You can fit those last two in there. Call it SMIXTHIRB. Or change the order and call it BIRTHSMIX.
I would like to make a comment about #4, that since Marx the left cares more about ideas than people.
I believe so-called “progressives” would insist precisely the opposite, that they care more about people than ideas or ideals.
Consider the difference between caring for Persons, or individuals, and caring about people.
I hope it should be obvious that you or I can care deeply about one yet not the other, just as someone may care about both or, sadly, neither.
A Person (to belabor the point) is an individual: when one says “I love my mom.” they are talking about a particular Person; but, when one say “I love mothers” they are talking about people, an abstraction of persons. Such a lover of mothers, caring about the ideal of motherhood, may not even like their own mother. They may even hate her.
Here, I will try to cut to the chase to say that progressivism enjoins that folks care a great deal about people in the abstract, and for evidence we can look at how progressives often go about meeting the needs of people through the intermediary of governments where professionals direct tax money (that is obviously not their own) to individuals as “cases”.
Your archetypal progressive response to people being in need is not “charity” where someone sees a specific need and from their own means and at their own discretion tries to meet it.
That doesn’t mean that progressives do not engage in charity, don’t think I’m saying that!
It means that when progressives act in society the welfare they seek to provide for “people” is something done through official proxies.
Yes, someone can actually “care” a great deal about the idea of “people” but not give a damn about some (or any) Person standing there before them ... but that’s an extreme I’m not wanting to deal with here.
Rather I want to deal with the difference between the use of publicly funded proxies to meet the needs of a class of persons (like “the poor”) and caring for others either directly or through voluntary association.
Remember that old adage about charity being insufficient, that people fall through the cracks and that is why we need force association welfare schemes?
Charity in its purest form is “me” giving to “you” but I only go so far: I have only so much to give, in resources or time, and only so much awareness to inform my giving.
Someone can care deeply about meeting the needs of actual Persons that they encounter and, being resigned that they can only do what they can do, are “okay” that there are Persons they cannot help, and which are therefore not being helped by them. They probably hope that others are meeting those needs and part of the motive behind banding together in voluntary charitable associations is rooted in this hope.
That is deemed both insufficient and inefficient (the argument being that hoping that something occurs is not the same as it actually happening).
And it is a desire for sufficiency and efficiency, that helps to establish that the “progressive” way is to care / provide for groups at the expense of other groups.
Everyone “gives at the office” by their taxes because that’s efficient and care is given by agencies with deep resources because that’s sufficient.
It does not matter that making them give at the office removes from folks some of the means with which they could be more charitable themselves because their charity is flatly defined by progressivism as insufficient.
So we have reached a very different point in our history from earlier times when people may have been leery of charities, as voluntary associations, to where many folks are leery of the efficacy any but involuntary associations.
In my less charitable moments I have said that, of this desire to meet asserted needs through official proxies funded by force, that if only Ahab had taken Naboth’s vineyard for a vegetable garden to feed Samaria’s poor he would be a hero to the left!
More commonly I express the view that any lack of sufficiency in charity is exasperated as government gobbles up people’s means to waste on bureaucracies shuffling money to the needy. That the assumption they make (that charity is insufficient) is not a fact but a prophecy for it is certainly insufficient now that they take so much of people’s means for their mad schemes of public welfare!
To them “sufficiency” is from some in the group (by force as required) to others in the group per need.
Sound familiar?
They do “care about people” and ironically “people” are an idea, an abstraction of actual persons that they meet.
I’m not going to say that “progressives” only care in the abstract; but, I will say that if someone does not care in the abstract as progressivism ideologically demands that they do there is a marked tendency among “progressives” to consider such people to be bad and that this gets worse the deeper one lives within the echo chamber.
So then, what are the ideas or ideals that progressives care less about than they do “people”?
Well, without apology, they would be anything, like our Constitution as amended and even what this country was founded to be, that may stand in the way of the official proxy do gooders that they demand run the show.
Or ...
Me: people’s circumstances are not amendments to the Constitution ... because I do care about those ideals greatly in addition to caring for Persons.
Them: we don’t give a damn about your old fashioned views ... it’s a living constitution bla bla bla bla...
... and we can know for certain that they have not valued our Law because those progressives responsible for bringing us all this progressivism have never attempted to amend the Constitution to make it all actually lawful. Arbitrary government was good enough for them, their oaths of office be damned, from FDR till the present day.
Of course that isn’t the same as saying they do not value any ideals ... for it is not without a cause that there is nothing left of the old extreme left that is still considered extreme by the left anymore! Nor is it divorced from this change that they now define McGovernites as moderates and call unrepentant Alinskyites right of center!
Those who have given us and who continue to propagate Arbitrary Government and absolute rule certainly have ideals that they value.
I am this close to ending a friendship over this gutless, irrational and unreasoned crap.
I’ve told them I am tired of being given their frenemy and don’t care to be in an environment where they feel comfortable abusing another person.
I’ve already started visits less but, endured this craptastic vitriol again last night and rather than reflecting upon a night of pleasure, I cringe thinking “WTF happened to my friends?”
Really not interested in being around the adolescent name calling, which was well worn out over the last 8 years and this ridiculous “Against Everything”.
Fun part was the loudness at a restaurant with a friend raising her voice “YOU TRUMPETTES ARE GETTING TURNED ON BY THAT FASCIST, WHO IS RENEGING ON EVERYTHING YOU VOTED ON!!!!....I LOVE IT!!!!”.
I almost left the restaurant but, I drive.
Next time I think we’ll just go in separate cars, so I can excuse myself with ease.
Meh.
If they cut us off they will have to eat each other sooner or later.
Libs eating each other is a win win for us.