Nancy Bauer/Dennis Perrin wrote:
>
> Yes, Carrol, they do have every right to be as prudish and as humorless and
> as pedantic as they possibly can -- just as you enjoy your right
> (beautifully on display here) to be cranky and predictably contrarian. Ain't
> life grand?
Actually, this is just a parenthesis from something I've been thinking about for several years but have never formulated to my own satisfaction. I won't try to argue it now but I'll give it a sort of title: "The essential incoherence
and bad faith of almost all criticism of the left by leftists." Someone says smugly, You leftists think you know so much more that the masses." That someone is arrogantly claiming to know so much more than other leftists. It is also a lie because that person *knows* that his/her basic princples compel him/her to believe that he/she knows so much more than all those people who approve of lynching or all those people who engage in fag-bashing or all those people who approve vigorously of humanitarian bombing or all those people who go around thinking that other people shouldn't have any fun. . . . . .
All attacks on Dogmatism reveal themselves on inspection to be the worst sort of egotistical dogmatism. Thank myself that I am not as others.
Carrol