Matt Cramer wrote:
>
> If I piss you off here, flame me for
> what I type here. I think this is a reasonable request.
>
I would narrow that even further. My private practice is to read attacks on the argument of a particular post I have written, but as soon as someone starts drudging up other posts and yakking about pattern or contradiction or whatever, I delete and go on to other things.
A maillist is not a scholarly journal or the internal political journal of a disciplined party.
Let me give a particular example (on two other lists) of where such broadening from the particular document to the author's total output utterly ruined what could have been a useful debate. Doug wrote an article in the Nation on an anti-globalization conference in New York -- an article which I personally thought was a mixture of the obvious, the flatly wrong, and the irrelevant, but which in any case raised issues worth debating. But on both of the lists on which it got posted, attacks on it immediately wandered off the topics by dragging in Hardt/Negri (not mentioned in the article), and innumerable other (real or alleged) features of Doug's politics. No debate ever occurred. About a month after the threads subsided I tried to write a post on the original article, but it was pointless -- too much irrelevant dust had been kicked up by wreckers who were more concerned with showing how Doug's politics as a whole were bad than with his particular politics in that article. Utterly unprincipled. And while I don't read you very extensively, since mostly you debate issues that for me were settled several decades ago, in this case you are certainly being subjected to unprincipled attacks.
Carrol