You haven't paid tax one, met a household budget, made a mortgage payment, taken a sick kid to the doctor.... All you "know" is what you read and that is obviously not a balanced "knowledge" judging from your previous references. If you "know" Cuba is such a better place than here, I'll gladly foot the bill for your trip. And you don't know from a tired belief. You haven't exercised your brain beyond your pathetic attemts at polysylabbic pontifficating to know tired. Somebody hold muh beer. Ah'm gettin' riled up.
I must agree with many of your points. Even Gilles Deleuze argued that the Marxist/Freudian use of the Oedipal complex as a means by configuring the goals of Marxist regimes was flawed. They felt that gaps within language represented gaps within power in which they could pose violent resistance. Capitalism and all other economic machines were viewed as utopias stuck within the "Symbolic Order of the Imaginary" Therefore, they felt that gaps within the Sovereign's control of the discourse in a geopolitical region, IE Cuba, could serve as a gap in power relations in which a violent revolution could break free and start a new communist regime. They did this by mobilizing populations that were slowly beginning to awake and resist the dominant discourse of their Sovereign, and then attempt to implant radical alternative discourses of revolution and resistance. This would be what the Marxists/Freudians called the "Real", a break away from capitalist fantasy.
What they didn't calculate was that the Freudian repression of desire and of capitalism's argument that desire led to social production (physical products) was actually a gateway into a new form of desire. Where capitalism viewed desire as a viable and productive means of attaining a product, the Marxist/Freudian political machines tried to play it into the Oedipal triangle as another gateway back to the Fantasy, another Oedipal partial drive. What they didn't realize was that desire could be productive, and that in fact, their calls to resist power was actually another form of DESIRE, a desire for power and disrupting existing power relations.
This proved problematic for communist regimes, as no one could account for the desire their leaders showed within a ideology that was thought to embrace collectivism, independent radical discourses that were never tied to the state, amd so forth.
Others, such as the political analyst/philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, still argue that the communist revolution has never really taken place yet, that postmodern criticisms and working within the current global order are flawed, and that the only thing holding back the true revolution is the mindset that it can't happen. I won't get into that here.
Anyways, good historical point. It alone isn't enough to discredit an ideology, though I also don't embrace Marxism. One on the other side could make a valid point that capitalism is obviously inherently violent, oppressive, and subversive to those out of the dominant discourse or position, or within the cracks of society.
I applaud your personal attacks, theyre nice substitutes for real rebuttals. First, I didn't claim Cuba was a better place than here. Second, sure I havent made a mortgage payment or taken a sick child to the doctor, both are rather unusual for one of my age. However, I have "paid tax" as you say and dealt with household budgets.
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