kelley wrote:
> i love how it's a okay to attribute to people a mental disorder because you
> don't like their habits. just like i love how people who are opposed to
> homosexuality are called homophobic as if they have some sort of irrational
> fear....
This I agree with. Despite my skittishness at multiplying "isms" I have accepted "heterosexism" in lieu of "homophobia" because it's a bad idea to ascribe vicious political/social attitudes to personal defects of any kind and mental illnesses in particular. (According to Jonathan Edwards in "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" God suffered from anthrophobia just as many humans suffer from arachniphobia <sp?>.)
> if people are buying into the right wing thingy wojtek, then it is partly
> because the left has "made" it a rightwing cause. and that was my point!
I guess I haven't followed the thread closely enough to understand this laconic statement, but I distrust the implicit principle. There is a current thread on the sixties-l list re how the 'movement' of the 'sixties "turned people off" by its excesses. But this is a false (I think seriously false) argument -- not because there were no excesses or because those excesses did not do damage, but because the argument implies that there can conceivably be a left movement -- or any kind of popular movement -- that doesn't have excesses. Excesses (Sparticists, Weathermen, SLA, actually ill people like JJ of the Weathermen, vegetarians, what have you) are simply part of the weather -- and a left that can not find a way to prosper within a climate of left excesses is a left that ought to stay home in bed. Demanding that there be no excesses is as silly as demanding to go ice fishing in Florida in July.
Carrol