> ravi wrote:
>
> Rather than cultivating Left alternatives [CLIP]
>
> And just who is going to be the minister plenipotentiary for this mystical
> nation, "the left," for the purposes of negotiations regarding those
> alliances?
>
> All propositions of what "the left" should do are sheer nonsense: The Left
> does not exist as an agent that can go this or do that.
>
But I did not write “the Left” at all! I wrote “we”:
=== relevant part of my post ===
> Rather than cultivating Left alternatives within the system, we should enter existing institutions (and I mean Goldman Sachs or the justice system, not the Democratic Party) and find ways to subvert them through a few clean surgical actions or use the gains to alter politics and public perception.
=== end relevant part ==========
I guess “Left alternatives” suggests the existence of “the Left”, especially with my capitalisation. But the “Left” in “Left alternatives” wasn’t meant to be a noun. My later proposition applied to us, the concrete us, here on this list. I am literally suggesting that Joanna, Kelley, Colin, other geeks, and non-geeks, band with me to create a "cloud computing” or Groupon-like bubble vapourware corporation that we can sell to Google or Microsoft for $8 billion.
—ravi