Posted on 11/22/2021 4:00:13 AM PST by MtnClimber
This has been on my mind for some time, this dichotomy we see regarding Leftists and Liberals.
I know many of these people personally, and am related to at least one like them who subscribes to their agenda.
These people are not stupid, though we (myself included) often ascribe this characteristic to them. How else to explain this weird mix of apparent ignorance, stupidity, laziness, arrogance, and stubbornness?
Many of these people are intelligent and accomplished in the sphere I know them in. (By choice and temperament, I generally don’t knowingly socially mix with Leftists at all, and Liberals to a minor degree.) But I interact professionally with many of them, spend time with them, and must retain positive professional and sometimes personal relationships with them.
I find them a puzzle, and I am not willing to explain their odd rejection of facts and reality with the excuses of stupidity and ignorance.
There is something to do with the mechanism of ideology that twists these usually intelligent people to dogmatically accept things that are simply and factually untrue, never mind things that are shaded in any degree of complexity and subject to rationalization.
It is this degree if ideologic adherence that baffles, concerns, and frightens me. I feel that we all hold the seed to this unsavory condition inside us in some degree (the condition that results in a disregard of fact coupled with a slavish adherence to form)
To me, there is something sinister and evil in the concept of something that will twist otherwise decent people into tyrants, or being supportive of tyranny.
I am open to suggestions and explanations, but it isn’t stupidity. It is something else.
They can only be convinced by death camps, as they are being dragged away.
Therefore, in the racially charged context of the Rittenhouse case, it does not matter whether or not self-defense was justified. Rittenhouse should be thrown in jail because that’s what would have happened to a black man in his position.
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This is simple to understand from liberal “logic”. In their world, there are no individuals. People are assigned to groups. You have no separate identity and no control over your life. Your existence is only a stand-in as a representative for “the group”. So punishment of “the group” is all that matters.
What the author misses is that the left and the right have two radically different views of what is justice. For the right it is justice for the individual. For the left it is justice for the group. This is the meaning of the term “social justice.” For the left the trial was never about the individual Kyle Rittenhouse, is was about the group to which he belongs, white America. For all forms of leftism, i.e. socialism, the goal is the redress of perceived injustice to the benefit of a favored group against an identified oppressor group. For the Marxists the favored group are the workers. For the Nazis the favored group were the ethnic Germans. For the present day leftists it is racial minorities. Justice for individuals in the favored or identified oppressor groups is of no concern. The only concern is the group. This is “social justice.”
I have lived deep in leftist land for most of my life.
What they are about is _virtue_.
They want to be “good” and “moral”.
They would run over their grandmother to be “good”.
Here in New England it appears to be a remnant of Puritanism.
They want the world “pure”, not messy.
In seeking that Utopia they are ruthless and evil.
They just can’t look into the mirror and figure out who is looking back at them.
They have created a new religion of Woke Deities.
But—to me it is just Puritanism with a new face.
That is an interesting angle. I am from that Blue State that was the home of the Puritans, and I believe that for many “Liberals” that desire to be “woke” is a powerful one.
The thing that really eats at me is the way these underlying mechanisms seem to completely overpower the normal foundations many people have, the collection of principles of various kinds, the historical knowledge, even the underpinning of Judeo-Christian values which many of these people have, and they even belong to “real” churches (not those Unitarian things)
A lot of these people do have those principles and foundations, yet...they subjugate them and disregard them to embrace Leftist ideology, and that is what rules them.
I find this phenomenon deeply unsettling.
As conservatives, we accept nearly as dogma that humans are flawed, and all of us contain the seeds of evil within us that by nature, we are capable of great and unjust evil. So, we must accept that the seeds are resident within us, even if they are not expressed in our lives to a great degree.
And it is that realization that there is a partition between “us” and “them” which can be crossed at any time (if we allow ourselves to do so) which is disturbing to me.
I get the impression that this key observation is completely unknown to them, which in my mind, makes it even more dangerous. I also have a gut feeling it goes in some way to the heart of the matter.
So, your comment about virtue, good, moral, and pure may be summed up in that one word: Utopia, which all Leftists and Liberals seem to believe is achievable, but...we conservatives know, is not.
Perhaps that is the root of it.
“It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use of reason as to administer medication to the dead” - Jefferson
Billy the Bomber, aka Just a Guy in the Neighborhood, Weatherman, son of scum bag Frank (DownLowBarry’s probable bio daddy)’s Chicago connection....well I could go on. My guess is DownLowBarry, ValJar, Big Mike, Cass Sustein, Gates, S9ros, LiarSusanRice ARE RUNNING THIS SHOW.
No
I sympathize with the author. After the last election I attempted to help a family member understand why I questioned the election results. I asked him if he watched any of the hearings going on in WI, PA, GA, AZ, etc where testimony was given. I sent him links to videos and tried to explain why it was valid to have a reasonable doubt about the election. He responded that he watched a few minutes but didn’t believe there was fraud and he wasn’t going to sit through it all....
Stunning, that someone who had a career in engineering, someone I had looked up to as smart and successful- was too intellectually lazy to consider something outside the MSM narrative. That laziness has done more damage to this country than the pandemic ever could.
I believe the answer is yes, but by the time they figure it out it is too late.,
Analogy
I have only found One sure fire way to teach the concept of Gravity to most Plumbers in SoCal, Take them up on the roof and THROW THEM OFF, They will understand Gravity about the time they hit the ground, but it will be too late,.
I believe there is truth in that description, that we all live in a “bubble of perception” because that is the human condition. In general, we don’t have any other way.
We are self-centered by nature, because we are human. The first big difference in my opinion between Left and Right that makes us more able to construct a more durable “bubble of perception” that is more in harmony with the “real world” (and as a result, more stable in the long run) is our recognition of this fact, that it is human nature to act according to the “self” as opposed to acting for the “collective”.
Acting for the collective (such as jumping on a grenade in a foxhole to sacrifice your own life to save your comrades is 100% laudible, but nobody anywhere is going to be able to argue that is integral to human nature.
Acting for the “self” is, and that is sometimes unfortunate. But it is that recognition that Leftists and Liberals lack which is the significant difference.
Correction: Leftists are all for the collective, with the caveat that they themselves are more important than the “collective”.
They leave it to their bug-eyed, mottle-faced, spittle-lipped Leftist ideologue foot soldiers to “act and sacrifice” for the collective, augmented by the bovine “Liberals” who are intellectually lazy and press whatever lever is in front of them to get the “woke” treat.
the only way out of this, given the reality you just described, is to loosen the political bands that connect us.
As an engineer, my world is driven by facts. I make most of my work decisions based on the facts - the facts at hand. More often than not, the 'facts at hand' change...A more accurate reading is made...More data comes in and the statistical averages change...There was a calibration error...A different calculation method was used...Additional data channels are recorded..Etc.
I am accustomed to being wrong from my first decision and must quickly change it to become up to date. On average, I'm likely more often wrong than I am right. I'm quite used to that.
In the world of politics, few change their opinions easily. Opinions are usually based on ideology, not facts, anyway. People can rarely be conclusively PROVEN wrong. Many (example: resident Joe) will never even accept that they are wrong even when faced with overwhelming evidence. That's just life.
Progressives are even more prone to this. Most live in a sheltered world where alternative facts are simply unavailable. If your only news comes from CNN and NPR, and Facebook, the world of conservative facts is simply unavailable. They are quite unaware of what we know to be truth. Even worse, they're totally unwilling to find out. It doesn't help to try. They simply say 'goodbye'.
Lol the Don Juan part should have been a dead give away that most of his writings we’re BS. I read his whole series then dug even further by reading a lot of much older books, and lo and behold many of his statements were word for word from the older books.
Also a brujo would never teach any of those things to anyone other than someone who was going to be a replacement for him...
“Can A Progressive Be Convinced By Facts?
No, and neither can conservatives if it is about a subject they feel strongly about.
There are reasonable people who are amenable to facts, but in my experience they are small in number compared to everyone else who is not moved by facts.”
What a stupid thing to post.
I suppose only clear thinking folks like you are capable?
You’re assumption that Conservatives can be closed minded is close minded. Ergo you must be a closed minded Conservative.
“feel strongly about” and facts do not mix. Please post some of your Facts Conservatives don’t believe.
And post some Facts Progressives dont believe.
Might be easier to follow RWR, regarding folks believing things that simply aren’t so”
I can see you visualize much of the same mechanism in action with the Left as I do.
I really did think at one point in my life that it was all about getting the facts into the hands of those people who needed them to come to the appropriate reality-based conclusion, but...I have sadly come to realize just how completely wrong that is.
Reality based discussions of fact have zero effect on them. For a while, I thought that perhaps it was because they didn’t have the physical time or energy to research things (Laziness?) but have since come to realize, the door to the vault is much closer to the heart of their minds.
They have determined “the truth” for themselves, and have walled it off to protect it, and...as such, are impervious to rationality and information.
They simply don’t allow it to enter.
We as conservatives do not have this luxury, for the most part. We have to constantly engage in a self-reflecting process to assess and re-assess our stances and core principles, because they are constantly under attack. While this takes energy on our part, I don’t see it as a negative in the end. I think we are stronger intellectually for it, and our foundation principles are more in harmony with reality and less likely to be perverted or malformed by the ricochets of Cognitive Dissonance inside our heads.
Leftists and Liberals are not exposed to any kind of reflective process that forces them to evaluate, and reevaluate their principles base on factual data. They get constant reinforcement from government, media, entertainment, and education that they are correct, and they leave it at that.
This is why the VAST majority of crime and violence emanates from the Left of the political spectrum. I believe it is due the damage done by a huge amount of Cognitive Dissonance which is, by necessity, introduced by Leftist concepts.
Mark Twain said it best.
“it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled”
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