permaculture

["jamie" <jamie@tiscali.fr>]

I believe my email the other day was ill-judged: entering a contentious
debate from an oblique angle does little to clarify either what was said or
what I wanted to say. Fortunately Gaiden has helped me find the mark.

Gaiden's 'faux horreur', given a delightful piquance after allowing
sufficient time to properly marinade, expresses all the pent up banality of
stock liberal (yes, I know Loren!) reaction (and again, yes, that is
reaction as in conservatism).

If any statement is always to be pilloried because it steps outside accepted
usage how is anything ever truly going to be said? How is anything ever
going to be changed? (and in this case I'd commend Loren for his gnomic
utterances as demanding our attention if we're to try and follow what he's
saying - his 'build soil' incorporates the totality of agriculture).

If Gaiden knows Toby is "...someone who has and continues to contribute a
great deal to permaculture", doesn't believe "...deliberately intended to
hurt people", doesn't believe "...the statement was written with the
intention of being bigoted" and isn't by his email "...trying to belittle
Toby" then why doesn't Gaiden concentrate on the point Toby was making and
not unfortunate way he expressed himself.

Perhaps our current President, Silvio Berlusconi, can provide a useful
analogy (it's time he was useful for something): last week as Italy gained
the rotating presidency of the EU and Berlusconi was outlining to the
European Parliament Italy's plans for their term, a German Socialist stood
up and heckled him, Berlusconi retorted by likening the German MEP to a
guard in a German concentration camp.

Now when a man who is Prime Minister of a country that has just hurried
through legislation to give immunity from prosecution to said PM (and a few
other top politicians) when that PM is currently being tried in a Milan
court for corruption and that Berlusconi has right wing members of his
cabinet (Fini), his comment to the EU Parliament might not be thought to be
a matter of the heat of the moment but the actual way he views the world ie
'all German's are Nazi's'. Just as when a man has clearly dedicated himself
to PC we might give enough consideration to his words to actually hear
what's he's saying.

In my previous comments about exemplification I tried to suggest that debate
should not be constrained by liberal ideas of tolerance or fair-mindedness
because there are so many other potentialities to which human being are open
(and the original debate was a discussion of what  human attributes were
required for a community). Why must we be afraid of this agonistic dialogue?

I am not from the US and neither have I ever been to the US (a weakness I
agree, but one that, given current electronic media, is not insurmountable)
but this inability to discuss ideas, to enter into dialogue with others who
possess different opinions, would seem to express the stagnation of
liberalism (and, yes, Loren, I am now speaking about the US left of centre).

Given a parallel discussion on this list currently, the problem with PC in
the US might be that everyone is too scared of having a proper debate about
the ends and means of PC. If this debate is anything to go by, I suspect
everyone with any character and imagination is going to keep their heads
down.

Jamie (English, of Scottish father, living in France, married to a
Belgian...which I mention to suggest the plurality of possible debate in
this one small corner of Europe)
Souscayrous