I can also understand why European-born lefties, such as Hitchens or for that matter this writer, become so disillusioned with the US left (point of clarification, unlike Hitchens I do NOT contemplate defecting to the opposing camp.) They seem to mis-apply the European political categories, which have ample room for the left as being a separate-yet-part-of-the-mainstream force, to the US, where the mainstream left is difficult to distinguish from the Democratic Party, and what is labeled left is mainly fringe cults. As a result they treat these fringe leftish cults as if they were mainstream left and become progressively annoyed with their fundamentalism and irrationality.
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And here you state, perhaps for the first time with admirable clarity, the source of your demonstrated fixation on challenging what you perceive to be dominant lefty preoccupations.
Recall the debate that unfolded following the shooting of the Brazilian man in London by police: your assumption was that every and all challenges to this act came from an irrational attachment to romantic notions of, as you so often phrase it, "da people" and a knee jerk rejection of police action against terrorism.
This prevented you from, at first, understanding that when some people, such as yours truly, questioned this, it was informed by an analysis of the operational effectiveness of the 'shoot-to-kill' method and the predictable likelihood of accidental deaths at the hands of nervous, poorly prepared and, in more than a few cases, racially biased officers.
In other words, you elevated irrational arguments over rational ones and chose to debate against irrational points as if they were the only ones on offer.
There are many other examples.
My question to you is this: why continue to fixate on the, as you write, "fringe cults", the un-serious, the lost in myth instead of those who're trying to understand matters with as much sense and real-world information as possible?
.d.