war and the state

[Gordon Fitch]

> "Behavior _is_ history, in the sense of being the raw material 
> of which it is constituted (if we're talking about the things 
> people actually do, anyway). There's nothing idealistic about 
> that. You may want to argue that the notion that ideas result 
> in behavior is idealistic, but that requires a kind of duality 
> I don't subscribe to and in fact find difficult to follow, 
> the Cartesian mind-body stuff. Too idealistic for me." 
> 
> ..........
> 
> "I didn't say anything about the production of Lenin's and 
> Trotsky's ideas, and I don't see what the particulars of 
> their production has to do with anything. It seems as 
> irrelevant as their morals. As for the rest, anyone who 
> has ever tried to fix a broken automobile engine knows that 
> some ideas are more materially useful than others. 

Dddddd0814 at aol.com:
> Could someone please clue me in on what the heck this guy is talking about? 
> "Behavior is history"? "The notion that ideas result in behavior is 
> idealistic"? Huh????
> Total mish-mosh.

Well, you don't know; if a text is incomprehensible to you,
you don't know whether it contains meaning for someone else,
is good or bad, right or wrong, well- or ill-arranged, and so
on.  It's just opaque.  Since no one else has risen to either
agree with you or explain the text, however, I suspect it is
worse than obscure: it is boring, and the prospects of
well-received explanation are dim.  Therefore, I will not
abuse the patience of this mailing list with one.

-- Gordon