Book People Archive

Re: Please share this with all colleagues and people you know that may help 

> why are u.s. social scientists studying such arcane topics,
> when a full-scale analysis of the corruption of our own
> political and economic systems, as well as our imperialism
> and global war-making actions, is so much more important?

My question is, why are these putative public-service messages coming
to us via the book-people list?  Didn't MH raise the topic of spam on
this list just last week?

Bill

[Moderator: Tangential posts can be tricky to deal with, and tend to 
 be present to some degree in any book-related book group, if for
 no other reason than that books themselves are about all kinds of
 other things.  (In places like rec.arts.books, the "other things"
 end up dominating many of the threads.  That doesn't tend to happen so
 much here, nor would I want it to, but on the other hand, book discussions
 that completely avoid "other topics" are kind of sterile, and leave out
 an important dimension of *why* we care about books in the first place.)

 I generally let through tangential posts that seem likely to advance
 book-centered discussions, and not just lead to further tangents and
 noise.  In practice, usually there at least needs to be some explicit
 attempt to tie in the tangents to books.  In the previous case there wasn't,
 but I was already planning a post on what I was doing with current-events
 cataloging and book-listing priorities, and part of Bowerbird's post
 served as a useful jumping-off point.  So it got through this time,
 whereas in other situations the same post might not have.

 Bowerbird has another followup in the queue that does more explicitly
 bring the topic back to books (comparing spending in Iraq with
 spending on book digitization).  That will be going through too, since
 it raises issues of priorities for online literature that can be discussed
 regardless of one's opinions about the justification or value of
 US military action in Iraq.  And it's possible to hold a conversation
 about the former while not getting sidetracked into a debate on
 the latter.  Folks here can express their opinions on the latter
 (pro or con) as appropriate in a the midst of a book discussion, but posts
 that are mainly debating the latter are generally best made in another forum.

 Thanks! - JMO]