>I was a bit taken aback by your comments on the treatment of Comrade
>Susi. I have no problem with philosophical differences or a lack of
>expertise. What bugs me is when people spout a lot of conventional
>opinions as if they were transgressive, and tediously familiar stuff
>as if it were fresh. Those are close to unpardonable sins, especially
>if committed simultaneously.
Well, my view on it doesn't matter, but I'd've thought thinking the things that characterise the society that produced you is wholly pardonable. And anyway, sometimes people don't realise their views are conventional.
And we could have stretched all kinds of threads out of the issues Christopher introduced in his first post to the list (the one which started it all): about the functionality of sexual reproduction, the spectre of downloadable human consciousness, and the nature of progress as immanent in the nature of evolution.
I disagreed with everything Chris wrote and said so. In reply, Chris wrote: "On the other hand, there is another part that says "This is life in it's rawest grittiest form. This has happened for hundreds of millions of years, and will likely continue to happen in one form or another for another hundred million years or more." Who am I to change that process?"
And we were off! 'Bewdy,' we thought, 'a Spencerian social-Darwinist misanthropic, bourgeois reactionary! Let's put in some boot!'
So we didn't discuss any of the other things he brought up. Nope, we'd found a politically incorrect line (one it is not hard to take apart in enlightening fashion - Singer, Gould and Lewontin have all done it in clear friendly English) sufficiently artlessly expressed to make room for a self-affirming feeding frenzy. All heat and very little light.
If Christopher is genuine, we punish him for it. If he is not, he doesn't care either way, and the rest of us have burned bandwidth on bugger-all.
Never mind Chris had brought up lots of interesting issues, had said he's not wholly committed to the view, and had been unfriendly to no-one.
And, anyway, if he is a radical individualist, I imagine the question 'why be moral"' is indeed an important one for him.
So I do reckon we've a propensity for sounding off from high moral ground, antagonising, intimidating or boring people beyond our cult-like convocation, and preferring to focus on the adversarial swopping of respectively known and fixed Truths rather than engaging in the process of knowledge; which, as I thought most of us would agree, is definitively a process of social production, ever a movable feast, and best done in a democratically tolerant spirit (Carrol's pronouncement that only one lister here may talk about evolution would be a prime example of ensuring that a mailing list become a static pissing contest, for instance).
That said, I like LBO-Talk lots and learn heaps - most of the time. And it ain't just LBO I'm talking about. Happens everywhere lefties come together - really and virtually.
Well, you did ask ...
Cheers, Rob