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To: Billthedrill
The question is how those 'parallels' are linguistically constructed. Without a certain framing they aren't parallels at all, but, alternatively, random events in unrelated narratives and causality spheres......

I can 'frame' the Founding Fathers to sound like terrorist revolutionaries and murderers of all that is decent. Go back and read the British dispatches of the time, they did it....

What was the 'truth'?
65 posted on 03/12/2003 8:07:44 PM PST by Byron deVilliers
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To: Byron deVilliers
The question is how those 'parallels' are linguistically constructed. Without a certain framing they aren't parallels at all, but, alternatively, random events in unrelated narratives and causality spheres......

All that we know is "linguistically constructed," truth and falsehood. So let's see whether the term "framing" applies here.

For example, when I state that both Saddam and Stalin held party conferences, denounced many of the attendees as disloyal, and had them shot, is there really room in that claim for "framing?" They did or they did not. In fact, they did. In Stalin's case it was the Congress of Victors in 1934, of whose 1996 attendees 1108 were executed (or committed suicide when facing that) in the subsequent terror. Do you deny this? In Saddam's case it was the very first Baath party conference at which he made his accession to the throne - do you deny that event? Neither Stalin nor Saddam did so in their respective cases. Is this then a parallel? Is it framed? Or is it, as I assert, an action of grotesque and disturbing similarity?

There is no real room here for casuistry - the events either happened as I stated or they did not, and if they did, are significant in terms of comparing the two individuals. Where a number of such occurrences happen in the lives of both men, it is no accident of description, no "framing," that leads us to compare them, only the bald, bare facts.

I'll restate it so that there will be no room for misinterpretation - Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin are men of closely similar character, closely similar antecedents, with closely similar career arcs, closely similar crimes, closely similar failings as human beings. The similarity I describe is not a random occurrence, not the product of linguistic interpretation, and not an artifact of "framing," it is a long chain of events that justify the comparison of the two men. In less similar men there will be fewer events that so closely correspond. There the comparison will be less valid.

That these narratives and "causality spheres" are unrelated is central to the argument - the commonality isn't in either of those, but in the characters of the two men. That's the point.

77 posted on 03/12/2003 8:56:58 PM PST by Billthedrill
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To: Byron deVilliers; dighton; aculeus; BlueLancer; L,TOWM
Without a certain framing they aren't parallels at all, but, alternatively, random events in unrelated narratives and causality spheres......

Cute. Taking a cue from Chomsky, are we? He was rather loathe to condemn the genocide in Cambodia, as I recall - must be something about mass-murder that brings out the worst in your typical garden-variety moral relativist. It's all a language game, now step lively and please pay no attention to the piles of bodies over there....

95 posted on 03/13/2003 7:34:10 AM PST by general_re (Non serviam.)
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