Constantinople <constantinopoli@yahoo.com>:
> >>>>... 
> >>>>                                         Leftists 
> >>>>apply criteria to the masses.  ...

G*rd*n:
> >>>And what are you doing in that sentence?

Constantinople <constantinopoli@yahoo.com>:
> >>Describing what leftists do.

G*rd*n: 
> > _En_masse_.  So you're engaging in the very sort of
> > performance you're deprecating.

Constantinople <constantinopoli@yahoo.com>:
> First of all, I wasn't deprecating anything, I was describing. Second, 
> the point I was making about leftists was not that they described people 
> en masse.
> 
> If I had thought that a single sentence in my post captured what I was 
> saying, I would have cut the post down to the single sentence. I did not 
> do that.
> 
> The nature of your response makes me inclined to boil my point down to 
> short sentences with small words so that hopefully you can understand 
> finally. But I have a feeling that that would not be of any more value 
> to you.

This sounds like deprecation to me:

"Left wingers care about people from an objective standpoint.
Leftists apply criteria to the masses. What is the lifespan
of people? What is the infant mortality? What is the literacy
rate? Are people racist? Are they sexist? Are they *spit*
religious *spit*? Are they teaching creationism to their own
kids? Are they buying things they don't really need? Are they
taken in by advertising? Do we enlightened ones need to show
them what they really need so they stop buying what they don't
need? Are they working too hard in order to buy all these
things? Do they fail to see the value of leisure time? Don't
they understand that they're being manipulated by the
corporations? Are they living inauthentic lives (well, yeah)?
Do we need to cure them of their false consciousness (chuckle,
of course we do)? Do they need health care? (The question is
never: do they want health care enough to pay for it.) And so
on. Leftists have a lot of ideas that they want to impose on
people."

I think that's pretty obviously deprecation although we could
torture it some more, I suppose.  It also treats "leftists"
as a single mass object, just as you accuse them -- oh, excuse
me, it's not an accusation, just an nonjudgemental, quite
unemotional observation, right? -- just as you accuse them of
doing.  So it turns out that at least one fan of capitalism
and liberalism treats this vague, diffuse, variegated category
_en_masse_.  Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with
that if, in fact, you can give some evidence and reasoning
for doing so, but I don't see any, just naked assertion.
Probably, a lot of leftists _do_ think of people in broad
categories, just as do moderates, liberals, conservatives,
libertarians, monarchists, calico-cat fans, and violent,
frothing-at-the-mouth religious zealots.  But if you think
it's so bad why don't you refrain from doing it?