mck@ratex.UUCP (Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan) (05/11/85)
Lines marked '>>' are those of Janet; lines marked '>' are those of Richard Carnes. >>I find it strange that Dan's articles always make it to cbosgd, cbscc, utzoo, >>alice and so-on, but no reply is heard from most of his opponents when their >>positions begin to look untenable (when I made this point to dan, he insisted >>that one of the reasons that Carnes dropped out of the discussion on marxist >>metaphysics was that any further discussion would probably require regurgita- >>ting huge excerpts from Hegel, but that doesn't explain the rest). > >You can't draw any conclusions from silence on the net. Most of us >have little time for the netnews, especially if the topics being >discussed are not directly related to our studies or profession. (A >good thing, too -- otherwise there would be 500 articles/day in >net.politics alone.) You can't draw conclusion from an instance of silence, but you can draw conclusions from a pattern of silence. > As a grad student in econ, Dan seems to derive >more marginal utility from writing articles for net.politics* than >most of us. That conclusion is unjustified; there is no basis for interpersonal comparison of marginal utility. >I was under the impression that *Dan* had dropped out of that >discussion because he had been soundly thrashed. Hardly. You tried to argue by presenting a quote of Engels which did not explicitly refer to the metaphysical views that I assert Marx and Engels held. I pointed-out the inadequacy of such an argument, and nothing was heard from you subsequently. If you think that an opponent is thrashed by presenting inadequate arguments and then bailing out, then you can trash any opponent in the world, but your alleged victory will be a farce. > Oh well -- I'm sure >Janet believes that her hero trounced the opposition, and I'm touched >by her hero-worship. Janet is not taken to hero-worship, and has been known to be quite nasty to me. Back later, DKMcK