[Peace-discuss] An "intra-left" debate? No.

[C. G. Estabrook]

"An Intra-Left Debate: Is Obama the 'More Effective' of Two Evils?"
By Conor Friedersdorf 
The Atlantic

<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/an-intra-left-debate-is-obama-the-more-effective-of-two-evils/262134/>

There's a lot wrong with this article - notably the notion that "our president [sic] wages an ongoing assassination campaign ... *in order to theoretically reduce the already miniscule [sic] chance of an American citizen dying in a terrorist attack*". No; that's not the reason he's killing kids in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, et al.  

And it's wrong to consider Dyson/Ford as an 'intra-left debate.' That's to reduce the meaning of 'left' to an 'empty signifier,' in the jargon of now-vanished postmodernism.

(An empty signifier is a form of sign - e.g. a word - "with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified." Such "floating signifiers" may "mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean..." - i.e., they allow you to keep talking when you don't know what you're talking about, and neither does anyone else.)

The real problem is to see these two positions as Dyson does,  as a matter of more or less, along a spectrum, when in fact they are contradictory, as Ford realizes.  

We might do better to use another problematic word, and speak of Dyson's position as 'liberal,' and Ford's as left. 

Better yet would be to listen to (or read) the Dyson/Ford debate. (Ford, I think, is talking sense.)  --CGE