[BlackBellamy]

Well with nothing on the political front and boredom setting in let's greet the new arrivals:

Originally Posted by Zuranthium [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

LOL at you tards LMAO.

Hi Zuranthium and welcome to the 2020 Election MEGAthread, where we all exist as one American family and refrain from personal attacks just like in real life. Just ask Jibartik he will vouch for me.

I was looking to see what kind of insight I could gather about your opening post and so forgive me, but I used the the search function which I know I know, it's not fair because we all type stuff, but in this case:

Leftist mentality dictates rationalism, education, and peace. There's a reason why people tend to become more liberal as they become more educated. Nobody of this mindset wants to put people into cattle cars for not agreeing.

See, now that got me thinking about semantics. What is a leftist? Because a hundred years ago, in 1920, my grandmother (age 8) watched with her mother as Bolsheviks shot her father in the street and then for the next three days they just kept shooting everyone in sight, well specifically men and specifically men who weren't laborers but that was a lot of people. My grandma then got thrown onto a wagon with some retreating soldiers and long story short here I am. But my grandmother didn't see her mom for fifty years after that because she was in the gulag the entire time. The rape gulag. I mean I'm not sure that it was called the rape gulag but she was a woman and she was there for 50 years. Were those people 'leftists'? I mean at that time, that's what they were called. They came waving red flags promising equality and rationalism. They would strike down the false gods and make everyone equal and everyone would get all the free education they wanted and peace would reign. They sang songs with those very specific promises.

Fast forward 55 years. My uncle makes a remark at work, something about the equality not being so equal. His door is broken down that night and the police take him away for questioning. Three days later he's thrown out of car in front of his house and then he's thrown out of work because who can work with all those broken bones.

In my lifetime I have personally known people whose entire lives were destroyed by people they referred to, among other terms, as 'leftists'. And when my uncle did not agree, well I guess at that point cattle cars were a little primitive. Was he beaten by the leftist mentality?

Haha I kid, he was beaten by the police. And the police were just a tool of an extreme regime. It could have been an extreme right-wing regime. The police breaking your bones extrajudicially are just a symptom of a system gone berserk.

My point is that being a leftist or a rightist doesn't dictate anything and doesn't automatically lead to any outcome. Because those guys who murdered millions of people and very specifically my great-grandfather didn't set out to do so. No, they were guided by dictates of 'rationalism, education, and peace'. Yet somehow they wound up as one of the worst regimes and ideologies ever to curse this planet. They didn't even bother with cattle cars, they let 20 million people starve in place. And they began as happy leftists. According to the Inexorable March of Lefist Progress according to Zuranthium should not those people have wound up in a better place? Even slightly? A tiny bit?

Next, on to your liberal progress hypothesis and why you're wrong.

Educated people tend to become more liberal because they become arrogant and think they can solve the world's problems through rapid social change. Educated people think they're special because most people aren't educated. Most people are stupid. Better put that knowledge to work fast!

Older people become more conservative because they've lived through the revolutions and the havoc and the chaos that the educated liberals wrought and would prefer a slower approach. Older people have seen how fragile society is and how peace just hangs by the thinnest thread. Perhaps you have seen some cities on fire this past summer? If you think that's as bad as it gets, that would be some frightful ignorance. Perhaps age will make you wiser.

I'm going to finish by attacking your stance on dissent.

I will put forward that Nazi Germany, which is the paragon of the most extreme right-wing state, the fascist ideal, was materially more tolerant of dissent than the USSR, the prototypical extreme left-wing state. I'm going even further - Nazi Germany was a more tolerant state than The People's Republic of China today (I'm only talking about political/ideological dissent and not those other things they did). I'm going to offer this analogy - in an extreme right-wing state there is lots of paranoia, so dissent is monitored, but nothing is done unless the dissenter takes some action. Talk is talk. In an extreme left-wing state there is also lots of paranoia, so dissent is also monitored, but action is taken as soon as talk is detected.

This is why. The appeal of the right wing is unity, strength, and safety, a sense of belonging to a tradition and a nation. The left-wing appeal is freedom and equality and progress. Each side appeals to each of those of course, but in much different proportions.

The right-wing appeals have a concrete payoff. There is a nation, you can touch it. There is a tradition, we all do it. The left-wing benchmarks are more amorphous. Can you taste freedom outside of a bad cliche? Do you feel the equality? How do you quantify progress? So the left-wing depends a lot on positive feedback. When Obama said yes we can, he wasn't offering a trite platitude. He was reassuring the left-wing that they were on the right track, that their ideas were good, and that things are going to work out.

This is why the left is fragile on dissent and can't tolerate it in it's more extreme forms. Because any criticism means a direct attack on the main thing they are protecting, which are ideas. You can't burn down an idea, and you can't sink it. You need words. But literally words are all you need. Words are the most dangerous thing to them.

The right-wing, they think the dissenter is just a loud-mouth punk. They see they mighty nation-state, they hear the jets overhead and they can touch their church. Talk isn't going to bother them that much. You're going to need explosives.