if you really do work with people and not among a rarified crowd of university activists, then you would never try to sell the pack of lies you try to sell here at lbo. a quick tour of any ordinary neighborhood or a discussion with a taxicab driver or whathaveyou will yield an array of complex thinking on the topic that DOES NOT boil down to a simplified: big government bad; individual responsibility and free market good. and it doesn't boil down to a simplified romanticization of people as really progressive underneath it all, either.
in other words, you wouldn't say that *most* people are against government socialized medicine [1] or however yoshie put it originally. you would know better than to make such ridiculous hyperbolic claims and you'd exercise more caution. those of you who do this --make people out to be social dopes-- *NEED* people to always be social dopes and conservative and in need of the helping massage of lefties to unshackle them from their falsely conscious prisons. disconcerting to find out a little differently. eh?
at any rate, whether or not your persona is or isn't like it is in RL --a dorkyass distinction any way you slice it-- the fact that you are willing to present yourself on this or any list as pessimistic and always looking at the "working class" as beknighted dupes is not in your favor. as i've said many times, there are many people subbed to this list who are trying to figure it out and come here for an answer. but read some of you people at times and you might want to think twice about characterizing people the way you do. if you are willing to beat others over the head on lists then you are probably willing to do the same in so called real life. a reasonable conclusion to make, i think.
back to examining navels!
kelley
[1] (sure they'll be against if you ask, "are you for socialized
medicine...?" but asked a different way...something that surveys do try to
get at by asking question in different ways to get at conditions under
which people will agree <---->disagree).
At 07:39 AM 7/7/00 -0500, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >
> > 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