[quote]helga wrote:
Call me an idiot but I am not sure that I understand what you are trying to say here. Can you expand a little? I am interested to understand[/quote]
Not gonna call you an idiot, I know that not to be the case. My brief and agitated mutterings are not always too clear, your confusion is completely warranted. I guess I’m just making a frustrated observation that most discussion I find on the boards, here and on other sites, at least that originating with my fellow countrymen, be it political-, religious-, or otherwise based, is in a way pre-scripted to a certain extent.
Too much political discussion is based in the talking points of our political/religious/special interest parties and their agents - the pundits, and most religious discourse I’ve born witness to more or less follows the talking points and archetypal narratives provided by the religious parties that exist here, the so-called moral majority, the related evangelical movement and its own figureheads/celebrities (yes these people have a deal of fame and do profit quite handsomely from it).
Very little discussion actually addresses the substantive issues at hand. Very little independently formulated opinions or views are expressed, just the same stuff I could have found on the republican or democratic parties’ websites, the editorial pages of a website, magazine or newspaper, evangelical websites or in some political or religious fixture’s books.
Of course, little original thought or ideas actually exist, but the fact that the great volume of discourse on such theoretically interesting and complex topics is often very narrowly defined by a subset of often reductive and ideologial arguments or talking-points bothers me.
Now, it may well be the case that the discourse elsewhere in the world is similarly confined to those arguments and positions advanced by a few individuals and groups who figure prominently in societies at large or subgroups contained therein. As discourse here is largely constrained in terms of participation by the geographically diverse by the fact that the english language is the medium by which ideas are conveyed.
That said, even if discourse is similarly constrained elsewhere, those constraints (the arguments and ideas of the figureheads previously mentioned, which prevade discourse) are different than those prominent in the states. This being the case I find them more satisfying intellectually and otherwise as the dominant modes of thought and lines of inquiry are different than those that are pervasive in much of the discourse of the states.
My comment was, I suppose, commentary on the fact that there are other modalities of thought and lines of inquiry beyond those that are preceived by the often dualistic american culture to be the issues of import and contention with regard to a specific topic or variant thereof.
