Response Wanted
I wrote in my "Ah, Yes" post below two different viewpoints of American history and the role of American government.
View 1: The American government makes decisions that affect the lives of many people, who lives, who dies, who eats, who doesn't, who gets money and support, who gets blamed and who gets punished and how they get punished and how much support, etc, etc. The government makes these decisions - and some turn out to be right (abolishing slavery) and some turn out to be wrong (Japanese internment).
View 2: The American government pursues a violent, aggressive foreign policy and policies against particular groups of people in an effort to further our own narrow self interest, economic, cultural, and militarily.
Granted, not all actions over the entire history by the US government can be lumped into one of these two viewpoints...but one can look at US history or US modern history and argue that either View 1 or View 2 is more common or a more dominant theme in our actions.
I'm curious for all the Michael Moore Left out there (sarah, kevin, alice, cindy) what View they find more accurate.
4 comments:
views 1 and 2 are by no means mutually exclusive, view 2 being a subset of one. therefore it is impossible to pick which of the two is more accurate.
oye vey! i thought i wouldn't need to put the uber obvious disclaimer that avoiding answering the question is pointless....but i guess i should have. i expressed in the post that of course, we cannot lump everything into one or the other - but one can certainly detect and take a position on a specific theme of US behaviour. why try to avoid answering this question? can't one say which view is more accurate or akin to their pov?
this idea of a subset is off...the point is motivation - view 1 has to do with motivation based upon responsibility whereas view 2 has to do with motivation based upon selfishness.
it seems to me to be an easy question to answer, and by answering it, no one ought to feel like they are being trapped into an ideological position, i'm merely interested in seeing the self proclaimed LEFT take a specific position on a given question.
i suppose if you think the question makes no sense, you can pose the question in a different way and then take a position....i guess what i'm interested in is taking a firm stance on something specific as opposed to something general and unspecific, like - we ought to care more about other countries or we ought to face up to violence in our culture or we ought to respect other people, blah, blah, blah, yeah we all agree on this crap.
1) not trying to avoid the answer. the problem is that your own answer is clearly written in the posin g of the questions, so it seems a bit like a trap. hence my approaching it rather analytically.
BUT
if you boil it down to responsiblity vs. selfishness?
Selfishness, without a doubt.
dammit.
i promised i wouldn't get involved in this crap.
i'm saving the rest of this argument for beers.
Post a Comment