speaking personally, and not on behalf of either, the wsf or the anti-globalisation movement, i think coherence can be over-rated. carry it far enough and you wind up with fundamentalism, totalitarianism and fascism. there's clearly some balance between perfect coherence and perfect chaos that achieves the diversity necessary to ensure creativity, innovation, dialogue and democracy.
my own experience with gatherings of the wsf kind suggests that they do provide a useful platform, especially for smaller, less well-known groups and causes to find an audience, opportunities for partnership and a sense of solidarity. they are also unruly, noisy and somewhat chaotic. i suspect the real issue is with the apparent lack of tangible outcomes. as with any free market that's self-correcting, however. movements often make for strange bedfellows. i suspect the anti-slavery movement, india's freedom movement or the environmental movement all included some people whose primary interests were more self-serving than altruistic. as to the immediate negative impact in term of traffic snarls and the like, the average wedding reception at the turf club here in mumbai or president hu's visit last week cause greater inconvenience than the mumbai wsf did. -- "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." - Aldous Huxley
