This is actually a good thing to have happen this early in the campaign cycle, and also with such a flawed opponent like Judd. I think the Obama presidency has taught us that all rules (decency, law, etc.) can be ignored for the “right” in service to their agenda.

DNW Says:
April 11th, 2013 at 4:44 pm

‘The point is that we are only mystified because we are not swimming in the same intellectual current. This stuff isn’t hidden. All you need is access to the “plans” to know where it is going. And the plans are published and out there.’

Which is what Artfldgr has been telling us over and over and over and over and over again…”

Yes, as I hit the submit comment button I realized that with the way I had formulated the statement, I was flogging Art’s horse.

I suppose that more accurately than a plan, what Rorty is doing is laying out a world-view and advocating on that basis a transformational social anthropology; a core re-envisioning of what we consider it means to be what we are. He does this on the basis of a radically a-theistic, thoroughgoing historicist, and anti metaphysical-questioning, perspective.

Rather than argue values and human nature, which is in his view, to join the logic choppers in their metaphysical presuppositions concerning the existence of an objective reality “out there” waiting to be ever more perfectly discovered, his program is the reinvention of social and ultimately personal meanings, through the programmatic re-describing of the world by means of a persistent social introduction of new metaphors and images.

We don’t argue, we reshape.

The logicians are to be replaced by a psyco-social revolution in perspectives generated by intellectuals, not out argued. Victory is to be won by making some perspectives or life ways seem “cruel” or marginal, not by proving moral propositions in accordance with some deduction based on the supposition of a fundamental human nature.

We ask why the media elites seem indifferent to “truth” and more concerned with narrative? It’s because they are already living in the land of the lost.

The point is that we are only mystified because we are not swimming in the same intellectual current. This stuff isn’t hidden. All you need is access to the “plans” to know where it is going. And the plans are published and out there.

Which is what Artfldgr has been telling us over and over and over and over and over again…

What people refuse to understand is that their ideals were always more important than their bank accounts. Or to put it another way, only by maintaining loyalty to the cult doctrine are they able to keep the cash flow open to themselves and their friends.

Different people often wonder why the US would be willing to pay money and blood for mostly useless nations like Afghanistan, Iraq, and even post WWII Germany.

Yea, well, when one is involved in a war, the costs aren’t really the goal, so to speak, nor is REDUCING the costs worth LOSING the war.

People refuse to look at that concept, probably because they still think they are in a political disagreement with the Left.

In order to motivate one’s side to destroy the enemy, one must hate the enemy. There are other ways and motivations, but hating the enemy is probably the easiest. Whether for real or manufactured pretexts. The side that started the war, may say that it was the other guys that fired first.

But a strange thing happens in a war when one side does not hate the enemy. That side starts losing the will to fight and starts finding ways for peace. That may be nice when both sides want peace… however, that’s not always the case.

The media isn’t just post objective, it’s inhabited by persons -assuming it would not offend them to call them that – who are gleefully post-modern, post moral.

We, (meaning the cohort represented by the visitors here) spend years developing our analyses of what we are confronting socially, by tracing surface currents and disturbances – and then trying through a process of inference to link them up to various manifesto proclaimers and theorists with whom are familiar with from our university studies.

The problem is that most of us graduated before say, the mid to late 1980’s. We tediously weave together current events with what we learned of Comte, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Mead, The Vienna Circle, Gramsci , Cloward Piven, et al, and nod, “Yeah, that’s how it all fits together formally … but who could really believe, who could really embrace, internalize, all of this crap as their life project?”

We can’t believe that they believe.

Years ago, I can’t say exactly when, I came across and read a paperback titled “Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Reader”.

The book had probably been out 8 or 10 years by then, having been published about the time I left school. But Deconstruction was in the news as I recall, and I was curious as to what was causing the stir. It was then, generally mocked as if it had, or was destined to have, no real and lasting influence beyond perhaps some lit department faculty and a few fecally focused crackpot grad students in them.

In reading the book one could easily see though, how the doctrine of interpretation wove together and expanded upon trends and doctrines already long prevalent among intellectuals.

When within the context of political trend discussions I brought up the content, and especially the anthropological implications of what I was reading with some older peers who I generally regarded as intellectually competent, their reaction was either bafflement at the ideas and social implications of the ideas, or a kind of dawning horror and incredulity that anyone could even think that. One guy, even began sputtering something about “diabolical” and asked me where the hell I ever got such a book. LOL

The point is that we are only mystified because we are not swimming in the same intellectual current. This stuff isn’t hidden. All you need is access to the “plans” to know where it is going. And the plans are published and out there.

In line with this I want to mention what is I think, one of the most helpful books out there in understanding the mind of the people we are confronting … or at least the minds of their intellectual leaders.

It’s all the more valuable because it is not written by some outraged, sputtering and and uncomprehending conservative for use at an indignation party. It’s a manifesto.

Th book, and many of you have probably already read it, is “Contingency, irony, and solidarity” (pub 1989), by the philosopher (or maybe post philosoper) Richard Rorty.

It’s an easy read. It is lucid. It pulls no punches, and engages in no equivocations. He’s not at all shy about what he is aiming for; nor about the strategy for getting there.

Anyone with a reasonable background in intellectual history will find it easy going.

It is where those half a generation behind us have – many of them – already gone.

It’s subject to criticism and rebuttal. A great deal of genetic science has taken place in the last 24 years. Science which might, in some sense be said to salvage the concepts of “essential nature” or teleonomy, if not teleology.

But before you waste time developing counter arguments, take the time to grasp that this “doctrine” if these converging intellectual vectors can be called that, is already where your antagonists are.