Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Some will be headed North by Northwest this weekend to recharge their batteries, but paint me a doubting Thomas when it comes to the efficacy of harangues on the "present crisis" for clearing mental cobwebs.

Thanks for keeping this place going! It can seem so obvious among the company on this site that the Dems are in no way representative of what those on the left profess to care about and are actually as uncaring, blood thirsty and elitist as those on the right appear, but as unbelievable as it is, it's still not common knowledge. Or rather, the cognitive dissonance has been far harder than anticipated. So it's great that there is something like this out there.

sk
did you help organize this pink festival ???

quite a list of topics

who sponsored this giga gig ???

inquiring paranoids want to know

I myself am fleeing the UWS to spend America's Birthday in lovely Montreal. MJS, Don't worry if you haven't been inspired much recently, just write something when the spirit moves. After IOZ (RIP), I don't think I could take it if you cashed out.

I asked it once here a while back, but anyone know a good paper or blog to keep tabs on NYC life or politics? I know MJS has a blog about how he hates cars or something, but that he doesn't update it very much...

MJS, though "one feels after a while that one has said everything one has to say, a hundred times over" --- keep saying it. It bears repeating.

Keep this blog going. Among many other things, it's a refuge.

"It's a little difficult to keep this blog thing going -- one feels after a while that one has said everything one has to say, a hundred times over. Perhaps a few days or weeks at sea will recharge my batteries."

I ran into that same feeling a few months back. So I went on a drunken spree... running off to Maine in a sail boat is probably better for your liver.

...this pink festival?

Not me, you need to have already drunk deep from the fruit punch bowl of the Old Moor and his prophets to have a good time at this type of phrase-fest ("without illusions", "concrete", "crisis",...). At least there's more humor, witting or not, at jamborees where Don King lookalikes hold forth.

Thank you sk -

The essential precepts descended from Luxemburg rather than Lenin. They consisted of three or four central tenets. These were that, contrary to the babble of smart-asses like Crosland, Britain was still a class society in every sense of the term; a central fact that the Labour and Communist Parties played down for reasons of opportunism. That the capitalist system had only temporarily stabilised itself, and that the stabilisation was not by means of Keynesian welfarism but by reliance on a permanent war economy which proved the continuing irrationality of this mode of production. That the Soviet Union and its satellites were not the affirmation but the negation of socialism, resting on a system of ‘state capitalism’. That while the globe was ruled in this way, it was idle and romantic to expect anything of peasant and Third World revolutions.

What do you think of that excerpt?

Juan, talking the talk is one thing, walking it another, especially when you're dealing with "extremely talented polemicists". Personally, I found the letters to the editor, especially from Richard Gott, more enlightening on the polemics of an earlier era which are still raging in some out of the way ghetto or two.

talking the talk is one thing, walking it another......

absolutely and when i began 'walking it' in parts of Guatemala [Peten, Alta Verapaz, Q'uiche] during the late 1970s, i certainly could not even 'talk the talk' - experience pushed me into Marx's writings which became part of a second stint at university.

i did meet cesar montes [macias] a couple of times down south and, years later, a few people with the SWP -- Que Diferencia!

anyway thanks for the response and yes, i also appreciate Richard Gott's letter.