Prometheus 6

Matt confuses the world with his description of the world. Most folks do...

A Little Night Nuance
by tristero

In a post titled "A Little Nuance"Matt writes:

Perhaps this is just pointless hairsplitting, but I feel I should say that while I'm not at all happy with the precedents Bush is setting with regard to presidential power, that I think the case for strong executive power as such is actually pretty strong. The trouble comes from the nexus...[etc.]

We'll get to whether or not there's a little nuance, a lot, or none, in Matt's post in a moment. But one thing I can certainly say is that Matt was not splitting hairs. The trouble comes from the nexus between the world of reality and the assertion of a non-existent realm of principles (ideas) co-existent with that reality but independent of it. [P6: IOW, your model of the world is wrong.] In short, there's a little bit of an epistemological incoherence goin' on.

Inadvertently, Matt has fallen for one of the oldest trick in the rightwing's rhetorical playbook. They often assert a crude dualism where principles are divorced from reality, where mind exists apart from the matter of the brain, where you can just decide things and make them happen. Some examples of this strategy in action: 

Regarding Alito, I was once asked, "Don't you think that, in principle, a president has the right to pick a Supreme Court justice in agreement with his ideology?" "In principle, isn't the removal of Saddam Hussein a good thing?" "Looked purely in regards to whose position it furthers and whose it doesn't, were not the peace protestors of early 2003 ojectively pro-Saddam?"

The problem with such characterizations is that the rhetorical tactic of "in principle" reifies a supernatural world.