What is the Left?

[_Droopy]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/ ... phany.html

Here's an excellent and insightful observation from a paragraph of the essay. Speaking truth to power doesn't get much better than this:

Progressivism as played out in the last fifty years in America is the belief system of deeply unserious people. It exists to indulge a complete and utter lack of maturity and responsibility in large enough numbers that it is assured of getting its way. It celebrates vices. It must be imposed coercively. Overt fraud and deceit are admired skills. Its practitioners wallow in behaviors and beliefs that prior generations recognized as embarrassing character flaws. It is the belief system of spoiled, antisocial children and misguided enablers, rather than responsible grownups.

Rarely have I seen a working description of the Left that better comprehends and elucidates its major features.

[_huckelberry]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/a_liberalprogressive_epiphany.html

Here's an excellent and insightful observation from a paragraph of the essay. Speaking truth to power doesn't get much better than this:

Progressivism as played out in the last fifty years in America is the belief system of deeply unserious people. It exists to indulge a complete and utter lack of maturity and responsibility in large enough numbers that it is assured of getting its way. It celebrates vices. It must be imposed coercively. Overt fraud and deceit are admired skills. Its practitioners wallow in behaviors and beliefs that prior generations recognized as embarrassing character flaws. It is the belief system of spoiled, antisocial children and misguided enablers, rather than responsible grownups.

Rarely have I seen a working description of the Left that better comprehends and elucidates its major features.

Screaming winds of infernal violence alternate with periods of dead calm as one nears the surface of Uranus,

[_Tarski]

Rarely have I seen a working description of the Left that better comprehends and elucidates its major features.

No. It is thoughtless utter buillshit.

Asking you or people like you to explain the left is nothing like asking Ed Decker to explain Mormonism............... in that Ed Decker's uncharitable misrepresentations are far more charitable and far far more accurate than anything coming from your direction.

[_Droopy]

Rarely have I seen a working description of the Left that better comprehends and elucidates its major features.

No. It is thoughtless utter buillshit.

Asking you or people like you to explain the left is nothing like asking Ed Decker to explain Mormonism............... in that Ed Decker's uncharitable misrepresentations are far more charitable and far far more accurate than anything coming from your direction.

Looks like that paragraph hit a home run.

[_Analytics]

Rarely have I seen a working description of the Left that better comprehends and elucidates its major features.

No. It is thoughtless utter buillshit.

Exactly.

Calling this "speaking truth to power" was especially ironic. Not only are these observations the unqualified opposite of truth, the people they are spoken to are the unqualified opposite of power—they were spoken directly to a group of bitter, bigoted, uneducated, utterly impotent losers who are so weak they don't even have the power to look at themselves in the mirror and recognize that it's their own damn fault that they are such losers. They don't have the power to be successful in the United States of America, and they don't even have the power to look at themselves in the mirror and see why. Their weakness is what drives them to blame a politician for their own pathetic failings.

[_Droopy]

No. It is thoughtless utter buillshit.

Exactly.

Its one of the best, most insightful, perspicacious, and lucid descriptions of the underlying intellectual and psychological substratum of leftism as a world-view and the mentality of those who hold that world-view, as I've seen in a long, long time.

Its actually an expansion upon a comment I read in the American Spectator a number of years ago, in which it was remarked that leftism, at its core, is "a fundamentally adolescent philosophy." Indeed.

Calling this "speaking truth to power" was especially ironic.

Yes, I turn this classic leftist phrase on its head now and then, don't I?

This is one sacred cow - the pretensions to moral sanctity that drives most of what the Left does, believes, and sees itself as - that can never be gored without inciting a stampede of outrage that someone would dare pull back the curtain and expose the man behind it.

[_Kevin Graham]

Whenever serious folks I know begin to entertain the possibility that blogs like American Thinker may be on to something, I simply point out one fact to them, and it usually changes their mind completely.

That fact is simply this.

It doesn't even begin to resemble scholarship. These blog entries are never supported by evidence. You don't see these people provide references to their claims. Instead, what you get is a long-winded monologue which amounts to nothing more than opinion.

That's all it is. No substance, all hot air.

It is nothing more than a glorified "comments section" for a Rush Limbaugh blog entry, where any Joe Blow can post his ignorant diatribes in a failed attempt to impress "intellectuals."

But we all know intellectuals don't read these silly internet sites. People like Droopy read them.

[_MeDotOrg]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/a_liberalprogressive_epiphany.html

Here's an excellent and insightful observation from a paragraph of the essay. Speaking truth to power doesn't get much better than this:

Progressivism as played out in the last fifty years in America is the belief system of deeply unserious people. It exists to indulge a complete and utter lack of maturity and responsibility in large enough numbers that it is assured of getting its way. It celebrates vices. It must be imposed coercively. Overt fraud and deceit are admired skills. Its practitioners wallow in behaviors and beliefs that prior generations recognized as embarrassing character flaws. It is the belief system of spoiled, antisocial children and misguided enablers, rather than responsible grownups.

Rarely have I seen a working description of the Left that better comprehends and elucidates its major features.

In the study of rhetoric, there is a falacy called poisoning the well. Basically it's the practice of saying "You can't believe anything my opponent says. He's a liar." You poison the well before the audience can drink in your opponent's argument.

Here is a portion of the article that Droopy didn't paste:

"When liars blame their enemies for events that either did not happen or which the liars themselves brought about, they are lying. When liars tout their own actions or intentions, they are lying. One does not create an unjust social structure and replace justice with injustice by telling the truth about what is afoot.
We have never had a more dishonest president than we do at this time in our history. He is the embodiment of progressivism. He lies effortlessly. It is not merely second nature to such a man. It is his essence. Every public statement he makes is the perfect opposite of truth.

See how this goes? There is no argument being made here. There are only conclusions. When you can make the word 'progressive' (or liberal or conservative, for that matter) a bad word without having to discuss reasons, then you have eliminated reason from the argument. Progressivism is bad because...well it's Progressivism. They're all liars. They're never going to tell you the truth. The perfect circular argument. It's a closed loop that doesn't require proof.

I just can't understand the sentiment 'We're the greatest Country in the World, except for half the people who are incapable of telling truth and have a secret plan to destroy the fabric of the country'. I'm not sure how to begin a political dialog from there.

(Speaking of 'poisoning the well', I would like to thank Max Schulman for writing The Raccoon Coat, a very funny short story which was my junior high introduction to logic.)

[_Kevin Graham]

Precisely.

But this appeals to very simple minds because anything else would require something for which they'e just not up to the task: independent thinking.

Droopy gladly drinks in anything and everything that it pumped out by ignorant opinion sites like American Thinker. It is why he reads them religiously every morning an night, constantly posting their drivel on this forum as if he were doing God's work.

Doing this means he doesn't have to form any opinions of his own. He just borrows those developed by others, because they at least share something in common with him: a racist, bigoted perspective of the world.

[_Droopy]

Whenever serious folks I know begin to entertain the possibility that blogs like American Thinker may be on to something, I simply point out one fact to them, and it usually changes their mind completely.

That fact is simply this.

It doesn't even begin to resemble scholarship.

I'll let the irony of this sink in without comment, as it speaks volumes for itself.

I'm also at a loss to understand how a body of personal observations, insights, and philosophical propositions about the nature of a world-view could possibly be referenced, in the way an archaeologist sources a conjecture about the provenance or meaning of a piece of pottery There's plenty of evidence that these propositions are true, as far as they go, but how do you go about referencing an opinion piece containing personal perspectives of 10,000 -20,000 words?

Yes, well, its just more of Kevin's deep self-consciousness of his own intellectual status and abilities in relation to others bubbling to the surface again as a snotty disdain for anything not "scholarly," as if every op-ed piece written by George Will or Thomas Sowell should have the format and feel of a professional journal article.

One would think that the utter failure of every project, policy, initiative, program, and philosophy the Left, anywhere, anytime, in any nation, has ever undertaken would be strong evidence the its core premises were flawed. But the combination of hubris plus utopian ideology - which is what the Left really is as a human enterprise - never takes failure as a reason not to continue the revolution.