![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
First Principles
15/1/07 22:18Reading Orson Scott Card's (supposedly apolitical) opinion common is like eating not very good buffalo wings--you remember how good buffalo wings are at their best, so you keep eating them, somehow expecting them to be good buffalo wings in the face of all evidence to the contrary, but all they do is burn your mouth.
The scary thing is, if I compensate for Card being way conservative and having an oddly high esteem for "family friendly" movies no matter how terrible, our opinions do work out to be quite similar; for example, I was astonished that he liked Lynn Flewelling. And Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. However. Every so often he writes from the assumption that liberals/academia are eeeeeeeevil, and I just want to strangle the man.
Between him and a certain anime blogger, I've begun to figure out just what irritates me so much when there's a parenthetical "by the way liberals are evil" inserted into apolitical discourse. It isn't argued from first principles; it seems to be thrown out there as a thing that All Right-Thinking People agree on. There are certain sentence constructions that allow assumptions to be built in to a sentence: to "You cheated on the test," you can respond "No I didn't!", but to "Your cheating on the test undermines the school's academic integrity" it's not so simple--you have to back up and say 'Wait.' And in Orson Scott Card's columns, when they do get political, it feels the same way. It's not an argument but an assumption of shared knowledge and agreement.
But, thinking on it, this is something that I do too. And it is something that most of the political blogs I read do. Because... you can't really argue from first principles all the time. Sometimes you just want to tell a "George Bush is dumb" joke, which of course relies on the assumption that All Right-Thinking People think that Bush is dumb. Sometimes you want to add another brick to a wall of discussion and theory without having to build up that whole wall from the ground. So I don't know that I can fault conservatives for doing it even when it drives me up a wall.
I think that blogs break down some of the barriers that existed between daily-journal writing and political writing and writing that's about cooking or knitting or books. It's not just that you might talk about books in one post and politics in another; it's that all those things can bleed over within a single post.
And maybe that's how it should be--after all, the personal is political. I think I rather like that, even if it does drive me crazy sometimes.
The scary thing is, if I compensate for Card being way conservative and having an oddly high esteem for "family friendly" movies no matter how terrible, our opinions do work out to be quite similar; for example, I was astonished that he liked Lynn Flewelling. And Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. However. Every so often he writes from the assumption that liberals/academia are eeeeeeeevil, and I just want to strangle the man.
Between him and a certain anime blogger, I've begun to figure out just what irritates me so much when there's a parenthetical "by the way liberals are evil" inserted into apolitical discourse. It isn't argued from first principles; it seems to be thrown out there as a thing that All Right-Thinking People agree on. There are certain sentence constructions that allow assumptions to be built in to a sentence: to "You cheated on the test," you can respond "No I didn't!", but to "Your cheating on the test undermines the school's academic integrity" it's not so simple--you have to back up and say 'Wait.' And in Orson Scott Card's columns, when they do get political, it feels the same way. It's not an argument but an assumption of shared knowledge and agreement.
But, thinking on it, this is something that I do too. And it is something that most of the political blogs I read do. Because... you can't really argue from first principles all the time. Sometimes you just want to tell a "George Bush is dumb" joke, which of course relies on the assumption that All Right-Thinking People think that Bush is dumb. Sometimes you want to add another brick to a wall of discussion and theory without having to build up that whole wall from the ground. So I don't know that I can fault conservatives for doing it even when it drives me up a wall.
I think that blogs break down some of the barriers that existed between daily-journal writing and political writing and writing that's about cooking or knitting or books. It's not just that you might talk about books in one post and politics in another; it's that all those things can bleed over within a single post.
And maybe that's how it should be--after all, the personal is political. I think I rather like that, even if it does drive me crazy sometimes.