Great little gem in SDB's latest rant about the nature of PoMo leftism:

But there's something deeper going on. I think the post-modernist lit-crit left has redefined "success", and it's come back to trap them.

In many academic settings now, the true test of value of some assertion is no longer based on utility, or quality, or correctness, or even consistency. The value is viewed as being proportional to the sincerity with which it was created or embraced, especially if by someone who is not "majority" (read "white male").

That's why you have the almost ludicrous situation where everyone's opinions are supposed to be accepted and given credence solely because they're sincerely held by someone else. "Acceptance" and "sensitivity" are paramount, and any attempt to point out that a given opinion can be demonstrated empirically to be wrong is a form of censorship. After all, empirical reality is a myth; truth is socially constructed; and you're a boor for trying to crush the person's spirit by pointing out that their assertion can be directly disproved. Away to the sensitivity-training gulag with you!

Bravo and right on!  Cold hard facts aren't what win policy debates with the lefties SDB encounters because they are, well, cold.  In their ideology, a policy may have a Good outcome but would still be Bad because the proximate intentions weren't sincere / good.  

Removal of rent control here in San Francisco, for example, may unequivocally have the Good outcome of more housing on the market but our Berkeley-ites consider it a bad policy because step one allows grubby landlords to profit.   The Good policy would be to directly convince (or force) the landlords to construct housing expressly allocated for particular interest groups (poor minority gay / lesbian artists).   Or better yet, create state housing and take private landlords out of the picture altogether.  In their minds, the proximate cause of new housing shouldn't be profit incentives for landlords but rather the direct desire to see more housing for everyone.

To the PoMo left, proximate intentions are more important than ultimate results.