To Review

This would have sent my day down the toilet if I had let it.

Those of you who've had your patience sorely tested by my rather lengthy ramblings over the years already know what how I'd answer the question posed in the article's title.  For those of you new here, I preface my explanation with a reference to another article I came across. (I had earlier posted Esperanto Grrl's blog as a MySpace bulletin, something I usually do when I want to draw attention to an article I find interesting but don't have enough commentary on it to make a blog of my own. And yes, I know some of my readers--I think there's one or two of you left--are busy themselves and don't have time to pan through who knows how many trivial bulletins to get the nuggets of stuff that might interest them.)

In short, Esperanto Grrl expressed the kind of ideas that I have heard from anthropology majors in my college days and discussed at even greater length and in greater detail by biologist Joseph L Graves.

"Well, yeah," some might say, "that might be true but try telling that to the next white supremacist gang looking to stomp your head in."

And to such a smart ass, I would say (after sighing heavily because I'm trying to figure out how to say what I'm going to say without going back over a whole lot of stuff I wrote way back at the beginning of 2007 ("The William Drayton" essays, coda, and "Two Points"), "No, I'm not trying to be a milquetoast pollyanna liberal. I am saying that just because some Dedicated Racist Idiot can't accept that race is nothing more than a social construct with little if any physical meaning, that doesn't mean I have to going along with his/her/its stupid idea to save my neck I just have to avoid getting my head kicked in."

That may mean working with allies to protect myself, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have to subsume my identity like some cell in a greater organism known as the group. To further explain my position, I'll add this quote from Herbert Spencer:

"Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society."

I'd apply Spencer's idea to just about any group, not just society. Groups, in my opinion, are individuals working together in what they each hope would be to their overall best interests, i.e. what one gains from being in the group outweighs what one loses. And what constitutes "gain" and "loss" for each individual ultimately has to be defined each individual, not the group's leader, president, "people's committee", round table of intelligentsia, or some nebulously defined "greater good" or what-not.
For readers who've heard all this before, I apologize for repeating myself. For the new folks, I'm talking about reification fallacy here.
So my answer to the question in the Disinformation article's title is--naturally enough--"Uh, yup. Next question please."

Coda:
For Tea Party members out there snickering at my response, let me ask you something while I have your attention--and please forgive me if you've heard this one before: I've repeatedly said that I don't like excessive government intrusion into our lives any more than you guys do. That being said, WHERE WERE YOU PEOPLE AND YOUR ANGER BACK WHEN THE NEOCONS HAD THEIR TURN NEEDLESSLY INTRUDING INTO PEOPLE'S PERSONAL LIVES (such as fighting gay marriage and this bullshit ) AND RUNNING ROUGHSHOD OVER THE CONSTITUTION (such as ramming through that other lengthy and Constitutionally questionable bill that Congress seemed unable to read before signing: the Patriot Act)?

To be fair, some of you may have been protesting back then as well, so please realize that I'm not talking about you. As for the others, Christopher Moore nailed it when he commented that for all the people angry with Bush awhile back, a whole lot of people sure did vote for him back in 2004.

Anyway, just asking. Don't mind me.

© Copyright 2006-2010 Anthony Anderson