From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Jun 05 2002 - 01:06:46 MDT
At 03:37 PM 6/5/02 +0930, Emlyn wrote:
[Olga:]
>> > >No, Techno, this was a very, very bad point - and totally
>> erroneous.
[Max:]
>> > Yes, I'm totally, totally certain that Olga is utterly and
>> >completely forever and ever wrong wrong wrong!!!
>Just in case this was missed: I don't think that Max is saying that you are
>wrong here (although he may well believe that you are). He is just mirroring
>the language you used with Techno; he is criticizing your unsupported
>assertion that Techno's point was very, very bad and totally erroneous.
Aaargh. This is presumably what comes of people dipping in and out of
threads without paying attention to what earlier people actually
*wrote*--understandable though that is, life being short (currently).
How could Olga's statement be "unsupported"? She was simply stressing that
Techno imputed words to her she quite plainly hadn't written. Then she went
on to make an additional claim: that this mis-reading might reveal
something interesting in itself (an appeal to a Zeitgeist political
unconscious at work, perhaps).
Yes, Max's tone (I believe) was one of medium levity, playing on Olga's
diction. But everyone keeps ignoring *why* she found Techno's
representation `totally erroneous'--NOT because she preens herself as
omniscient, or whatever, but because, oddly enough, Techno's representation
of what she wrote WAS `totally erroneous'.
And the irony is that Techno apparently figured he was making a peace
offering, in granting that at least one aspect of Olga's case had merit
(something to do with black people suffering from unfair amounts of
poverty). Which ENTIRELY missed Olga's central point, which is that blacks
in the USA at that time *suffered bigoted treatment independent of such
markers as their cash value*. This, at any rate, is my reading, and I'm
astonished that anyone would have trouble parsing it this way.
Damien Broderick
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