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