I have spent a significant portion of my morning ...

[patrice]

78. Not all posts supporting PO and/or the Democratic Party are what they are characterized as.

Posts are often mis-characterized, mistakenly or otherwise, as worshipping PO, or as Democratic robots, which I could accept if, rather than offering those opinions largely WITHOUT enough information to do so, those doing so (that is, those who are mis-characterizing posts in support of PO and/or the Democratic Party) would offer their judgements as HYPOTHESES and, thus seek, i.e. ASK FOR, additional information to test one's own judgements/opinions about others, because discovering empirical truth should be more important than our opinions about it. I am willing to do this and I do call on others to consider it too.

Not that people can't/shouldn't have opinions, but just that, whichever "side" one is on, let's please not proclaim (like the oppressor whom we oppose) that our opinions are gospel truth, especially NOT when one lacks authentic determinative information.

If I make a claim and fail to identify what I don't know about my claim, my claim is, to some degree, falsified.

The reciprocal of these discovery processes (in which one forms HYPOTHESES about others and seeks information and evaluates that information objectively as to whether it supports or does not support one's hypotheses about others and then admits what one knows and what one does not know about any given hypothesis) is to ALSO apply the entire hypotheses process to one's self in doing the same thing to others.

Simply put, the processes of discovery are at least a 2-way street, and likely even more than that, as long as everyone who desires to be a part of that dynamic recognizes and participates in it's RECIPROCAL nature. In order to claim X, one NEEDS to be open, not only to just propounding one's own position, but also to receiving critique of it, including what you don't know/understand and what others DON'T KNOW/understand. Too much about what happens around DU is due to what we don't know about one another and too many people appear to believe that they can state their opinions as gospel truth that everyone else should accept, without any consideration for what one is NOT revealing about one's self, that is, what those others who are supposed to just accept your "truth" don't know about you or about what you are saying, an obvious example of this, though there are many many many more besides, is our real names. Who IS the DU community? Whose voice am I reading?

We are pretending that not knowing one another does not matter, or we are pretending that it is okay for some of us to actually know one another personally and not others . . . at any rate, the things that we don't know, including not knowing one another personally, factor big into the, mistaken or otherwise, mis-characterizations of posts and positions, including the fact that not all of those who support PO and/or the Democratic Party are blind robots.

One thing that is often completely ignored in the zero-sum games at DU is the possibility that some people, and I include myself in this category, place ISSUES higher than other priorities and candidates/political-parties are functions of ISSUES, not issues as the function of, or determined by, candidates/parties. It is possible that at least a significantly strong minority of what is pro/anti-Obama and/or pro/anti-Democratic Party on DU comes from people for whom THAT category of criteria, candidate/political-party, IS the highest priority, NOT ISSUES. This means that for some DU-ers it is possible that DU activity is defined by their own pro/anti-Candidate (e.g. Ron/Rand Paul) and/or pro/anti-SomeOtherPoliticalParty. - AND - We are supposed to PRETEND that this is not happening on this board, but that "not happening" is a strong statistical improbability.

For some people for whom issues ARE, in fact, the highest priority, that's a SINGLE issue, for some that may be a couple or more issues, for others it's as close to all of the issues that are relevant to the lives of the people as one can get, count me in this last group. And yes I do resent the fact that people so commonly play fast and loose with the laws of rationalism, which they SAY they respect in offering obeisance to "science", and yet FAIL, intentionally or otherwise, to consider their own prejudices and stereotypes of others, based almost solely upon a SINGLE trait (pro/anti-Obama and/or pro/anti-Democratic Party or at least not pro/anti-OurClique'sCandidatePicks and/or not pro/anti-OurClique'sPoliticalParty) . . . . all almost without ever asking anyone a single direct personal question (my guess is because they are afraid of being asked questions themselves in that reciprocal process I mentioned earlier that leads to authentic discovery).

The thing about making issues the highest priority is that issues, in terms of the more or less democratic processes by means of which we address them collectively, triangulate one another and the thing about the necessity of triangulation/negotiation is that at some point, issues DO turn into candidates and, hence, one form or another of something that could be referred to as a political entity (currently bearing, more often than not, either the "Republican" or "Democrat" party label) because political parties are statistically where the biggest demographics are. Demographics are the means by which ISSUES are more or less well defined and addressed and I dislike being abused for the candidate/party inclination when, IN FACT, that IS what ISSUES, if they really matter, are about, in one way or another. The tasks relative to all of that have to do with whether we have the "cart/candidate->party ahead of the horse/issue(s)" or not.

Issues defining candidates defining party is true even for those making that negative candidate/party critique, mistakenly or otherwise, of others. Scratch an absolutist ideologue and find a relativist ever time. Maybe that's unavoidable. Compromise, negotiation, some degrees of those things that are commonly called "hypocrisy", all of that is necessary if we are to just live without killing one another. That doesn't mean that all of it, compromise/negotiation/hypocrisy, is all equally valid, but it does mean that we should always strive to identify the rational bases for who each of us is and what each of us is doing and if one is authentically engaged in doing so for one's self, it's okay to call upon others to do so too. And, yes, I personally reject anyone who claims the PRIVILEGE of being above those FREE and open collaborative discovery processes, because of the way that fascism has historically come wearing whatever costume/label currently suits the pure will to power over others.

In regards to all of the above, I admit to a temperament predisposed to fight "argument from authority" especially when there appears to be a mistake about, intentional or otherwise, or lack of information concerning a position that I hold. Please accept my apologies, all, for any of my un-necessary bite. I hope you know that it really is more situational than it is personal (as I have described above), but please also know that I believe, if we are to stand half of a chance of being/doing any better, I must not stand down from my personal responsibilities for the best, most honest, truths as I know them. For me those truths place issues, what is happening to people in their lives first and critically assesses candidate/party, as best I can, in service to those lives.