roachboy

general question:

i dont really understand the notion of "winning" in a context where there is no defined game.
what would it mean?

particular:

loquitor: in the thread you referenced, i decided to take on one or two of your posts because i thought they were interesting enough to do that with...and it was self-evident that we were circling around classical positions with respect to the theory of the state (btw there have been a number of newer ones, since mill, but tant pis it's not germaine)....you built a historical argument and i thought it was wrong...but it was just a parlor game so far as i was concerned--i happened to have a bit of time and there was your post and there we are.

so if that's what you refer to as an example of this "win at any cost" thing, i think you're mistaken, at least as concerns anything that crossed my mind as i was writing.

but maybe you got the idea from my tone, i dont know--and that concerns me a little----i think my writing is particularly sensitive to waves of exasperation that flow from my brain toward my hand, sometimes so fast i dont realize it. and there are things that make me impatient...

but even with that said, i would assume that "winning at any cost" would entail some sense of a game, and so sense of which moves could and could not advance that end, and a sense that there is an opponent playing the same game--without which there is no point at all--and so would entail some degree of intent. there wasn't any. but i do get annoyed by arguments that appeal to "throughout history" or "human nature" because i dont think they mean anything. maybe the problem lay there. i dont know.

i say all this because i wonder if and how i too am no implicated at one level or another in the problems that politics, am a generator of them (and dont see it).

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite