Re: [OT] Slashdot and media accuracy (was Re: Improved Debian Project Emergency Communications)
scripsit Tom:
> You conveniently ignored the quote by the Indian fellow who complained
> about how there are too many political parties.
I guess it didn't occur to me you were offering it as a serious
argument. I confess I didn't pay too much attention to it, as I misread
it to be coming from a USian, and thought it was offered as an example
of absurdity.
> In my personal opinion, the culture which is most similar to America
> is India, although we took different routes to get there: they've been
> through Democracy, Theocracy, Tyranny, Oligarchy, Nothingorcracy, and
> Sillyocracy, and so they really don't take much of anything too
> seriously nowadays. Americans don't take anything too seriously
> either.
This is not a comparison I would make, but it is interesting to
contemplate.
> The "anarcho-syndicalist" comment was hopefully a self-conscious ironic
> reference to Michael Palin in The Holy Grail, I hope, and not serious.
No -- I actually had in mind the Catalonian workers' militias in the
Spanish Civil war (the ones who considered the Comintern-allied
Communists to be right-wing).
It was not really serious, though; I appreciate some aspects of their
political thought, but I don't think it really workable. I tend to
describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist only when talking to Americans
who think that Howard Dean is a radical leftist, only to illustrate just
how centrist the `left' of American politics really is.
> http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/side/whig.html:
> "The term Whig came into common use in 1834, and persisted until the
> disintegration of the party after the presidential ELECTION of 1856.
[...]
I tend to associate `Whig' either with the liberal opposition in Britain
(dating from the 17th century; their descendents are today's Lib-Dems)
or with a rather naïve progressive view of history as the story of
continual progress. The latter is the way the term tends to be used
generically by historians. Either way, the term evokes a rather
old-fashioned classical liberalism.
--
Pax vobiscum; pax cum omnibus.
Thanasis Kinias
tkinias at asu.edu
Doctoral Student, Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.
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