Re: D.J.Taylor

Daniel -- Well if you mean "you" then refer to yourself as "I" and not
"we" unless yer fricking royalty and I've just been missing that :) .
Otherwise, you are making yourself out to be someone talking for everyone.

> we, is the little me, as in the we folk of bonnie Ireland. All this
> defense of politics and someone's talking for everyone.
> Daniel

Scottie --

I have mixed feelings about this:

> By your definition, it seems to me you're damned (or political)
> if you do & damned (or political) if you don't. 'For evil to flourish,
> it requires only that good men to do nothing....etc'. Yet surely,
> to be at all useful, the word must imply some degree of active
> participation.
>

On the one hand, I want to make the point that we are indeed damned if
we do and damned if we don't, that all our actions (and our inaction)
have political ramifications and that we're kidding ourselves if we
don't admit this.

On the other hand, I have to agree with what you say about the word
losing meaning if you make it mean everything.

I think I've avoided this by just making my point explicit -- that
everything has some political ramifications, that it's the expression of
a specific political and social point of view even if it's not directly
and deliberately working through existing political systems.

As for this:

>You could, I suppose, call these approaches 'political' acts, though they seemed to me more like good old golf-club networking, backstairs corruption ... whatever ... made by people who thought - mistakenly as it turned out - that their incomes were threatened.
>
Maybe it's different over there, but this sounds like the very
definition of US politics. Heck, wars are started over fear for
someone's income.

I think the point here is that the arguments revolved around
income/funds and not the immediate welfare of the patients who, even
though they were more directly affected by this decision than anyone
else, sound to me like they didn't have much of a voice in the decision
at all. This is the result of a network of attitudes that support the
idea that it's the people with money who really know best (ultimately
for themselves), and is also supported by the notion of "class" which,
we see here, very much determines who gets to make these kinds of
decisions and who gets listened to when they're being discussed.

This entire structure can easily be supported by a lot of people with no
direct involvement in the political life of a nation, but certainly
determines how its run.

Jim

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Received on Tue Jul 29 12:10:52 2003