Re: New 5-part MLM-Rolf Thought!!(or, the quintessence of cyber-idealist thinking)

[m-14970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Hugh Rodwell)]

Gina writes eloquently of the problems of knowing who you're dealing with
on the net. She declares:

>The fact is that these words in cyberspace prove NOTHING about the
>real material world.  The words of the  person who spends every
>waking hour transfixed in front of the screen appear no different than
>those of the person who taps out a few paragraphs after coming in
>exhausted from a long day of tramping from one end of the city to the
>other passing out literature, organizing a demonstration, editing a
>newsletter, etc.
>
>These words in cyberspace give no indication as to whether the
>ideas expressed here have ever stood the test of practice.  Especially
>when the various contributors live and work in far-flung areas of the
>world, it's easy to simply lie about what you do in the rest of your life.
>Who will know?  Who can check up on you?

Just a couple of brief remarks.

1) It's *not* 'easy simply to lie about what you do in the rest of your
life'. For one or two postings perhaps, but after that it takes someone
with marketable literary skills to make a fake identity stick, and they
don't grow on trees.

2) Who will know? Experience counts. After a certain number of meetings at
various levels, a certain degree of different kinds of activity, you get a
feeling for who does things in a certain kind of way, who talks with this
or that tone, who is serious and so on. In a forum like the list, there is
a collective with a fairly solid core of this kind of experience, and
sufficient disagreement for any fake to be put to the test rather
vigorously. Remember Mimi ciao4now Laszlo, bless her heart?

It is very difficult to create a unanimous witch-hunting hysteria against
anyone here. There have been plenty of attempts, with the most vicious
charges being made -- accusations of being a cop among the favourites. Over
time it is often revealed (as in the Maoist wars) that even the most
serious charges are bandied about on the most trivial personal grounds, the
'black vomit' and 'you are a cop' invective just being hurled at whoever
disagrees for the moment. So be patient, sit tight, let the mob howl and
follow your course. Principles win in the long run. The longer the time
scale, the more people will know who's serious and who's got a  good line.

3) Who can check up on you? Well, as emerged in the brief exchanges re AOL
anonymous accounts recently, people with a knowledge of computers and the
net can check up on you, as well as the thought police of course. It's not
too easy, but we've got people on the list and access to others off it who
could do a pretty thorough job of checking if the need arose.

Far flung we might be, inaccessible we're not. Just to take Sweden. If any
of us were interested, it would be fairly easy to check out if we were
real, where we lived and what we did.

4) So all in all, I don't think there's any great need for such a
pessimistic interpretation as Gina implies. Words tell you more about the
person using them than you'd imagine.

Some people are harder than others to pin down, of course, but this is
usually because of some kind of professional experience with words. The
difficulty often just boils down to the wordsmith being very careful about
the choice of topic, the amount written and the pretensions open or hidden
in the piece written.

The most canny of us in this respect must be Doug H. The only question on
which he drops his guard is Robert M -- the intense hostility he has
manifested over time begs big questions. Others have shown hostility in the
same direction, but their attitude is pretty firmly rooted in clear
political disagreements. Doug is so canny about declaring where he stands,
that political disagreement must be deduced indirectly.


Enough on this.

Thanks again for an open, non-hysterical, reasoned contribution. Someone
arguing like this can be worked with -- even despite big disagreements on
very basic issues.



Cheers,

Hugh




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