The hidden ideology of metonymy-would you call Wittgenstein then 19XX’s most famous philosopher and would you hide that in a turn of phrase?

Breadcrumb trails:

“It’s not because John McCain doesn’t care — it’s because he doesn’t get it “

Barack Obama’s concluding remarks at the DNCC became prophetic with the republican choice for vice-president.

The transcript in extenso follows (via demconvention.com)

Breadcrumb trails:

Civil disobedience

First of all, civil disobedience implies in its very name that it’s about not obeying something. “Civil” is defined by some dictionaries as “having to do with people and government, as opposed to the military or religion”. So well, so far — but fixing “civil disobedience” as “not obeying the government” begs the question of why should one obey “the government” in first place.

When you invoke the phrase “civil disobedience”, the matter of the source of a government’s power is immediately dragged into debate. The classical political scientists have explained it in the form of a founding myth, which makes government power particularly easy to deconstruct, but modern political philosophers like Bob Nozick have taken the hobbesian/lockeian approach to its logical limits, thus exposing the naked structure of a founding myth argument. A founding myth argument, it appears clearly, is about reasoning about a world without government and its undesirable characteristics, thus demonstrating the need for government by a reduction to absurdity.