That said,

My normal mode of utterance is, in my own view, more tentatively, even hesitantly, opinionated than apodeiktic; although a friend (name of Gary Darling; now long since dead of AIDS), did say that I was the most opinionated person he knew--and he was a gender-bending, masochistic bisexual who quite openly loved both cock and pussy (and sometimes gave me the creeps); but when he spoke candidly, from his Piscean Depths (like Bach or Chopin or Einstein), he spoke Truth Undeniable and Self-Evident. And/but so, if I seem belike a tad o'erweening, it may be due to my having read Lord Russell's History of Western Philosophy five or six times over in my young manhood--till I had acquired the supercilious habit and the tone of it.  I know how angry/mad it makes neo-Marxists and postmodernists and feminists, and it pleases me no end so to infuriate them: to say with a wolfish mildness, "But what is the evidence of that? Let's examine it!"  Logical Positivism/Empiricism is like Aqua Regia on the skins of female philosophers.  By whom (in fondly imagined throes of agony) I do mean Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Michelle Foucault.



But--and here's the funny thing--I do not include Jean Baudrillard among those awful pretend-fake, anti-science French postmodernists, whose contemporary and compatriot he certainly was, and whose language and "narrative" he seems to speak in terms of.  How can I despise Lacan and Derrida and adore Baudrillard?  But so it is.  I plead the miracle.