Re: [Marxism] Huntington

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
> I am not sure whether the indecipherable is a reference to the 
> politics or to the messed up formatting. In any case, I just unsubbed 
> Hartal for the latter offense. Les and I have tried to wean him from 
> hotmail to gmail to get rid of his formatting problems, but he 
> refused. Maybe we are anal retentive or something but we can't stand 
> poorly formatted posts. And that's that.


as he skulked away in disgust, Abu told us to get our Mailman setup 
hotmail-compatible.  after thinking about it a few moments, i realized 
Mailman is not interfering with the formatting of emails forwarded to 
subscribers save that we require plain text posts. We do mess a bit 
during the archiving, but i fixed that recently to deal with the 
one-long-line problem.

on formatting: the people i read most frequently on Marxmail -- Joaquin, 
Fred, Lou, Mark, Mike, Carrol, are a few that come to mind -- tend to 
take their time and write a post with some content in it and they rarely 
have formatting problems. i think people who want to use Marxmail as a 
kind of off-the-cuff roundtable replete with quick quips and forwarded 
stuff do not take the time to write up something of general interest to 
the list. so, from my point of view, the focus on formatting is intended 
to get people to write legibly and understandably to circa 1200 
subscribers plus countless web-based readers.

in  a bar or restaurant, if you say something that cannot be heard or 
comprehended, you get asked to "say again", and most people when asked 
to repeat will take the time to speak more clearly. should be the same 
here. the truth is, unless you have lots of free time on your hands, 
there is very little time to read poorly formatted posts with minimal or 
vague content in an attempt to extract signal from the noise. and the 
tools to properly format are free and at hand at no cost but a little 
setup time.

Plea: guilty, to anal retentive on formatting.

Les


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