Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Facebook Civil Disobedience Discussion

In a post titled “You’d Better Not,”, Billy Beck loops the civil disobedience discussion into Facebook.  I am not a Facebook member, so I am not privy to the discussion taking place, there, but I’ve recently posted on the idea of civil disobedience here, which Billy contributed to here.

Billy’s most recent contribution, “You’d Better Not,” notes the importance of language, words, and ideas.

“If we’re going to talk about it, then let’s get it out straight. I don’t like to fool around with the language.

We’re talking about actual combat. Shooting & shit: people dying badly, wrongly, and early, and their stuff getting blown up.

Now… of course, that’s already happening right now. Just for one example: I don’t know what people under Nixon thought they were paying for when it came to a ‘War on Drugs’, but that’s exactly what it is, and people should be goddamned careful about their metaphors, because they have a special sort of blinding way about them. When the language does not refer directly to extant referents (the objects and concepts in reality around us) then what happens is that thinking is deprived of its necessary and elementary cognitive material. The function of language is to raise concepts to the perceptual level—through words (they are the percepts) and for the purpose of concept transmission—and this means that when the language does not refer to reality, then no concepts are being transmitted, and then all bets are off…

Here is my largest point at the moment, Randell: I see very few people in in this country who know what to fight for, or why. Nevermind how.”

Posted by John Venlet on 06/30 at 07:36 AM
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