Thomas Bias wrote: > > We have to concentrate on the present-day reality. I don't believe in > judging what our comrades did in the 1930s through the prism of political > reality today. >
Exactly. Trotsky was doing the only thing that he was capable of doing back then, but we have no such constraints today. Speaking of constraints, I would urge comrades once again to not do what Tom just did, namely to include my entire post in his reply. Here is a procedure that I would like everybody to print out and tape to their computer: How to reply to a Marxmail message 1. Select reply in your email program. 2. Type in your response. 3. Before selecting send from your email program, review your reply from beginning to end. This is done by pressing the keys on your keyboard that look like this respectively: /|\, \|/ or "page up" and "page down" if you are cursed to use a Wintel computer. Alternatively, you can go from top to bottom with something called a mouse that ordinarily comes with your computer. This is an object about the size of a potato that has either one, two or three buttons that come in handy launching programs, etc. 4. If you find any extraneous text in your reply, please clip it before pressing send. Here is how one dictionary defines "extraneous": "not forming an essential or vital part <extraneous ornamentation> b : having no relevance <an extraneous digression>" Here is a good example of extraneous text. If I wrote a 2000 word article on why the Fourth International was a doomed venture that you disagreed with, you should write your reply without including my entire article. A paragraph from the beginning should suffice. Here is the main reason that Les and I want you to do this. It bothers us to no end to see such sloppy and lazy behavior from people intent on overthrowing the capitalist system. Plus, we are neat freaks and anal compulsive so please humor us lest we have to put you on moderation ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
