"Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com" wrote in
oups.com:
This is where liberalism really bugs me. Liberals are the poison
paranoia people. Somebody finds some kind of politically correct
"poison" like thimerosal, and regardless of the evidence for, or
against, liberals will try to hamstring a program that will save 3/4
million kids a year, to keep it from being used. Unintended
consequences. They don't care. If the solution doesn't fit their
utopian vision, they'd rather *prevent* a reasonable version of it
used at all.

Don't tar all liberals with the same brush. The subset you're correctly
railing against are largely motivated by Romantic ideology and would more
correctly be described as "pseudo-liberals" just as many authoritarians
have been described as "pseudo-conservatives." Their world-view is
actually rather comparable to that of nineteenth-century aristocrats who
looked down on anyone who acquired wealth through "trade" rather than his
ancestors' use of the battle-axe (they're anti-capitalist not because
they think there are better alternatives to capitalism that could be
implemented in the future, but because they think that the better
alternatives *were* implemented in the past).

One similarity is that they tend to view third-world people in "noble
savage" terms, worrying greatly that their "traditional ways of life"
might come to an end. They never seem to ask the objects of their
concern whether or not they *want* to continue living the same way they
did millennia ago (I'm reminded of a quote from a woman in Africa who
said she wished she could afford (gasp!) *herbicides* to spray on her
crops. When asked why, she said she wanted her children to go to school
and learn to read and write instead of spending their days stooping in
the fields picking weeds). They consist largely of upper-middle-class
women, but they idealize societies in which women spend most of their
time barefoot, pregnant, and completely at the mercy of men. They take
at face value the claims of the most reactionary and authoritarian
elements of any "oppressed" society, oblivious to the fact that those
"leaders" are simply third-world equivalents of Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson (www.butterfliesandwheels.com discusses this in great detail).

This branch of the Left really consists of reactionaries in
progressives' clothing. Romanticism has historically rather quickly led
to authoritarianism, even fascism. It contains a streak of anti-urbanism
that often has a sub-streak of anti-semitism. Ultimately, it stems from
the conviction that humans are inherently evil. How it came to be seen
as part of the Left is unclear, though it appears that a lot of it
entered through the 1960s counterculture; old-school leftists and their
ideological descendants don't seem to be much affected by such nonsense.

I've become convinced that when neo-Romantics talk about "health,"
they're actually talking about achieving a sense of personal *purity*. I
think much of the "poison paranoia" is actually a feeling of being
ritually unclean.