Yes, I am aware of the ongoing spat with Yoshie ;-), but however, I was responding to the specific bit of text from your post that I had quoted, in which you had wondered if we can talk about the demonisation of Iran while also acknowledging that the state has its negatives. In a later post you mentioned that that latter acknowledgement would be the intellectually honest thing to do. My objection is to that idea.
On 10 Sep, 2007, at 13:04 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>>
>> Well, such is life! It seems to me though that you are complaining
>> about bothersome content interrupting your commercial viewing ;-) ...
>> it seems you would rather chat about who is reading what books (look
>> what a bunch of smarty-pants we are! ;-) Some of us even read two
>> books at the same time! ;-)), and so on?
>
> I didn't say anything in the books thread and thought about the same
> of it as you.
>
I think the thread was okay really... I mean, being leftists, we have no real world friends, and Doug does not seem to mind our using this list as a community. And if we were to meet in person, after the usual "Man, you are not what I imagined you would look like based on your posts" (*), we would probably chat about this or that including what we are reading. The thing that amused me was all the high- falutin stuff with the almost obligatory Harry Potter thrown into the middle of it:
* Conway's Functions of One Complex Variable * Elements of the Autodidactic in Pre-Renaissance Umbrian Art, 3ed * Nancy Drew and the Den of Macaroons * Randall's The Golden Tapestry: A Critical Survey of Non-Chivalric
Fiction in English Translation * And of course my seventh reading of Waiting for Godot,
this time by moonlight
;-) ;-)
--ravi (yes, I realise I am probably alone in not having friends!(**))
(*) So far, the faces/people I know from the list (Joanna, MP, Doug) do not look too far off their list personna, which is usually not the case...
(**) i.e., not counting online friends.