[lbo-talk] lbo, a den of right-wingers?

[ravi]

Doug Henwood wrote:
> ravi wrote:
> 
>> 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. 
> 
> 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.
> 

its not an issue of likes and dislikes is it? i mean, this is not a 
movie review list (though i do like reading LNP's reviews), yes?

as noted in my original post, i do not think LBO hosts a majority of 
right-wingers. did you guys miss that?

as i noted in my response to jks, the "western" in "western liberal 
democracy" is gratuitous and exclusionary. thoureau to gandhi to mlk and 
mandela, and a whole host of unnamed unknown thinkers and actors have 
contributed to the bits of decency that our world exhibits today. if the 
term is used purely in a placeholder sense, to mean "the sort of govt 
and society/laws of a place like sweden", then as jks suggested better 
alternatives are available.

cockburn's piece was one-dimensional? so, what's the problem with that? 
is the voice of the other dimension (the predominant one) hard to hear? 
this is the criticism of cockburn? that suicide by farmers did occur in 
india, but hey, perhaps he should have also taken the time to parrot the 
lines of the neo-liberals in power in india? why? because god forbid the 
white sahib question the brown sahibs? and what of the facts? sujeet 
provided some numbers... i responded with my analysis on why i felt the 
numbers (he provided) ill-substantiated [what i understood to be] his 
thesis.

if we can have multiple views, why not alex cockburn's, especially when 
its contents stand mostly unrefuted (except for suggesting muslims are 
33% of kerala rather than 25%)?

i enjoy reading wojek's posts too. or at least used to. but i do assume 
that we, on this list, and on the left, share some basic notions, 
attitudes... whatever the right word is. (and when i see you step in as 
listmom to censor/steer conversation, i see a similar assumption though 
perhaps your notions are different from mine).i have gone into all that 
elsewhere.

	--ravi