WSN and long posts

Friends

        As list-owner and manager of WSN, I must make daily decisions on
whether to allow certain posts to appear on the list.  Most posts do not
require my approval, so they appear without my prior knowledge. But the
software that runs the system has settings that require my approval when
those settings are violated.  Hence I must decide on whether to allow any
messages from non-subscribers to be posted (much of which is advertising),
as well as approve posting requests for messages that exceed a certain
length.
        So when Arno's series was posted, each component exceeded the
normal length limit and was shot over to me for the ultimate decision.  As
I usually do in these circumstances, I skimmed through the material to
check for topical relevance and educational value.  It was soon obvious
that every submission in the series was precisely appropriate to our
list, so I approved them all.  And I would do so again for any other
equivalent series, whether or not I agreed with the contents.  While I
would not want all posts to exceed more than 20->50 KB, it has been my
conviction since Chris and I started WSN 10 years ago that it would serve
as an educational vehicle first.  That includes the dessemination of the
foundational tenets of the W-S perspective as well as high-level exchanges
between abstract thinkers.  Some of us may not think about it, but WSN is
a GLOBAL resource that makes available information within the core to those 
outside it who find it useful for their own research, teaching, and
political work. Hence I enthusiastically support the posting of
spreadsheets containing numerical data as well as the research that Arno
has recently shared with us.  Also, works and ideas in progress posted for
advice and helpful criticism from others are welcome.  Less important but
still useful are notifications of conferences and new book publications.
        The entire thrust of these priorities is to proliferate and
democratize the critique of the global capitalist empire, and solicit as
broad a range of contributions to that critique as possible, while
simultaneously instructing those new to the perspective in an informal and
comfortable way.  Sometimes very long messages serve this goal so well
that their length is outweighed by their content.  This was the same
decision I made when I posted a reprint from SCIENCE magazine on the
collapse of tributary empires being attributable to prolonged draughts
instead of internal social conflicts.
        However, I do agree with some that an advance warning of perhaps
24 hours might be useful to warn list-members that a large file is coming.
        Finally, I strongly believe that the posting of news about class
struggle within the system is legitimate insofar as it is typically
suppressed by the corporate media and often exemplifies in concrete terms 
the principles of power, domination, and hegemony so central to the
theory.  Such stories help to "bring it all back home."

Peter Grimes