Posted on 02/02/2010 6:19:10 AM PST by Kaslin
1) Liberals believe they can change human nature. Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they're having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side of the world. We're just built that way and no amount of sensitivity training, preschool classes, or Michael Moore documentaries is going to "fix" it.
2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies. One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we're good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, "Why do they hate us?" The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don't even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we're nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can't be reasoned with.
3) Liberals don't have enough respect for our culture and traditions: To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism. Unfortunately for them, as a general rule, that's not so and proceeding as if it is, will often lead to exactly the same difficulties that our ancestors already dealt with in times past. No matter how smart we are, as Thomas Sowell would say, our wisdom is often no match for the "distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before." Truly wise people are aware that there is a great deal that they do not know.
4) Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy. Ironically, given all their talk about "shades of gray," liberals have a very Manichean view of the world. They consider their fellow travelers to be on the side of the angels, while the people who disagree with them are treated as evil. This leads to an "anything goes" mentality when dealing with their foes: ignoring the law via a "living constitution," politically based prosecutions, shouting down opposing speakers, and treating lying about their agenda or opponents to be moral. On the other hand, liberals will support other libs, no matter how corrupt, sleazy, or vile they are as long as they're politically useful to the left. See Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, John Murtha, and Robert Byrd for examples of that. In other words, as Margaret Thatcher has said of the Left, "For them, the end always seems to justify the means."
5) Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people. Liberals who're obsessed with money think they're compassionate because they give away other people's tax dollars. They believe they care more about the earth than other people, even as they fly around in private jets, because they babble on about global warming. They can be dumb as a rock, but believe they're smarter than most other people because they're liberals. In other words, in the minds of most liberals, liberalism is an all-purpose substitute for actual virtue instead of just another political philosophy.
6) Liberals have too much faith in government. Even most liberals would admit that government regularly fails the people. If you don't believe that, just ask them about the Bush Administration and they'll give you an earful. However, liberals tend to believe that with the right person in charge, government won't be so slow, stupid, inefficient, and badly run. Human history proves that they're wrong about that.
7) Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not. To most liberals, whether a government program betters people's lives is completely irrelevant to whether they'll support it. A program that doesn't work and costs billions, but sounds compassionate and helps Democrats politically is a huge success in the eyes of the Left. Once you understand that liberals think this way, their baffling support for programs that make no "common sense" is much easier to understand.
Funny thing, that...
When I detected that my “benchmark libinlaw” was arguing from the premise of the “superiority of the elite elected left”,
I asked her if she knew who Maxine Waters and Cynthia McKinney were - nope, no clue. Or the various dumbass statements that 0bama has made... nope, hadn’t heard that.
Wow!!! Great post.
If you read Alinsky, you'll find that not having principles while your opponent does is an advantage, as you can pin your opponents to the principles the opponent holds but has trouble living up to. That's why an R sex scandal hits the WaPo and NyTimes early, but D sex scandals need the National Enquirer to get on the case.
To the left, only the right can be hypocrites, because the left believes that anything goes.
I’ve been taking the intellectually superior route with certain libs. Refer to some matter involving history or science or economics and when it becomes clear they don’t understand your point just sort of look at them with a pitying expression, or chuckle and say “well, you did vote for Obama”. They hate it.
I like it.
Actually, you’re not pulling the SAME “intellectually superior argument” that they’re using,
you’re just destroying THEIR air of superiority through demonstration,
and that’s what they really hate,
because often this is the sole reason for being liberal - the false sense of superiority.
bttt
I might add “Liberals have a fundamental distrust in the average person, reserving power and responsibility for themselves, while simultaneously depriving it in others they deem “unworthy””. Therefore, we cannot be trusted to safely own/operate guns, money, food, to name a very basic few. It is fundamental to their need to establish a “risk free” utopian liberal/socialist society. Leave it to the professionals, they say, which is why police have become more recorders of a crime after the fact, and frequent deliverer of body bags rather than protectors.
And there are a lot of libs -- or Dems anyway -- or aren't snobs. It's just that they still think it's 1962 and their party still believes in God and country.
But I have started making it clear to those Dems who think they are independent and smart that they are sheep and stupid.
How can anybody still believe in global warming??
Liberals are irrelevant, they are the useful tools of stalinists and lenninists. True hard core communists do not believe any of that claptrap. What we have in the white house are hard core radicals. Liberals believe in the utopia, communists are practical ruthless murderers lacking bourgeois sentiment. Do not confuse the two. Having been a stalinist in a past life I can tell you, true communists despise and revile moronic liberals and trotskytite scum..
Anyway, We both agreed that liberalism vs conservatism is more a question of emotion versus reason.
For instance, I don't believe in man-made global warming because there's little hard evidence - beyond that which is cherrypicked - to show that it exists. He believes in man-made global warming because he THINKS it makes sense.
Reason versus Emotion. I looked at all of the evidence and came to a conclusion - one which, given substantive evidence to the contrary, I'd change. He doesn't care about the evidence, he just believes what he wants to believe.
ROFLMAO! And how do you really feel about liberal? LOL!
My tagline used to say "I can reach across the aisle without even using my sights."
Even BETTER! LOL!
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different result - Albert Einstein
And that's socialism/liberalism/communism/progressiveness (or whatever they call themselves today) for you. It is the same old story, even though their ideas and ideals have without exception failed every single time and have caused nothing but death and misery, instead of reexamining their beliefs, they continue to convince themselves that “this time it will be different.”
This delusion is caused by the belief that the past reason for failure was
1) The right people were not in charge, but the new leader is so much smarter and/or less corrupt than anyone that has tried and failed before, therefore he/she/it will make it work this time. (Hence Obama’s nickname “The One”)
2) We just didn't spend enough money. If we only spend more and spend it sooner . (2nd stimulus anybody)
3) or it's whatever scapegoat/Emmanuel Goldstein they can find fault for opposing them. ( Bush's fault)
The order of this implies that liberalism=emotion and conservatism=reason. But that is the exact opposite of the liberal (they call themselves progressives now) view. They see themselves are rational and conservatives as emotional. To them, Kerry and Obama are brilliant(I know this sounds idiotic) and Bush was a bible thumping spoiled goof. A good example is embryonic stem cell research on already dead embryos. They see opposition to this as being pure superstition. But we see liberalism as being emotional, their religion is saving the planet with higher taxes on us.
Economic theory by liberals is completely bogus (reference Paul Krugman ) . This is because they create these economic theories from their primary social justice moral views. So government paid health care as a civil right becomes “we are going to save money by giving free health care”. (Compare this to ours “Your tax cut paid for itself” as the conservative economic Santa Claus motivated by the fact we believe we deserve a tax cut.)
I have been studying these libs for years. They can't survive without Bush or another boogyman.
Actually the issue is a bit different. Our bitterest enemies do have rational reasons for hating us...at least in their worldview way of looking at things. The problem liberals have is they fail to grasp that people don't think like they do. Despite their claims to global concern they really are excessively provincial in how they think.
ping
I thought part of logical thinking included not making baseless assumptions.
How can someone be said to think logically if he does not verify his starting premise?
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