[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[david buchanan]

gav said:
the US is the most fascist place i have ever been, you never forget where 
you are in the states: there are flags EVERYWHERE. banks, shops, houses, 
cars, clothes...jesus it seems scary surreal when you aint used to this 
nauseating patriotic fervour.

Platt replied:
Americans have every reason to be proud of their country that has shed lots 
of blood defending intellectual level freedoms from barbarians.

dmb says:
Martha Nussbaum makes a case in "Cultivating Humanity" that the intellectual 
values rest on the ability and the willingness to subject one's own culture 
to Socratic inquiry, to rational scrutiny. This, she says, is the only way 
to cultivate our humanity and to put the breaks on all kinds of religious 
and ethnic prejudice. Here, Platt is simply asserting "intellectual level 
freedoms" as a tribal cultural value. It is an irrational and unprincipled 
application of these ideals. Like Bush himself and so many other 
conservative Americans, the concept of freedom has been drastically narrowed 
and perverted in a very self-serving and inconsistant way so that they can 
talk about freedom and democracy even while they destroying those rights at 
home and acting in defiance of them on the world stage. The president who 
talks about speading "God's" freedom has been busy all week working out 
legislation that will allow him to get around the torture prohibitions in 
the Geneva Conventions, who is busy this week denying that our "Allies" in 
Pakistan joined us in the war on terror only because our diplomat terrorized 
them into it.

Think of it this way. Fascism is the glorification of social level values at 
the expense of intellectual values. That is to say, fascism is the 
experssion of the wishes of the giant when that giant feels threatened. If 
every culture has an immune system, a means of eliminating threats to 
itself, then fascism is what you get when the giant has a fever. Fascism is 
what you get when a culture feels  that it is under attack. Sometimes this 
threat comes from other, rival giants and is basically a clash of cultures. 
But as far as the Giant is concerned, intellect is an alien culture and it 
is seen as a threat. This is why Platt hates people like Arlo and Noam, 
because they are willing to openly scrutinize the history of American 
foreign policies and to criticize the policies of the currrent 
administration. This is why Platt thinks its so unthinkable to judge the USA 
by the same standards as everyone else. That's why when the other guys 
torture and rape it is viewed as typical, as the essence of the other guy 
and his "barbarian" culture. But when we rape and torture, well that's all 
about freedom and democracy and gee, I sure do feel awful about it afterward 
so that's not the same at all. But I think its pretty obvious that torutre 
is wrong no matter who does it. Killing civilians to achieve a politcal 
outcome is terror no matter how expensive the bombs are and no matter who 
does it.

But Platt's posts are very illuminating. If you ever wanted to know what an 
American fascist would say and believe, there you go. You'd hear the same 
basic attitude from millions of others just like him. Its all over the 
president's speeches, FOX "news", right-wing talk radio, in the mega 
churches, in the sermons of radio preachers and can otherwise be found in 
every town. He's a prime example. As you can see, its a big bag of 
prejudices and attitudes more than anything like a principled ideology. Its 
more like unexamined common sense rather than an actual set of principles. 
Its the voice of the giant rather than the voice of reason. Its about 
asserting MY culture and MY religion and MY tastes and sensibilities over a 
pluralistic, democratic, rights-based vision of humanity as a whole. Its 
tribal instead of global. And the fascists in American have confused the 
global reach of tribalistic hegemony with a truly democratic community of 
nations. They think they're spreading freedom and democracy, but they're 
really just spreading Kentucky Fried Chicken and death.

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