At 07:53 PM 10/7/99 -0400, Soren wrote:

> ... Restricting the forum in other ways would
>seem to me to violate important criteria of free political debate.  The
>Chomsky forum, of all places, should encourage free political debate.
>Civility, collaboration, mutual respect, and a sense of common purpose would
>also be nice, but not at the expense of freedom, in my opinion.

The Chomsky forum is, as far as I know, perfectly open to free political
debate - especially as it relates to 'the philosphy and work of'. However
this freedom is going to waste as no-one's engaging in such debate. I fully
sympathise with those who feel for their delete keys; one-upmanship posited
on pedantry is not political debate, has nothing to do with Chomsky, and
was not what I was looking for when I subscribed. I remember fondly the
posts of Tresy Kilbourn (sp?), which did generate some semblance of
political debate, but the list has been steadily degenerating and I don't
remember reading any interesting points in the past while.

So I'm all in favour of restricting freedom of speech in instances where
the forum or medium is inappropriate, for example pyramid-scheme spammers,
or hard-core porn in comics. Of course, I fully support the freedom of
antagonists to express and expound opposing views as long as they like, but
given the reaction of people on the list, it seems obvious that using
interpersonal email would be more considerate.

Anyway, point 3 in F. Leon's post mentioned the sharing of resources
relating to the politics of the man. Someone mentioned Stratfor
(www.stratfor.com) recently, which came as a revelation; I also use Z
Magazine (www.zmag.org - I strongly recommend it) and, occasionally,
Foreign Policy in Focus (www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org). Does anyone have
any other resources I should know about? I'd be especially interested in a
site with a right-wing / establishment / reactionary perspective, for the
sake of comparison. Also, any sites with good introduction to his
linguistic theory would be interesting. I think that someone once mentioned
to me that Derrida (or perhaps Foucault?) disagreed with the idea of brains
preprogrammed to be receptive to linguistic structures - anyone know the
argument for this view?

best regards,
Hugh Denman