>recent material on this list has been interesting: the wonders of
>*western* liberal democracy. the shooting of an innocent person by
>the british police is an "accident". male feelings of impotence as a
>primary cause of the london bombing. alex cockburn's highlighting of
>the other side of the "indian [capitalist] miracle" is wrong. a
>while ago we had someone express his opinion [of distaste] on a man
>having sex with another man. someone else posted recently that a
>vegetarian diet stunts growth. etc. etc.
These are hardly the modal positions of most posters, and almost all are at odds with my own POV. On the specifics, I'd say that Western liberal democracy has its virtues (one being that we're not at risk of arrest), even if it's well short of wondrous. The position on the London shooting was held by one person, who gets lots of disagreement from others. Cockburn's piece, as his stuff often is, was one-dimensional because it relied, as his work often does, on a conversation with a single source. Homophobic expression is quite unwelcome here; this list couldn't be much more queer friendly. And one poster's idiosyncratic views on diet don't represent much of anything.
There's no party line here, so people will say all kinds of things. I want Leninists, anarchists, Democrats, social democrats, polymorphous radical hedonists, and nondenominational Marxists to coexist and converse. Sometimes opinions will get expressed that you don't like. But that's the idea.
Doug