By: jim robertson

jim robertson — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:09:06 +0000

O.K.

By: jim robertson

jim robertson — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:52:58 +0000

Julie, sorry I missed your post. What makes you think that I think that it's not a big deal if teachers molest their students????? That's quite a leap given I was molested by teachers. You're in outrageous territory when you toss out an aspersion like that.

By: Publion

Publion — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 20:29:43 +0000

The difference between talking about a conceptual analysis of the defects of high-altitude strategic bombing with iron-bombs as opposed to incident-reports about particular aircraft and tail-numbers. That sort of thing.

By: jim robertson

jim robertson — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 15:41:44 +0000

A bit blurry for me.

By: Publion

Publion — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 21:05:38 +0000

Ah, but that’s precisely the point. What you missed was that the comment was conceptual – about ‘story’ in general – and not about any particular story. My comment was on a different level of analysis. Not just the usual high-school cafeteria scrum. You put it so well.

By: jim robertson

jim robertson — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 14:22:04 +0000

I guess I'm missing something. Who's "story" on the net are you refering to?

By: jim robertson

jim robertson — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:57:14 +0000

Au contrare mon ami. Ayn Rand will not save you but organized left labor will. Just my opinion.

By: Ken W.

Ken W. — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 19:35:34 +0000

….all of which has -0- relevance in the labor dynamic today. My grandfather and my father needed a union. I do not.

By: Publion

Publion — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:47:32 +0000

This isn’t directly connected to anything in the article above. I had been going over some old material and that prompted the thoughts I am putting up here.

I had previously noted the twin problems of ‘stories’, especially on the internet: a) it is not possible to conclusively corroborate them (especially with the internet modality) and b) there developed during the 1980s an under-examined tendency not to want to corroborate them, but rather to accept them at face value as presumptively credible.

That (b) point was partially a result, as I have said, of media and special-interest influence in whose interest it would be to have an apparently boundless cache of ‘stories’ to apparently support this or that. And it was also partially, I think, the result of a conflation of the therapeutic forum and the public forum: in the therapeutic forum (individual or group), there is a necessary tendency to accept the validity of the presenter’s feelings about the story s/he brings; accepting those feelings (rather than immediately questioning them) allows a build-up of a safe ‘space’ and a positive working relationship between therapist and presenter (and, in the group setting, with the rest of the group).

But it can also happen – and perhaps in less-skillfully conducted therapy, more often than one might imagine – that accepting the feelings about the story somehow works out to also accepting the story itself, and without any substantive questioning. With the rapid expansion of ‘therapists’ in the 1970s and 1980s to include all manner of what would previously have been known as ‘concerned helpers’ or ‘supportive listeners’, this dynamic became – I think – more frequent.

And, mixed with media and special-interest objectives, that dynamic came to assume a primacy and status that it really shouldn’t be accorded.

And then, transferred to the internet, it assumes a life of its own.

But I have – as I said – come across an old file that reminds me of another element to the mix. Some may recall the autobiography (from the later 1980s) of Rigoberta Menchu: it achieved a rather quick notoriety in that era, being, it was said, the autobiographical story and reflections of a young Guatemalan peasant woman during the Reagan-supported tenure of that country’s authoritarian government. (You can already see where her story would have appeal to a number of interests and groups.)

But questions arose: for a putatively unlettered young peasant woman from a rural milieu, she seemed to have some remarkably advanced-level theoretical (some said Marxist) interests, and a bit like Tom Hank’s ‘Forrest Gump’ character she seemed to have been present at a whole lot of noteworthy events, and her experiences appeared to be so spot-on for what one would expect of a ‘typical peasant oppressed by capitalism and American imperialism’ and a ‘woman oppressed by patriarchal dominance’ and so forth.

I am not here getting into either support or critique of US foreign policy in the Reagan era.

Rather, the significant point that relates to the Catholic Abuse Matter is this: in the course of things following the publication of her book, the defense was made that even if she didn’t really and actually experience all these things, the ‘situation’ (one might say ‘outrage’ or ‘crisis’) that she was describing was very real and that was all that really mattered. In other words, what she herself actually experienced and relates in her story should not be the main concern for readers and the public; rather, it should be that ‘situation’ that her story was bringing to light.

You can go back and forth on whether you agree with that approach to things, but I think that the publication of her book marked a watershed in the way public opinion was being shaped: it’s not the facts of any actual ‘story’, but rather the ‘situation’ (or ‘outrage’ or ‘crisis’) that the story – with presumably the very best of intentions – is trying to illuminate. Thus – as is famously asserted – “facts don’t matter”. Facts don’t matter because whether they are true or not isn’t as important as the ‘truth’ of the larger phenomenon that the story is dealing with.

This was, not surprisingly, one of Al Sharpton’s defenses of Tawana Brawley a year or two later, when her claims of rape began to factually unravel: the case wasn’t about whether she personally and actually was raped, but rather that white law enforcement brutalizes and rapes black suspects. And we saw it also in the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case, where – as the charges began to come apart (and the DA himself came under investigation and eventually lost his job and was disbarred for promoting a story whose assertions he knew to be false) – over a hundred of the Duke faculty signed a public statement of support for the allegant, and once again the mantra was voiced that “facts don’t matter”.

So to 1) the difficulty of corroborating (especially through the internet modality) and 2) the confusion of the therapeutic and the public forums, we now have to add 3) the ‘principle’ that being truthful about actual facts is not necessary so long as what your story is trying to illuminate is a situation (or outrage or crisis) that people should know about.

Immediately, you can see that what is lost here is a) any principle of actual truth-telling and b) the limiting-principle that imposes the boundary and limits of actuality and reality upon a story. There is, almost literally, a philosophy of untruth here (although spun as a ‘philosophy of a larger truth’).

None of this is immediately and completely dispositive when you are trying to assess the credibility of a ‘story’. But these are all elements and dynamics that are in play – and perhaps deliberately (if quietly) deployed.

Thus I offer these thoughts not in any sense to ‘simplify’ the task of assessing credibility, but rather to complicate that task. But it is – I am convinced – a necessary complication, if we are to sort through appearances to reach the substance.

By: jim robertson

jim robertson — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 01:49:14 +0000

And the unions ended child labor. In England in the 1800 children worked 18 hour days and when they droped dead at the looms they were buried in the factory yards Government is there to defend the peoples rights and protect them from the oligarchy .yet today the government is owned at large by the richest of us, not because they paid for it but because they stole it. Do you think the Wobbilies or The Molly Maguires of this world would have allowed the looting of the American people?

Comments on: School Is Back In Session, and the Epidemic of Teacher Sex Abuse Continues Unabated; Predictably, the Media Is Uninterested

By: jim robertson

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By: Publion

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By: Publion

By: jim robertson

By: jim robertson

By: Ken W.

By: Publion

By: jim robertson