3 Points and strands, semi-long:
1) In response to Bruce M.'s request , here is an atte
attemptted precis of my long message to Alan Isaac
offnet (to which he gave me a long response; we are
not too far apart at this point, although he may not
concur with that assessment).
There are two cases: a) Someone can deny the
fact/value distinction by denying the existence of
facts. They are then susceptible to Alan's "Is
that a fat (fact)?" arguments regarding contradiction.
(He arnd I are using Aristotelian logic, not Zen
or fuzzy or whatever), or b) Someone can deny the
distinction by sayning facts exist and are identical
to values in just the same way that "black" is
identical to "noire." Such a person can deny the
distinction without contradictionl.
2) Yes, Gil, I think there was a Holocaust. However,
there is another problem here involving time. In some
sense the only "absolute facts" are those in the
immediate present, which we can never get our hands
on (the "illusion of Maya o" of the Hindus) because,
well, it keeps constantly changeing. ( I note Marx's
fascination with Heraclitus who said that the person
who leaves the stream is not the same as who entered)
In that s3ense the past is ultimately unreal. on the
other hand it has not any probablisitc element about
it. Hitler killed mikillions of people and that is
that. That the eye-witnesses are dying off and the
Holocaust deniers are runnign around saying "weell,
you weren't there so how do you know?" gives all the
more reason for such things as the Memorial in DC.
Future "facts " are both more and less real. They
are less so because of their contingent and probablilsitc
nature. Maybe I'll bash my nose if I walk into a
brick wall and maybe I won't (besides the quantum
possiblity of walking through, there are such
possibilities as the wall might fall down when I
walk into it, or I might position myself to bash
my chin or my stomach). But the future has a greater
reality because it it is still to come, it is still
to be real, whereas the past is gone and is only
real as it is remembered and influences the present
(which it tends to do).
3) (gods must be craxy stransd)
I would like to add a bit mor e here . I
confess to laughing when I first saw the movie
(not all the humore is racist, such as the hero
creating total havoc when he encounters the heroine
(both white of course)). But I also saw that it
was a piece of racist South African propaganda as
several prople have notw noted and which has not
been generally remarkked upon in most of the media.
I really see its depction of the Khioi-San
as tragic. None of them remotely live now in the
idyllic way depicted in the fiolm. They are the
most exploited of peoples in Southern Africa now.
And let me emphasixze that although im many cases
tnhose immediately above them are Bantus; this is
because the Bantus had their land taken away by the
whites, a kind of cascade of oppression. The
analogy is to the Chippewas in the 1660's pushing
the Sioux out of Northern Wisconsin in to the Dakotas
because the Europeans were pushing the Chippewas
out of Ontario.
Barkley Rosser
JMU and Umea
sense
