[FRA:] Marcuse question

[Ralph Dumain]

While your response is more intelligible than Fred Welfare's, I'm still 
having trouble making sense out of it.  Is the problem the many meanings 
attaching to the term liberal?  And is not pomo the province of political 
liberals as we term them in the USA?  There's certainly nothing radical 
about pomo.

At 07:58 AM 2/21/2006 -0500, James Rovira wrote:
>I'm sorry, but this is silly:
>
><<Matt, The PoMo works of people like Foucault, Rorty, Lyotard, Baudrillard,
>Derrida and the thousands of feminists must still address the time worn
>differences between liberals and conservatives, that is, between those who
>  believe
>in human rights and that the state's purpose is the protection of the
>individual's rights, and those who believe that the everyday state of
>affairs in  our
>commuities and internationally is not what ought to be.>>
>
>Postmodernism is a critique of the liberal tradition in the west, not a
>defense of it.  Political "liberalism" and "conservatism" in the US are both
>expressions of western liberalism, which manages to be oppressive all on its
>own even while engaging in the rhetoric of individual rights.  Furthermore,
>even if we limit the US political landscape to a simple left to right
>spectrum, with liberals on one side and conservatives on the other, both
>sides claim that "the state's purpose is the protection of the individual's
>rights."  Which rights are more important than others is where the debate
>between them lies.  Is "safety" a right, as "privacy" is a right?  Which
>right is more important?  If most people are willing to sacrifice some
>privacy for more safety, does the government have the responsibility to
>follow the demands of most people, or not?  This is all far too simplistic,
>esp. for writers like Foucault who, as far as I understand him, understood
>the need for the state to exercise power.  To protect "individual rights,"
>the state has to weild the power to oppress specific behaviors.  You either
>advocate for anarchy or are implicitly in support of some kind of mechanism
>of oppression.  For example, many feminists would advocate for absolute
>reproductive freedom but support the oppression of specific types of speech
>-- but isn't speech an articulated constitutional right while reproductive
>freedom is not? The real arguments are about what is being oppressed, by
>whom or for whom or in whom, and why.  Language about individual rights is
>usually only the language of special interests.
>
>Jim Rovira