The Anger Of The Left

LovingTongue said:

Oh hell yes.

Your "anything to the left of free market anarchism is COMMUNISM" brickbats are the stuff of legends.

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Ibsen said:

Ok, where have those brickbats been tossing bricks? I´m honestly curious.

I´m not anarchist, I belive that people can work and run a civilized society without a government stealing 60% of my income.

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LovingTongue said:

Look up Lost Cause, Cap'n Amatrixca, UncleBill, or Ishmael on here.

And if the government takes 60% of your income, I don't need to insult you - your lack of tax breaks knowledge does all that in and of itself.

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B_Gus_Richards said:

"It is hard to think of a time when Karl Rove or Dick Cheney has even raised his voice..."

Does telling a Senator to FUCK OFF on the Senate floor qualify?

Or what about poor Karl screaming at Sheryl Crow?

Yeah, this is brilliant alright.

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Pookie said:

Dude, thinking is hard work.

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The Tolerance of the Right

That people on the political right have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the right are accompanied by open mindedness, and even tolerance and love.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the right, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is, strangely enough, almost entirely absent.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the radio waves, hurling slurs or slogans? How often have conservative activists threatened an abortion clinic or taken a baseball bat to gay rights activists? How many feminist speakers or civil rights activists do you see walking around with police protection?

The source of the love coming from the Right, "conservatives" or radicals all too apparent. You have to go deep into the Muslim neighborhoods, online in the Hurricane Katrina discussion chat rooms, turn on Ann Coulter or any talk radio show, or fly all the way to the Deep South to see any kind of intolerance from the Right. If you go to church you'll see the depth of the Right's love and tolerance.

The few and far between targets of the Right's anger - the working class, swarthy people, those nappy headed hos, rappers, opponents of the war, opponents of globalist trade, feminists, anti domestic surveillance activists - are the vast minority of people in America anyway. They're a threat to America and as my online sycophant Vetteman once said, we're going to wipe them out some day soon! Go America!

er, wait a minute...

It is hard to think of a time when Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter have even raised their voices, much less said anything intolerant, but yet they are hated like the devil incarnate.

There has to be some identifiable entity to arouse the ire of the Right. "Wage increases for the working class", for instance.

All sorts of people can have all sorts of beliefs about what wage levels are best from various points of view. But how can people not get enraged over the fact that the working class is on the verge of earning more money?

The tolerant Right has no time to spend even considering the argument that what they call "a minimum wage increase" would in fact destroy the economy, what with these evil, hateful Liberals hounding them 24/7.

Just because minimum wage increases haven't been found to actually hurt the economy in reality, doesn't give the angry Left the right to censor and oppress the tolerant Right's theories. What happens when the sky really does fall? Remember, we told you so!

And now let's talk about tax cuts. Budget deficits have often resulted from runaway spending but seldom from reduced tax rates. Just ask the state of Minnesota. But once again, the angry Left won't let the loving, tolerant Right speak up on that.

The hateful Left is not even above the naked use of force. Look at what they're doing to ram gay marriage down the throats of millions of unwilling Americans. Do you realize every time two gay people get married, one whole blue blooded traditional American family spazzes out and foams at the mouth? Gay marriages are acts of terrorism, yet the angry Left would force America to endure it with no regard to our national security.

Those on the other side may have different arguments. However, the question here is not why we all have different arguments, but why there is such anger on the left and love on the right.

Often it is an exercise in futility even to seek to find a principle behind the anger. For example, the left's hateful intolerance of the Right's "Tough Love" policy toward the working poor. It's as if "Let them eat cake" is a bad thing! No doubt the angry Left will accuse the Right of preaching hate towards working class chump-er, Americans who can't afford health care. Why not turn that hatred towards all the lawsuits being filed against doctors who kill their patients? Why not turn their intolerance towards American pharmaceutical workers and send those jobs overseas to, say, China? It worked for dog food, it can work for pharmaceuticals! Imagine the cheap imported drugs.

If it is hard to find a principle behind what angers the Right, because really, nothing angers the Right.

Well, except swarthy people.

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Karen Kraft said:

[snip]

“Their greatest anger seems to be directed at people and things that thwart or undermine the social vision of the left, the political melodrama starring the left as saviors of the poor, the environment, and other busybody tasks that they have taken on.

It seems to be the threat to their egos that they hate. And nothing is more of a threat to their desire to run other people's lives than the free market and its defenders.”
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Nice article. I find no difficulty at all understanding the anger that the good people on the left side of the political spectrum are experiencing. In my opinion, it has little to do with the actual celebrities seated to the right of them on that spectrum, but more to do with a systemic frustration, founded in either a lack of understanding of- or a refusal or denial of- the natural proclivities of man. Despite centuries of socialization, civilization, religion, and political philosophy, the animal that is man is nevertheless still governed by- and motivated by- the unyielding though often disguised characteristic of selfishness. Now, I don’t use the word “selfish” in a stingy sense at all. I simply mean that selfism for one’s own person, family, race, religion, ethnic group, sex, tribe, and so on, works extremely well. Compassion, the touchstone of the left, is contrary to the natural instincts and motivations of man.

George Bernard Shaw expresses the seminal error most characteristic of left thinkers, when he states, “You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?’”

Therein lies the rub. Where the right demands adherence to their ideological catechism, wagging their jewel-encrusted fingers at the world, the penalty they foresee for disobedience is an afterlife in Hell. Since much of the world has moved beyond primitive concepts of Heaven and Hell, it is far easier to simply shrug off the warnings from the right.

The left is angry because it is frustrated. It is frustrated because it seeks to make a better world by legislating compassion and presenting to the public an image not of the real world the way an objective observer might describe it, but a world they way it OUGHT to be, in the hopes that if, with enough fervency, the population can be taught the correct way to think, we can overcome the selfism that has always plagued us. But compassion is not one of the components of natural selection. Selfism is. This is always going to be frustrating to those who dream the way thing ought to be but who are unable to change the heart and mind of man.

Is this irrational or unreasonable? No, not really. It’s just really very frustrating to those who so sincerely believe that we can do better. We can’t. We won’t. Compassion resides only in our individual hearts, it can never be collectivized. To legislate compassion in order to codify it somehow will inevitably lead to the frustration that vents itself in anger which, in turn, expresses itself is misplaced anger toward people in the leadership on the right. This is because it is far easier to blame a few people who seem to be somehow blocking the progress of man than it is to accept the reality that man is the way that he is and has not evolved through compassion.

To quote Shaw again: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

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Hamletmaschine said:

Back in the '80s the neocons decided the academy was hopelessly corrupted by evil left-wing English professors and ugly femi-nazis, and so they decided to go the old liberal (oh, the irony!) route of occupying the "public intellectual" position. Sowell is a case in point of how trying to explain anything more complicated than how to program a TV remote to John Q. Sixpack just makes one stupider and stupider with each successive pronouncement.

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LovingTongue said:

And the last quote explains why all PROGRESS, indeed all ACHIEVEMENTS in America and history in general, have been because of the Left.

The Right, by your words, embodies cowardice and surrender to our basest instincts. People are people, so why try to be better? It's easier to give in to our base urges than stand our ground for what's better.

Many called, few chosen...

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SeanH said:

The only sensible emotional response to some of the right's actions, through history and of late, is rage. No apologies are necessary for feeling it.

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Ishmael said:

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

The source of the anger of liberals, "progressives" or radicals is by no means readily apparent. The targets of their anger have included people who are non-confrontational or even genial, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

It is hard to think of a time when Karl Rove or Dick Cheney has even raised his voice but they are hated like the devil incarnate.

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And nothing is more of a threat to their desire to run other people's lives than the free market and its defenders.

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Karen Kraft said:

Fine.

But why are they so outraged? I'm not asking for a list of "bad acts," but a more general explanation. Why do even the most gentle conservatives generate such outrage and condemnation from the left?

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SeanH said:

The only sensible emotional response to some of the right's actions, through history and of late, is rage. No apologies are necessary for feeling it.

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LovingTongue said:

Er, Patriot's Day.

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MechaBlade said:

When the Republicans lose the White House in 08, I want a bumper sticker that says "If you don't like America, you can just secede. Oh wait, tried that."

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Karen Kraft said:

Fine.

But why are they so outraged? I'm not asking for a list of "bad acts," but a more general explanation. Why do even the most gentle conservatives generate such outrage and condemnation from the left?

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RightField said:

I still like the article.

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