<html> Doug, I carry a few dozen photocopies of Rorty's essay "Private Irony and Liberal Hope" (Chapter four in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity ) around with me and pass them out whenever that happens.  It leaves me slightly less dispirited and alienated. Cliff At 12:12 PM 9/20/02 -0400, you wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>You can say, obviously, that such and such leftists are humorless, self-righteous prigs, naming names, without the statement turning back upon you; but you can't be a leftist and say that "the left in general are a bunch of humorless and self-righteous losers," without a reflexivity problem.</blockquote> When you make jokes that editors of leftish publications delete, or make observations at a meeting that fellow attendees find sacrilegous, you don't feel a "reflexivity problem" so much as a sense of dispirited alienation. Doug </blockquote></html>