Quico
91p1,316 comments posted · 2 followers · following 1
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Mental Health View Fro... · 13 replies · +1 points
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Subverting Chavismo\'s... · 3 replies · +1 points
My sense is that, paradoxical as it may seem, the defense of a tolerant discursive order demands absolutely rigid inflexibility in marginalizing certain kinds of engagement in the public sphere, kinds of engagement that are incompatible with democratic decisionmaking. Greg Wilpert has to be fought, because he defends a system of rule that makes the kind of debate he offers impossible.
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Subverting Chavismo\'s... · 0 replies · +1 points
Listen, it's easy to moan. 20 years ago, regular people like you and me had no possibility to participate in these kinds of debates at all. The internet, within a fairly clear set of constraints, allows us to joint he fray and contribute something substantive. Obviously, it's constrained...but it's also fun, so it's worth doing!
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Subverting Chavismo\'s... · 0 replies · +1 points
But to the degree that even people in the Venezuelan elite often fail catastrophically at the basic rudiments of critical debate, I don't think starting online is preaching to the converted.
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Dictatorship means nev... · 1 reply · +1 points
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Dictatorship means nev... · 0 replies · +1 points
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Dictatorship means nev... · 1 reply · +1 points
The extent to which you manage to engage people you disagree with is PRECISELY the extent to which you are unable to act as an actual spokesman for chavismo, because chavismo has left really no doubt as to its indefatigable opposition to any type of intellectual engagement with those who disagree with it.
Your PETA Meat Processing Company shtick is cute and all, and I bet it's heartfelt. But it's schizophrenic, and basically a distraction.
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Dictatorship means nev... · 0 replies · +1 points
Sorry to get all torquemada on you here, but there IS a price you have to pay at the door to this debate: you have to disavow disqualifying, authoritarian discourses. Thing is, by the time Greg is finished disavowing authoritarian discourses, there's nothing of chavismo left for him to avow, because Authoritarian discourses are basically all there is to chavismo anymore!
I wish Greg all the fun in the world trying to work out the little laberynth his position has backed him into. By the time he's processed it, he's going to realize that he can either support the revolution or support discursive democracy, but he can't do both.
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Dictatorship means nev... · 1 reply · +1 points
That would be a hopeless endeavour, given that with the sole, individual and rather idyosincratic exception of Gregory Wilpert the other side is militantly committed to the rejection of reasoned debate.
Greg is a fun oddity at best, though really his shtick is more like a distraction. But chavismo as a political movement has really let there be no doubt that they are committed to the destruction, as an organized political force, of people who fail to snap to attention when the president barks out an order.
You can't engage an ideology marked out, from the ground up, by a militant rejection of the practice of communicative rationality. What you can do to such an ideology is resist it, and try to subvert it, by practicing communicative rationality around and about it.
The time for engaging "chavismo lite" is in the past, Juan.
14 years ago @ Caracas Chronicles - Dictatorship means nev... · 0 replies · +1 points
The virulent, insult-laden rejection of discursive democracy isn't some incidental frippery attached to chavismo. It isn't some stylistic flourish. It's what chavismo is about; its heart and soul.
I've thought about this a lot, but Greg's claim to want a frank debate from an unapologetically pro-Chávez perspective, even if it's put forward in good faith, is hopelessly self-contradictory. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all...but animal rights activists don't get to work in abatoirs.