Going down for the first time, the second time, .....

I suppose I should admit that Simps has been such a useful volunteer to show how stupid the pseudo-left has become and so much that is wrong with the pseudo-left and why it has sunk the real left into the political mire where it has been struggling to keep from drowning for the past half-century.  I don't imagine for a second he's smart enough to realize what a good specimen of futile, counterproductive stupidity he's been, serving as a jumping off point for making arguments, he's simply not smart enough or reflective enough to realize that.  As a foil, he's all tin,dull on both sides.

His response to my article last night was to whine that in an article which dopey googled in search of ammo David Bentley Hart used the word "perplexity" To quote Simps,  

I think we can safely dismiss him as a thinker of any sort out of hand. Unless perhaps English is a second language for the guy. Perplexity? Jeebus, what a poser.

Since I can google, too, I find that etymological dictionaries say that the word "perplexity" has been used in exactly the way that Hart used it has been found in the English language since c. 1300, that would be news to a guy who believes himself to have been a professional writer.  If I had time I'd go look through the corpus of such writers as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, etc. to see if any of them had committed the foolish act of having made use of that particular word offered by the English language since before English was English.  I wonder if his host, Duncan Black, ever used it, way, way back when he still wrote stuff. 

One of the sources of endless smiling when being insulted and derided by Steve Simels is his utter cluelessness about what he, himself, says in his own comments.  He's upset that I spent most of a post responding to his accusation that David Bentley Hart was my "favorite theologian" by me listing some of my actual favorite theologians.   The man is such an ass he gets upset when someone responds to what he said in the very terms he said it in.  It's not enough that he's made an ass of himself, he also expects his opponents to pull his out of the sling he's put it into, himself.  

I know that the rump remnant of the Eschaton commenting community is, with few exceptions, not the best of what it was ten years ago.  But it isn't even the best of what it was two years ago.  I would recommend anyone who wants to see why the left was lost go look at what gets said there today.  Duncan Black openly maintains it as a source of income for himself while doing the very minimum to keep it open.   I have, in the past, noted how like Harry Hope's bar in the play The Iceman Cometh venues like Eschaton are, only, as Harry Hope, Black isn't going to risk anyone coming in and upsetting the regulars with any unwelcome reality such as what Hickey upset the regulars with in the play.  It might impinge on his profits if people stop clicking on, generating ad revenue for him and buying stuff through his Amazon bar.  I'm afraid that even those who have some vestiges of ability and maturity left are as stuck in the futility of the place as those characters in O'Neill's play.

Update:  Oh,Yeah, There was a time when Duncan Black showed some promise, some potential.  The thing is, those have a shelf life before they go bad.  His past-code was about 2008/