Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> What's the point of writing a humorless jeremiad that complains about
> humorlessness, a pleasureless jeremiad that complains about
> pleasurelessness? In that case, I can only say to the messenger,
> "Well, speak for yourself." If you want to celebrate wit and skewer
> the witless, you want to do so with wit. The same goes for pleasure.
> Lead by example.
>
I'm beginning to tune out. But reading this post provoked an interesting notion. If you read through this bundle of threads on lbo you find that the whiners have _nothing to say_ about left politics or left theory. They are reduced to analyzing the alleged personality and/or character of various (mostly unnamed) "leftists." The marxism list has become something like People magazine, reduced to chit-chat on the sins etc. of various conservative celebrities. LBO lately has also found personalities (but in this case vaguely hypothesized and unnamed ones) the only topic very worthy of conversation. DP, for example, has never analyzed a specific "Stalinist" principle concretely defended by nameable people, but merely raved that there are a bunch of nasty stalinists out there.
It's a rough life, isn't it.
Carrol
P.S. The usual response to any specific proposition is a remark on the tone (i.e., on the supposed personality of the person advancing the proposition). But I think this has become so deeply engrained a habit that those victim to it can no longer recognize the difference between an argument over principle and an attack on a personality.
There is, of course, no Left to attack, so they can only attack the personality of creations of their own vivid imaginations.