Apparently my previous and rushed post regarding Jack Layton's death has been circulating on Facebook and Reddit where it has been intentionally misunderstood by that large sector of confused leftists who are under the impression that Layton was a comrade. One commentator called me "cold" and "provocative", and another, who I guess refused to read precisely what I wrote, complains "now we're trying to establish precedents on who should or should not be mourned?"First of all, the inability to read carefully and precisely seems to be a hallmark amongst internet self-proclaimed experts. It definitely is a common characteristic of the occasional random commentator on this blog (for example, the people who comment on my first and somewhat juvenile Nietzsche post, from way way back, without actually reading or understanding the argument I was making). It is also one of my largest pet peeves because: a) I have to deal with lazy readings as part of my job when I mark student papers; b) I cannot stand, as part of my training, logical fallacies––the straw-person fallacy (nor can I stand false accusations of straw-person fallacies that are actually, in and of themselves, straw-person fallacies).Secondly, opinions exchanged on Facebook and Reddit are, generally speaking, annoying and ignorant. The latter context, for example, seems to be a place where people can make up wild anecdotes about their experience that no one can prove and, anonymously and pompously, act as expert commentators. As far as left-wing reddits go, I have rarely been impressed by what I've witnessed (aside from some commentators who usually are also critical of the entire reddit context), and often I've been shocked by the statements of the supposed "left" reddit commentators. The "socialism" reddit, for example and aside from a few commentators, should change its name to the "social democracy and/or welfare capitalist" reddit due to some of the weird statements flouted by its champagne socialist crowd. One of my blogger comrades showed me a set of posts where a commentator claimed Keynes was a "socialist"––a statement that would power all of America with the power of John Maynard's spinning coffin.And this returns me to the comment, quoted above, where someone asked "now we're trying to establish precedents on who should or should not be mourned?" I want to deal with this question because I think it directly relates to my point about misreading––it also demonstrates a general ideological confusion that I find extremely telling. (I will also keep in mind that whatever I write in the following paragraphs will be ignored and/or deliberately misread.)The fact that someone complained that the point of my article was to establish a "mourning precedent" ignores the fact that. And THIS was the point of my hurried post: I wanted to question why we were choosing to mourn one capitalist when the "mourning precedents" we already possess would prevent us from mourning other capitalists. Would the person who wrote this comment mourn Stephen Harper? It seems doubtful, and thus demonstrates that the left is already qualifying who should or who should not be mourned. Would we mourn fascists? Of course not: to complain about mourning precedents is ludicrous, especially since the complaint, as aforementioned, is driven by the fact that mourning Layton's death is already about deciding who and who should not be mourned.We on the left already have our mourning precedents because we choose who to make into heroes and villains all the time. The point of my last post was to clarify a certain confusion surrounding this choice that I found inherent in the celebration of Layton as some sort of leftwing comrade when,, he was definitely not a comrade. None of this was ever to say that we should be utterly dogmatic about our choices in this regard: Imourn the death of another Tommy Douglas even though he was not a full-fledged communist because Douglas was still someone who did, in his own limited way, struggle on behalf of the people. But Jack Layton was not Tommy Douglas.Furthermore, this complaint about "mourning precedent" demonstrates a banal bourgeois humanism where people get hung up on a hypocritical morality about the sanctity of human life. As I wrote in that post, and I want to reemphasize this, "the point is not that a human being's life isn't worth mourning but, rather, why some of us on the Canadian left seem to care about mourning the life of a social-dem-turned-liberal." I was not interested in mocking people for caring about the death and life of another human being, but asking questions about our choices for mourning one type of capitalist over another. I was not critiquing those who are mourning the loss of a family member or close friend, but those whose only relationship with Layton was on the political landscape and who, as leftists, are mourning the politics he supposedly represented.So the larger point, and the one that was misread, was an historical materialist question about thebehind our mourning. I am a communist, not a bourgeois humanist, and so my approach has to do with the the structural questions, which always concern class struggle, not questions about the sanctity of human life. A good historical materialist does not focus on vague and ahistorical platitudes about the sanctity of human life when it comes to events like, for example, September 11, 2001. No, a historical materialist places the ethical question in historical context and asks why the attack on the WTC happened in the first place, why some deaths are considered worth more than others in the bourgeois-imperialist mindset, etc.And yet we have a Reddit "socialist" commentator arguing the bourgeois humanist position that "every human life is valuable, socialist or otherwise" and, because of this, that my post was cold and provocative. The fact that, again, my point had nothing to do with whether or not a single human life was valuable but that we on the left were celebrating one type of capitalist when we refuse to celebrate others was obscured by this misty-eyed humanitarianism. Layton is not being mourned by the Canadian left simply because his life was as valuable as every other human life––if this was the case, we on the left would also be mourning every dead reactionary and dead liberal for the same humanitarian reason––but because this Canadian left somehow imagines he was a comrade and that his death contains a weight that it certainly does not. If I am to be attacked for pointing out this problematic assessment, then those who claim Layton is being mourned simply because he is another dead human being should get off their high humanitarian horses and spend the rest of their life attending every funeral of every person, no matter their politics or actions, that they can.My post was never about Jack Layton the human being. I never knew Layton personally, I am not a member of his family, and I know that if we were close than I probably would mourn the death of a close relation regardless of the difference in our politics. But the majority of people mourning his death with leftist eulogies also never knew Layton personally and, like me, would only know him by the politics he represented––that is what they are writing about. So the critique is about Layton's position, the structural politics he represents, and not who he was as a person. These eulogies do not pretend to know him as person, either, so it is in complete bad faith when they appeal to the sanctity of human life.Again, my point was about the left's amnesiatic and delirious reaction to the death of someone who was a member of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. As I wrote before, but that bears repeating, "I'm not saying that we should celebrate Layton's death, I'm just saying that we as the left should not care because the death of a liberal capitalist politician should be treated as meaningless. I care more about the anonymous deaths of women and children in third world factories than the death of a man whose policies, if he had ever been in power, would allow these factories to continue functioning."