[lbo-talk] Spanish promiscuity or German erectile dysfunction?

// ravi ravi at platosbeard.org
Thu May 3 08:46:01 PDT 2012


On May 3, 2012, at 9:27 AM, Alan P. Rudy wrote:
> And yet, Michael, you're carefully skipping over every substantive, rather than personal point, Marv makes… and Marv's personalized points are, I am quite sure, generalizations about a type as much as they are irritated statements about an individual. THe way you have, here, skirted substance to focus on style is something we also see on the list with some regularity…

Unless I missed an earlier post on this thread (which is possible), this is the only one I can find, and I would like you to help me identify the substance in the below, which is the entirety of Marv Gandall’s post (minus quoted bits):


> I don't at all, at all, "hate" Carrol. I've heard that he's more much more restrained and gracious than his ferocious online persona would suggest. No surprise there; many flamers are. Some of his commentaries are sober, well-informed and thought-provoking, and I have no doubt, as indicated below, that he is well-intentioned.
>
> But he's also ridiculously self-deluding, as many armchair radicals are, and it's his revolutionary pretensions which underlie his Puritanical pursuit of the many "soft-on-the-DP reformists" he perceives in his milieu. Like others with similar pretensions, but with very little practical political experience outside of small circle organizing in university towns and among the better-educated, he'd be quickly chewed up and spit out in a working class political party, union, or social movement of any consequence, where mastering the "art of defensive formulations" is essential to political survival. I mostly restrain myself from commenting on his frequent outrageously iconoclastic observations, but his light-hearted "enjoyment, win or lose" from afar of the desperate struggles of European and American workers was particularly offensive - even if it was, as I am sure, calculated to display to himself and others his unsentimental and unflinching "revolutionary" steadfastness.

Sorry, another search yielded this post:


> And easier still when you're not even among the 9%, but a comfortably retired professor of English literature vicariously "enjoying the battle" from behind a keyboard in a small town far removed from the loci of the crisis. The limitless self-delusion of the well-intentioned...

Weeding through the archives online right now, as I await your response.

(http://search.lbo-talk.org/search/swish.cgi?query=spanish+promiscuity&submit=Search%21&metaname=swishtitle&sort=unixdate&dr_o=12&dr_s_mon=5&dr_s_day=3&dr_s_year=2012&dr_e_mon=5&dr_e_day=3&dr_e_year=2012)

—ravi

P.S: Sparrow Mail? That’s pretty chic! :-)



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