Mr. Byfield's Excellent Posts

t byfield tbyfield at panix.com
Mon Jan 3 10:02:48 PST 2000



> Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 01:44:43 -0500
> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>


> Speaking of Mr. Byfield, I do not think he is interested in what I have to
> say on any subject. What's the point of trying to refute such confident
> judgments as reproduced below? One is left speechless by the self-evidence
> of his thoughts. The only reason why Mr. Byfield condescends to comment on
> my posts is not to hear from me, but to remind all the LBO-talkers of the
> (probably) already well-known fact that he dislikes and disapproves of my
> ideas. I think that by now everyone here got _that_ point, if nothing
> else, but it may be that he has nothing better to do than repeat the same.
> Besides, it's free speech, as they say. Yoshie

'(probably) already' sounds a tad pomo, no? or at least as rigorous.

doug ought to have told me that lbo was first and foremost a platform for you to wax with endless dogmatism in one subject after another and only secondarily for others to challenge your excesses of vaporous bombast. darn you to limbo, doug!

yoshie, if you're going to pontificate with such breadth you should get used to people occasionally needling you for some specifics. if there are indeed hordes of pomos who denounce science as unadulterated hogwash, it should be an easy matter to name one or two. and if psychoanalytic attempts to deal with the social can only produce an 'individual writ large,' it should be an equally simple matter to justify such a claim without quoting thinkers who, in other contexts, you'll happily denounce as a principals in a cabal hell-bent on 'occluding marxist conceptions of class.' and if longing for a writing degree zero is a symptom of commodity fetishism, then surely whatever analytical framework you employed to arrive at that thesis is adequate to explain a propensity for interminable and, more often than not, only marginally relevant quotations.

obviously, i'm quite comfy with eclecticism as an 'approach,' so please don't mistake me for faulting your words for that. but it's a bit irritating when you slag eclecticism only to employ it when it's useful to your project of flogging a Grand Unified Theory. as nixon said he said, 'pee or get off the pot.'

cheers, t



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