Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == My take on this quarrel? Post Wisconsin and Occupy, the class struggle is at a low ebb in the USA, thus there is time for factional sniping. When it picks up again, most of the people involved will be on the same side of the barricades. Jon Flanders On Sat, 2013-06-01 at 16:41 -0400, Michael Smith wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Sat, 1 Jun 2013 06:28:16 -0700 michael yates mikedjya...@msn.com wrote: maybe a fuck the ISO and all the other chowderheads who have made stupid comments is in order. This seems very much on the right track. What seems to have gotten the ISO politburo's knickers in a twist is, as far as I can see, the use of the word 'tits'. Now why 'tits' should be unsavory while 'breasts' is OK is entirely beyond me, except that the former is vernacular whereas the second, for some reason, is genteel. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == how do you clip extraneous text without deleting the entire email? Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 6/2/13 9:20 AM, Allan Harris wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == how do you clip extraneous text without deleting the entire email? Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/lnp3%40panix.com You highlight the extraneous text with your mouse and then depress the delete key. For example, if somebody crossposted a 25 paragraph article from the NYT that you wanted to add a 2 or 3 sentence comment on, you'd highlight the last 23 or 24 paragraphs with your mouse and then depress the delete key. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == So when the real issues pick up, sexist crap and straw arguments designed to avoid discussing it will assume their rightful place as mere trifles - great! On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 8:41 AM, Jon Flanders jonathan.fland...@verizon.netwrote: My take on this quarrel? Post Wisconsin and Occupy, the class struggle is at a low ebb in the USA, thus there is time for factional sniping. When it picks up again, most of the people involved will be on the same side of the barricades. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I don't think Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair are typical sexist jerks, and I don't think Sharon Smith and the ISO are puritanical Trots out to censor everything in sight. There are real issues of class and race all mixed up in the debate worth discussing surely but neither side should be read out of the left over it. So yes, I think an upsurge in the class struggle will subsume this, just as Wisconsin and Occupy saw a decline in factional point scoring. Jon On Sun, 2013-06-02 at 13:56 -0400, Dennis Brasky wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == So when the real issues pick up, sexist crap and straw arguments designed to avoid discussing it will assume their rightful place as mere trifles - great! On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 8:41 AM, Jon Flanders jonathan.fland...@verizon.netwrote: My take on this quarrel? Post Wisconsin and Occupy, the class struggle is at a low ebb in the USA, thus there is time for factional sniping. When it picks up again, most of the people involved will be on the same Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == From: Louis Proyect I wonder why people like Andrew and Dennis Brasky have so much trouble making substantive contributions on the issues under debate. Unfortunately, the Counterpunch editors themselves have trivialised the discussion. Examples: Well, the Socialist Worker types don’t do irony. ... They are rich and well-educated at elite schools, such as Brown and Northwestern. Many of them live off of trust funds. Most rarely converse with poor people and have only a vague, theoretical notion of what life is like when you are indigent, black and have just been diagnosed with breast cancer (if you can even afford to get diagnosed). and: (In spite of this laborious self-consciousness about its place as a hipster utopia, Portland hosts more strip clubs than any other city its size and lissome Earth First!ers are often glimpsed pole-dancing at Mary’s Club during the winter months to fund their high-wire activism in defense of ancient forests when the snows melt and the chainsaws fire up. For them, stripping is a much less humiliating experience than applying for a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.) So how are you supposed to respond to that? Trust-fund Trots and pole-dancing lissome Earth First!ers? WTF? Andrew Pollack's response of So fuck off, Counterpunch may not be ideal, but it's about as serious and political as the Counterpunch editors deserve. And, no, I don't particularly think that their choice of not replacing the word 'tits with something else (breasts?) is any terrible offense. They've just taken the discussion to a new and even stupider low. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 6/1/13 3:17 AM, Alan Bradley wrote: So how are you supposed to respond to that? Trust-fund Trots and pole-dancing lissome Earth First!ers? WTF? I think the latest article was not an attempt to continue the debate with the ISO but to terminate it. It was an old-fashioned flame. I will probably be writing a piece analyzing the ISO for CP but more in the vein of whither the ISO. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/31/13 9:48 PM, Adam Turl wrote: It seems to me the problem with the original article (Fowler's) was that in trying to write an article that combined a class and gender analysis of the issue she ended up counterposing them in a pretty crude and undialectical way, unleashing a good amount of rhetorical ammo on a celebrity (rather than the actual structures of power). If every group on the left that had more than a hundred members or so decided to launch a campaign against objectionable material on CP, there would be ongoing trench warfare that would make the Battle of Ardennes look tame by comparison. I go nuts over the Syria articles from all the usual suspects but would never entertain the idea of severing my relationship with CP. Unlike the ISO or any other Leninist group, CP is not a party organ. Writers develop a relationship with Jeff St. Clair based less on their line than on their ability to write compelling prose. Whatever else you want to say about Ruth Fowler, she has that ability in spades. CP's Alexa rating in the USA is 8,602. My own blog, which gets about 50,000 visits per month, is 485,154. That should give you an idea of CP's influence. I have had a long relationship with CP going back to when it was launched by Ken Silverstein. In one of the early issues, I was interviewed by Ken about a mass firing in Goldman-Sachs's IT department. It is an amazing resource that is essential to the left. The wide variety of writers that appear in it is a testimony to the continuing determination of the left to put up the Good Fight. It is unfortunate that the ISO decided to pick a fight with CP in this fashion. When I used to write an attack on one of Alexander Cockburn's global warming denialist articles, he could laugh it off. But when you have a group of over a thousand people circulating open letters condemning CP, quantity turns into quality. A better approach would have been for Sharon to write a letter to Jeff taking a different tone but sadly--as we know so well--groups operating in the Leninist tradition like to adopt a pure as the driven snow stance as if upholding revolutionary continuity. Bollocks, I say. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Let's see now. ISO people bandy about words like filth and disgusting and locker room humor and so forth. No one seems to notice or care that Jeffrey St. Clair's own daughter has a rare and debilitating form of cancer. Maybe like a woman I taught with said about another colleague, a man, who had two daughters with cancer, Well, he's the father, I doubt he takes care of them, they think Jeffrey, as a man, doesn't have feelings. Only the ISO men grasp sexism. And those who support CP and don't see anything wrong with Ruth Fowler's article are denounced as old white men who are sexist. Without a shred of evidence. So, maybe a fuck the ISO and all the other chowderheads who have made stupid comments is in order. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Sat, 1 Jun 2013 06:28:16 -0700 michael yates mikedjya...@msn.com wrote: maybe a fuck the ISO and all the other chowderheads who have made stupid comments is in order. This seems very much on the right track. What seems to have gotten the ISO politburo's knickers in a twist is, as far as I can see, the use of the word 'tits'. Now why 'tits' should be unsavory while 'breasts' is OK is entirely beyond me, except that the former is vernacular whereas the second, for some reason, is genteel. I can't see why. 'Breasts' seems to me both illiterate and prurient, since in English as she was well-spoke, back in the day, no individual had more than one breast. To pluralize it calls attention to anatomy while purporting to elevate one's gaze therefrom: consummate Pecksniffery. But a great deal of campus-PC diction policing comes down to the enforcement of choosing the genteel expression, with a thin -- very thin -- left cover. I had an aunt -- great-aunt, really -- who used to quote the old chestnut 'horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.' She meant it, too. It wasn't till years later that I realized this wasn't original with her. The same dear lady thought it was quite important whether you said 'couch' or 'sofa', 'drapes' or 'curtains', 'dinner' or 'supper' (though the last was almost Talmudically complex; each term was acceptable -- *in its place*). 'Tits' was acceptable too, but only if you were talking about a cow. She would have spelled it 'teats', but pronounced it 'tits'. Spelling it as it sounds would, of course, have been coarse. Auntie, if dire necessity had ever forced her to refer to a lady's tits, would have said 'bosom'. Anybody who ever pluralized it -- 'bosoms' -- would have been cast immediately into the outer darkness. -- m...@smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org Leur sçavoir n’estoyt que besterye, et leur sapience n’estoyt que moufles, abastardisant les bons et nobles esperitz, et corrumpent toute fleur de ieunesse. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == just lurking here, but figured that as an uninvolved 3rd party observer, i could offer a less emotionally charged opinion. i find the fixation, which exists on both sides, but particularly by CP defenders, on the singular issue of the word tits, quite a distraction. i think adam's reminder below has been missing from much of the debate: on Fri, 31 May 2013 18:48:47 -0700 Adam Turl adamct...@gmail.com wrote: Add into this the way the article was promoted (as if it was promoted by a frat house) and one should be able to understand the response. - - - - - - in case people forgot, adam is referencing the CP email newsletter (which i don't subscribe to), where fowler's original piece was promoted as snapping jolie's bra. i cannott for the life of me see HOW this somehow ISN'T easily seen as a sexist and misogynist joke - one that is readily distinguishable from just the use (regardless of context) of the word tits. for the record, i think ISO has taken it a bit too far in terms of its party-line-style diktat of wholesale (or as adam described, existential) condemnation of CP as just a bunch of old misogynist pigs. but on the other hand CP defenders really do come off - to this lurker at least, and to a large number of my female comrades in particular (who, like me, are at least half the average age or younger than the regular contributors of this list, and have been debating this on facebook) - as being defensive in PRECISELY the way most men do when challenged for a transgression of male privilege. ie, by way of bluster, dismissive bravado/machismo and of course, rhetorical circumvention. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == “But why can’t Ruth use the word ‘tit’? She’s a big time writer. Sold more books than any of those ISOers. Maybe all of them combined.” “Fowler can use the word, but we can’t print it. Because we’re, well, men.” “So, we’re supposed to correct Ruth Fowler’s word choice for her?” “Yep.” “The two of us, both male editors, are supposed to commit an editorial intervention on her prose? She’s from Wales, right?” http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/31/the-shame-merchants/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == How much deeper are these assholes going to dig their own grave? It's bad enough to continue, indeed intensify, the sexist boys' locker-room jocularity. But to add to it lies about the ISO's politics, practice, and race and class composition, is just garden-variety Stalinism. I've been a hard-core Cannonite for almost 40 years, and therefore speak as someone who is predisposed to sniffing out faults in other wings of the Trotskyist tradition where they can be found. So I expect to be taken seriously when I say that, having seen the ISO in various cities and movements since their founding, their work in the labor movement in recent years has been, from what I can see, nothing short of inspirational. So fuck off, Counterpunch. Andy P. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/31/13 9:19 AM, Andrew Pollack wrote: So fuck off, Counterpunch. I wonder why people like Andrew and Dennis Brasky have so much trouble making substantive contributions on the issues under debate. Maybe it is because they really have no answers to Ruth Fowler's arguments? Does Andrew thing it was wrong for Jeff to not override her use of the word tits? What about the group Pussy Riot? Maybe I was wrong to write an article for CP (my first actually) taking up their cause when they call themselves such a sexist term. Should they have named themselves Vagina Riot instead? Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I've been a hard-core Cannonite for almost 40 years... predisposed to sniffing out faults in other wings of the Trotskyist tradition So I expect to be taken seriously Bit of a lacuna in the logic here. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Merchants of Shame » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == It seems to me the problem with the original article (Fowler's) was that in trying to write an article that combined a class and gender analysis of the issue she ended up counterposing them in a pretty crude and undialectical way, unleashing a good amount of rhetorical ammo on a celebrity (rather than the actual structures of power). Add into this the way the article was promoted (as if it was promoted by a frat house) and one should be able to understand the response. After all, women actually are oppressed and objectified in this society. It doesn't mean that Counterpunch should be permanently vilified or that St. Clair et al havent done good things otherwise. It is too bad they saw this as an existential attack rather than an opportunity for their website to actually host a debate about these issues. For example, it would be good to have some new writing that patiently unpacks the difference between opposing the objectification of women and prudery. The latest response from St. Clair, however, does dig the hole deeper, and turns what might have been a crude mistake into out-and-out red baiting. Whether you agree with the original SW criticisms of Fowler and CP or not they were a reasonable response to something that was, if not sexist (although I think it was), certainly problematic for people (socialist, anarchist, feminist, whatever) who claim to oppose oppression in all forms. On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Carl G. Estabrook galli...@illinois.eduwrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == ...how quickly the prosecutorial mindset of those possessed by a poisonous manifestation of identity politics can congeal into a lynch mob. It’s something that my old pal Alexander Cockburn knew intimately. In 1990, Alex was invited to speak by a gang of puritanical Trots at Reed College in Portland, a city almost paralyzed by the conventions of political correctness... The invitation was a setup. Instead of a lecture, a self-appointed tribunal had been convened to put Alex on trial for his series of provocative columns in The Nation, which denounced the sexual witch-hunts sweeping the country in the wake of the McMartin pre-school case. Along with the great Debbie Nathan, Alex was one of the very few journalists to slash through the toxic hysteria and expose the accusations as fraudulent claims cooked-up by politically-motivated social workers and therapists. At the time, Alex was derided as an 'anti-feminist,' but he was proved right. There were no apologies from his accusers. That case was deadly serious. L’affaire Jolie is comically absurd... On May 31, 2013, at 8:03 AM, Louis Proyect l...@panix.com wrote: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/31/the-shame-merchants/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/adamcturl%40gmail.com Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
