louis kontos wrote:
>
> who would you have judge whether he is willfully publishing crap? half
> of sociology strikes me as crap, but i wouldn't give anybody the right
> to punish anybody for it.
Yes. And as Yoshie has shown, the essay is _wrong_ but NOT by any stretch of the imagination "crap." The desire for unfocused revenge is a general feature of u.s. daily life. Back in the '70s I led a forum on campus on the Pontiac Brothers's case. One of the people in the audience was a relative of a guard at the Pontiac prison. I forget the exact wording, but one of her statements very forcefully expressed the view that since "they" had "got" one of "us," "we" had a right to "get" several of "them." "We" here being the Pontiac guards, "they" being any wild selection of the _black_ prisoners at Pontiac.
As Yoshie has argued, that makes pretty bad politics -- but not I think as bad politics as the somewhat sticky moralism or almost-Victorian purism of those on this list who are hastening to prove their purity by damning Churchill as "crap" or "as bad as the imperialists" et cet. I hope none of these politically chaste polemicists dare, ever, to use the charge of purism against other leftists.
Carrol