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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (116873)	5/28/2005 9:45:30 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793608

I don't believe that we can just dismiss this message as something born of "of angst and hatred and a bonding exercise." I'm not sure what you mean by dismissing the message. I don't mean to dismiss the feeling, which I said "I get." I think that I have a working understanding of both sides given that I find myself spending time arguing with both sides and have one of my own feet on each side. My point was that the rant "really has nothing to do with the main point of this essay." The point of the essay was that the media shouldn't trumpet things that make the other guys think of this as a war against Islam because that can cost us the war. The first half of the essay was about that. The latter half, the part about the Smarties, was just venting, best I could tell, and not germaine to the argument. If you can see how the rant about those horrible Smarties adds substance to the argument that the media should restrain release of such info, perhaps, you'd clue me in. Both these men tell me that it is Smartland that has seceded from America as traditionally defined. I think that depends on how you define Smartland. If you define it as the progressives or the chi-chi literary set, I couldn't give you any argument. But if you define it more broadly, I think you may be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Much turns, don't you agree, on whether the "anti-Smarties" are just displaying a kind of hick jealousy and antagonism to the Smarties' superior knowledge, or whether they are reacting within reason to the Smarties' arrogance and assumptions of superiority? Hmmm. That's a good question. No, I don't think it matters. Polarization is polarization. It feeds on itself in a descending spiral so I don't know that it matters which is chicken and which is egg. Re "the Smarties' superior knowledge," I don't want to make too much of your phrasing but I was struck by the lack of an "alleged" in there. One thing that I think matters is whether there really is superior knowledge on the side of the Smarties. I don't happen to think that there is, so that affects how I view this. I think we need the smarts that both sides bring so that's why I decry the polarization. Nothing saddens me like lost opportunity. Whether or not the Smarties really have superior knowledge, and whether or not either side or both sides think that they really do, I don't think it's constructive for the non-Smarties to wallow in it and be obsessed by it. Also, much does turn, I think, on a cultural divide you don't seem to recognize at all - the division between those who see the world in moral terms and those who do not; who think it is narrow and bigoted to even try to do so. I am more than aware of that cultural divide given that I am on the "wrong" side of it, the minority side. I can barely bring myself to use the word, "wrong." <g> But likewise I recognize that there is a different divide on that continuum between those who think that morals are absolute and those who apply human interpretation. I'm on the majority side of that one. Hard to tell which divide is more critical in the final analysis.