I am of an opinion that the bitter and marginal spewing out venom on a mailing list all the time (rather than erupting once in a while) are not having much "fun." Why sign up for a leftist listserv if you can't tolerate leftists who populate it or can't take much interest in what they say (other than as occasions for venting rage)?
To me, some of the reasons why I'm politically on the left (in cyberspace and the real world) include:
(A) I like a good number of leftists today (at the very least I like them much better than liberals and rightists), so I want to hang out with them;
and
(B) I like a good number of leftists of the past, so I like to discuss them with other leftists today. Justin wrote:
***** Marxism has been a collective project, a conversation involving, among others, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, and Lukacs, whose voices radicals should heed, and extending up through the present. There is a danger, if people ceased to think of themselves as Marxists, that this conversation would be relegated to the museum of intellectual history, raided occasionally for an idea or tool.
<http://pulpculture.org/MarxAfterMarxism.html> *****
I like a conversation involving left-wing radicals (including but not limited to Marxists) of the past and the present, famous, infamous, little known, or mostly forgotten, thinking about their hopes and fears, ambitions and disappointments, what they managed to achieve, what they couldn't and left us to do. Carrol keeps saying -- and I agree with him -- that we don't really have a "Left" as a political movement to reckon with now. Nonetheless, we do have a rich and diverse left-wing tradition in which I'd like to participate -- that's the joy of the left to me.