*See also, who are those MIM guys/gals anyway?

*Why do you say there is a "science" of politics?

*Listen to mousnonya@yahoo.com's videotape of MIM's leader in RealMedia (1.2meg)

"My motives must remain in the depository of my own breast. My arguments will be open to all and may be judged by all." --Federalist Paper #1, 1787, by Publius, the pseudonym of the author of the Federalist Papers, considered by all American founders to be the most important document after the "Declaration of Independence," and the "Constitution." (Historians later determined Alexander Hamilton was the author of the above quote.)

MIM is struggling mightily to raise the scientific level of discussion. We find that people who start asking questions about persynality never get into the substance of political questions.

The root error of most critics along these lines is known in logic as "ad hominem" criticism. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ among numerous other places explains this problem.

Frankly someone may be a coward and still be correct that 2+2=4. That is the nature of truth, that it stands independently of whatever the motivation for saying it was. It is the people who cannot win an argument because there is no logic, theory or data on their side that raise criticisms like this one, but we are not going to be diverted from putting forward the truth by fundamentally illogical people.

We are not usually interested in having biographies written about our leaders except those in prison and some other circumstances when we need to provide people a model life to follow or think about. We are also not interested in the usual discussion of whether someone's persynal life fits their politics. See for example our whole critique of lifestyle politics as not being politics at all.

So aside from being a bad security practice, talking about oneself often distracts from the task we have set for ourselves which is to "build public opinion and the independent institutions of the oppressed to seize power." We realize there are countless parlour intellectuals who would prefer to talk biography than substance, but we do not have interest in them.

MIM's newspaper, theory magazine and website only claim to be influencing public opinion. Mostly we do not make much of a claim one way or another as to whether we are "brave" or not, because it's not really relevant to our work. It is relevant in our recruiting and doing our own work but usually not in our public discussion.

We do not ask for "trust" in the way that some people vote for candidates who are their neighbors. We ask people to find independent ways of checking what MIM is saying and we try to provide answers on how to do that. That is the nature of science.

We find that most people who make this criticism have read countless famous authors who used pseudonyms--ranging from Lu Xun to Mao but also the founding "fathers"--the American revolutionaries Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. Very rarely do we find anyone making a consistent cause against authors using pseudonyms. Quite often though we do meet people who are pre-scientifically opposed to communism and use this sort of line as an excuse for their own failure to get into substance questions. Criticizing MIM for not signing real names while enjoying other authors who use pseudonyms is hypocrisy.