Lefty Despair

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Sep 18 14:22:38 PDT 2002



>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Why are so many LBO-talkers obsessed with finding
>> fault with "the
>> left"? If leftists themselves don't like "the
>> left," why should
>> anyone else? Self-flagellation and self-deprecation
>> are
>> unattractive. It makes sense to flog "the left"
>> ritually once we
>> cease to consider ourselves leftists, but,
>> otherwise, it's
>> self-defeating. Suppose we are interested in
>> winning friends and
>> influencing people, as everyone here says we should
>> be; then it makes
>> sense to stop saying that "the left sucks," which is
>> like a salesman
>> saying, "Never buy this product -- I won't use it
>> myself."
>> --
> > Yoshie
>
>And we can go on pretending that the Left is strong
>and doing things it should be doing. Dare not
>criticize oneself! It makes you look bad, even if you
>are doing wrong, you can do no wrong!
>
>=====
>Kevin Dean

It doesn't make sense to go to the opposite extreme either. It is irrational, though, for a leftist to make it sound like we might as well write off "the left," unless he really wants his audience to do so (which, of course, isn't your intention -- your website suggests that you're a fine activist on the left). Criticisms of other leftists' practice should be fact-based. If you have better ideas than what other leftists are doing, you don't wanna say to them, "You're wrong!" unless you want to burn bridges. You want to make suggestions for improvement in such a way that other leftists would think as if they themselves had come up with the ideas to begin with. I'm not saying I can do this well myself now, but I've seen others do it gracefully, which I would like to learn to do. -- Yoshie

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