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
Thank you Anthony, for bringing this to our attention.
‘On the road to Damascus’ moments are rarely blinding lights of utterly compelling insight. More often they are incremental shifts of growing realization until they coalesce to become a moment of crystalline self-actualization.
“It parallels many if the trials and tribulations climate skeptics suffer at the hands of [climate activists].” I think you meant “many of the trials” not “if”.
please don’t let me be misunderstood.
https://youtu.be/-hwiCkU73NA
This is great! I still consider myself a libertarian democratic socialist – I haven’t left the left. But there is so much here that I recognise from first-hand experience and abhor. I realise that what it’s about is principles, evidence and a proper (Popper) scientific approach. Strangely, I find that, currently, principles that I had associated with the left are actually being promoted by the so-called right, including Pres. Trump, especially in his opposition to islamism, and of course his questioning of EPA dogma, while many on the left are immersed in obscurantism about climate science, and fellow-travellers of a primitive, supremacist, anti-democracy and anti-freedom ideology, islam. Does that sound strange, “libertarian democratic socialist”? I recommend a book that probably many Americans haven’t read: E.P. Thompson, “The making of the English working class”, Penguin, London, 1963. One of my heroes: a libertarian, democratic socialist who fought in a tank regiment in WWII, a great historian, a Marxist who opposed Stalinism and neo-Stalinism (in the work of Althusser, Poulantzas and their ilk – see his “The poverty of theory”), and was generally a great guy. Get hold of the book and give yourself a real delight reading it. Thompson was also nearly unique amongst Marxists in recognising the immense value of the rule of law (so-called “bourgeois law” amongst most Marxists) for workers / ordinary people (read “Whigs and hunters”). So yes, I’m a libertarian democratic socialist, and I have no home. I can’t even vote Labour in Britain because the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is a rabid anti-semite and pro-hamas jihad. The small h for hamas is not a mistake.
Now this is a surprise, a well thought out political post which I entirely agree with ! I like the point about the far left promoting far right ideas, exactly my own perspective.
Let me phrase a statement to agree or disagree with
The New left is not ultimately interested in achieving solutions to any of the problems it so trumpets.
It exists to parade itself in opposition to the forces it claims try to destroy it.
If those forces do not exist, it will invent them
You would likely be at home in Iceland where many libertarian democratic socialists exist and it works pretty well. The citizens gripe somewhat about high taxes but are delighted with social medicine and education.
Other than that, liberty exceeds that in the United States on almost all vectors, realms and theaters. It is extremely rare to see a “bannad” (banned, forbidden, no trespassing) or “lokad” (locked, closed) and in such cases it is because what is on the other side is *dangerous* as in instantly fatal. Merely burning your face off is permitted if you wanted to look down the borehole of the geyser, Strokkur.
But all of that liberty is cultural and ultimately related to life itself. In a land that until recently had essentially no roads and no fences, people and animals traveled pretty much unrestrained by such things; guided across featureless tundra by stone cairns built every so often.
It was a garden of eden; and like the original, soon enough came a serpent called private banking and the forbidden fruit of easy money. Google “IceSave debacle” for the rest of the story.
Thanks for the contribution Danusha.
I know you’re not a Slovakian gypsy – would not change anything.
Best greetings – Hans
If not Marx, then god.
I am sick and tired of it.
Can anybody think on their own? Hello out there?
Yep, but I’m thinking of leaving the solar system…:-)
In the UK, the penny bazaar, was the saviour of the working class
http://vps.templar.co.uk/Cartoons%20and%20Politics/Archive_Cardiff_pre1901-9037.jpg
Later it was supposed to be central socialist government or as I call them, Marx and Spenders.
Leo, I guess like many on the right you have great difficulty discerning between democratic socialism and Stalinist dictatorships. Don’t worry , you are not alone in that blind spot.
“I guess like many on the right you have great difficulty discerning between democratic socialism and Stalinist dictatorships.”
“Democratic Socialism” is an oxymoron.
Socialism cannot be imposed only by force and by the elimination of all individuals who wish for liberty to follow their own path.
Socialism is a theology that has replaced “God(s)” by “the State”, and in fifty years of the Twentieth Century Socialist regimes were responsible for murdering more of their own citizens than all the God-based theologies in all of recorded history.
Its worshippers invariably have humungous chips on their shoulders and wish to drag everyone else down to their pathetic level, or they are evil exploiters of the credulous.
Oh, and just so there can be no doubt, I don’t hate Socialists – that would be a waste of a very powerful emotion.
I despise them.
The difference exists mainly in the minds of those who are trying to confuse fact and fiction.
https://youtu.be/8VceW6F9ZsM
The
.Very good article , that’s for giving it some airtime.
What ? How on Earth does she get there?
I would have thought that the ‘teabagger’ mockery is simply to ridicule as being something small and insignificant, not a reference to being “orally penetrated by a man”.
Either I’m not using my teabags correctly or I’m a little out of touch with politically correct logic.
Teabagging is the act of a man placing his scrotum into the mouth or onto the face or forehead of another person, usually while standing or kneeling over that person. (Think dipping a tea bag into a mug and you’ve got the visual.)
Yes. You are a little ‘out of touch’ with modern leftist slurs and defamation of those who oppose socialism.
obama used the term often enough (to insult the ‘tea party’ groups)- and you may be very sure he knows what it means.
obama was totally respectful of the orifice of the president.
The crews be picking on your flesh and you got no control of the
____ Situation.
Terminus el dorado.
did you know Ted is running for Senate in Michigan?
Dr. Goska’s experience echoes that of a prominent UK political journalist, the American born Janet Daley
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/
Her comments on the left are all the more cogent because she was in it.
The same goes for writers like George Orwell.
I think history will judge socialism and the rise and fall of Marxism in the 20th century much as it now views the rise and fall of witch trials in the 17th – as an inevitable stage through which we had to pass, given the conditions and beliefs of the time.
Ayn Rand had binocular vision too, having been born in Russia in 1905 and moved to the US in 1926.
All about carpal tunnel syndrome
https://www.google.at/search?q=Tunnel+syndrome&oq=Tunnel+syndrome&aqs=chrome.
if nothings to see here – move along
It’s interesting that a critical moment is being reached in the climate debate and public is more broadly exposed as the policy list is mainstreamed. In every past moment such as the cap and trade proposal period, Kyoto frame work etc
the climate debate becomes brutally political as the base numbers of debaters increases. In times of stagnation and smaller more academic settings the focus is layered in technical disputes, rationalizations and politics is derided. The cycle repeats again and again.
The climate advocates (green establishment) saw the short term value of being perceived as the “science” authority. From that the “consensus” was born and enforced.
It’s the failure of the technical skeptic to acknowledge the core political agenda of the climate advocacy political motives from inception (Circa 1960’s green/left counter culture) that formed the weakness to create a global UN climate authority and design.
Acknowledging the political primacy of the climate war both currently and historically is the only road to disbanding climate central planning ambitions and restoring critical thinking to “science” and academics itself. This only seems to happen at policy peaks and reverts to smaller debates in between. The pattern is repeated on this site as well.
Skeptics can’t resolve their political contradictions to the core of the climate agenda. It’s larger then any science fact to debate. If you can’t see and admit the agenda of the CO2 claim you remain on the losers road.
Articles like this are a positive but on average middle of the road acceptance of Curryism is more a problem then solution here. It’s like General McClellan on the Potomac, prepared but unwilling to accept the basic frame that climate was always a political movement first and science an abstract second. Climate is a leftist, globalist grasp at state centered authority and little else. The rest of the details are tactics and self delusion.
Lindzen and Delingpole are the face of the resistance in logic.
“After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.”
The Leftist point of view is an example of mass psychosis.
Having read the article and then started to read the comments, the authors points are made by the leftist commentators. And they probably do not even realize it. They are so consumed by their hate, that it is their natural state. They cannot even think outside their box.
I read Dr Ball’s article as well. Both of these are good reading to understand the sole motivation of the left. They live to hate.
I have a right/ liibertarian political outlook, and agree with Dr. Danusha V. Goska’s “after” views, but I
am cynical regarding any coverts after their 20s; that includes both religious converts, like St. Paul converting from Judaism to Christianity , and political converts, like Dr Goska and Whittaker Chambers. Religious and Political views are established over a lifetime. Being converted after age 30 is a sign of mental instability. I wouldn’t trust such people.
“Religious and Political views are established over a lifetime. Being converted after age 30 is a sign of mental instability.”
What is more intelligent, moving away from error, or persisting in it?
We each have the power to change our own minds by directing our own thoughts in new ways. Also, goal directed thoughts and actions are the essence of human rationality and freedom. The author has not only changed her own mind, but has taken the time to explain and elucidate her reasons and goals in the process. This is like showing the steps when finding a mathematical solution. No one here has pointed out any problem with the actual errors she is concerned with solving.
Her end result is the following: “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 would say she has truly accomplished that. This is also something I aim for. Appreciation, admiration and respect for others is close to heaven, contempt and revenge are close to hell.
Alan,
“Being converted after age 30 is a sign of mental instability.”
Have you considered the possibility that you’re insane, sir? . . I just did ; )
eric hoffer made mention of the phenomenon where a true believer easily swaps flags or fetishes.
one religion is not much different than another – the hallmark is mysticism.
“Being converted after age 30 is a sign of mental instability. I wouldn’t trust such people.”
In one way I can see why you would say that; suggesting a person cannot make up his mind. But in the case of Dr. Goska, she never was like the other leftists. She did not “convert”, rather, she recognized that her character type was not accurately or adequately represented on the left. She has already, or will soon discover that it also isn’t represented on the right. She may become “libertarian”, choosing for herself and letting others choose for themselves, perhaps with some persuasion and education to make good choices.
People that “convert” to my religion don’t really change, it isn’t a conversion as much as it is embracing a religion that conforms to a character type each already possesses; perhaps with some refinements here and there to be in better alignment for the benefits thereof.
Today’s leftists are not the hippie, make-love-not-war Berkeley types of the 1960’s.
Once upon a time leftists had a thing they believed in called socialism, or communism. A proposed society they believed would set everyone free from oppression. The ‘kingdom of heaven here on earth’. In a real sense, proposing an alternative (you believe in) gives legitimacy to your criticisms. You criticize the here and now from the point of view of a better future.
If not earlier, leftists generally gave up believing in communism over 26 years ago just after the Berlin Wall collapsed and all the communists became capitalists, or workers. Since then the auguries for socialism got worse (North Korea, Venezuela, …). The left, pretty much, gave up talking about socialist economics. The only left economics available today is Keynesian redistribution, which is capitalist.
What do you do after your dream dies? I think Danusha explains it well. You classify the world as perp, victim, or SJW. The only way to avoid the fate of victim or victimizer is to fight against it: to be a SJW. The SJW criticizes from a future perspective too – a world without victims. Except – who exactly are those victims in SJW parlance? Not actual victims but imaginary ones. Examples of SJW victims are:
* Trans-people who want to use unisex washrooms. So all washrooms must become unisex.
* Polar bears dying because the ice melted (but in reality prospering as never before)
* Larvae and fish eggs potentially harmed by desalination plants
* The projected millions dying of carbon pollution in an imaginary future (the SJW’s nightmare world)
No actual human victims are saved here. No human lives improved; if anything the opposite. Our lives are made materially and spiritually worse. SJWs psychologically victimize ordinary people: promoting a generalized ‘guilt trip’ for merely being alive. A hatred of oneself, and of humanity. Anyone not suffering from such a guilt trip is deemed Republican, or rightwing, racist, Nazi, or all four.
It’s an actual moral hazard being a left SJW today.
In plain speak, Dr. Goska decided that being part of the perpetually aggrieved crowd was no longer healthy or fulfilling.
She stepped out of the dark and into the light. Welcome Dr. Goska…welcome.
There seems to a lot of left wing people about, protesting about all sorts of things and pushing their various agendas. I am very interested in what motivates them and I’ve been trying to understand them.
This article is fascinating as well as disturbing. Is what it describes extreme or normal or what?
“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.” This particular phrase seems to articulate what I often observe. What influences people to end up in this state?
The Adam Smith Institute has published a report which claims that about 80% of UK academics are left wing. These people are educating the next generation. No wonder that many of today’s students are politically correct to the point of lunacy.
That study can’t possibly be right. You might want to examine it to see how they arrived at that figure. I find it very hard to believe that the level of leftist educators in any country could be as low as 80%.
I have friends who are liberal history professors. They won’t stand for the pledge of allegiance, because it is “fascist” Whatever. They spend enormous amounts of time attending marches and political speeches, but not a second doing any sort of actual charity work. I asked them once about it, and they explained “We are trying to save the world, we don’t have time to help just one person.” I never forgot that. Then I realized the ugly truth – they were only interested in things that aggrandized themselves. Helping one person, helping dozens, was not enough for them. It didn’t make them feel good our powerful enough.
It was all about them, not the people they were supposed to be helping.
Beyond that, attending rallies and such doesn’t cost them anything.
Trying to actually help people requires money. Your own money.
Leftists want to save the world, but they always want someone else to pick up the check.
Perhaps, being history professors, they are thinking back to when this was the Pledge of Allegiance?
Reading this, I am reminded of the Ronald Reagan remark that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him.
This story reads like propaganda. Disappointing on this blog.
In other words, you can’t refute it but are desperate to say something disparaging, and that was all you could come up with.
It really is fascinating how self-blind leftists can be.
It is a true tale of one persons journey to enlightenment. How is it you see that as ‘propaganda’?
I read it as a profound and deeply moving ‘windows view’ into one woman’s soul. I find this to be excellent literature, worthy of wide distribution and acclaim!
Awesome!
To all who have commented my humble note, some reflectively, some with foolishness, I repeat: The attitude towards and understanding of science is the one and only decisive matter.
Most of my liberal friends did not have a similar background to Dr. Danusha V. Goska.
1. They had nothing to do with ultra-liberal Berkeley.
2. They were not communist sympathizers.
3. They didn’t attend a lot of protests.
4. They were not in the Peace Corps.
5. They did hate Bush, Reagan, etc., but never outright said so.
6. They act like normal people (capitalists) until you get into politics (and global warming). They are probably more like capitalists than me as I am a “starving artist”.
JPP
And a lot of them do volunteer work to help people – food drives, etc.
One is an ultra liberal, but his favorite speech is Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Go figure…
She really does nail it.
But it wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time there roamed the fruited plains in great numbers a now nearly-extinct creature called the “bleeding-heart liberal.”
But these days liberalism is the ideology of hatred.
I remember “bleeding-heart liberals,” but that was a long, long time ago. These days, liberalism is characterized by selfishness and viciousness. Liberals’ heroes are people like like abortionist LeRoy Carhart and gay activist Dan Savage. (If someone reading this is unfamiliar with them, just ask google; e.g., http://bfy.tw/5YX )
These days, liberals are “caring” only about themselves. Bleeding-heart liberalism, which cared about OTHER people, is long obsolete. Liberals celebrate ruining the lives of anyone, like Melissa & Aaron Klein, or Elaine Huguenin, who dares to have a contrary opinion. (If you don’t know those names [really??], then ask google; e.g., http://bfy.tw/5Yu )
These days, people on the Left are often so full of hatred, rage & selfishness that they want those with whom they disagree to die and go to hell (except that most of them would say that don’t believe in heaven or hell). Remember leftist Phil Jones telling his leftist friend, Michael Mann, the “cheering news” that conservative John Daly had unexpectedly died?
Once upon a time there were a lot of good-hearted, gentle, “bleeding-heart liberals.” Even when they were wrong, they weren’t Bad. They were people who a conservative Christian could like and respect, even when we disagreed.
But that was long ago. Those nice liberals are mostly extinct, now. Since killing inconvenient unborn babies has become a sacrament for liberals, most people on the Left have hearts of stone.
Abortion has become one of the core Sacraments of liberalism, which all liberals must support, just as Christians are expected to participate in the Christian sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. If you oppose abortion you can’t really call yourself a liberal, just as if you oppose the Christian sacraments you can’t really call yourself a Christian.
Support for killing innocent, unborn babies is an essential Tenet Of The Faith of modern liberalism. If your heart aches at the thought of an innocent unborn child being dismembered in the womb, you aren’t a liberal.
But liberalism is not characterized solely by hard-heartedness. It is also characterized by aversion to reality. Evidence is no obstacle to liberal opinion. “Abortion does not kill babies,” say liberals, as if unborn babies either are not human, or not alive. “My body, my choice,” say liberals, as if unborn children were indistinguishable from their mothers’ bodies.
They might as well deny the law of gravity as to deny that an unborn child is a distinct, living, human baby. At some level, they surely know it’s untrue. It’s just that truth has lost its consistent relevance to them. It becomes dependent on context, or convenience.
The next time an expectant friend — even a liberal — shows you the ultrasound of her unborn son, you try telling her that her child is not a baby. Or if she tells you her baby just kicked, try telling her that’s just an “embryo or fetus, not a baby.” See how that works out.
Or if she comes to you, red-eyed from crying, and tells you that she lost her baby, will you correct her, and tell her that her miscarriage was just the termination of an embryo or fetus? (Even most liberals have more sense than that!)
But if she decides to have an abortion, because a baby would be too disruptive to the lifestyle she wants for herself, then, in THAT context, liberals insist that this is not really a baby:
About 18 days after conception, the baby’s heart starts beating.
43 days after conception the baby’s brainwaves are detectable.
By the 8th week the brain and all body systems are present, and the baby will wake and sleep, make a fist, suck his thumb, and get hiccups.
By the 9th week he has his own unique finger prints.
By the 11th week he is sensitive to heat, touch, light and noise. All body systems are working.
People who have hardened their hearts so much that they have no regard for whether such a child lives or dies are called liberals.
Some of them even go so far as to applaud the abortion of an innocent child, for its supposed environmental benefit of curbing overpopulation. That sentiment sounds a lot like a famous literary character, who said, “If [the poor and destitute] would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
“daveburton March 6, 2017 at 9:22 pm”
Hummm…the rudiments of the spine/backbone and anus form first according to the biology texts I read. I didn’t fare well with biology, so could be wrong.
daveburton:
It is sad to find such a vile, hate filled rant as your post in a thread that is about opposition to expressions of hatred.
Richard
I was restrained, Richard. Instead of an image of an unborn baby sucking his thumb I could have shown a photo of one of the victims: a baby whose thumb and arm are no longer attached to his body. That would have been a clearer illustration of the character of modern liberalism.
Your reaction is familiar. I see it sometimes, here in North Carolina.
There are still a few Southern admirers of the Confederacy left around here, who call the American Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression,” and think Gen. Wm. T. Sherman was armed with a pitchfork. Your reaction to my description of the true nature of the most horrible of the horrors of liberalism reminds me of the angry reaction typical of those Southerners, when they’re shown the true nature of the character of the Confederacy, as revealed, for example, in photos of its victims:
http://www.burtonsys.com/Andersonvillesurvivor_11pct_for_FB.jpg
Most people would guess that photograph was of a man liberated from a German concentration camp, in 1945. But it wasn’t. That man was liberated from a Confederate POW camp 100 miles south of Atlanta, GA, and the photo predates Auschwitz by 3/4 century.