Friday, 14 December 2012

Barack Obama: Tears For Souvenirs

Moving speech.
But if you care about children dying so much, then stop using drones.
Posted by Fagburn at 21:21:00
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3 comments:

  1. Angela Sarah15 December 2012 at 00:36

    Only children they can equate to themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BK16 December 2012 at 11:32

    I was thinking about sentimentality yesterday. In films and in the public sphere in general. And I think sentimentality is a denial of life as lived and reality as it truly is.
    Which sounds academic and useless as an appraisal or criticism, but this makes me even more certain of that.
    I've been reading a book of interviews with JG Ballard and he (talking about George W. Bush) comments on how much of politics is driven by emotion now rather than reason. And I think more and more that increasingly that emotion is sentimentality.
    Yes, his speech is moving and may well have been genuine on his part - but given the strategy you mention, Fagburn, has resulted in the many deaths of innocent people and children, one can only conclude that a sickening denial or double-standard is at work here.
    I also see some gay people (celebrities) who I usually admire and who are seemingly unquestioning supporters of Obama re-tweeting this speech of his - my assumption is that their unequivocal support is due to his pro-gay stance - but those drones will have probably killed gay people as well, so that one-issue, blind or myopic political support is also deeply in denial too.
    It's sentimentality.
    As someone else said yesterday in reply to the usual response to calls for gun control, calling for a change in the law is not politicising this tragedy, it's reacting to it with humanity, decency and rationality.
    Instead, everyone cries along with the President, forgetting his complicity in the deaths of similarly young and innocent people and nothing changes in the real world because it's completely disengaged from the real world.
    It's sentimentality.

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    Replies
    1. BK17 December 2012 at 14:56

      I think this is also what annoys me about a lot of political discourse, esp. the shite I read on twitter (left and right), is that's it's almost always couched in emotional terms.
      I think it muddies the debate. It seems to me quite easy to win debates on the Left without having to emotionalise everything. In most cases - like gay marriage, for example - rationality is absolutely on our side. There's no need to add an emotional component. I just feel uneasy with attempts to manipulate people's emotions, rather than engaging their intellect.

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