Carrol Cox: >Sabri, you simply have to acknowledge that a maillist post, usually a >fairly hastily written first draft, and almost always rather short for >the topics being covered, is not an article in a scholarly journal.
It is exactly this notion that makes email lists, especially and ironically those that are geared to academia, pretty worthless in my opinion. You get the most extreme version of this at the H-Humanities site, which practically interviews you before allowing you on one of their self-aggrandizing but sterile lists. For example, I just opened up the September archives page of H-afrpol (African Politics), selected at random and which presumably would be boiling with discussions of the Ivory Coast rebellion, etc. Instead it reveals this: 2002-09-29 Amos Anyimadu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> REPLY: Film BlackHawk Down as a Teaching Resource View Amos Anyimadu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Film BlackHawk Down as a Teaching Resource View 2002-09-10 Amos Anyimadu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Job Annoucement. Duke University, African and African American Studies Program View Amos Anyimadu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> AFRICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALASIA & THE PACIFIC 25th Annual Conference, View 2002-09-08 Amos Anyimadu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Help with Ph.d. on Governance Constraints in Africa View 2002-09-07 Amos Anyimadu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> A New Film about Rwanda View 2002-09-03 Diana Rosenberg New Book: Computerization of An African University Library That's exactly 7 messages in the month of September and all fall into the category of announcements or teaching aids. Africa burns and these pedants offer help with Ph.d.'s and the appropriateness of 'Blackhawk Down' as a teaching aid. The lists at CSF are not that much better. I just unsubbed from the WSN list because it consisted of nothing but crosspostings from the bourgeois press and the infamous Nemomini. I stick with PEN-L because there are many academics here who might actually find one of my lengthier posts interesting. In fact, my contributions to Canadian Dimension, which have numbered perhaps a dozen over the past 3 years or so, were read here first and selected for publication by the editor. This is just the way I like doing things. My days of sending in a blind submission to MR or CNS, etc. are long past. The discussion over fascism here is exactly what I find useless. Carrol thinks that you can have an intelligent discussion about fascism in a paragraph or two. I have no idea how this is possible. I developed an analysis of fascism on a Marxism list in 1996 during the Pat Buchanan campaign. It amounts to 14,288 words and includes a discussion of the 18th Brumaire, Hitler's rise to power, McCarthyism, etc. I understand that for many people, especially professors and journalists, email lists are a diversion from more laborious tasks like getting their next article ready for submission but for the rest of us proles it is a way of ANALYZING SOCIETY and DEVELOPING A REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY. To do this effectively, it requires more than a one or two sentence quip. http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/fascism.htm Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
