<html> <head> <style> P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body { FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY:Tahoma } </style> </head> <body> Sean wrote:   > That was sort of my point: Postel wants to villify "the Left" for not > helping, but at the same time wants to make it clear that Iranian > intellectuals don't want the help of "Leftists." And all this at the > same time that he wants to say that the mainstream US discussion about > bombing Iran is a separate issue altogether. It's fairly convoluted > position to take when all he really needed to do was inform people > more.   I suspect the convolution results from the desire to communicate, without explication, that the Left has to *become liberal* in order to participate in Danny's cause, and should do so if it wants to pass his morality test.  It's a real laugh, him raising existential bad faith.  His noisy inarticulacy, aside from reflecting bad faith in the conventional sense, also describes precisely the kind of Sartrean bad faith he refers to: he knows he is not of the left, but behaves as if he is compelled to pretend that his critique is immanent.  As if his current preference for liberal rights discourse is somehow forced upon him by the situation in Iran, as if he had no choice but to abandon his past radicalism (which he ostentatiously references), and no alternative but to ritually denounce the left.  It is forced on him, by virtue of his association with the dissident Iranian intelligentsia and their distance from the Western Left, and therefore he is not responsible for it. <hr />Stay up-to-date with your friends through the Windows LiveT Spaces friends list. <a href='http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.aspx&mkt=en-us' target='_new'>Check it out!</a></body> </html>