Friday, October 11, 2002

IDEOLOGICAL STREETFIGHT: CPO Sparkey distills warblogger vs. warblogger-watcher into romantic vs. post-modern and we all find it pleasing and unique. A sample (Steven meaning Steven den Beste, Josh meaning Josh Koenig):

No matter how much detail Steven (or any other romantic) writes, the PM will always disassemble it in the most frustrating way possible for the romantic. The PM will always look for subtle little points to discredit or marginalize the romantic, for he must. The absolutism of the romantic is the matter to the anti-matter of the postmodernist; they are mutually exclusive. Both propositions cannot be right. Either there is a core set of right and wrong as the romantic believes, or there is no absolute reality--it’s all differing shades of gray as the postmodernists preach. Therefore Josh (as a self-appointed missionary for postmodernistic theology) must disassemble Steven’s writings using NJSC methods, or else he must accept the existence of a valid viewpoint that by its very nature is contradictory to his own. We romantics don’t have that problem, because we can see such viewpoints as validly held but wrong (such is the refuge of the absolutist).

Remember, to the romantic facts matter; to the PM facts don’t, but results do. Hence, in the blogosphere debate between the warbloggers and the warblogger-watch crowd, the warbloggers tend to dominate. In the social arena, the PM can point to Civil Rights for an example of results that dominate undesirable details (as in affirmative action or sexual bias cases), but in the context of the current war, 9/11 is a fact that romantics feel is (in part) a result of PM appeasement. The PM can point to potential undesirable results of proposed action, but the romantic can point to a factual attack upon this nation.

Post-modernism get a bad rap, by the way; in practice all it means is "the freedom to be entertained by multiple forms of crap besides yet including the classics without feeling guilty about it." This is what I have always taken it to mean, anyhow.

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