[lbo-talk] Sloppy Posts from Perspective of later readers

[Carrol Cox]

LBO posts are kept in an archive, presumably on the assumption that they
may be read later, either by non-subscribers or subscribers returning to
read them at a later date. In either case the reader is removed from the
original context of the post. Now it happens that I have been going
through all the posts generated by the question of prose style, editing
them into a single word file, because this cluster of threads seems to
me to have brought out a whole series of interesting questions. (I am
Condensing headings, stripping them of >s and labelling quotes,
shortening the quotes themselves, etc.) And it is amazing and irritating
how many posts which probably were clear if read at once can become
utterly baffling on later rereading. Here is one of the simpler
instances:

----------------

[lbo-talk] Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion
Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Fri Dec 8 09:46:25 PST 2006

Doug wrote:


>

Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, vol. 3:

"[Some old book by some old dead economist] is a real example of
feeble-mind thought, which winds its way in a casuistical and
self-stupefying manner through its own inner confusion, and whose
difficult, clumsy style leaves the unprejudiced and incompetent reader
with the impression that the difficulty of making sense out of the
confusion does not lie in the contradiction between confusion and
clarity, but in a lack of understanding on the part of the reader.''

[The couple of posts I just read on this thread reminded me of this
passage.  I don't know whether the quotation relates to what's being
discussed.  As an aside, it is curious to me that here (and a few
other passages in his works), Marx uses the term "unprejudiced"
negatively.  For him, being "prejudiced" -- having some a-priori
judgment or knowledge about the matter (not necessarily rigid, but
definitely far from the empty-your-mind attitude) wasn't necessarily
bad.  Sorry for my unprejudiced introjection in this thread.]

-----------

Now what the hell does "Doug wrote" in the post above refer to? Also,
Julio's apologetic final sentence itself from a distance becomes (at
least to me) irritating as hell. I think he had something to say, but
for some reason (perhaps he had many more important things to do)
'chose' not to bother to say it. But in any case, even in this trivial
instance, some editorial consciense I've picked up someplace, has made
me spend a hell of a lot of time trying to interpret how that "Doug
wrote" got in, what it has to do with Julio's post, and why he wrote the
post in the first place. Probably at this distance he can't answer these
questions either, but I am curious.

My guess: he deleted the whole of Doug's post but accidentally (it is
easy to do) didn't delete the "Doug wrote"??? This assumes that he
wasn't responding to Doug's post, but simply using his reply key as a
simple way to address the post?

Incidentally, implicit in this post is the reason it would have been
highly inappropriate for Martin Ostwald to have translated most of the
Greek passages he quoted -- that in fact doing so would have required
additional material that would have made the book harder to read, even
for non-readers of Greek.

Carrol