kelley wrote:
>
> At 09:53 AM 6/1/01 -0500, Michael McIntyre wrote:
>
> >BTW, I enjoyed the gossip and confess to the venial sin of
> >Schadenfreude. But gossip isn't fun anymore once you have to find good
> >"moral" justifications for it.
> >
> >Michael McIntyre
>
> i'm confused.
>
> i don't see how you can dissociate any of this from his political views.
>
In the lonely last instance (which never comes?) it is impossible to separate theory and practice, and a person's thought will be found to be in harmony with their actions. But in the meantime, reactionaries thrive whenever they can complicate a debate with a thousand different complexities. For example, the utterly irrelevant chatter about free speech in the case of the Brown students' response to the Horowitz ad. It seems almost a majority of leftists joined the reactionaries in changing the subject to free speech in that dispute, and hence once more the core question of getting an audience into the tent was submerged to the quite trivial question of what to say to them once they were gathered. (Trivial because it is so easy to articulate the content when the occasion for its articulation arises.)
Now the gossipers on the left and the Augustinian propounders of the unity of thought and action as a philosophical principle have, as a few have noted, allowed the struggle to be shifted to mere trivialities about the sincerity etc of a single prick of an individual.
Left politics is not a high school debate with a captive audience of judges calmly balancing the points. Nor is it bourgeois politics of personalities.
Carrol