When I first gravitated towards progressivism during my early twenties, it wasn't entirely because I was drawn in by the raw appeal of leftist ideas. My disgust at what I saw conservatism espousing was a powerful impetus.
My political awakening came during the Bush presidency. I understand the right not only as warmongers and wiretappers, but representative of an uncompromising moral absolutism and a streak of fundamentalist Christianity that preached damnation with far more vigor than it espoused and took to heart the Beatitudes. They stood for intolerance and orthodoxy, and I was glad to throw in my lot with the crowd that professed inclusion, egalitarianism, and the primacy of reason over doctrine.
But over the last few years, I've noticed the left making noises that sound an awful lot to me like the smug self-righteousness and brimstone that set me against the right.
Here's a very small example. Earlier today I saw this on my Twitter timeline:
My first reaction: "ha ha! That's funny." I was glad to see this person poking fun at himself. It's important to have convictions, sure—but it's equally important to be able to laugh at oneself from time to time. Acknowledging your own foibles is an exercise in empathy: we are all of us absurd and inconsistent creatures, and should recognize this in ourselves. It makes us more amicable to forgiving others for their own congenital stupidities, as we would hope them to forgive us for ours. (Note: it is possible to cut someone slack for their ignorance and bring their errors to their attention. Ideally we should do both.)
Then I scrolled through his timeline and found ample cause to suspect he wasn't joking after all. The topics he tweets about, and his tone—well, they're pretty consistent.
So I have to assume he and his friends aren't being facetious in the convo following the original tweet. (I might be mistaken, but I'm willing to take that chance, and will own up to it should it happen that I'm wrong.)
Whoa. Okay.
Are we even going to try to imagine that this guy just bought a banana from 7-Eleven, without looking at the label, because he was hungry, because the banana was 75 cents, and because it was a healthier choice than a bag of Doritos?
Nope.
Are we going to make any effort to give him the benefit of the doubt and guess that maybe he hasn't had the good fortune to go to a liberal arts college, take a few semesters of theory courses, get involved with the activist cliques, learn all about the unscrupulous corporate practices of Chiquita Brands International, and adjust his consumption habits accordingly because he understands that everything one buys is a political statement and a perturbation in the moral magnetosphere enveloping the planet?
Hell no.
He's a racist. He's an enemy. Period. Because he's eating a banana with a Chiquita sticker on its peel.
We won't even touch the "white" qualifier in the original tweet—though I surmise it wouldn't be necessary to specify the banana-eating malefactor's skin color unless the observer felt that it modified the act's ethical weight one way or another.
The following exchange is telling:
Of course. Let's congratulate ourselves for being among the Elect. Most people don't have the purity of spirit to care the way we care, to achieve the enlightenment we've achieved. What excellent people we are!
Presumptuous assholes.
Look, kids. I'm all for responsible consumption habits. I'd really like to see the capitalist system defanged and dismantled before it renders the planet uninhabitable, before it bifurcates the global population into a tiny, fortified elite and several billion impoverished helots. I support the cause to the extent that I'm able.*
And it's because I support the cause that I feel I should point out things that do not help it:
• Immuring yourself and yourself and your allies behind a wall of ideological absolutism.
• Looking at everyone beyond the periphery of your bubble as a foe to be shunned rather than a potential ally to be invited in.
• Assuming the best of yourself and the worst of everyone else.
• Becoming the priggish liberal scarecrow that the champions of the status quo would love to point to in order to discredit the opposition.
• Being a sanctimonious dick. It bears repeating because I don't think I like you very much, and I'm on your side.
Please bear in mind that you're the ambassador of your politics to the rest of the world. And remember that being woke is no excuse for being a jerk.
* Frankly, if you're not growing your own food and weaving your own clothes from the wool of your own sheep on a 100% solar-powered homestead, you're in no position to call anyone else out for engaging with the capitalist mechanism. Let he who is without sin, etc.
Recently, I found myself (as is my wont) in middle of an Internet argument with a far-right-ish stranger. He was bashing the "libtards" (following the Berkley incident) as violent, rioting mongrels that did not have a point and had to employ vandalism and violence to make up for it. I pointed out to him that generalising a whole party with the actions of an extreme few was dishonest. He redoubled his comments, this time including me and suggesting I should riot to make my point and the such. I pointed out that the right also has its own breed of extremists including white supremacists and the such and surely he wouldn't want to be lumped with them so he shouldn't lump other people either, but I was expecting the discussion to lead nowhere as he was clearly very angry and relishing to have an incident like that to rant his head off about.
ReplyDeleteHowever, something interesting happened. By the point where my experience dealing with similar people had me expect an insulting dismissal and an end of the conversation, he kept engaging me. He was still angry and generalising but his responses showed that he was paying attention to what I was saying even if only to try to invalidate it on principle. I imagine that subconsciously his interest was piqued by interacting with a liberal that didn't just call him a bigot and ran away so I tried becoming more gentler in my approach. Less "what the hell is wrong with you to think and say those things" and more "I see, why do you feel this way?"
To make a long story short, over several angry replies, he let me know little by little how for the past decade he has been bashed, dismissed and ridiculed by leftist people for having unpopular opinions, and all his pent up anger has finally found an outlet thanks to Trump's presidency. Those words felt strangely familiar and then it hit me: they are very similar to the words of disenfranchised minorities rallying against an oppressing system! Modern culture has made pariahs of non-progressive people and the resentment so cultivated is precisely one of the main causes that gave us Trump.
Instead of attempting to educate and guide those who are not, yes let's use this word, "privileged" with a better education, rearing or sensibilities, we have attempted to steal their voice, mock them into irrelevance and ultimately dismiss them as an archaic evil. Doing so, we have bred the alt-right monster that now, having finally gained power through the sheer accretion of resentment, seeks to execute its revenge on its oppressors. We failed to show them the compassion we demand from them and they have now reasons to call us hypocritical.
Hrm. Something Andrew Sullivan wrote for New York Magazine last month comes to mind:
DeleteI feel like I know Stephen Miller, the youthful Montgomery Burns who lectured the lügenpresse last Sunday morning in his charm-free Stakhanovite baritone. I feel like I know him because I used to be a little like him. He’s a classic type: a rather dour right-of-center kid whose conservatism was radicalized by lefties in the educational system. No, I’m not blaming liberals for Miller’s grim fanaticism. I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate. Before too long, they start adopting brattish and obnoxious positions — just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers. After a while, you’re not so much arguing for conservatism as against leftism, and eventually the issues fade and only the hate remains.
I tend to take Sullivan with a grain of salt, but I think he's on the mark here. I've seen it happen with a dude I went to high school with. He used to only lean right: I'd see him posting stuff from the National Review on Facebook, maybe say something negative about Obama (and get dogpiled for it). Now he's talking about red pills and going to demonstrations and rallies to document rowdy anti-Trump protestors.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan-the-white-house-mole.html
If you'd like to start "giving people the benefit of the doubt" you might want to stop thinking of the people on team Trump as obnoxious brats with no guiding ideology or goals beyond throwing a hateful tantrum after getting their feelings hurt in college.
DeleteHas it every occurred to you that the raw attacks against white people, reverse racism, absolute economic insanity, and overt justification of street crime, has ALWAYS been the cause of the left, and that you were just too blind to see it?
ReplyDeleteWithout, in any way, making excuses for the bush conservatives who were only a stone's throw away from the modern democratic party ((look how quickly his associates adopted gay marriage, and how quickly the democrats adopted pro-war policies (who are not in ANY way related to trump and the alt-right mind you))... without apologizing for them in any way, the modern democratic party is quite logically an extension of the clinton years in just about every facet. Which is why the natural successor was the very man's own wife. It's not a "personal" proclivity of hillary clinton, it is a very extension of the entire left wing platform to its logical conclusion.
now that you see that left wingers, are IN FACT just as likely to wage war in foreign countries, and MORE likely in fact, to stab, shoot, or burn your house down, perhaps you should reconsider supporting right wing parties with the caveat that you continue to oppose war.
I guarantee you a lot of those conservatives are smarter than you. Which is why they voted left for 30 years, complaining that this very situation today would emerge, and they predicted it correctly. Which is a far cry from anything the leftists managed to predict.
If you really abhor what hte left is doing, you need to unilaterally disavow yourself of it. The left is supporting leftists murdering right wingers in our very own country. You can either support those murderers directly or indirectly. But you can't distance yourself from the murderers and riotors by rejecting their tactics, but not their cause.
Whoa, what? When you say "the left" and proceed to spout things like that, you are asserting that either the majority of the people in the left espouse or advocate the beliefs and behaviours you describe, or that their representatives in the government bodies do. So now you'll need to back up those statements. Show me evidence of random leftists in the street hi-fiving and saying "let's go kill a right-winger and then burn their house!" Show me evidence of leftist politicians lobbying in favor of "street crime" (how does that even work? "Let's arm our street thugs with guns!"?)
DeleteNo. You are simply one of the thousands of resentful conservatives that upon seeing a handful of idiot kids rioted because getting overly angry over a /patently awful person/ (c'mon fight me on this) giving a speech at their school, rubbed their hands together crying "finally! the proof we needed that the WHOLE party is a bunchh of no-good, violent rioters! Finally we can graduate our contempt into fully fledged hatred and entirely dismiss their side of the argument, because riots!"
Ever since that fateful night, every single conversation has gone like "nice point, are you going to assault me to make it stick?", "yep, we may have white supremacists among our midst but at least we're not rioters!", "Antisemites? maybe, but at least we're not assaulting and burning and raping and trying to destroy civilisation!" and so on.
Run along, you hateful, small-minded, generalising nobody. The fact that you have to overblown one incident and stereotype the millions and millions of decent people in the left both show that you hardly have a logical argument and that you subscribe to partisan hate, up there with racism as one of the weakest, pettiest and most irrational reasons to hate large groups of people. All the decent people in the right that I know also look down on the likes of you.
The only way the right could earn my support would be if the entire Republican Party took a radical environmentalist platform. I'll vote for the conservative candidate who wants to end fossil fuel subsidies, shut down coal power plants, and invest in wind, solar, and nuclear power. I don't expect it to happen in this lifetime.
Delete(Yes, I support nuclear power. Don't look so shocked.)
Name the number of right wing riots in american history. There are zero. Yet people had zero problems automatically graduating them to full fledged bigot status.
ReplyDeleteAn example of the hole in your vision includes the fact that blue cities are ALWAYS the ones filled with street crime, pardons for criminals, etc. I wouldn't feel scared to let my mother walk alone along the streets of salt lake city, beijing, or singapore.
If you can't see the inherent stability of the left's platform, them I mistook how intelligent I thought you might be.
The fact of the matter is, intelligence is the ability to discern truth and make accurate predictions. Not only have you, and the left, been making poor predictions, your predictions are the exact opposite of the outcomes for the last decade.
People like you are throwing contempt upon those who dare to not only make accurate predictions, but point out the basest of facts.
No one is afraid of your magical voodoo words any more. Grow up. You've lived a sheltered life. Lucky you. That doesn't give you the right to look down on people who have actually had to endure street crime, and come to terms with the reality of it.
If immature brats like you continue to force OTHERS to accept the violent consequences of your choices, you can't expect them to be happy about it. The more you force violence onto others with a smile, the more they are going to react against you. For 30 years the left tried to hush up reporting of street crime, rapes, and grisly murders. The left has always apologized for it. It ends now. You have been an accessory to crime.
Have fun with your 12 year old video games blog. Do you feel intelligent?
Whoa. And here I was worried about vituperative comments from lefties.
DeleteName the number of right wing riots in american history. There are zero. Yet people had zero problems automatically graduating them to full fledged bigot status.
I'd wager that conservatives have less reason to riot because conservatism, by definition, means approving of the general status quo. Nobody ever took to the streets brandishing signs saying "THE SYSTEM IS JUST FINE THE WAY IT IS."
But if we want to discuss conservative violence, let's talk about abortion doctors getting murdered by pro-life activists. Let's talk about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Let's talk about the armed takeover of the wildlife refuge in Oregon. Let's talk about that Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Heck, let's talk about the Ku Klux Klan. (You'll point out that the Klan had ties to the Democratic Party, but this was back when Dixiecrats were still a thing—and the Klan's ideology was nothing if not conservative.)
If you can't see the inherent stability of the left's platform, them I mistook how intelligent I thought you might be.
I'm going to point out that you either meant to type "instability" or don't know what "stability" means. But I won't be petty about it.
What inherent instability are you referring to?
Not only have you, and the left, been making poor predictions, your predictions are the exact opposite of the outcomes for the last decade.
Huh. Please tell me what predictions I've made?
For 30 years the left tried to hush up reporting of street crime, rapes, and grisly murders. The left has always apologized for it.
I can't speak as a representative of the left, but I'm not apologizing for street crime. However, I think any solutions that don't aim to create opportunities and improve the quality of life for people in economically disadvantaged areas treat the symptoms instead of the sickness. People who aren't alienated and desperate tend not to become muggers.
No one is afraid of your magical voodoo words any more.
You will be.
Have fun with your 12 year old video games blog.
Seven years old as of September. And I will enjoy it, thank you.
Wait. When was the last time I wrote about video games?
Do you feel intelligent?
I have smart days and dumb days, like everyone else.
I believe that you hear very little about "riots" from the right because they usually have another name: "wars".
DeleteMoreover, the "riots" you speak of with such distaste have given us things such as women's suffrage, emancipation, 8-hour labour days and other anti-exploitative rights. Oh, and a little thing called "Democracy".
(Note that I am actually not advocating or condoning riots nowadays. I believe that our civilisation has come far ahead enough to do cause change in better ways. However, dismissing the left for its use of rioting in the past betrays a historical blindness--if not outright biased, wilful ignorance-- to the fact that there were hard-fastened systems in place impeding social progress and that riots only erupted after more pacific attempts proved ineffectual.)
(You have one person posting under two different names just to insult you. Nice.)
ReplyDeleteThis sort of thing is why I don't read comments on Tumblr, or follow any political blogs there. It always reminds me of the scene in the Simpsons where Lisa tries to crash a peewee football practice, only to learn that her high horse has been preemptively undermined and she has no ability to react beyond self-pity.
The Left needs to address the strain of political activism that sees the appearance of having the proper viewpoint as an end unto itself. It accomplishes nothing, and those who don't care to achieve anything of value need to be sidelined. For all they really are is a distraction.
Haha! I hadn't noticed!
DeleteThe Left needs to address the strain of political activism that sees the appearance of having the proper viewpoint as an end unto itself.
That's a bullseye and a slam dunk at once. Sagacious is ever the word for you.
(Been a minute. How's tricks?)
Your entire argument boils down to "I LOVE democracy, unless it elects a right wing platform, then, democracy is less important than securing the goals of the left." You say that killing right wingers is an inevitable outcome of "social injustice." You expect people to treat you humanely when you talk like that?
ReplyDeleteBLUE cities are the ones with massive poverty problems. Poverty problems that blue platforms have failed to solve. And then, stuck with violence problems that their platforms are also unable to solve. Now you're blaming the right for drug, gang, rape, and gun problems that exist almost exclusively in blue cities, with blue voting people, blue mayors, under a formerly blue president. Gee.
There isn't a single left wing country left on the planet with a solvent banking system or safe streets. I don't see these problems in singapore or hong kong or taiwan.
Keep apologizing for anarchist thugs and see what it gets you.
Ooops, turns out that you are lying! 10 out the 16 most violent states are red. http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-dangerous-states-in-the-u-s.html A whooping 8 out of the 10 states with the highest poverty index are red as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_rate
DeleteTime to accept that you have a warped notion of reality, having learned all of your facts out of Trump's Little Big Book of Propaganda and Alternative Facts in Which We Learn to Blame the Left of All the Evils that We Cause.
Nice try. All of those states with the exception of alaska are in the deep south, whose cities are 70% black, and solid democrat territory, and also the subject of the majority of the new deal programs (Which failed them) or red states along the mexican border with 30-40% hispanic populations, whose CITIES ARE ALL BLUE.
DeleteYou'll note that the urban areas are always blue, and the urban areas are always, ALWAYS where the the dispoportionate amount of the homicide is committed. It's very likely that alaska is the only red state in the entire country with red cities where the homicide rate is high.
Also, no one mentions places like west virginia, which is 93% white, which has the poorest county per capita in the entire country, with 35% of the entire county in poverty, and a total median income of around 22k, which is below the AVERAGE welfare disbursement, where half of the households do not have running water or power.
DeleteMcdowell county is the poorest single place in the ntire USA, without even basic utilities, and their murder rate is solidly in the middle.
Oh, I guess poverty doesn't cause crime after all.
What about china. Where the poverty 25 years ago was so great that parents boiled their children into stews because they were starving.
DeleteWhere is the murder. Where is the "trauma" that would cause riots?
You people are B- average liberal arts students with zero employability, no financial literacy, can only speak english, and have no understanding of any other country other than the USA.
Pathetic.
Having fun?
DeleteHey bud, don't go changing your tune when presented with facts. You were the one who insisted in making statements about state poverty and crime based on partisan allegiance alone (which is an extremely disingenuous and facile approach, as it ignores the unique factors about the population and government of each state that influence their status more than their stupid party colours). Now, all of a sudden, /race/ factors too? In fact, you are implying that it factors even more, apparently 'corrupting' the numbers for red states. Are you starting to show your true, bigoted colours?
DeleteAlso, who is trying to deny a link between poverty and crime? All I did was showing you how your alleged link between a state-wide left leaning and poverty and crime was false and that, in fact, the opposite is true--if I wanted to be so intellectually dishonest as to establish that correlation as causation like you tried to do.
Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, are you still spreading the rumours about baby eating in China? You are either a consummated liar or are religiously against fact-checking. Not only has such thing been categorically proven false, but the few rumours that still remain in the Internet about it don't even link child cannibalism to poverty but to libido-enhancement practices.
Not that I need to prove myself to you (or that you'll believe me) but I know 4 languages and I'm fluent at a professional level in two of them, and likely have been to more countries than you can name the capitals of. But you carry on. Keep absorbing the drivel from Breitbart news and believe it makes you "intelligent" because it's an "independent" outlet. Keep dismissing people you don't know with crude stereotypes of your making in order to dismiss their arguments without consideration. Keep spreading rumours, logical fallacies and falsehoods as weak evidence for your biased thinking, but keep an eye for the racism that sometimes comes afloat when you are not careful enough with your words.
https://youtu.be/mrfx8KyD1b8?t=909
DeleteSo what, exactly, are you hoping to accomplish here?
DeleteI presented simple facts. Your argumentation is all verbal sleight of hand, the more clever of which replaces the meanings of the words I've used, the less clever outright ignoring what I've said or putting words in my mouth.
DeleteThe modern left is essentially engaged in struggle sessions, where facts are ignored. You persecute your own for being insufficiently leftist, or insufficiently sorry. These attacks are unidirectionally pointed further right, and so extremity deepens with every passing month. Mao would be proud.
Mmm. You were also rather unnecessarily nasty about it. I've been less inclined to weigh and respond to your points than to say U MAD BRO? and block you from commenting. (You'll notice I've done neither.)
DeleteIf you want to troll, fine. Whatever. Mission accomplished. But if you're actually looking to have fruitful discussions with people in other camps, it would be more productive to approach them with respect—or at least civility.
Better luck next time.
Civil discussion starts with facts. When facts are ignored, I stop being civil.
DeleteThe left platform created the inner cities. There isn't a single right wing city in america with a slum like atlanta, detroit, dc, and on and on.
Now, the left is bringing violence out of their own territory and projecting it against red people, and you say it's "inevitable." For what it's worth, antifa are a bunch of rich, spoiled brats, without jobs. They are not the 'truly' suffering.
You're just making excuses for leftists to attack right wingers, and complaining when the thugs you've unleashed attack you verbally for eating bananas. Their violence is just as arbitrary against the right as against the left.
These are the base facts. You say you want civil discussion, except that the right is being physically attacked. Restrain your own party, or you will find that we will restrain it for you.
Dude you keep mentioning "facts" yet keep bringing 0 to this discussion. Now we have moved to most violent cities? Alright. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2016/10/01/most-dangerous-cities-america/91227778/ Hmm an even divide between blue and red states... could you be lying again? No, wait! The red states in this list must have black and Mexican people in them, so they don't count because according to you, your racism is based in /facts/. Not in weak correlations that only a mind intent in justifying an already existing bigoted bias could trace, but in "facts". And note that I have never tried to link poverty and crime (or deny the link). You were the one who brought up those two topics to posit that they are "blue state" traits. I merely showed you that that was incorrect without trying to add any commentary on it.
DeleteOh by the way, baby eating in China? Both the Interpool and the FBI looked into it. False. Stop this weak flailing. You accuse me of not knowing anything of the world and yet your only knowledge of it seems to come from stereotypes and morbid Internet stories. You throw blind, unnecessary accusations about my knowledge of languages, then think that you get to dismiss the languages I speak on your own principle. Nothing matters to you but the narrative you already have in your mind and nothing is going to stop you to try to overlay that fantasy on top of reality, so there's simply not enough common ground for a real argument.
Also, the Berkeley riots were over a month ago, stop whining about "delicate" people on the right such as a confessed paedophile or a proud antisemite being "physically attacked". I don't see you complaining about all the vandalism and death threats that American Jew communities have been the target of more recently.
So, you don't bring facts and you don't bring civility. You think yourself smart but upon seeing a leftist expressing feelings of disenfranchising with the party, you bashed him just to bash the party in general, instead of trying to enticing him to your side. You have failed in every possible regard.
You're braindead. I never mentioned states once. By zooming out to the level of states instead of focusing on cities, you are looking at a low resolution form of data with zero usage. Why not examine crime data based on time zone, genius?
DeleteThe fact of the matter is that NO STATE has a dramatically outsized murder rate. So examining STATES is stupid. Some cities though, have murder rates 100 times above the average, and thousands of time higher than other cities.
So when you look at cities, yes, they are almost exclusively blue, and all of them but a couple in alaska are filled with nonasian minorities.
That's not a coincidence.
I bring plenty of facts. I doubt your bachelor's degree in underwater basket weaving prepares you for much in life. If you think trump supporters hate jews, when trump's DAUGHTER is jewish, you're an idiot. Muslims are the only ones with a vested interest in killing jews. Those are the people YOU like, idiot.
I bashed him because he's whining that the liberal manaiacs that have unleashed are attacking him as irrationally as they're attacking anyone who isn't a full communist. I tend not to have sympathy for people who support violence, and complain only when it happens to be directed against themselves.
Dude, you have progressively shown yourself as an unabashed, outspoken racist, who uses racism as a pretend logical argument. And you must be also pretending not to know who Bannon or Richard Spencer are if you are trying to wash your hands clean of the blatant antisemitism in the darker corners of your party, Ivanka Trump's Jewishness-by-marriage notwithstanding. As I said above, there's no common ground for a discussion as every single one of your arguments is fabricated around excusing and justifying your racism. And you have the temerity of complaining about the threat of physical violence when you yourself spouse racial hatred? Get out of here.
DeleteI didn't collect those statistics. The local police departments headed by democrats, such as in atlanta, collected the murder statistics as they zipped up the body bags.
DeleteBeing numerate in basic math doesn't make me racist. But being innumerate does make you stupid.
You're worse than a yippy chihuahua.
DeleteClever.
DeleteI'm sure we can both agree on the methods by which science denial happens, as a phenomenon.
But how did we get to the point of arithmetic denial? Because truly, crime reports are a census, rather than statistical extrapolation. It does not fall into the mathematical domain of statistics, though we call the figures statistics for simplicity's sake. They actually fall under the domain of arithmetic, at about what you might learn pre-geometry in middle school.
I must concede you are right about one thing. Conservatives do tend to be mean and lack sympathy. On the other hand, what are liberals who disregard arithmetic as racist warlock magic?
I think people capable of middle school math are witches. If they perform addition, and I can't count, they probably deserve to be burned alive at the stake. They deserved it, after all.
Deletehttp://therightscoop.com/horrifying-video-of-afghans-beating-to-death-and-burning-body-of-woman-accused-of-burning-koran/
DeleteDon't worry. She probably deserved it. Anyone who says something racis... against the Quran deserves it. And she DEFINITELY said it. There's no doubt.
Thank allah for mob intelligence.
Arithmetic is evil.
*sigh* I told myself I wouldn't engage with you again but here's a last attempt, one more reckless reaching out to see if under the several layers of desperate need for validation that make you condescend to others, to presume that they are illiterate, unworldly and wilfully ignorant there's a human being.
DeleteLook, the problem is not the numbers or much less arithmetic the problem is with the causation that you and people like you want to demonstrate based on weak correlations suggested by the numbers.
So, cities are more violent than country towns or counties, ok. You take that little datum and then dig for another datum: Cities have a higher concentration of people of non-white races than country towns do. Then you go "ah-ha! found the clear, mathematical, undeniable cause!", jumping to a conclusion that you clearly find satisfactory while ignoring and dismissing other factors such as:
-There's more density of population in cities. There are more people living close together than in towns, all the time.
-There's a higher percentage of unemployment due to jobs in cities being both more specialised and more automated. This leaves lots of people in enforced idleness.
-There's more stress. Lots more.
-There are 'undergrounds" of organised crime.
-There more class disparity but less distance between classes, meaning that people with low income get to resent the rich people they see rolling around in expensive cars while they are barely scrapping a meal a day.
-That class disparity mean that although the index of poverty may seem lower in cities than in the counties you speak of, poor communities in cities are actually much, much poorer than that.
-There's more corruption.
-There's more anonymity, both enforced and/or willing.
In other words, of course that cities are more violent. They are bubbling cauldrons of stressed, sometimes angry people haphazardly divided in pockets of extreme income disparity. Racial diversity is a fact that is parallel to these issues, though it could be argued that the discrimination and marginalisation that non-white people have historically suffered and the consequent diminishment of opportunities to elevate oneself above one's circumstances have contributed to the problem.
So the issue with what you are saying and the reason why you are being called a racist is not because we are trying to deny your numbers, but because we see the issue as multifaceted as it is. The fact that you take a reductive, facile correlation to boil down the issue of urban violence to is problematic to say the least. But when you seem not only comfortable but, in fact, boastful that your conclusion implies that non-white races are /inherently/ more violent or whatever other trait conducive to violence, then you are thinking and talking like a racist.
Once you realise that there are only two paths: you either embrace your racism like other illustrious people inside your party such as Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopulos have done, adhering to their belief that "whites have better souls" (something that Spencer has publicly said); or you realise that maybe it is possible to have a more nuanced version of your political beliefs that do not include considering a significant amount of your fellow Americans inherently subhuman and, as such, blameable of all the evils in our society.
The idea that racists in red states 2k miles away project psychic mind waves that make minorities kill each other exclusively in blue states... is literally like blaming a witch from the next town over for your husband falling ill.
DeleteThere is a very local cause to all these blue cities. Notice I said local, and not someone you can easily scapegoat and attack with impunity.
If you like the idea of mob justice coming from the new left, you should be very thrilled about the way the radical muslims in afghanistan stoned that woman to death for an imaginary crime. Islam is actually very egalitarian in many ways. No matter your race, everyone is equal under islam, and everyone has equal right to punish heathens, as you would see in the video clip above. The problem is in defining the scope of blasphemy, and who gets to define it. Unfortunately, in afghanistan, it's currently controlled by radical imams.
Who controls who gets to be attacked in blasphemy in America? It SEEMS as if the democratic party gets to decide who can be freely attacked in the streets. You seem to agree, because you have advocated that people like me deserve to get attacked.
Well then.
Note: nowhere in my posts did I say I would RATHER live in a right wing government. I certainly don't want to live in a safe, but roundly awful and corrupt, China or Morocco.
DeleteBut there does seem to be a strong correlation between left wing governments, and sudden outbreaks of street violence, all the way up to civil war. It was AFTER the introduction of democracy in the arab spring that civil wars broke out, which ultimately led to ISIS forming.
A balance might be nice. But most people on the left are too busy attacking absolutely everyone even slightly to the right of them, and then the blog author is busy saying "Hey, I'm a little to the right of you but don't attack ME, there's a guy over there who is even more right wing than me. Attack him! HE is guilty for racism, not me!"
Gee, I wonder if this mindset is part of why people are attacking each other in the street.
Hmm, but you initially seemed to imply that /most/ cities are "blue", regardless of their state traditional affiliation (which is why I was initially confused about your argument). Here's the quote in question, for clarity's sake: "So when you look at cities, yes, they are almost exclusively blue, and all of them but a couple in alaska are filled with nonasian minorities. That's not a coincidence." Note that this quote also seems to imply a correlation between comparative percentages of nonwhites in cities with the core of your argument, higher violent crime in cities. Since your latter post seems to clarify a focus on the role of party policies over race, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt for now that you simply used an unfortunate combination of words.
DeleteSo, then what, now? First, I'd like to address the claim that "most cities" are blue. I'm going to take that as a fact for the sake of the argument as I'm unable to find any solid numbers on this (mostly because the word "cities" is a rather nebulous descriptor: what makes a city? raw population size? density of population per km2? I'd appreciate if you shared any sources on this to support your claim.) Nevertheless, I lean to believe your claim in principle. Why? Mostly because cities seem to have, in general, a more progressive level of education than more rural communities. People in cities are, again in general, better travelled and more conscious of issues outside their core communities at nation and world-wide level. They also have day-today contact with people from many different racial, cultural, religious and intellectual background, plus possess a better understanding of new technologies, especially those that regard human communication. Going by that, I'd indeed expect a left lean across the board.
The issue, then, seems to rest in what we qualify as "left" policies? According to me left policies aim to increase the rights of individuals, especially those who have been marginalised and need increased representation to reach that which other groups of people have enjoyed for centuries. According to you, they are destructive policies that directly increase crime, impunity and unlawfulness. This is logically problematic in the most basic level: Why would anybody support those policies if they are as blatantly counterproductive as you suggest? I think I am going to ask you at this point to give me a specific example on how a leftist policy has directly and undeniably the effects that you describe.
Moving on, you seem to keep repeating "violence against rightist" which needs to be condemned as so on. Are we speaking about Richard Spencer getting punched? You always speak in rather vague and nebulous terms in order to present your argument as an encompassing issue, but if we're talking about an incident in particular, I think it merits to be examined in detail to see if it truly can be said to represent a trend, rather than an isolated incident with extenuating factors.
Next, you seem to dismiss outright the factors I present as associated with violence, but have no base for such dismissal. For example you almost laugh at the link I make between stress and violence when several studies exist linking anxiety to aggressiveness. True, not directly to violence but my point is that when you /combine/ all the factors that I mentioned (and sure, poor policing and the other things you mention *as well*) you get the violent outcome. It is a more realistic, nuanced and responsible way of looking at an issue than your "THIS and this alone is the cause of violence in cities". As an exercise in thought, any conclusion to which you can jump which outcome is to be able to hate a group of people for it (especially one that you were already predisposed against) must be examined critically as likely influenced by biased thinking.
Btw, Canada and Australia are some other countries that have several "leftist" policies and have comparatively very little violence. France may be suffering of a problem caused by warring immigrants, but other than that its policies have greatly increased the quality of life of its inhabitants and once you take away the problem of the militant immigrants, there's very little urban violence. On the other hand, I could think of several right-wing country governments suffering of high indexes of violence, Italy and Colombia come to mind. Again, what I'm saying is even though that individual policies (left or right) may be the direct or indirect cause of violence, chalking a whole political leaning as THE cause for violence is not only facile and self-indulgent but also bound to be incorrect as we start looking at both more detailed data and more examples.
DeleteThere are other things you touch here and there, but as this post is long enough already, I'd like to focus on these topics for the time being, if you don't mind.
Most cities became leftist as the result of immigration from the third world, note, everywhere in california, which was a solid red state from its inception, or migration within the country FROM blue states that failed, notes: current state of texas and colorado FROM california.
DeleteYou will note that california currently has one of the 'highest' levels of education. education, which you say, is supposed to cure the ills of violence and poverty. funny, as california becomes MORE educated, it becomes MORE violent. california also has one of the highest unemployment rates, so seemingly it doesn't improve the economy either. And as formerly safe midwestern/southern states like colorado, idaho, and texas, get MORE californians, they get LESS safe.
Your solution doesn't work. Your solution is, in fact, CREATING the problem. and if you were to blame it on poverty instead: again, why are all of these problems not evidenced in chna, where everything is worse, but violence is less?
Ah! China, and Japan, and Korea, and Singapore, and Taiwan, AND MOROCCO, for that matter, are not leftist. That's why. They don't ENCOURAGE riots, nor give people an 'education' that says if they don't like something, they should blame it on the people with middle class jobs, and kill them.
I am not disavowing the link between nonasian minorities and violence. I am saying you 'education' system has trained them in neo-marxist rhetoric to encourage killing white people.
3 days after hiroshima was bombed, they began rebuilding teh city, even though they were dying, starving, missing limbs, lacking medical care
There were NOT riots in hiroshima OR nagasaki. Are you telling me the 'stress' of living in california on welfare is worse than hiroshima or nagasaki, post bomb? You throw together a cavalcade of stats, including stress, income, etc, and it STILL has a power correlation than raw statistics indicating race or whether it's a blue city or not. your entire conception of how to use inductive logic is flawed.
Australia is moderately right wing. They've been repelling immigrants for 15 years now. Canada is pretty left wing, but unlike france, they have lower levels of immigration. france is not "improved" by their left wing policies. France has been getting steadily worse for 40 years straight. You'd know that if you spoke the language.
note, it should saw lower correlation. the combined p values of all these factors is rated as basically nothing, to psychologists.
DeleteYou can't just invent a theory about how the brain works in your head and say "yup, that's exactly how it works."
Stress, in fact, does not directly increase violence. IT shows in the numbers. But, IF, you stress someone and give them a target of violence, say, jews in germany or "white males" in california.... well then you might get a result.
killing white males is known as an "actionable" goal. The right was floundering for 30 years because even though all the things trump pointed out, such as the fact that white people were getting targeted for crime, were obvious, there was nothing 'actionable' because even mentioning something like that could get your fired from your job.
Deletefor the last 30 years, killing white people in street crime has been actionable. It's VERY easy to understand how to do it and get the result you want: which is that white people die. If police retaliate, it's not very actionable.
To that end, you might notice that what is 'actionable' is completely determined by who is in power. now that trump is in power, conservatives have freedom of speech, which they did not before. When obama was in power, democrats had freedom of violence.
but this problem stretches back 80 years or even longer. remind me why JFK forced school integration at the barrel of a gun, but obama cannot even stop riots with the barrel of a gun. Oh, because obama had ZERO interest in making sure that the riots stopped."power comes from the barrel of a gun" I might remind you, is a saying from Mao.
So, if you TELL people to commit violence, well, they very well might. It wasn't exactly 'bigoted' white evangelicals in boise idaho that made gangster rap ubiquitous. They advocated outlawing it, in fact.
So shouldn't we blame white democrats, who advocated that gangster rap about raping women and shooting people, be free speech instead of obscenity?
I guarantee you, boise, Idaho, is still quite a pleasant city to visit. Baltimore, you might want to avoid.
America is MORE EQUAL TODAY than it ever has been in history. But strangely, now is when the loudest calls for violent reprisal against whites have been sounded.
Confess you are racist, because we know you are racist already, so you might as well take responsibility!
You sound like an evangelical during the KKK era. And that's not a coincidence. Liberalism is a fanatical folk religion which, instead of witches casting curses and disease on people, invisibly, racists 3k miles away in red places somehow cause crime in blue cities.
Of course, you could look at who owns the labels publishing violent rap albums... No, it's probably the christian who says 'turn the other cheek' rather than NWO, who explicitly write lyrics about killing white people.
Of course it was 'just a song.' Until today, when it became the explicit democratic party platform.
Thanks.
Damn, I hate when I am proven to be mistaken. In this case, it was a mistake to keep engaging you and giving you the benefit of doubt. I did offer you the opportunity to discuss this civilly. I asked you pointed questions to further the discussion, requested sources for your claims instead of outright trying to dismiss them and tried, overall, to be conciliatory in spite of your belligerent tone and the unfair assumptions and insults you make in every post.
DeleteHowever, you don't have an argument. You don't have sources and there's no logic or facts behind your claims. You have now been reduced to parrot "they want to kill us", "violence against whites", "teaching to be killers" etc, all baseless claims that you have been unwilling and unable to support with evidence. And of course you are unable to find any because even other rightists would look at you like you are crazy when you say things like "they are teaching at schools to kill us".
You are basically living a dark fantasy where the millions of men, women and children that belong to other races, cultures and political leanings are out to get you. Every single one of them. They are not minding their own business and pursuing their own happiness, no, they are exhaustively plotting how to kill you. You know this because there's like, a rap song that kind of says that and the other day someone punched a person who's basically a self-confessed nazi. Those two items give you all the evidence you need to jump to such conclusions the make up more facts and more connections that support your prejudiced beliefs. In an era when every decent person, regardless of party affiliation tells you that being a racist is bad, you have to come up with reasons to support your hatred, no matter how fantastical.
Writing this I have come to a realisation, though. The kind of beliefs you and the few people in America hold resemble most closely those spouted by neo-nazis and white supremacists. Then all of a sudden, everything makes sense. Your paranoia, your fear of violence against you! We live in a world where it is ok to punch nazis! (which you obviously conflate with "white people.") And that frightens you. You want to be able to spout your hatred freely, without consequences and maybe hoped that a Trump presidency would be your time to shine, but it turns out that it is not. And it will never be.
I was going to say that I find you disgusting, but examining my feelings I think that I actually pity you, genuinely. You are so alone. There are so few of you and the world that you want, free of the hated "Other" will never come to be. One day Trump's presidency will come to an end and your hopes for cleansing of the evils you perceive will cease and you'll go back to be reminded that you are the evil that needs to be cleansed. And even under Trump, you cannot publicly say these things without fear of retribution, without fear of the rest of the world making a caricature out of your punishment. So you are left to trawl the dark corners of the Internet, troll left-leaning blogs of people that you feel that you can condescend to and run your mouth of all the things you wish you were allowed to say from a podium. Look at you giving thanks at the end of your post as though it was an impassioned speech met with ovation as opposed to a poorly researched and punctuated, overly emotional rant that literally two people in the world are reading. It would be adorable if it wasn't rather sad and pathetic.
DeleteSo I'm going to do something nice for you: I'll allow you to have the last word. C'mon, it's ok to do your worst. Do say that I am a killer and an ignorant nobody. Do accuse me of fleeing your "logical" argumentation in defeat. Do feel like you have won a powerful debate and greatly furthered your cause on this world. I won't say a peep even if you make the most laughably outrageous claims that could be disproved with the most basic Google search. God knows that those are tempting to refute, but I'll steel myself. Enjoy.
If you want numbers, look at public crime statistics sorted by city. You'll see that all of them at the top are blue with the exception of a couple of oil boom towns in alaska and the dakotas, where they are literally hiring ex convicts to do the work.
DeleteYour asking for sources is a mask behind which you hide the fact that you ignore the stats, and continually do. It's a ritual cleansing you do to yourself to absolve yourself of hte guilt you project onto anyone who disagrees.
It is obvious the left is more violent. Russia and china killed an order of magnitude more peple than fascist. The communists in america will target you before they target the far right. They're targeting moderates as well. THE BLOG HOST complained about this. No wonder I'm afraid.
Violence against communists would never be tolerated in america. The violence has a single direction. You have ideologically justified killing anyone further to the right than you.
The left can't even build a website or functional healthcare system. The left can't even keep the water running in cities like detroit, which has regressed back to the pre-industrial era.
No, I'm not afraid because I'm alone. I'm afraid for the same reason the chinese had reason to fear mao.
Anyway, have a good day. I pray not too many innocents have to die, lose their health coverage, etc, to satisfy the pride of a petulant child who calls people who voted for obama "nazis."
What do you mean "conservatives have no reason to be upset"
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, you're a retard who can't properly delineate definitions and causality.
The conservatives were not in a position of power for the last 8 years under obama, and are not currently in power in all of europe. How does that mean they are the "defenders of the status quo" or "power" as many other confused liberals like to put it?
Obama made the wars in the middle east worse. Liberals let in the muslims into europe, liberals currently own most major cities where the crime, debt, drug, and not to mention POVERTY AND EDUCATION PROBLEMS exist.
YOU are the status quo. Liberals are the status quo and you idiots have mucked it up rightly.
Your english education has left you ill prepared to do anything other than manipulate definitions, such as "power" like a post-structuralist. Without central funding of these empty ideas, they have no ability to maintain power because they do not correspond to reality.
You guys fucked it up. If you won't take responsibility, at least shut the fuck up and sit down politely. If you keep defending rioters and murderers from YOUR STATE that YOU CREATED, then a separate country for blue states will be the most merciful of solutions.
k.
DeleteAround ten years ago I was in Argentina visiting a dear friend and we found ourselves grabbing dinner with a professor who had been arrested and tortured by the Junta back in the late 70s.
ReplyDeleteIt was 2006 and the we were talking about how, having been expelled from mainstream political life after the debacle of 1968, the American left had taken refuge in academia and how that made the US left overly obsessed with narrative, optics, discourse to the detriment of actual political action. That's still true today. Go to "woke" Twitter and 90% is poli-sci seminar bullshit masquerading as "hot takes" on the issues of the day.
And that is why, you see, the Right always wins in the end. Because be it in Argentina in the 1970s, when suit-wearing "liberals" (in the Euro sense) where more than happy with the gorillas doing their killing, or America in 2017, with #nevertrumps now begging Bannon for jobs, at the end of the day, as the professor said then... "The Right always goes hunting together."
The Right hunts together, the Left hunts itself. Sigh.
Delete