A Valediction

Oh, I do thank Duncan Black for one thing.  It was on his blog I figured out a lot about how liberals were misled, duped, suckered and seduced into powerlessness.  His libertarianism and, among his rump community,  the utterly brainless repetition of those self-contradicting, losing ideological slogans, bromides and tropes which, when you research them, dissolve into the lines of ideological and dishonest secondary and tertiary sources killed those off for me.   Finding that out did it.

Once those were out of the way, once I'd read Marilynne Robinson's distinction between the 18th century "enlightenment" distortion of the word and original liberalism of the Mosaic tradition, especially as relayed through Christianity. once I'd read her essays and a series of other religious thinkers,the liberation theologians,  James Cone, Walter Brueggemann, etc. a way forward was a lot clearer.   I'd never have gotten there if I hadn't finally, finally felt compelled to fact check those assumptions I'd learned from the atheist, pseudo-liberal, left of my youth and adulthood, when I read them articulated on his blog.  As it turned out, virtually all of them were either blatantly false or unsupported or riddled with the most basic of self-contradictions.   And, yes, when you peel back the layers, they were lies told to promote atheism and materialism. 

I'm left far more radical than I ever was before, once I left that "left".