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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (24989)	7/24/2006 8:03:27 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542525

Thanks. I didn't take it as an insult just a bit of forgetfulness. That comment struck me as perfectly appropriate for private e-mails but not when the third party being talked about sees it and knows its wrong. My reaction was also to the audience as a reminder that we be careful when we characterize one another's positions. As for the argument about the Times and bias, I simply see it as quite complicated in a very healthy way. Whereas it's not complicated with simple ideologically based news outlets like Fox and the Washington Times. Now if they said to the public, look we are more like the National Standard or The Nation, than we are like a good newspaper, that would be fine. The problem lies, so far as I'm concerned, in the hyprocisy of pretending. One addition to this discussion. Very strong ideological commitments do not block "getting the story right." More than one very serious academic sociological factoid type has raved over Leon Trotsky's volumes on the Russian Revolution. Trotsky claimed he got it right because of his political commitments. He said he had to know exactly what was happening, what had happened, in order to change it. At the time he was writing that, it was the bleakest of realism. I'm joining Dale's side of the argument that what he calls partisanship is compatible with strong commitments to narrative accuracy. One more illustration. In the 60s the New York Review of Books featured several articles by E. P. Thompson and Lawrence Stone. Each was an extremely eminent historian and some of their work covered the same period in English history. Thompson was very much the lefty, the political activist, the origin of the social history movement; while Stone was a creature of the historical establishment. But those articles/debates were elegant for their joint commitment to the art/craft of doing history right. For anyone interested in discussions of the actual practice of scholarship between two scholars of very different political convictions, it's a classic.