>
> Thanks for a lecture, but I know people's ambivalence, etc., and I
> "don't beat them over the head with the pessimism and with the
> constant attacks on the inadequacy of their ways of thinking or
> expressing themselves." My activist work consists not of discussing
> the ins and outs of the Korean War on e-lists but of supporting local
> strikers, organizing protests against racial profiling, etc.
The oddity of maillists. Most people on these lists have themselves done ordinary agitational and organizational work, and if they think at all they must recognize a sharp divide between the *persona* exhibited in such work and the *persona* they exhibit (willy-nilly) on a maillist etc, but so many of them nevertheless will then blab on in maillists disputes how the tone or the rhetoric or the chocie of topics illustrated there would not work in many other situations -- and in particular in agitational and organizational work. Maillist conversation depends on the recognition of this split or difference by all concerned. To argue with someone who does not recognize the difference is as fruitless as arguing with a Sparticist or a Jehovah's Witness. The dogma that all discourse shares the same decorum (that of everyday speech on the assembly line) is an insuperable barrier to any attempt at conversation..
Carrol