I’m being completely honest with myself. I never said that I had sole license on all the views that I presented; if some “typical left” groups also share similar opinions, then so be it. What I was taking issue with is your implication that because of any such similarity, you lump what I’m trying to say in with what you’ve heard before from other people, rather than having a conversation based on what I actually said.

By all means, I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to carefully avoid certain phrases in a discussion, but I am suggesting that all the implications that go along with the labels that are used are serious roadblocks to a productive conversation, because then you end up debating a stereotype of what you think the other person believes instead of actually listening to what they’re really saying.

Getting back to the subject of this post/rant, it was actually primarily inspired by my frustration with a lot of “left-wing” groups which seem to not be very inclusive in bringing in people to help their cause unless they also subscribe to a long list of unrelated issues (which I mentioned in this post above). I know that doesn’t fit with something that someone in your “typical left” framework would say, but try to think outside the box a little bit.

The comment you made yesterday on Dan’s blog just reminded me of that kind of mentality, and the fact that I wanted to post about it. I wasn’t referring to you specifically in this post, and I didn’t even link to that discussion or mention it until you did.

I don’t think anything about what I was stating on the post you are referring to was a “typical argument from the left”; I think you just may have conditioned yourself to see things in that frame or reference.

Dismissing anything that sounds similar to what you may have heard from “the left” before as a “typical argument” from the left, and reading into that things that I didn’t say just because that’s how you choose to view it is exactly the ridiculous mentality that I’m talking about here, because instead of actually listening to what I’m saying, you’re blending it in with a whole bunch of other stuff that I didn’t say.

Whether you say it’s the labels or the “ideology” that prevents people from having rational discussions about things is just a matter of semantics. If your “ideology” consists of staking out your positions and refusing to listen to anyone you don’t agree with, then your ideology is lame.

I have an “ideology”, for sure, but it isn’t a closed-minded one that lumps groups of people into simple categories and lets that predetermine whether I agree with them, or (even worse) make assumptions about what they think just based on the label I’ve chosen to give them.