Mugged by reality
Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.
I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances — I had no right-wing friends — expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I’m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don’t know that they were. I’m speaking here, merely, about language.
In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn’t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.
A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as “Bushitler.” The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine.
In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn’t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.
I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone — even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health — meant a great deal to me.
Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, “No, I’m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.”
“Julie,” I said, “You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don’t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something — capitalism.”
“Yes, but I’m very nice about it,” she insisted. “I always protest with a smile.”
Wow. I have no other response.
That said, I think I’m becoming what Ms. Goska was before, only a politically opposite version. I’m really starting to be extra angry (and almost hateful) in my thoughts about today’s ruling class, and some of the groups that she used to be part of (Occupy types, for example).
I am seeing myself as being guilty of some of the 10 items she lists, but in the other direction.
It just another manifestation of the phenomenon we’ve observed countless times over the past decade-plus. They believe, to the bottoms of their hearts, that they are the “good” people working on the side of truth and justice and rightness. As such, they can’t recognize their destructive behavior for what it is. Sure, they express their hate openly every day, but the targets of their hatred “deserve” it. Sure, they’ve condemned the inner cities to a life with terrible schools, non-existent jobs, countless fatherless children, and all the despair and violence and hopelessness that comes with such an environment. But they can’t see that they’ve destroyed the cities, because they really, deeply care so much, and anybody who cares deeply and has the best of intentions can’t be responsible, so it must be the fault of those evil Republicans.
It remains an endless fountain of frustration to me that I cannot get most of my lefty friends to even make the attempt at examining their behaviors, beliefs, and policies objectively. Partly, it’s because their devotion to the cause makes them believe that there’s no need for self-reflection in the first place. But more than that is the pain that comes from the cognitive dissonance that kicks in as soon as they start making the effort.
– The pitfalls of dumping where you eat.
– If you think about it for a moment you realize that destroying and hating at every opportunity instead of loving and building is the providence of both the Left and Islam. No wonder they share common cause.
– The little king just made his “statement” on the Ukraine. What a total pussy.
But they can’t see . . .
This may be where Nathan’s strategy with David may work quite nicely. Nathan makes an abstract, a parable to which David can agree, along with vehement denunciations of the actor in Nathan’s story. Then Nathan, clever fellow, delivers the reveal: you, David, are the one you denounce.
Working from the extremely abstract (like Plato’s dialogues, for instance) can be a very useful technique for arriving at a mutual agreement.
You can go back over every single argument that Jeff has had with lefties, and see where this is fucking spot-on. In fact, you can scrape together every shitty comment left by a lefty troll, here, and see that it’s fucking spot-on.
…which is not to say all lefties are like that. Just a lot.
One who’ll never change.
One of the reasons I comment less about politics these days than I used to, is that I don’t like being angry.
I don’t mind anger — it’s a useful motivator, for some things — but what I would need to do to improve things politically, I can’t use anger for.
Homer used anger for his very first word in the Iliad — making anger, in a sense, the whole ball o’ wax. Man, what a use.
If my wife ran off with the Prince of Troy I’d figure I must have married the wrong woman. But then, I’m closer in age to Priam than to Paris.
A link from Geoffb’s link that says all that needs to be said about the spoiled child mindset of the typical leftist of today.
heh. What’s even stranger is all the other guys (who wanted her just as bad as the winner of her did) pledging to help the winner out avenging her abduction, all at the same time each of the losers of her were thanking their lucky stars they weren’t the winners of her — there but for the grace of the gods go we, they were telling themselves, like his brother: “yeah, she’s a beautiful piece [of work], but thanks be she ain’t my piece of work and I got stuck with her sister instead”.
– Speaking of family, I’m about to get a visit from my middle son and his family, whom I haven’t seen in over 32 years. The last time him and his older brother visited me in Cal was when they were young turks just out of high school. Finally get to see two of my 5 grandkids.
–
In other words, she grew up and her friends did not.
In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.
In Cali Colombia, beggars are known to keep open wounds open to evoke pity. How the wounds got there I do not know: maybe they’re self-inflicted as the cost of doing business. But you’d see these totally wrecked shins and knees and arms, scabbed and re-scabbed with yellowed scar tissue around the edges. It was more disgusting than pitiable, because everyone knew what they were up to.
I once saw a “blind” man board a bus with his cane and outstretched hand, then as the bus lumbered about he glanced upward to grab the bar. Everyone saw the eye movement and booed audibly. The Colombians are just as sick of pretend victims as we are. And this is in a country where real poverty exists, where abandoned and orphaned children live in the streets and people build shanty towns in the outskirts of every city.
Ima just link this comment of mine (plus downthread) because the American Thinker article supports some of the points I made, to wit:
Unfortunately, conservative response to the welfare state has been to stand on the sidelines muttering “you’re doing it wrong” and even “those people are cheating,” as if being Kept Voters were tantamount to Getting Away With Something.
We would do better to think of our welfare system, especially as it is administered to the inner cities, as demented wildlife rescue centers where the injured eagles went in but were never rehabilitated and never released into the wild — instead, they were kept in crowded cages where they reproduced and pecked each other’s eyes out because the captivity made them crazy.
Means we gotta go find those who can be rehabilitated and teach them to fend for themselves in the wild, the way God intended. We gotta do it in the absence of legislation (except where possible) and we gotta do it such that it’s visible and the good results are undeniable.
If I didn’t have to lie down and rest a couple times while getting ready for work, I’d start something up myself.
Like I said, a LOT of people on the left or leftish side of the divide cheer for their team colors but have never really met anyone on the other side. Ms. Goshka obviously did her leftist things not because she was a neurotic sadist with delusions of superiority but because she wanted to genuinely do good things and those leftist paths were what were open to her until she ran into ACTUAL CONSERVATIVE IDEAS and people and her mind began to change.
Furthermore, those folks coming over from Latinoamerica know nothing of Enlightenment ideals and many would be open to them if they could only hear them.
Anyone know how to get conservative talk radio in Spanish up and running?
It is. The fact the keepers are getting away with worse doesn’t excuse the kept.
– The best charity is legal, safe, and rare.
It is. The fact the keepers are getting away with worse doesn’t excuse the kept.
What are they getting away with? I’m not talking about those who consciously scam the system; I’m talking about 4th-generation welfare recipients who have no concept of how else their lives might be.
If they’re getting away with something valuable, why don’t you go live in a project and collect a check?
It’s not just because you’re white and have self-respect: it’s also because you know that everything about those neighborhoods is toxic and you want nothing to do with it.
Some of those captive eagles can be rehabilitated; they just need mentoring to learn how to hunt and build nests.
She left out not liking the left’s delight at seeing Jews killed as one of her reasons. Wonder why? Probably just slipped her mind.
Indeed, that article should have gone up to eleven.
You’re talking about people who have HDTVs. They can see every day — probably for 12 hours every day — how else their lives might be.
This is how you get into unnecessary fights with your friends. I’m not someone who can be preached to on that subject.
>If they’re getting away with something valuable, why don’t you go live in a project and collect a check? <
because i'm a productive individual who doesn't want to cloward piven the society?
“I’m not talking about those who consciously scam the system; I’m talking about 4th-generation welfare recipients who have no concept of how else their lives might be. – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=54477#comment-1096649”
That is a distinction without a difference in most cases I’m afraid. Until very recently, government benefits required the illegal immigrant to acquire fake ID, and every one getting welfare knew damn well they were criminally scamming the country which they criminally entered.
This is why the phrase “living in the shadows” was coined, because “scamming the system” sounds mean to the tender hearted.
“Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist”
So, that LGF fellow is back ?
You’re talking about people who have HDTVs. They can see every day — probably for 12 hours every day — how else their lives might be…
…were it not for Evil Whitey who keeps them down.
Successful, productive behavior is learned. You and I learned it. They did not.
This is how you get into unnecessary fights with your friends. I’m not someone who can be preached to on that subject.
That rhetorical question wasn’t a challenge, it was the introduction to this assertion:
It’s not just because you’re white and have self-respect: it’s also because you know that everything about those neighborhoods is toxic and you want nothing to do with it.
Some can be saved using conservative principles, teaching them to fish what wants to.
We can’t wait until congress cuts the budget, or until the left changes their ways, or until the poor figure out they’re being used. We have to elbow our way past the left-wing barricade and extract them what can be.
and every one getting welfare knew damn well they were criminally scamming the country which they criminally entered.
We cannot fault the illegals for not taking our laws more seriously than our own government does. They’re used to living in a system that is so corrupt that gaming the system IS the system. Going through channels in their countries gets you nowhere — you have to know someone or grease a palm or fudge a document or whatever.
Everyone does it because it’s the way everything is done. They don’t see it as criminality; they see it as one of the alternate channels.
With plenty of help from our gubmint officials, BTW. Don’t blame the illegals for accepting an invitation for free stuff from Uncle Sam himself.
You’re talking about people who have HDTVs
In the case of Latinos, they watch sports and soaps and the occasional zany game show.
The soaps are ALL Dickensian Cinderella stories wherein a virtuous but poor young woman catches the eye of a rich man and after running a gauntlet of evil, jealous women and lustful men (and amnesia and evil twins and revealed parenthood and all manner of soap-opera twists) she through her virtue and sweetness ends up in her rightful place alongside the rich man.
Remember how Oliver Twist ends? We find out that his mother was actually the daughter of a rich family and Oliver inherits a bundle. That’s how all Dickens’s heroes are rescued: a hidden relationship or forgotten inheritance is the deus-ex-machina that lifts them out of poverty. I think there’s only one Dickens character, in Little Dorritt, who invents something and makes it rich.
Their economies are residual feudal systems: you have Old Money and classes and no mobility unless you’re a narcotraficante who elbows his way into High Society with violence and a truckload of cash.
> They’re used to living in a system that is so corrupt that gaming the system IS the system.<
Detroit’s Water Cutoffs Spark Protests
Crackdown on Delinquent Customers Draws Public Ire
**** I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it. ****
I’ll say it, then.
That outrage does not exist.
I think that’s a less than charitable reading of her essay, sdferr.
“I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I’ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.”
True Ernst, it is less than charitable — a fine criticism of my criticism, I think. I’m not certain I have a reasonable defense for the harshness of that comment, save possibly this: that the delight (such as I witness it) is quite open, and frequently displayed to one and all — and to that extent the author has also glimpsed it — and therefore, seems to me, there is a great deal more that she can say without need to resort to “others better qualified”. We’re all fucking qualified, is my sense of it. Of course I assume a strict holding to accountablity for those many leftists who exhibit these outbursts.
Hussein Ibish bathes in the blood.
I’m reading her as saying that Left-wing anti-Semitism is both so obvious and such a blatant embarrassment to every ideal the Left claims to stand for that nothing else needs to be said.
Perhaps also with a dash of identity-politics/ victimhood-privilege tossed in.
Recovery is a process, as they say.
But then again, she did call anti-Semitism on the left Nazi-like, albeit indirectly.
Somehow I don’t see the incongruence between left political “ideals” [claims] and murderous genocidal tendencies, I guess, particularly when religious teachings undercut leftist political teachings.
There simply is no substance to left political claims to beneficent intentions toward the religious or what have you, and least of all the Jews. So there remains plenty to be said or rooted out, if rooting out is what is required. After all, the project of the political left is deception, top to bottom, and the corrective for deception is saying practically beyond measure, if the old saw about lies traveling half-way around the world before truth can get its boots on holds any sway with us.
Confusion?
Until one understands that all these “causes” are just means to be used to obtain power and are discarded when they conflict with each other and/or that desired end.
It seems, Geoff, that The Jarrett Junto is discarding Blacks in favor of ‘Hispanics’ / ‘Lah-tee-nahs!’.
**** I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it. ****
I’ll say it, then.
That outrage does not exist.
Tell me that guins is wrong. I dare you.
With that being the case, why would anyone cede the rhetorical case? Like, ever?
This is not a collegial argument where we each make our case and may the best one win.
That’s a profoundly immoral way to approach evil. It’s also useless as a method.
Let’s have none of that. Ever.
And we should observe this weak impulse in those pretending to speak for us. We should judge them for it rather than make excuses.
Yes, cards on the table, I do mean this rather broadly.
>Yes, cards on the table<
mr. glenn beck put his cards on the table a few years back in jerusalem. the american thinker/ conservative treehouse et al not so much.
When in doubt, you can always now assume that I’m not addressing you, nr.
I’ve seen Jeff’s adventures with Twitter. No thanks.
I’m sincerely uninterested.
>When in doubt, you can always now assume that I’m not addressing you, nr.<
while mr. beck has his foibles it is interesting that his insight of the world has come to pass:
ISIS Seizes 4th Century Christian Monastery in Northern Iraq – Kicks Out Its Monks
good luck
Because, as I said above, recovery is a process. I’ll quote again from Bottum, pp.75-77:
sorry about the block quote fail. The blather at the end is me, not Bottum.
Unless it’s brilliant. In which case the blather is the stuff that’s only single blockquoted.
Heh.
Your point is well taken, of course.
I suppose I find it hard to accept some conversions without first seeing some bloody marks of ritual self-flagellation. Althouse and Noonan come to mind for some reason.
With Althouse and Noonan you see the I’m a good person because I’m against the social sin of bigotry dynamic that elected the Poseur in the first place.
It’s important to point out to the Eric Holders of the world that we won’t truly experience the fullness of authentic equality* until it’s permissible to rip the negro a new one —when he (or she) has it coming to her (or him) without fear of social sanction or legal reprisal.
*Catholic language deliberate
It’s interesting what strikes a chord, and what doesn’t. Personally, I think this is the most significant post of the month (well, maybe the week — I mean, it’s not like I’ve tried to quantify it), and folks ’round these here parts are more interested in commenting on narcotrafficantes and the saintly children crusaders encamped in our midst.
And part of it undoubtedly descends from the old Romantic view of primitive life as being more authentic and spiritually rich.
Another ‘Thank You’ owed to M. Rousseau. /sarc
Randolph Churchill: One of the greatest Misfits in history of The West.
The thing is: those who embrace Leftism are required to harden their hearts towards their fellow Men and balance it with a Hysterical embrace of maudlin ‘love’ for the idea of The Group, The Collective. Why? Because every System Of Ideas – every Ideology – demands rigid adherence and unconditional ‘love’ for it, as they are all fragile creations.
I think this rejection of Love for individuals [ie: real, flesh and blood Human Beings] and the untempered embrace of ideas [ie: the Not-Real] leads Leftists, ultimately, into suffocating arms of Nihilism. Ideas can be perfect and people are not. Spend too much time in the comforting arms of the former and very soon you will end up despising the latter because they just don’t measure-up, as it were.
…Just some thoughts that have come to mind.
harden their hearts towards their fellow Men and balance it with a Hysterical embrace of maudlin ‘love’ for the idea of The Group, The Collective.
Hellooooo Mrs. Jellyby.
Like bacteria, we will never be rid of these pseudo-philanthropic narcissists.
It seems not, Di.