Eat The Press | Harry Shearer: The Rhetorical vs. the Empirical | The Huffington Post
posted August 10, 2006 at 6:55 p.m. MDTI posted my first
"It is the simplicity of the plot that yada-yada bla-bla-blah" ... CNN is having a field day!K, sorry, but it's not a happy day.
In short: post-tantra I inevitably revert to what I extracted from Sun Tsu, "Let each and every strive in their own way to be a sage general."
Minutes after having posted, "Why are their armed guards in the airports? When have uzi-totting gestapo every get involved in a hijaking?" I heard a suit announce that there would be spot searches of vehicles near airports.
It's pure 1984. The althernative? Democracy ... individuals should be empowered to question authorities' rationale for making blue-haired matrons discard their skin cream.
As a militant I can assure you that the fundamentalists are laughing up a storm ... nothing like yuppies adopting authoritarianism holus-bolus to confirm their foundatalional assertions.
Yuppies' kidz have adopted ADD as their only effective gambit in the face of systemic double-bind. Now they're to contend against literate activists with 1000 years of grievance to redress?! Not likely ... really.
Rhetoric ... give me rhetoric. But to hell with sophistry! You point is painfully wrong-headed.
I've only just recently reconceptualized my "Participatory Deliberation" in terms of Hesse's "Magister Ludi". I ask you, _mano a mano_, what is more rhetorically well formed than an intuitively inspired communicative gesture? When you promote "empiricism" so energetically, aren't you confounding it with the experiential, i.e. the authentic i.e. the subjective? You're in danger of slipping into a mechanistic reductionism ... and that's not bravery (though I suspect you're plenty brave), it's hubris.
"It still turns" ... let it turn, of its own authority. Then testify to what that means to you.
Thugs to the left of me, thugs to the right, and everywhere good folk losing their mind. I'll feed my blue ox well tonight; I might be calling him into service soon.
