ravi wrote:
>
>
> > --- uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
> >
> >>Sorry for overposting, but I suspect a very large
> >>section of the US Left
> >>tends to put all goodness in the Universe outside
> >>the US. US is either an
> >>Evil Empire or a Dumb one.
> >
>
> i do not see this from most of the US left i encounter, or in the
> writings of the intellectual leaders of the left. chomsky, for instance,
> points out that he reserves his criticism mostly to US action
UVJ treats himself and other posters as spectators not participants in politics. This is the stance of the dogmatist who thinks all that counts is having a correct belief. (Salavation through faith.) But if one takes _participant's_ perspective; if one's concern is to make a difference, then OF COURSE for any u.s. citizen The Enemy (The Evil Empire) is the U.S. Were I a citizen of France, France would be The Enemy. Were I a citizen of China, the present capitalist leadership would be The Enemy.
And again we have, of course, the kind of error that I always put a good deal of emphasis on in my teaching of freshman comp. UVJ starts out "a very large section . . .tends" to X. Again, a lot of water is dirty. On a lot of days there are clouds in the sky. No sentence starting out that way can say anything useful. This is one of the errors I used to come down heaviest on in reading freshman papers. I spent a lot of time in writing classes on the importance of avoiding pompous tautologies. I wish maillist posters would give more effort to avoid such pomposity.
Carrol