Re: Re: Freedom to Spew

On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 11:36:53PM -0600, Dave Rolsky wrote:

> We certainly are spending a lot of time dwelling on this one paper burning
> incident.

Yeah, but that's a good thing, right? Critical reflection is
hardly *over*practiced, even on the left. Humans need, generally, more of
it rather than less.


> When your tactics become more of a subject
> of debate than your goals than you've failed.

Even temporarily? Like, have we edged into that already, d'ya think?

I guess maybe it's a function of my background, but I can't think of
many examples where talking about tactics was 1) completely irrelevant
to larger questions, and 2) not always already interpenetrated with
talk about goals. There seems to be a pretty obvious dialectic between
goals and tactics, such that discussing the one is always at least
implicitly discussing the other.

And, at any rate, as a virtual collective of *writers* and, dare I say
it, thinker-types, our goals *are* to think clearly and critically, among
other things, about tactics and goals of the left generally.

Coming up with good plans to beat back the Horowitzes of the world is
a very good thing, in my view. Especially given his overt commitments,
not only to *opposing* reparations but to intimidating and silencing those
who support them.

So, in case I'm being too subtle, how about we *talk* about the reparations
argument, pro and con, for a while here? I know Bijan wants to write about
Randall Robinson's *The Gift*; and I've been working on some arguments about
the ethics of remedying historical evil generally, as well as having spent
a good bit of time with Conyer's legislative proposals, and I know that others
here have valuable contributions to make.

It's a great issue to organize around, particularly since it so nicely
helps divide sheeps and goats. There are even some novel pro-reparations
arguments that might be attractive to conservatives.

Kendall