[lbo-talk] Pug The Slug

[Marvin Gandall]

Big overreaction, and Doug succumbed too easily, IMO, to the necktie party 
which had formed. I disagree with MP on many things and I still haven't 
decided whether he is deliberately or just innocently provocative, but I 
could say the same about a lot of people I've clashed with politically over 
the years. So what? We should be wary of circumscribing the boundries of 
"permissable" political opinion so tightly; we're not in a life and death 
struggle against a counter-revolution, and even if we were, history suggests 
revolutions can too easily strangle themselves through the overzealous 
pursuit of heretics. Michaels's "crime" was to align himself with some 
oleogenous critics of Yoshie and Juan Cole and it was proper for to call him 
to order on that, as I and others did. Then we should have moved on to more 
important things rather than getting involved, as we used to tell our son 
when he'd throw a fit, in "a game of uproar".