T: Several responses below.
On Feb 16, 2012, at 11:22 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> This rehearsal of banalities which no one would disagree with is
> illustrative of the impossibility of conversation (as opposed to point
> scoffing) on lb-talk.
T: So you are willfully spending years and years of your time on something worthless, are you? That would be enough of an admission to make you an idiot, even if you weren't so smugly sure of the superiority of your own narrow opinions. Personally I think that 'scoffing' a few points is way better than dogmatism, and that's what discredits you so often.
Having spent the day with a couple of Sri Lankan activists living under the very real threat of abduction and torture when they return home on Monday, and a couple of DRC activists who had to sneak to our meeting under threat of politicised arrest and rendition by Kabila's goons, I could hardly agree more. I'm embarrassed that I've devoted an entire email folder to this shit, and waded through it for as long as I have.
Oh, except "this" is not-not-not Amerikkka, right Woj? And, yes, Doug, your failure to respond to Tahir's challenge didn't go unnoticed. It's all quite telling. And not in a good way. "They hate us for our freedom." Yeah, right. Silliness and vanity.
T: That was what really enraged me and still does. The pusillanimous pussy.
Ignorance, stupidity, posturing, distraction, defensiveness and / or vanity all round. I call bullshit on it all. Carrol's a cranky old son-of-a-bitch, but he knows a helluva lot, and he's almost always right, and the rest of you are just too insecure to deal with the ruthless, insightful shit he dishes up pretty much daily. Effing kak. (Tahir can translate that if needed.)
T: Yes I can, but now that its' being directed towards me, I won't. What's kak about Cox is his dumbed down retreat from Leninism, which takes someone who's been through that and sees where it leads to recognise. There's absolutely no recognition that a communism that never departed the framework of Progress Publishers and Lawrence and Wishart was worthless from the start. It is intellectually dishonest not to settle accounts with that and move on, rather than to retreat into dogmatic anti-intellectualism instead.
Unfortunately what has always annoyed me about Henwood's list, and which I confess I had forgotten about, is the endless circularity and utter lack of conviction in anything other than a sub-cultural-studies commentary about American personalities and their views. Trying to raise Sri Lanka or DRC here is an utter waste of time. It wouldn't be so bad if the American focus actually led to something enlightening, but it never does because of the continual knee jerk responding to anything that smacks of genuine radicality: such as pointing out the absurdity of seeing an anti-capitalist possibility within the framework of the current nation state system.
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