@blatham,
blatham wrote:You seem to include her and her statements in the category of "far left".
I literally just wrote, in this exchange, that "personally, I don't think the place she's coming from is either far left or right-wing".
Describing it as either would assume an ideological consistency that's not at hand. And I don't even mean that as any kind of slight to Lash. A lot of people have a more or less idiosyncratic mish-mash of (sometimes contradictory) political views and instincts. People like us with fairly down-the-line views are the exception, not the rule.
(I do wonder about ascribing a position to me that I literally just contradicted. An honest mistake I’m sure - but oddly relevant to the context of this convo, in a way! If I were to overthink it, I’d ponder the power of assumptions, and how they lead us to reclassify, if necessary, people’s views to better fit our preconceptions about what would seem logical or typical to us, etc.)
Blatham wrote:That's a very big difference in ideological stance from the Lash we knew before the last election. Is that degree of shift more likely to you than my thesis?
Do you remember O'Bill? I forget what his exact A2K username was, but I'm still FB friends with him too. He was a brash if not abrasive supporter of George W Bush and the Iraq War, just like Lash. They were both different from the traditional conservatives in their zeal for revolutionary change and “people power” (however misperceived), yet both exulted in ridiculing liberals and Democrats as much as the most strident Republican. Just four years onward, he cheered on Obama. Last year he was a strident Bernie supporter. All of that was genuine.
The only difference is that his change(s) of heart tended to be more comprehensive, whereas in my impression Lash's newer views (which have come more gradually than you contend) have tended to layer more onto, and mix in with, still-potent underlying layers of conservative, viscerally anti-Democratic instincts. Though with him too, you can still see how the past and present fuse together when it comes to his views on "establishment Democrats" and such.
If anything, Bill's somewhat more (yet not fully) wholesale transformations are actually less natural than the contradictory mish-mashing — and yet, here we are. **** happens. People are weird. Yes, definitely more likely than the notion of investing a decade of posting in order to run a “false flag” operation on A2K, of all places, as right-wing troll posing as unpopular Bernie supporter.
