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Seeking agreement with our own opinions | 3 comments

[new] truth (as usual) (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#1)
by BrianHolmes on Wed Jun 4th, 2003 at 01:34:56 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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Nested behind the screen as I begin to write is the last website I consulted: "Depleted Uranium"... We all know about its existence (used in the Gulf Wars, Bosnia too), I would be curious to know how many people reading this feel sure about what they know? If pressed, how many people would make an existential decision based on what they think they know about depleted uranium?

The general problem is real. "There is no objectivity anymore." It gets worse when you read the Frankfurt School, and explore the concept of instrumental rationality, which puts the major procedures of verification and indeed, of the formation of scientific objects, into doubt as far as they are elements within a machinery geared towards production for production's sake. The demand of this kind of philosophy is precisely that you constitute a filter within yourself, an ethical standard which you take some care about constructing and which you periodically subject to different kinds of tests, confrontations, demands of praxis. But time passes, work presses, passion distorts or distracts, you go through periods of intense doubt which tear up your previous views, you have fallings-out or experience disappointments or are unable to keep up with collective projects that promised to give some human density to the ideas you had begun to form.

I reckon there is no solution. Also an expatriate, and a relatively integrated, polyglot one like Aileen, for many years I have resisted the "easy availability" in Europe of critique of the US, preferring engagements that were closer to my present home. Now I'm starting to feel like it's time to change filters and to go back to attempts, not just to criticize, but to help build resistance within the US to developments that are very dangerous for the whole world. Like the use of depleted uranium, and following that, the renewed discussions about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, just for instance. The paradox, of being uncertain whether DU matters, and above all, of whether your opinion about it matters, and at the same time, feeling it burning into your imaginary flesh, is the ordinary paradox of truth.

What matters by Aileen, 06/06/2003 07:36:18 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME (none / 0)

Seeking agreement with our own opinions | 3 comments

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