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nuncstans decided to air our disagreement of earlier today in public on her livejournal, i will retort here. A couple of months ago I signed up to volunteer for the Dean campaign. Tonight was the big rally in his support in Bryant Park, for which I did flyering yesterday. Apparently nuncstans is convinced that I, like all "progressive" Dean supporters have been "had" by Dean, because I am not aware of his hawkish foreign policy stance, which comes out of her belief that it is impossible to develop political consciousness as an individual (somehow in her argument individuals who get together on grassroots level to support Dean are less of a political group than the groups she is affiliated with). For the record, I am aware of Dean's stance on Israel and his gravitation towards AIPAC, which I do not support or endorse. I am not campaigning for Dean because I think he is the paragon of integrity, virtue and consistency. I am campaigning for him because I think he is ELECTABLE and I believe that at the moment the tactical goal of "anyone but Bush in 2004" is more important than a larger strategic goal of "another world is possible" variety. I believe that Dean is the ONLY candidate that, if he wins the nomination, can defeat Bush, for a number of reasons, having to do with his platform, campaigning skills and appeal; I also think that the Bush administration considers him the largest threat of the opposition (hence all of their remarks of how he is the candidate that would be easy to defeat, and he is "the one [they] want" which is part, in my opinion, of some behind-the-scenes machinations to get Lieberman the Democratic nomination, because if Lieberman was the candidate, Bushco wouldn't even need to rig the election). nuncstans argues that it is retarded to support Dean before the primaries. My response to that is, that my support from him comes from the same place as my firm belief that everyone who considers themselves on the left can't split votes in this election, so we can't have a repeat of people voting for Nader in borderline states in 2000. If Dean was the front-runner by a consistent landslide, I would not be worried about the Democratic ticket going to Kerry or Edwards, who share Dean's hawkish foreign policy stances, but do not have his legitimacy of critiquing the war in Iraq because they voted for the damn thing before they jumped on the bandwagon of criticizing it, or his grassroots appeal, which, whether real or contrived in origin, is very real at the current moment. If I believed that Dean was a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination, I may have been supporting Kucinich, who, on the whole, I think has more integrity and more right ideas about things, or maybe I would be engaging in more counterhegemonic attempts to try and shift the center to the left. Also, for the record, I do think that it's important to highlight Dean's (and others') problematic stances NOT to detract voters from him, but to force him to amend his stances in order to attract more progressive voters. I do think that works, so his position on dismantling Israeli settlements in the occupied territories has been shifting as of late; last month he called for "ultimately dismantling the settlements" which is progress from what he advocated on record in the past. However, this wasn't even part of nuncstans's argument, she was just trying to "educate" me in what I perceived to be a patronizing and didactic fashion where every counterpoint to what I was saying was postulated as a meta-negation of my position as inherently "individualistic" which was somehow a metonym for "wrong." (incidentally, nuncstans, your claim that i don't know anything about the kind of work you engage is wrong; i have always been interested in hearing about, and the horrifying misconceptions that you attributed to me stemmed directly from a miscommunication that transpired at the February 15th demo, that we had discussed and cleared up, where if you remember I had a problem with a certain slogan a couple of people were chanting, when I told you about it you angrily told me that you had been chanting the same thing, which later turned out not to be true, so I would not ascribe any huge misunderstandings of the group that you are involved in, that on the whole I respect and support, to a conversation which temporarily confused me as to certain stances of your organization, because either you thought I had said something else, or you accidentally said something incorrect.) anyway, I am not going to argue on here about whether nuncstans is patronizing, or whether I am hypersensitive, here is the transcript of our IM conversation and people can draw their own conclusions. I am assuming that since nuncstans chose to bring this up in this forum, she won't mind that I am including this.( Read more... )
nuncstans decided to air our disagreement of earlier today in public on her livejournal, i will retort here. A couple of months ago I signed up to volunteer for the Dean campaign. Tonight was the big rally in his support in Bryant Park, for which I did flyering yesterday. Apparently nuncstans is convinced that I, like all "progressive" Dean supporters have been "had" by Dean, because I am not aware of his hawkish foreign policy stance, which comes out of her belief that it is impossible to develop political consciousness as an individual (somehow in her argument individuals who get together on grassroots level to support Dean are less of a political group than the groups she is affiliated with). For the record, I am aware of Dean's stance on Israel and his gravitation towards AIPAC, which I do not support or endorse. I am not campaigning for Dean because I think he is the paragon of integrity, virtue and consistency. I am campaigning for him because I think he is ELECTABLE and I believe that at the moment the tactical goal of "anyone but Bush in 2004" is more important than a larger strategic goal of "another world is possible" variety. I believe that Dean is the ONLY candidate that, if he wins the nomination, can defeat Bush, for a number of reasons, having to do with his platform, campaigning skills and appeal; I also think that the Bush administration considers him the largest threat of the opposition (hence all of their remarks of how he is the candidate that would be easy to defeat, and he is "the one [they] want" which is part, in my opinion, of some behind-the-scenes machinations to get Lieberman the Democratic nomination, because if Lieberman was the candidate, Bushco wouldn't even need to rig the election). nuncstans argues that it is retarded to support Dean before the primaries. My response to that is, that my support from him comes from the same place as my firm belief that everyone who considers themselves on the left can't split votes in this election, so we can't have a repeat of people voting for Nader in borderline states in 2000. If Dean was the front-runner by a consistent landslide, I would not be worried about the Democratic ticket going to Kerry or Edwards, who share Dean's hawkish foreign policy stances, but do not have his legitimacy of critiquing the war in Iraq because they voted for the damn thing before they jumped on the bandwagon of criticizing it, or his grassroots appeal, which, whether real or contrived in origin, is very real at the current moment. If I believed that Dean was a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination, I may have been supporting Kucinich, who, on the whole, I think has more integrity and more right ideas about things, or maybe I would be engaging in more counterhegemonic attempts to try and shift the center to the left. Also, for the record, I do think that it's important to highlight Dean's (and others') problematic stances NOT to detract voters from him, but to force him to amend his stances in order to attract more progressive voters. I do think that works, so his position on dismantling Israeli settlements in the occupied territories has been shifting as of late; last month he called for "ultimately dismantling the settlements" which is progress from what he advocated on record in the past. However, this wasn't even part of nuncstans's argument, she was just trying to "educate" me in what I perceived to be a patronizing and didactic fashion where every counterpoint to what I was saying was postulated as a meta-negation of my position as inherently "individualistic" which was somehow a metonym for "wrong." (incidentally, nuncstans, your claim that i don't know anything about the kind of work you engage is wrong; i have always been interested in hearing about, and the horrifying misconceptions that you attributed to me stemmed directly from a miscommunication that transpired at the February 15th demo, that we had discussed and cleared up, where if you remember I had a problem with a certain slogan a couple of people were chanting, when I told you about it you angrily told me that you had been chanting the same thing, which later turned out not to be true, so I would not ascribe any huge misunderstandings of the group that you are involved in, that on the whole I respect and support, to a conversation which temporarily confused me as to certain stances of your organization, because either you thought I had said something else, or you accidentally said something incorrect.) anyway, I am not going to argue on here about whether nuncstans is patronizing, or whether I am hypersensitive, here is the transcript of our IM conversation and people can draw their own conclusions. I am assuming that since nuncstans chose to bring this up in this forum, she won't mind that I am including this.( Read more... )
