>"The Left" is not a coherent entity.
yeah, but you're griping at someone who knows that and who has been frequently enough told he is not part of the left.
some folks know that the left isn't a coherent entity; others lament it.
>Religious pacifists,
>for example, are not going to join anything devoted to justice
>in the sense of selective killing, and I'm certainly not
>willing to kick them out of the commune. You may sneer at
>these people -- how many divisions has the Catholic Worker?
>-- but consider this: no one knows how much repression is
>going to come down, and these people know how to do time.
religious pacifists are the core of any struggle for peace. they better than anyone i've worked with, know how to work with a variety of others. no one kicks them out of a struggle for peace. what nathan is talking about are the people who show up at our meetings who are little torn, uncertain and confused. they think a war against nations is wrong. they think shrub is wrong to divide the world into those who are for us and those who are against us. they don't want to see innocent people hurt. they often don't know much about US foreign policies, etc.
they come to the meetings to learn, motivated by their sense that, if anything, this even taught them that it would be wrong to behave in the same way that terrorists did.
now, they might not be as intellectually advanced as you and carrol are with your deeply held and well-thought out arguments against the US criminal justice system. they might not see anything wrong with wanting to put the terrorists on trial. haranguing them for not agreeing with your views of the criminal justice system wouldn't be especially productive.