Re: [ox-en] Re: [pox] Important: English list
- From: Thomas Berker <thomas.berker hf.ntnu.no>
- Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 12:34:19 +0100
Hi Niall, hi list
I am glad that the English list exists and that it is different from the
German one, of which I am a long-term member.
Some of the things happening here now - namely that the maintainer is
trying to exclude (certain) politics from debate (and certain not) - have
happened on the German list earlier, resulting in me and some others
withdrawing at least to a certain extent. This maintainer, Stefan Mn, is
just terribly afraid that some political activists could capture his
precious baby [ox[-en]] and malfeed it - because they don't understand its
'real' nature. Stefan Mn has made it clear several times that he will try
to avoid everything, which could scare away one certain target group: the
imaginary group of software developers contributing to Free Software.
According to surveys, this group consists of a large fraction of explicitly
non-political individuals, some of them tired of activists and activism,
some of them arguing (neo)liberal, some of them do just not care, etc.
Everyone happy with an [ox[-en]] that is avoiding to talk politics for the
most, will be happy with this list further on. I doubt that another
[ox[-en]] is possible maintained by Stefan Mn. Those not happy with it have
already gone or will have to move on (please leave a note).
However, I have another problem with the state of the English list in the
way you, Niall, frame it.
--On 15. mars 2004 23:57 [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED] s_fsfeurope2 nedprod.com wrote:
I'll go one further again - most of anything written in German is
permanently lost to the world and is of little use to anyone who
isn't German. English is a major world language with at least 350
million native speakers and several billion overall. Therefore
painful as it might be to accept, the most productive way to do
Oekonux discussions is in English. Or even Spanish. But not German.
Talking and writing English is definitely not the most productive way to do
discussions to me. Sorry, nut at all. No and it never will be, even if I
should become more proficient (after lots of work), I always will lack the
ease with which you guys switch the tone and play with words and allude to
meanings, write or quote short stories, etc, abilities, which would be
necessary to to take part in your productive discussion. Switching to
Spanish would make it even worse, and switching to German, is of course
only a partial solution either.
And I speak for quite many people on this globe here - which actually feels
great ;-)
This said, a majority of all philosophical advances in the last two
hundred years have come from Germans.
Lets talk about language and German (struggles for) hegemony? Or: What does
the "German" Kant in Koenigsberg?
They are uniquely able to
advance things.
Rubbish! I am not!
However, it seems to be that a fundamental tenet of
what Oekonux seeks is inclusion of everyone across language
differences.
Yes, and here I think mutual respect and "heteroglossia" and "translation"
and "creole" and other ways to avoid the hegemony of one way of saying
things are more crucial issues than to call for _one_ universal English
language. True inclusion takes everyone's specificities serious and what is
more specific about a person than his or her language?
Beste Gruesse, Thomas Berker
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: projekt oekonux.de