In case you missed it, our friends at americanthinker.com had a fantastic column (which won’t load now due to internal server error, but is cached by Google, so I repeat it here) by Dr. Danusha V. Goska in 2014. She was a life-long leftist and wrote that she has abandoned that philosophy. Here, she gives her top ten reasons. It parallels many if the trials and tribulations climate skeptics suffer at the hands of [climate activists]. I highly recommend it, and I recommend sending it to every activist who calls you a “climate denier”. There may be hope yet for those who value spewing hate over rational debate. – Anthony
by Dr. Danusha V. Goska
How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.
I voted Republican in the last presidential election.
Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It’s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.
10) Huffiness.
In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.
Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors’ meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!
Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said “Yes” or “No.”
Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.
I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. X.” Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.
Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists’ announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.
Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned. His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.
Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.
I appreciate Professor X’s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.
Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others’ pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this — “Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.” But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.
9) Selective Outrage
I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.
A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. “You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture’s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.”
When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, “binders full of women.” He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.
Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their “war on women.”
I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it.
The left’s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It’s an “I hate” phenomenon, rather than an “I love” phenomenon.
8.) It’s the thought that counts
My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: “Think Globally; Screw up Locally.” In other words, “Love Humanity but Hate People.”
It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:
“If you want your dream to be,
Build it slow and surely.
Small beginnings greater ends.
Heartfelt work grows purely.”
I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan’s San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.
Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that’s what we leftists do wrong. That’s what we’ve got to get right.
We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and “tolerance,” not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.
Peace Corps did not focus on the “small beginnings” necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. “Only intolerant oppressors judge others’ cultures.”
I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people’s clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.” Delousing homeless people’s clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.
Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state’s first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?
Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she’d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.
A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free. In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton “took me through Hell” and “lied like a dog.” “I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all,” the woman said. “If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.”
Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.
Hillary’s chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.
7) Leftists hate my people.
I’m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.
Karl Marx promised the workers’ paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class — think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.
Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan’s 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.
In the end, though, we didn’t show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood — “Workers of the world, unite!” But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn’t adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. “Property is theft” is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.
Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn’t just ancient history. In 2004, What’s the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What’s the Matter with America?
We became the left’s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we’d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the “imperialist” war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.” Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.
Leftists freely label poor whites as “redneck,” “white trash,” “trailer trash,” and “hillbilly.” At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”
The left’s visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a “major shock” to discover “the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people.” The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists “hate-fuck conservative women” and denounces Palin as a “small town hickoid” who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.
Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald’s, must accept that he is a recipient of “white privilege” – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.
The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard’s George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called “America’s leading immigration economist.” Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America’s working poor.
It’s more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.
6) I believe in God.
Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a “dead Jew on a stick” or a “zombie” and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented “flying spaghetti monster.” You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.
5 & 4) Straw men and “In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.”
It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.
“Truth is that which serves the party.” The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.
Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York’s WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn’t such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, “And yousupport that?”
Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.
On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post‘s credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a “family friend” of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, “making stuff up.”
Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents — including Muslims — from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.
2 & 3) It doesn’t work. Other approaches work better.
I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.
I grew up among “Greatest Generation” Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, “As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit.” In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends’ parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.
Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state’s open wound.
I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.
Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don’t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don’t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don’t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.
My students do know — because they have been taught this — that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know — because they have been drilled in this — that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.
As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.
In Dominque La Pierre’s 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. “In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you.”
That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.
After I realized that our approaches don’t work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue’s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is “My God, he’s right.”
1) Hate.
If hate were the only reason, I’d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.
Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.
Before that I’d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.
In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.
If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you’d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.
One topic thread was entitled “What do you view as disgusting about modern America?” The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.
Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.
I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances — I had no right-wing friends — expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I’m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don’t know that they were. I’m speaking here, merely, about language.
In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn’t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.
A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as “Bushitler.” The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it’s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.
I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would — car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my “eat the rich” lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.
In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn’t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.
I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone — even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health — meant a great deal to me.
Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, “No, I’m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.”
“Julie,” I said, “You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don’t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something — capitalism.”
“Yes, but I’m very nice about it,” she insisted. “I always protest with a smile.”
Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I’m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don’t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.
I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I’ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.
Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being “sex positive,” one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like “fag,” so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like “butt hurt.” Leftists taunt right-wingers as “tea baggers.” The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.
Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was “prone.” Carmichael’s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.
In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist’s reply to a woman critic. “I will make you a rape victim if you don’t fuck off… I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I’m going to rape you with my fist.”
A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC’s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment’s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won’t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir’s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.
I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I’ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.
I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.
Another related piece worth reading is by Dr. Tim Ball – A Climate Story That Must Be Told
I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue’s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is “My God, he’s right.”
I like to say it this way: Liberals believe people are greedy because they are capitalists; conservatives believe capitalists are greedy because they are people.
The carrot is envy.
“You want what they have? Follow me.”
https://youtu.be/bUiF4_pnbDE
Yes, liberals (in the current sense) have elevated envy from a deadly sin to a virtue.
Can I just say, there is a difference between “Capitalism” and “Greed”. Think in terms of monopolistic or other predatory distortions of Capitalism.
Capitalism is the free and fair exchange of goods. Greed is manipulating Capitalism to your own benefit at the expense of society as a hole. For example, predatory pricing to drive out competition so that you can raise prices later or using government election donations to drive policies in favor of you over others.
We want to encourage free and fair competition — we want to discourage anti-competitive greed.
Predatory pricing can only work when you have a government backing you.
The same goes for monopoly in general.
These actions don’t always need a government backing you. A government can simply ignore the actions using a free market ideology of non-interference. However, most of the time, these actions are backed by judicious campaign contributions.
The left loves to castigate the “greed” of capitalists. As if wanting to keep what you have worked for is greed, but wanting to take what someone else has produced isn’t greed.
Its just jealousy.
Others have proclaimed that socialism promotes “freedom”. And that could be true. When you are supplied with resources that were produced by others, you no longer have to worry about where your next meal will come from and you are “free” to concentrate on whatever interests you.
On the other hand, the slaves who’s work is being appropriated for the benefit of others aren’t free.
And I know leftists who use the “Dead Jew on a Stick” metaphor.
…a particularly ugly metaphor it is. It propels the UN’s resolutions on Israel.
The left worships Jews too — just the wrong one(s). Mary, Marx and Einstein. Subconsciously, Freud. (:
I have no idea what you’re trying to say, Zeke. Maybe I don’t want to know.
Yes sir, jorgekafkazar. What I said is unclear and clumsy. Sorry.
1. It is a response to the rude remark in the above comment about the crucifixion. You can tell because it is indented.
2. Jesus is a Jewish man who celebrated all of the Jewish holidays, including Hanukkah. His followers worship him. >>> I am connecting that to the overawed reverence (or worship) in progressive circles of the following Jewish historical figures: Marx, Einstein and Freud. In fact, Freud had to leave his professorship in German-annexed Austria before the war. I am just ribbing them because they are worshiping the wrong Jews!
~~~~
Also notice the last remark in the article: “I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I’ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.” I find anti-Semitism, and the hatred of the state of Israel, to be irrational for Europeans and Americans because it is the only free and representative democracy in the whole area, and is a natural ally for us. Why does the left coincidentally share the trait of anti-Semitism with pre-war Berlin? Why is that?
Nothing unusual about the Left hating Israel, Zeke–they hate the free and representative democracy known as the United States of America just as much.
Consequently, they’re consistent.
The left have always hated Jews, because Jews have been able to prosper despite being oppressed.
The left has always hated anyone who didn’t need government to become wealthy.
Slightly off topic: Is the purpose of education to teach you read and write and add and subtract, or to teach you to organize a boycott of Driscoll’s? There is a nice story http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/2017/0223/This-man-has-created-a-different-kind-of-urban-school-for-students-of-color. A mother of a student says: “At this age, I’m not so worried that he understands phonics or can add or subtract. He won’t get this real education anywhere else.”
Dear mother, it is better to learn phonics and add and subtract early. If not, your child will continue this real education in jail.
The Left does not educate, it indoctrinates. Clearly.
Sheri
Bad news time, so does the right and the center.
But not with political morality.
There is not such thing really as ‘The Right’ – not in the same way there is a Left.
The Right is largely a creation of the Left anyway. Its defined as ‘bad people who aren’t like us virtuous folk’
The left is a worldview based on conflict and hatred: I have nothing but admiration for the writer of this piece, not because she has suffered, but because she has not only understood, she has elucidated.
The Right is what the Left calls anyone whose worldview is NOT based on conflict and hatred.
Many years ago I was accused by an American Lefty of being a ‘Male Chauvinist Pig’
The next girlfriend but one was a rather intelligent – if someone damaged – friend. I asked her what she understood by the term….
“That’s what a woman calls a man when she isn’t getting her own way”.
Right is what you are when you dare disagree with the Left.
““He who is not a républicain at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.” Anselme Polycarpe Batbie (19th century academic jurist).” In this case, republicain (civic virtue and the common good) as distinct from Republican (economics and individualism).
With age and self awareness, broadening of one’s encounters and sources, one may achieve what Ms. Goska has achieved and shared. We are beneficiaries of her outspokenness and willingness to share the message of love, hopefully forgiveness, optimism, and see ourselves as contributing to the building of something better than what we had experienced.
The sun is shining. The wind is strong and a bit brisk. I think I’ll go for a walk now. I feel motivated.
I went and pruned some fruit trees ( with a smile on my face ) and it was snowing.!
Polycarpe was right! An adult liberal, then is just a thirty year old who never grew up. Sounds about right to me.
Danusha – brave name for a girl.
https://www.google.at/search?client=ms-android-samsung&q=goddess+Danube&spell=1&sa=X&ved=0
A very illuminating tale. I think Dr Goska deserves enormous credit for her honesty and bravery particularly as she will, undoubtedly, be on the receiving end of a very vitriolic response from her former allies. That takes guts! It is easy to be churlish about her belated ‘Damascene conversion’, as some previous commenters have been, but her story is worthy of the widest circulation. If it helps turn only one person away from a very poisonous life narrative then she is to be commended. Thanks Anthony. And take care Dr Goska.
Here Here
Thank you Mack.
Hear Hear!
Unfortunately I was unable to read all this personal confessing, but I wonder: do we have to be right-wingers to understand science? Folks, the crucial point is scientific attitude, not where we belong politically.
You don’t have to be a right-winger, I am a small “l” libertarian–unless one defines anyone not leftist as “right wing”.
Unable to read it? How unfortunate indeed. Is it a comprehension problem?
I only ask because either you lack comprehension or your question and comment are based on rather odd, illogical assumptions.
The Liberal Marxist/Socialist Progressives don’t use science in their understanding of climate, Odd…. to them, climate is a political cause that has become a religion (Godless, of course).
A very acute question. I am more and more coming to the conclusion that in order to totally misunderstand it, one has to be of the Left.
Yesterday I wrote a long diatribe about Leftism. I concluded, along with this poster here, and with others like Roger Scruton, that Leftism is a surrogate religion . It is a faith based world-view that defines moral stricture and structures, and is vigorously proselytising. Religion for people who don’t believe in sky fairies, but do believe in humanity as a separate species from Nature.
Science destroyed religion. Because it worked better than magic spells so its precepts were mistakenly held to be more true.
Marx et al realised that if they could create a religion based on pseudo science, it might do well. It did.
And that is in the end perhaps the answer to your question. The world-view necessary to do real science is not the Marxist world-view. If you espouse the Marxist world view as just another (limited) world-view then you can do science, but if you espouse it as Truth – and that is where most of the Rank and file Left, position themselves, you cannot do science in the way its normally done. It must become a tool of political and social thought.
Leftism is about changing the world. That is its fundamental paradigm. Science that doesn’t change the world in the way Leftism says it needs to be changed is bad science.
So, no, you dont have to be on the right to do good science, but if you are really stuck on the Left, you cant do good science – not as we understand good science.
Good science that attempts to arrive at, if not the truth, at least a slightly better approximation, relies on data to test theories.
Leftism is about the fundamental concept that truth is relative to the individual and to his cultural and linguistic norms. Ergo there is no objective truth, there is only what we believe. And that is where Leftism begins and ends, with the superstitious belief in magic thought, that if we all together now stop believing in capitalism, sexism, racism and indeed climate change it will simply disappear. Of course by talking in those terms at all we empathise the very things we profess to want to rid ourselves of.
(An apocryphal tale. Nigel Farage, at an open meeting speaking on behalf of his party for European exit, is asked by a member of the audience ‘what he thinks about gay marriage. Sharp as whip he replies:”I get between 60 and 100 letters a week as a member of the European parliament and leader of UKIP, and not one to the best of my memory has ever raised the question, and so my answer to your question of ‘what do I think about homosexual marriage?’ is that actually I don’t. Think about it at all. Perhaps I should but my constituents are not it seems very concerned, and my job is to represent their views, isn’t it”).
Leftism is all about emphasising lots of things it professes to want to get rid of, this making them appear to be real, even when they are not. It is almost entirely negative.
Science is about dreaming up new relations, new concepts, but not to get rid of the thing identified, but to create a new relationship between things that not only informs, but ultimately has predictive power.
Leftism is about creating the need to solve problems, in order to justify political action. Science is about trying to create solutions. That’s useless in a political context. If the Left solved all the problems (and we have given them enough dreary tedious time to do it: As Cherie Blair, wife of Tony Blair, champion of the New Socialism, and the then leader of the Labour Party said when she unexpectedly became pregnant again ‘We had forgotten how tedious labour could be”. Quite.)
Leftism is an endless search to discover problems that it does not solve, in order to have a perpetual revolution that keeps perpetual revolutionaries in power forever.
That is antithetical to a science: Once science solves a problem we move on. There are always plenty more problems.
Perhaps that is the difference between science and the Left
For science there are always new problems – far too many – and its business is solving them (e.g. with climate change: solving it is really simple, even if you believe in AGW, Build nuclear power stations. They are predictable in cost and performance very very safe very low environmental impact and emit almost no CO2 at all. A build program similar to what de Gaulle did in France in the 70s would see massive reductions in CO2, and cheap electricity. Job done. Instead we have a leftist solution. Virtue signalling ‘renewable’ energy that is massively expensive, and neither reliably generates electricity nor actually results in any significant CO2 reduction).
For the left there are never enough problems, and the solving of them is not on the agenda. Only the endless virtue signalling attempts to solve them.
Science has destroyed religion?
Not true by any stretch of the imagination.
I know that a lot of atheists like to make this claim, but when pressed, it’s pretty obvious that the atheists in question have no idea what religion is.
It’s like leftists who proclaim that they understand what rightists believe and then proceed to demolish these self generated strawmen.
I don’t see where anyone has claimed that only right wingers can do science.
Was it not Winston Churchill who said something like “if you aren’t left wing when you are young then you don’t have a heart; if you are still left wing when you are old then you don’t have a brain”.
Sad that so many won’t see it who should.
You want a good look at the state of either left/right politics or climate views, go read through political and/or climate related posts over on Quora. At least there are some conservative voices balancing the liberal ones. Not so much the case on climate – it’s a one-note site.
I grew up as an indoctrinated ‘red diaper baby’ in the fifties; both my parents were card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA. Every dinner-time was an anti-capitalist, pro-communist brain-washing session. All social justice activities (civil rights, early feminism, union organizing) were ancillary and subject to the cynical litmus test of whether such activity would further the communist cause. I spent my high-school and college years protesting everything from the Cuban blockade to the Vietnam war (NB: the anti-Vietnam war movement was engineered by young communists such as myself in order to defeat the U.S.and expand communist rule from North to South Vietnam;nothing else ). After college, and at the prompting of my parents, I spent 6 months touring the Soviet Union and eastern Europe (or the “Eastern Democracies” as they were euphemistically called). I returned to the U.S. a capitalist-loving conservative and never spoke to my parents about politics again; that was 45 years ago.
MarcL – thanks – great story.
You and Emma Goldman both had an eye-opening tour. Her book, My Disillusionment in Russia,” is her story of touring Communist Russia in 1919 – wow! a snapshot of the fresh nation!
“Hush now baby, baby, don’t you cry.
Mama’s gonna make all your nightmares come true.
Mama’s gonna put all her fears into you.
Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing.
She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing.
Mama’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm.
Ooh baby, ooh baby, ooh baby,
Of course mama’s gonna help build the wall.”
(Pink Floyd, The Wall, “Mother”)
Maybe that last line should be:
“Of course, mama’s another liberal.”
Very interesting. I considered myself a leftie (not a leftist because I never marched for anything!). Over time, since I started reading alternative media instead of the mainstream media, I have stopped being so. I haven’t got time to go into detail, but it was a process of finding out how much I was being lied to, and how these lies were being used to manipulate me and control me. What strikes me is how nasty and aggressive the leftist protesters are while the right-wing Trump supporters look like the sort of people I would invite round for a barbie.
Thanks JMH
There is a political circle. The extreme left and extreme right act similarly. It should be expected that those on the extreme left would find Trump more acceptable than George W Bush.
The argument that makes most sense here is that the left hasn’t been entirely successful. But the places which vote left most often are the most challenged places in the first place. It’s not that simple. Here in the UK the NHS and the welfare state are not anti-poor.
The idea that being left-wing and Christian is impossible is obviously wrong. Many are, even the Pope.
The idea that being left-wing and Communist is impossible is arguably correct. But there’s left -wing and extremist.
The extremist right-wing groups are just as hate-filled as the extremist left. But they aren’t mainstream. They are hard to find. The writer of this piece was already in the other extreme.
An easy example to show that most aren’t crazy on either side is to go the Guardian website and look at the comments on a religion article. There will be atheists calling Jesus a zombie. And there will also be atheists telling the first lot to be more polite and stop embarrassing themselves. And that’s on the internet. No-one is accountable on the internet so no-one is on their best behaviour.
Finally, the implied argument that one political solution is moral and others are not is – again – a form of extremism.
It leads to fundamentalism instead of engagement.
I agree that the extreme Right is just as bad as the extreme left. The comment sections of right wing sites horrify me—these people threaten death and espouse hatred as much as any leftist. When one points it out, one is called a Leftist, called a liar if they say they voted Republican their whole lives, accused of living in Mom’s basement and then there’s the pelting with profanity if the first accusations don’t work. Extreme behavior is a result of the country having very poor education, very poor social skills, and a media that thrives on bad behavior and glorifies it. Bad behavior is the norm. Is the Left the cause of this? It seems to hold the most examples, especially since the Trump election, but the Right is by no means kind when you get to the extremes.
Some political solutions are more moral than others, unless you are saying Stalin and George Washington’s politics are equal. That would be the definition of insanity. However, I have long argued you cannot take a country like China and impose capitalism nor can you take America and impose socialism. It has to move in that direction slowly. Morally, unless one espouses that freedom is not a desirable trait, capitalism and democracy generally yield the most freedom. Socialism, unless voluntary and well orchastrated, has much less freedom. Socialism is most easily destroyed, as is seen in Europe today where invaders preyed on the “nicities” of the Europeans and the idea of “fairness”. Socialism lacks grounding in the reality that life is not fair and life can never be fair. All systems in the end fail at some point and people are forced into dictatorships or work their way out of dictatorships. Humans are simply incapable of following one form of government for more than a few centuries and even then, the form is constantly pushed around and moved in one direction or another.
Socialism is never voluntary. At least it isn’t for those who have to foot the bill for it.
Please elaborate,…
“The comment sections of right wing sites horrify me”
Which “right wing sites” are you speaking about?
thanks
JW
Iceland is an excellent example of eyes-open, libertarian choosing socialism. Citizen participation in government is very high. I consider it impossible to export that experience to the United States or any nation that is not culturally homogenous, but it is possible in geographically and culturally isolated places.
Didn’t you mean, “…left would not find Trump…”
The shenanigans going on here now by “extreme” left did not happen after GW won.
“There is a political circle. The extreme left and extreme right act similarly. It should be expected that those on the extreme left would find Trump more acceptable than George W Bush.”
Yes, yes. The Russian communists invented the notion of The Right (nazis) to try to dissociate their nice, humanitarian (ha-ha) brand of Socialism from the nasty National Socialist version. Left and right aren’t ends of a spectrum; they’re like beads on a bracelet–next door neighbors. The true spectrum is Big Government vs. Small Government.
Give the man a banana!
In my book its a slightly different shade of that, its about where te power and authority, and also where the accountability realise.
Somehow the Left has become the main purveyor of the Big State principle that says that the central government is and should be responsible for everything that affects anyone’s life. Fascism – true fascism says more or less that governments should be small, utterly authoritarian and responsible to no one but themselves.
Libertarianism is the other option, The government should do the minimum necessary, with full accountability, to solve a problem at the most local level possible.
If you and your town dont like long haired hippies and you like wearing six-guns and stetsons, that’s your right, and you elect a sherriff to make it so and pass local laws.
Conversely if you really want a town consisting almost entirely of homosexuals, well just copy San Francisco. Its your neighborhood and its your choice. And unless its a federal matter, its no one else’s damn business.
Its not so much small state, as small central state. Because central state can’t make one size fits all legislation for everywhere that works effectively. Laws about dogs fouling pavements or burning wood in an open hearth maybe be relevant in NY city, but in rural Montana?
People work more effectively in smaller groups. Government should follow that, not try and change it. Its not about small government so much as devolved government. More local authority, less federal.
That way your kids can beat up the mayors kids and he gets the message
“There is a political circle. The extreme left and extreme right act similarly.”
Just who do you consider to be the “extreme right”?
The Right I associate myself with believes in personal freedom, including free speech, free enterprise, having the smallest government possible that can get the job done, balanced budgets, and the rule of law.
Is there anything extreme in my positions? I think most of those on the Right have these very same postions.
People such as “alt-right” are despicable. However one thing I have noticed is that while those who call themselves “populists” have economic policies that are indistinguishable from the socialists. They want high taxes on the rich with the money to be spent on people like them. They want government to control just about everything so that nobody is permitted to do anything that they disagree with.
All they differ on is social policy.
“People such as “alt-right” are despicable.”
I think this “alt-right” tag is just a device the Left uses to try to tie extreme, violent groups such as anti-govenment militias and the Democrat-inspired KKK to the Republican Party. The Republican Party has nothing to do with such groups, but the Left calls them alt-right in order to associate them with Republicans.
It’s all more propaganda and distortions of reality.
TA
CPAC addressed the so-called alt-right: it is nothing but leftists who hate the Constitution and free markets, but who use the term alt-right to deceive the press.
https://youtu.be/j3ENl9K1OCg?t=1m44s
While many “challenged” places vote in left wing regimes, however one constant is that except for a brief surge while the wealth of the few is distributed to the masses, the end result is always a situation where the poor are worse off than before the revolution.
In other places where leftists have been voted into office, such as many cities, the decline is inevitable even if it isn’t as quick. The more Other People’s Money available, the longer socialism can last. But the end result is still always the same.
MCourtney – Yes.
The original article (and many commentators in here) hold an extreme binary view of the world.
It ain’t that simple, and the etremely righteous at either end of the scale are largely ignorant, stubborn and extremely indoctrinated. Some are violent. All are unreasonable.
And it is so obvious the real answer lies somewhere in between.
World Far Left Movements have three phases: 1) feudalism; 2) Capitalism and lastly 3) Communism. In order to achieve these goals, World Far Left Movement must: 1) decimate Religion; 2) disassemble education into one of “indoctrination: 3) Capitalism and Finances (from Ludwig von Mises into a modified John Maynard Keynes “one government for all,” ; 4) Governance – an exponentially “top-down, command-and-control” bloated Washington DC We The Elite People of Culture of Corruption laying out “book-line-and verse” of how an 1) individual (absent their GOD) lives their lives and 2) the sacred union of one man +one woman =siblings procreating and lastly: 3) community – the union of Families and Communities organized into one cohesive, viable unit. These are what World Far Left Movements have as their “bucket lists” of things to destroy. Pray. Amen. God Bless America and ALL Americans. Read a Bible. NKJV. “A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control.” (Proverbs 29:11)
Thanks, JS! That saves me a lot of typing! Well said!
Very apposite, js.
In all human endeavours, there are things that work and there are things that don’t work.
Pursue what works and don’t pursue what doesn’t work. Experiment if you must to determine this, but once something has been proven to fail 100 times over, why pursue it further.
I’m sure you can find 100 examples of different things that this simple truth is demonstrated by. It covers the whole spectrum of human activities.
Interesting story. The writer’s conversion involved a major epiphany. I never had anything like that; yet, I still walked all the way from the left to the right, without so much as lifting a foot.
I grew up in West Germany. When I first became aware of politics in the early 70s, Willy Brandt and then Helmut Schmidt were chancellors. Both belonged to the Social Democrats, the more left-leaning of the two large democratic parties. Brandt and Schmidt were genuinely trying to improve the lot of the working class. New schools, universities, and hospitals went up everywhere; education was free, and students from working class families received generous subsidies — which at the time the country could well afford, since industry was humming and unemployment was low.
In the way of foreign policy, Brandt and Schmidt adopted a more open realistic approach to dealing with East Germany and the Russians, which resulted in easier travel across the border — it became possible for us to visit our relatives in East Germany easily and frequently. The EU was expanded at a moderate pace; the former military dictatorships Spain, Portugal, and Greece were admitted, which helped them on their way to democratic future. At the same time, Schmidt paid a lot of attention to defence; the Bundeswehr was modernized and turned into the strongest force this side of iron curtain — save the U.S. army, of course.
Real environmental concerns were addressed; air became fit to breathe, and rivers fit to swim in again.
I liked those policies then and still do; I would still vote for each of them today. However, if I wanted something comparable today, I would not find it in any of the established parties. Sensible environmental stewardship has given way to CAGW hysteria, to which all major parties subscribe. The EU has become a bloated monster, and the Euro currency distorts and strangles economic development across the continent. The German army is a war museum on wheels. Candidates for political office are selected by gender and ethnicity, not actual ability and qualification. Out of the secretaries in Merkel’s cabinet of horrors, at the most two or three would have made the cut under Schmidt.
This “culture” has taken hold not only among the Social Democrats but across the political spectrum; indeed, the ostensibly “conservative” Christian Democrats have governed for most of the time since Schmidt’s abdication.
Across Europe, the only parties that do not subscribe to this collective insanity are the “populist”, “extreme right wing” ones. It is a startling realization that, as a Social Democrat sympathizer at heart, I would now have to vote “extreme right” in order make a statement and maybe get some semblance of sanity restored to the political process. So, I traversed the political spectrum without walking a step, simply by staying put, while the ground shifted under my feet.
Excellent.
X2.
A perfect summation.
Very good summary of the state of things.
One thing I noticed was that the two major protest movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet, had participants that acted in totally different fashion. I know of no instances of looting, trash, attempted rape or attacks by the Tea Party members but all of these actions were said to occur during the Occupy Wallstreet protest. The most I heard of at a Tea Party rally was someone claimed to have been spit on. Well, actually I did hear of one black man being beaten. He was handing out Tea Party literature and was beaten up by SEIU(Service Employees International Union) thugs, a leftist trade union.
Another example is the Pipeline protest that left so much garbage and filth in their camp that it was an ecological disaster in the making. And this from leftists concerned about the environment.
The author, Thomas Frank, later wrote Listen Liberal in which he makes many of the same points made above by Danusha Goska. It outlines how the former party of the people has betrayed those very people. link
The people weren’t voting against their own interest when they voted Republican. Voting Democrat was no more in their interest. The Democrat party didn’t believe it could happen but the people were smart enough to realize that. At some point they became so disillusioned that they were willing to bring the whole system crashing down around their ears. link I see Donald Trump as our last good chance. If he blows it, we are in deep serious trouble.
The left has become seriously removed from reality. It is now mired somewhere between psychopathy and schizophrenia. Its denizens are literally not in their right minds. link
I wholeheartedly agree with everything Dr. Goska said in the above article.
While I agree that the left is seriously removed from reality, I don’t think rises to a mental illness. Human beings have a remarkable ability to ignore reality and always have. They believe the lie far faster than they believe the truth. Just how far one has to go to be considered mentally ill is a good question. I choose to go with those who have true delusions (see people not there, hear voices) and leave out the usual “I don’t want it to be that way so it isn’t” crowd.
People with right brain damage exhibit many of the symptoms of schizophrenia.
Our education system causes us to become over-reliant on left brain processes thus depriving ourselves of our built-in BS detector (our right brain).
Iain McGilchrist goes a long way to explaining how the problems John Ralston Saul described in Voltaire’s Bastards developed. Given the extent and severity, I think it’s pathological.
They love their theories way more than they respect reality. That’s crazy.
” I see Donald Trump as our last good chance. If he blows it, we are in deep serious trouble.”
I think you are right. And we barely got Trump in Office by a small margin. We are *very* lucky. Let’s not allow this opportunity to slip away, although I expect Trump’s margin in the election will be much larger next time, if he is successful, which he will be.
I don’t think Trump is going to blow anything. I think the Left is going to do everything they can to cause Trump to fail, but I don’t think they can steamroll Trump like they have done Republicans in the past. As long as Trump hasn’t done anything illegal, and it doesn’t look like he has, because if he had, that would already have been made public, then Trump will ultimately defeat all the propaganda from the Left and the MSM, and the Left and the MSM’s credibility will suffer accordingly.
Trump said the Obama administration was wiretapping him before the election took place. The Left and the MSM are trying to make it out like this is not true, even though the New York Times and the Washington Post have both done stories months ago which said exactly that, that the Obama administration was wiretapping Trump.
The MSM claims there is no proof Trump was wiretapped, but when asked about that this morning, Kellyane Conway, Trump’s advisor, said Trump had access to information that noone else has. Trump isn’t a fool, although you wouldn’t know that listening to the MSM, and if Trump says Obama was wiretapping him, then Obama was wiretapping him, Watch and see.
I’m so excited that this has sparked a Congressional investigation. There’s no telling where this will go. The entire Obama administration needs to be investigated, including the IRS and all the other agencies that tried to intimidate and strongarm conservatives over the course of the Obama administration’s eight years. The Obama administration was and is a criminal enterprise that needs to be exposed.
Leaks have always been the case in DC, but the level and viciousness of the leaks over the last month has reached unprecedented levels.
I have great respect for Obama, as I do for firearms, as I do for power tools, and as I do for snakes. Neither he nor anyone else in the White House will have had to directly order the wire tapping. There will be plausible deniability. LOL
According to Judge Napolitano, a Fox News legal expert, the FISA law specifically exempts the president from having to get a court order to wiretap someone.
In other words, the president can order anyone in the world wiretapped without asking anyone’s permission, including the FISA Court.
I don’t know if records of such presidential wiretap requests are kept or required. The judge didn’t address that issue.
Here’s a little followup from Judge Napolitano:
http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Judge-Napolitano-Presidents-Wiretap-Americans/2017/03/07/id/777309/
Judge Napolitano: Any President Can Wiretap Any American
“If he had wanted to, former President Barack Obama could have ordered a wiretap on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump — or on any American he wanted to, Judge Andrew Napolitano said Tuesday.
“If [President] Donald Trump wanted to, he could surveil anybody,” the Fox News senior judicial analyst told “Fox & Friends.”
“That’s directly in the FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act) statute, which after laying out a lot of detailed procedures about what the NSA (National Security Agency) is supposed to do says literally, notwithstanding all of the above, the president of the United States may on his own, conduct surveillance or order surveillance of any person in the United States upon the filing of a certification with the attorney general, who of course works for the president.”
There have been many people commenting that it would have been illegal for Obama to listen to Trump’s phone calls from Trump Tower, and to the eventual president’s in-person conversations, but that’s not true, said Napolitano.
“In my view, it’s immoral and profoundly unconstitutional and utterly wrong but it’s lawful because Congress has said it is lawful,” said Napolitano. “This was power given to every president from Jimmy Carter up to and including Donald Trump.”
end excerpt
“As long as Trump hasn’t done anything illegal”. That is going to be a sticky point. Trump is a sharp businessman, used to getting things done. If you dig hard enough, there will bound to be times when he would be found to have strayed over the line of legality.
In 2008, I stated that Romney was our last chance, and even he wasn’t a good one.
I fear that the left is too entrenched in the bureaucracy and that there are too many people who consider it their right to get a check from the government every month.
Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein were far ahead of their time and were taking a not insignificant risk when, in 1949, the wrote “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” for their musical South Pacific. The lyrics which are still applicable today follow:
“You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”
I disagree completely. Never did I have to tell a toddler to hate or fear, but only to be nice and not be afraid. Left to their own devices, humans are brutal. You may have to be taught to hate the relatives, but hatred and fear are what one starts out with. Love and courage have to be taught.
I disagree with you on this. I’ve raised 6 toddlers, and taught hundreds of others, and you cannot label a child that young with the same emotions of hatred and fear as adults have. Toddlers (age 12-36 months) can appear to be “kind” and loving one moment and “afraid” or “mean” the next simply as a reaction to stimuli, because they are tired, or hungry, or self centered by default. They aren’t really emotionally mature enough to self actualize.
In other words, they can “share” candy out of mimicry, or compulsion, or trained response, or just because. We might see it and interpret it as a “kind” or “loving” act, but we have no idea if that child is FEELING love or a desire to BE kind or not. A toddler might hide behind their mothers skirt when a stranger is present out of shyness, curiosity, simple unfamiliarity, or because “Mommy” is the prefered individual of the moment. We cannot know that they are truly fearful or “hate” the stranger.
I have known open, friendly, well socialized toddlers, and clingy, whiney, not well socialized Toddlers. How they “act” in any given moment is not an indication of the type of person they are, or even will be later.
Aphan,
WRT: “I have known open, friendly, well socialized toddlers, and clingy, whiney, not well socialized Toddlers. How they “act” in any given moment is not an indication of the type of person they are, or even will be later.”
Compare the behavior of a group of first graders in the famous “Marshmallow Test” to their near-identical behavior as grown ups in “The Mature Marshmallow Test”:
“A toddler might hide behind their mothers skirt when a stranger is present out of shyness, curiosity, simple unfamiliarity, or because “Mommy” is the prefered individual of the moment. We cannot know that they are truly fearful or “hate” the stranger.”
I saw a video one time claiming that very young children were naturally suspicious of strangers.
They had a mother stand in an empty room, holding a baby about three months old, and then a stranger to the child would enter the room and walk over and stand next to the mother without saying a word, and they all just stood there silently. And you could see the baby slowly leaning away from the stranger, and this was repeated with several other babies.
I think this reaction is probably an instictive survival mechanism of humans. We are born to fear something that is not familiar. It is probably at the root of racism.
Astounding tale…and summary…hat’s off to you, Dr.Goska.
“In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn’t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.”
So you never paid into unemployment insurance, workplace accident insurance, working disability insurance.
Never before contributed to the society of the unemployed, the workplace injured or the working disabilitated.
You have never ACTED ‘left’.
Of course that doesn’t pay.
It’s easy to be righteous Johann. I’m sure you are a well balanced individual with, I hope not, chips on both shoulders, but give her a break. It may, in your view, have taken her a long time to ‘see the light’ and she may not have contributed to the ‘system’ as you would have liked, but credit where it is due. She got there in the end! I thought that one of the things that set us apart on this side of the debate is honesty, decency, respect for opposing opinions (with a healthy dose of irony and humour), albeit we may believe them to be wrong, and a bit of humility. Snidey, hard hearted and sanctimonious comments do us no favours in the grand scheme of things.
Beautiful!
Well said. Getting there is always good, no matter how long it takes.
Mack, you surpass me.
I am just an average worker who wants to reside the next day.
Johann,
Unemployment only lasts so long, and only pays a percentage of your former income. It also carries the requirement that you actively pursue employment. Someone with a crippling illness cannot do that. Someone recovering from surgery cannot do that.
If she wasn’t “injured” on a job site, doing her job, then she doesn’t qualify for workman’s comp. And even great insurance doesn’t cover everything.
So what is your point?
Aphan, when not living ‘left’ – why asking from others.
Aphan, my point is obviously not seen here.
Cheers – Hans
Hans: I respectfully agree! 🙂
Jorgekafkazar,
Good…so it’s not just me then? 🙂
Johann Wundersamer March 5, 2017 at 1:10 pm
“So you never paid into unemployment insurance, workplace accident insurance, working disability insurance.”
Johann, don’t be so sure.
Because of the HIV epidemic we learned a lot about our worker insurance system.
Yes you have insurance until you are sick. If you can no longer work, you no longer have a job, then no more insurance.
It happens all the time. In the place I worked a young women went in for carpel-tunnel surgery, something went wrong, they operated on the wrong arm and caused a bad infection. She was going to be out of work for a few months. A bean counting manager eliminated her job and renamed it a “temp” position. Cost savings, to help keep the companies health costs down. So suddenly she was without heath insurance which she had paid into like the rest of us.
To the companies credit that manager was retired.
When I had my medical (heart) problem, they kept me on and gave me make work until I could ease myself out. I was lucky, many learn the hard way.
Oh and yes the author of the above article worked and contributed, She mentioned that she lost her “savings”. Duh.
michael
Mike, because of working with a fork lifter I’ve already developed a ‘carpal tunnel syndrome.’
When I went to the doctor she made an electric Flux measurement to both arms/hands. And told me ‘carpal tunnel syndrome’ relates 4 fingers of the hand – not the 5.th little one outside the respective hand.
So I knew it was my behavior in work / at home regarding arms / hands; change that ways and it’s going better.
Cheers – Hans
Johann Wundersamer March 5, 2017 at 11:52 pm
“Mike, because of working with a fork lifter”
Me I was a Toolmaker / Machinist.
Came out with all body parts.
Never had the problem myself.
The person I referred to was was an assembler. Of gas pistons.
Differs from person to person.
But then you skipped the whole issue. On how the poor women was dealt with.
This was personal to me. Some years earlier I was chair or the company Safety Committee. The first worker bee to hold it.
Repetitive motion is the single most destructive condition to afflict workers.
Glade yours was caught early.
My Heart issue was not work related.
Miss machining. Metal has a magic.
michael
“Yes you have insurance until you are sick. If you can no longer work, you no longer have a job, then no more insurance. ”
Let’s hope the Republicans fix this in the new health insurance law.
TA, the solution is to allow health insurance to be fully deductible for individuals. At present a company can deduct the cost while you can’t. This makes it rational to let your employer buy your insurance for you.
Unfortunately this also means that your insurance is attached to your job and not to you.
Perhaps what the author and many in here are all are missing is the point that the system which limits health benefits to the injured worker is a product of right wing “big business, let the market sort it out” thinking.
Hardly the fault of the ‘left’.
Introducing the free market to the health care industry is the only way it is going to be salvaged. There are far too many monoplistic activities and unfair business practices, at least from the consumer’s point of view, such as different hospitals charging different prices for the same operation, or the same hospital charging different customers different prices for the same operation. Or the drug companies who are able to charge outrageous prices because they are not required to compete. And on and on.
Fortunately, this time, we are going to get a full, public airing of all these healthcare issues. Let’s hope we can all settle on a good plan when it is all over.
Politically Correct Progressivism was her religion. The term “left” has no meaning.
She finally realized what her belief system was based on–hatred. Hatred of Normal-America.
The PC-Progressive Party (which uses the cover title “Democrat Party”) has an iron-clad list of beliefs. In order to be a member, one must subscribe to this belief system. One hundred percent. At least in public. Toe the Party line. Politically Correct–that’s what it means.
Here is a short list of the required elements of the PC-Prog (Democrat) belief system:
1. Normal-America is irredeemably racist. Blacks and other minorities live a life of constant harassment and hopeless repression by Normal-Americans.
2. Normal-America is virulently sexist. Women live lives of desperate hopelessness. They are forced by the patriarchy to accept social and professional roles that demean and diminish them. Normal-Americans aggressively try to restrict women’s rights to kill fetuses.
3. Normal-America is homophobic. Christian haters thump Bibles in their quest to locate, persecute, prosecute and lynch fun-loving homosexuals, lesbians, transsexuals, and bi-sexuals.
4. Normal-America is stunningly xenophobic. Normal-Americans loathe foreigners. Normal-American society rejects all foreigners and views them as vile, dirty, stinking beasts with unintelligible accents.
5. Normal-America is graspingly imperialist. Normal-Americans seek to conquer, destroy and subjugate peace-loving native cultures in Africa, the Middle East, South America and Asia. America is built on a legacy of imperialist destruction of Native American and Hispanic cultures.
6. Normal-America is greedily capitalist. The American economy destroys poor people with angry demands that they must work. The economy is systematically manipulated by the 1% in order to
subjugate the 99%. Capitalism rewards only the lucky few, while the masses suffer.
The American economy is boiling Gaia’s atmosphere–causing horrible things to happen.
These tenets are the core of the PC-Prog politics. The beliefs are nearly religious. To be a member, one must never contradict these tenets (in public, or in privately recorded conversations.)
The corollary to the tenets of PC-Progressivism is the “Action Requirement.”
It is simple: Normal-America must be changed.
This is it. That is the entire belief system, and the action plan of our political opponents.
Without understanding what it is that their system believes and requires, we have no hope of counter-acting their destruction of our country. Now you know. What will you do about it?
http://intelctweekly.blogspot.com/2014/07/politically-correct-progressive-belief.html
Kent,
YOU don’t get to determine which words have meaning to HER. You don’t get to tell her, or anyone else, what name or title or description they fall under simply because you said so. I know many Democrats that DO NOT believe many, or even all, of the things on your list and yet there they are…belonging to that party. No iron clad list in site.
It’s just as irrational, illogical, false, and biased to paint everyone in the Democratic party, or who labels themselves as “left” as identical, mindless robots as it is for people to paint all skeptics that way. Your “iron clad list” is your OPINION, not an established FACT.
She began her article distinguishing “how FAR left” she was for a reason. Because there are DEGREES of difference as well as individual differences. I will bust your chops even when you make broad sweeping generalizations about people I don’t agree with, just as much as I will people who do the same thing to me or those I agree with.
It’s just cognitive bias either way.
Kent is correct.
I can have a differing opinion on any of these, and ruin Thanksgiving in my Democrat family.
They cannot tolerate an opposing view. Outside of their own circles, they are boors – they start throwing their self-righteous views around, and believe they are merely engaging in civic dialog.
Everyone else shuts up and changes the topic because they are, well, boors, and cannot see it. They might as well have terrible body odor, stinking up the place. but this is how democrats are, nowadays.
Aphan,
I am still a registered democrat, and the description Kent gave is fairly accurate as to how the current Democrat Party come across to me and others. Sorry if you don’t see it but I am dismayed that the party has gone so far left and do not seem to represent the average worker anymore. The election of Trump clearly indicates so. I would like to see two viable parties to keep things on the best track for the country. The Democratic party needs to move to the center and abandon those concepts Kent mentioned.
The last Democrat,
Kent says:
“The PC-Progressive Party (which uses the cover title “Democrat Party”) has an iron-clad list of beliefs. In order to be a member, one must subscribe to this belief system. One hundred percent. At least in public. Toe the Party line. Politically Correct–that’s what it means.”
In order to be a Democrat, one merely registers as one. There is no test. No one comes out with a clipboard and reads Kent’s list of beliefs and demands allegiance to the Iron Clad Beliefs. He’s using hyperbole and rhetoric to reach conclusions, not logic or facts.
I’m NOT saying I don’t see this behavior. I’m NOT saying that there are not progressives, or socialists or batcrap crazy, extreme leftists IN the Democratic party. I’m saying that unless you can offer proof that ALL DEMOCRATS DO indeed embrace all of those tenets, you are engaging in cognitive bias to declare it as if it was established fact.
Your family and his, and 200 or even 2,000 other Democrat families you might have personal experience with may indeed be exactly as he described. But I personally know many Democrats that are MUCH closer to the political middle than his descriptions.
It’s like painting ALL Tea Party members as Nazis, or white supremacists=illogical and false. Or all skeptics as “science deniers” or “flat earthers”. Anyone who has traveled and met different people, and who is logical and reasonable as a person, KNOWS such blanket classifications are either incorrect/without foundation, or designed to manipulate the weak minded for one reason or another.
Count the number of times he appeals to spite, appeals to ridicule, association fallacy etc. All are illogical.
Aphan,
Thanks for your guidance. I’m sure it’s worth what I paid for it.
I’m not telling her anything. I’m providing the results of extensive research and analysis of the American political environment.
The hackneyed “left vs. right” political spectrum has literally no meaning in the USA today. What do you think “left” means? What do you think “right” means?
Was Obama “left”? Was Bush “right?” Give examples that support your contention.
The only political spectrum with any meaning today has Politically Correct Progressivism at one end, and Normal-American at the other.
This spectrum is operative now due to the introduction of the anti-Normal belief system, and concommitant holier-than-thou attitude, into the transmission belts of American culture around 1920.
In the last 90 years, the PC-Prog, anti-Normal-America belief system spread and grew, mostly underground. Around 1980, it emerged above-ground, and has spread even faster since then.
The lady in this article spells our clearly the belief system–America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist, capitalist hellhole, and it must be changed.
The forces pushing for destruction of America’s capitalist economy because of their imaginary global warming are simply following directly the dictates of PC-Progs’ anti-capitalist tenent.
This cannot be termed Right vs Left.
It is the greatest country in the history of the world vs the destroyers.
Aphan,
Sure, there may be registered Democrats who fail the PC-Prog belief test. There are Southerners today who are Democrats only because Lincoln was a Republican. But they are dying out fast.
Please point to one Democrat politician who fails even one point of the PC-Prog 6 point belief system test.
The “Blue Dog Democrats?” Long gone. They were all hounded out of the PC-Prog party decades ago. “Conservative Democrats?” Huh? There is no such thing.
Democrats are the PC-Prog Party of Hate-America-First. Their goal is to destroy American exceptionalism, and everything that made our country great.
PC-Progs are Hillary, Obama, Holder, Lynch, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Kerry, Sharpton, Pelosi, Schumer, Black-Lives-Matter, etc. etc. Look at the Democrat convention–pure hatred of Normal-America.
Wishing it weren’t so doesn’t make it go away.
“It’s like painting ALL Tea Party members as Nazis”
More properly it should be: “It’s like painting ANY Tea Party members as Nazis”
Certainly political correctness had gone off the rails.
But, as Kent himself says… there IS a spectrum in all of this.
And, some of this deserves a little rewording and an examination of the true situation.
The economy is systematically manipulated by the 1% in order to
..profit obscenely at the expense of the ….. the 99%. …. there’s probably a 50% in there who profit quite reasonably …..
Capitalism rewards a wide spectrum of society, …. but there is an underclass which… suffers.
… and this could be easily resolved by putting in measures to stop the big getting gigantic, and the gigantic becoming monsters…
“Was Obama “left”?”
No, Obama is far-left. A radical.
And then the “Liberal” Left Fascists wonder why so many people voted for Trump, and in the UK for Brexit.
You can’t fix stupid.
True that. What happened was the Deplorables finally spoke up.
Many years ago, when I was a young engineer in Britain, and Britain was effectively a socialist state, I took a second job in the evenings selling insurance. I must admit I was not a very good salesman and didn’t make much money at it, but I did get to go into a lot of largely blue-collar homes and give my spiel. One of the reasons I rarely made a sale was that, time after time, I heard the response “What do we need insurance for? Government’s promised to look after us from the cradle to the grave.”
After I while I got to thinking, what sort of creatures can reasonably expect to be looked after in such manner? The only answer I could come up with was cattle and slaves. If you are looked after from the cradle to the grave, you have no responsibility for your own life, you are totally dependent on others for all the important decisions in your life, and you are no more than cattle or slaves (the difference between the two is that slaves are aware of their position, cattle aren’t).
The true Leftie welcomes this situation – not for themselves, but for others. In their fetid dreams, they are the ones making the decisions that the proletariat is incapable of making for themselves, they are the cattle drovers and slave drivers. The right-wing person (I hesitate to use the term Rightie), in contrast, instinctively rejects this point of view on the basis that responsibility for one’s self is one of the core right-wing values, if not indeed the only core value.
I recommend Friedrich Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’ for further reading on this subject.
From my first working day I paid into unemployment insurance, workplace accident insurance, working disability insurance.
I’ll never be rich, getting along.