Case in point

Often times those individuals not on the barking left, the real lamp-post scratching left, try to engage leftie howlers in discussion on issues, rarely with any success. Based entirely on irrationality and hyper-emotive sloganeering, the "ideas" of the howling left are impossibly wrapped-up in statism and socialism to ever be unwound. One tug of the string and the whole tattered mess falls apart. Thusly, the howlers are so beholden to their warped ideology that they can never give an inch to reality.

Case in point, those falling financial markets. How does one approach, from a rational stand-point, claims such as this just six weeks ago:

I am intensely annoyed by the incessant reporting of movements in the FTSE 100 index on just about every news bulletin I hear as if this is indication of either my well being or that of the UK economy as a whole.

Neither is true. As far as is possible I have no money invested in the London Stock Exchange. I think it irrational for anyone to do so right now. Second, and more important, a substantial proportion of the FTSE has nothing to do with the UK. Either, as is the case with the Ukrainian companies noted above, they’re using it as a market place which indicates no link with any real economic activity in the UK, or even if the company is registered and trades here much of the activity it undertakes is elsewhere. In that case the rise and fall of the FTSE is no real indicator of the health of the UK economy at all.

So, "the FTSE is no real indicator of the health of the UK economy at all" a mere six weeks ago. Today, from the very same source:

This is Melt Down

Yesterday is rightly being called a ‘black Monday’.

Lehman has gone. Merrill Lynch has gone. AIG is teetering. HBOS looks like one for the lifeboat. There will be more.

The financial markets as we know them have failed. More important, the political philosophy that has backed them has failed. Neo-liberalism has to die, for good.

So, financial markets have no bearing on the life of an "ordinary" citizen six weeks ago, today financial markets are in "melt down" dragging with it every man, woman, and child. Is it too much to ask for a wee bit of consistency from the lamp-post scratching crowd? 

How else can we all engage in that lucid, tolerant, prosaic, nuanced, and celebratory happening of exchanging ideas and debating the issues from an open-minded point-of-view? 

(Yes, I am aware those types of discussions only occur on the left when everyone already agrees with each other in lock-step fashion.)