Oh my, Carrol, this was unexpected. You know, I immediately dropped my membership in the local spiritualist society and will limit my communing with spectres and nonesuch. And I now have a steady supply of Beano. Now if only we could convince Kelley that flatulence, water sports, and grooming proclivities knows no gender boundaries, socially constructed or otherwise.
But you ought to direct your ire to Hitchens and leave us small fry alone.
As to the other thing that provoked your wrath, well, opinions differ on the meaning of references to a/the left. Or it all depends on what the meaning of is is. Since I suspect you operate with a far more restrictive definition, I can understand your disagreement. I wonder if this restrictive definition is of the kind that is ever in search of presumably a mass movement bound by principles uniting theory and practice and with a particular set of leaders. If so, then this high benchmark will be a source of perennial source of disappointment. Indeed when has "The Left" ever existed? And historical sociology, disabled by its empiricist tendencies, might still instruct us that social movements are rarely equal to the social movement organizations that make them up. Shouldn't we be sensitive to the periodization of social movement activity and how vocabularies of action are dependent on a host of other demographic, geographic, social, economic, political forces?
Notwithstanding a theoretical difference, you're a far more proficient student of rhetoric than I am. Aren't the similarities among a body of opinion and thought indicative of something significant - a shared vocabulary of motives, say? In this sense, a left is a reference point in a matrix of ideas, not a unified set of bodies in motion. Hmmm...looks too idealist....
Then again your insistence that there is no Left, even in some bland metaphorical sense, looks to me like a position gripped by its own mythology and that drives the emotive nature of your responses.
Then yet again, this is the stuff of proto-organizational or movement politics and your insistence that its nonsense to refer to a left makes me think, well, you and I are in the same room together but you're eyeing those walls and thinking they're three too many for me.
No, Carrol, there is no Left as such. And I can live another day to take those long walks on the beach (actually a tick infested salt marsh that stinks).
Dennis