Kossacks,
I've been meaning for some time to write a piece on political orthodoxies and the reality based community, but keep putting it off. I'd like to blame you, for your ill manners, but the fault is really in myself as well. The Daily Kos 'community' presents a navigational challenge, a selection pressure, a sort of danger room if you will, in which we subject ourselves to all the hazards facing genuine self-expression in America - though virtually. Thanks for the opportunity. It beats physical abuse.
I'm thinking Daily Kos is a means of repairing our sense that the system we live in still somehow makes sense, whether actively by our own participation, or passively as observers who come to vicariously experience someone making sense of this cluterfuck of global proportion.
This, in the ultimate, is why conspiracy theory is derided as both against site policy and unrealistic. As violence is the power reserved to the State, so the making of conspiracy theories is the power reserved to the orthodoxy. Similarly, this power is treated as if it were essentially invalid, even while it is engaged in. As the State serves as an instrument for legimitization of the violence it generally prohibits, so too does political orthodoxy legitimize a double standard relative to its signature power.
Again, as the 'signature power' of the State is violence, the signature power of the reigning political orthodoxy is conspiracy theory - essentially the creation of historical narrative. Framing.
We might regard these two powers as if the Right and Left hand of authority, which create, respectively, facts on the ground (by violence) and facts in the mind (by various forms of persuasion). The Sword and the Dollar, as they have been termed. Violence and the manufacture of currency. It is entirely significant that in America we allow our currency to be controlled by a private Corporation. A Federal (though completely unDemocratic and answerable to no one) Corporation.
Money is history enshrined, as well as the motive force behind the ongoing enshrinement of history. We've got our most highly paid writers working on this thing! Daily. As every day it takes prodigious effort to reconstruct the facade that there are these people, see, and they represent our interests in this place, see, and without them we'd all be speaking Chinese and praying to Allah, or something.
Well, anyway, the Sun is setting here on one of the last warm days of Summer (yes, it's still summer here). Going outside to catch some rays before the rains set in.
regards,
FC