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I think we're really haggling over semantics, and a different idea of what an ideology is. Pragmatism is an ideology also - specifically, it is the ideology articulated and named by William James, John Dewey, Schiller, and others. It is in our vocabulary today, whether or not those who utter it realize it, because at the turn of the twentieth-century it was an explicit philosophy popular among the literati and intellectual "elite." Pragmatism is not an alternative to an ideology, it is an old and important one itself.
It is important, I agree, to know whether your opponent - in the sense of a group - is a band of pragmatic criminals. You would deal with someone like this very differently than a Aun Shinrikyo, or an Ayman Al-Zawahiri, which is my entire point. But enough on this, we probably disagree less in essence than in terminology.
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El Diablo sabe mas por viejo que por diablo.
Last edited by D9 (RIP); 01-26-2004 at 20:18.
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