> Thanks for that SA, it's interesting although I think it takes
> Hitchens way too seriously.
That's actually why I liked the essay. I think Hitchens, despite having now become largely a clown, should be taken seriously. He's a crying on the inside kind of clown.
> Who are these Platypus people, do you
> know?
>
They seem to be based on a core of grad students of Moishe Postone at Chicago who say their touchstones are Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Adorno. Their project is based on the slogan "The Left is dead, long live the Left" and they seem to have a particular animus against the 60's New Left and against Third Worldism. As for their own politics - the poor dears, when you strip away all their benighted grad school verbiage, it apparently boils down to the idea that socialism means people should work less and have a guaranteed income. Which is fine, but they mostly seem devoted to finding ever more grandiose and opaque ways of saying that, without making much effort to elucidate how it might actually be brought about. Still, it's nice to see the young people getting involved. (By which I mean people our age.)
SA