To all on the LBO list
The open letter of September 28, 2004, signed by 115 prominent Western political and academic leaders, has created the unfortunate impression that Russia-watchers are of a single mind about the nature of Putin's regime and the appropriate Western response to it. We find this disturbing.
To combat this impression and encourage debate about the nature of Russia's relations with the West, we have crafted a response. You will find it on the web at:
http://www.npetro.net/OpenLetter.html
After reading our letter, we hope that you can join us in this initiative, by signing the form below it.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Peter Lavelle Senior Analyst - United Press International Moscow, Russia
Nicolai N. Petro Professor of Political Science University of Rhode Island (USA)
Ira Straus U.S. coordinator, Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO Washington, D.C. (USA)
Robert Bruce Ware Professor of Philosophy Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, IL (USA)
Thomas Seay <entheogens at yahoo.com> wrote: --- Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> According to Rahul Mahajan, a member of the Green
> Party, one of the
> reasons for the collapse of the anti-war movement is
> its imprisonment
> in the AnybodyButBush political cage:
I agree with this in part, but by what means does Rahul measure that the Antiwar movement has collapsed? Is it because there are fewer demonstrations and that the number of participants at those demos has diminished?
If that is the case, I find it entirely reasonable that so few should now participate at these types of demonstration. You can only circle round the City Hall of San Francisco or the White House in DC before it starts to become old hat and uninspiring.
So, I agree that part of the problem may be that people pin their hopes on Kerry being better; but part of the problem is to come up with more effective forms of protest than the traditional ring-around-the-rosey peace march. These types of demonstrations served a purpose and now that is spent. Obviously no attractive POSITIVE alternatives have been proposed, or anyhow took root, and so people are going to fall back on voting against Bush and hoping things get better.
The antiwar movement has not collapsed. More and more people are against this war, but they obviously dont see the value in attending these demonstrations. Without an attractive alternative, they will restrict their protest to talking shit about Bush and voting against him in November. So they are against the war. I think when Rahul speaks of the collapse of the antiwar movement, he means that the antiwar movement did not evolve into something more anti-capitalist. That's probably what he is indicating when he criticizes the slogan "bring the troops home" as being too narrow.
===== The real world gives the subset of what is; the product space represents the uncertainty of the observer. The product space may therefore change if the observer changes; and two observers may legitimately use different product spaces within which to record the same subset of actual events in some actual thing. The "constraint" is thus a relation between observer and thing; the properties of any particular constraint will depend on both the real thing and on the observer. It follows that a substantial part of the theory of organization will be concerned with properties that are not intrinsice to the thing but are relational between observer and thing.
W. Ross Ashby
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