i still want to reply to this, though its perhaps a good thing i waited two days and that the conversation has mostly moved on ,............
Linguoboy wrote:
Pabappa wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 11:27 amSo many leftists seem to, at best, view conservatives as no more than miseducated leftists, as if our interests are the same as yours but we just can't see it ............and at worst, as an evil group with no legitimate interests, and wholly undeserving of compassion, let alone debate. Read upthread if you don't see what I mean, and it's certainly not just confined to this community. I've never seen this sort of thing from the Right.
Never? Seriously? I don't see how anyone can claim that unless it's being undergirded by some sort of No True Scotsman fallacy. Libertarians are the kings of the "you'd believe exactly what I do if you were only smart enough and educated yourself" stance and finding right-wingers who demonise and dehumanise liberals is easier than finding COVID carriers at a motorcycle rally.
yes, I stand by what I said here. to respond,
1) Libertarians are libertarians, not conservatives, so this criticism is irrelevant to me. if you really see libertarians and conservatives as some sort of two-headed hydra then it just underscores my original point that the Left does not and forever will not understand the Right.
2) well, an anecdote is worth an anecdote, i guess, and I imagine that neither of us believes the other.
3) I didnt bring this up in my original post, but the Left has a clear stronghold on this sort of sly conversation style where insults are baked into every parapgraph, and that underscores my point even more.
Raphael wrote:
You've never seen this sort of thing from the Right? What Right are you talking about? Frankly, I rarely ever see anything else than this sort of thing from the Right. Ok, can you name a single prominent, well-known contemporary right-wing commentator who, when they talk about leftists, don't describe them basically as "at best, no more than miseducated right-wingers, as if their interests are the same as yours but they just can't see it ............and at worst, as an evil group with no legitimate interests, and wholly undeserving of compassion, let alone debate"?
i am comparing this community to the other social media communities I belong to, not to television personalities. I never see this sort of thing on the RIght.
a hypothetical counterexample would be a discussion group consisting entirely of conservatives, sitting around and asking each other "well, what is with these LIBERALS? are they voting left because theyre emasculated and terrified of guns, or are they all Muslim fundamentalists hiding behind pasteboard masks until the time is right for the jihad?" and then talk for hours amongst themselves.
this kind of false spectrum of "are you X or are you X-prime?" opinions requires a conversation, not just one person , so i wouldnt expect it to come up on a talk show run by one person, and therefore i think Ive answered your question.
but I've never seen this type of situation within a conservative discussion group, either, whether the group is formal or informal, adults or teenagers, educated or uneducated, debate-oriented or game-oriented, etc... i would say that it never happens because conservatives understand leftist positions very well, and that this is because the Right recognizes the Left as a group with its own legitimate interests, which happen to be opposed to our own.
are there discussion groups with leftists who acknowledge that conservatives, too, have legitimate interests? well, i've found some, as I hinted at in a post more than a year ago, but they seem pretty rare.
Travis B. wrote:
Thing is, they often conflate people who are anything but socialist with the evil bogeyman of "Communist!", as if anything which is not on the right is equivalent to big-C Communism.
Again, I havent seen this. Communism is a spent force, .... the USSR fell thirty years ago, and even the Left admits that prsent-day China is communist only in name. Expecting the conservatves to be terrified of communism just doesnt make sense. Since quite a few people here said more or less this same thing, IM a bit puzzled, to be honest.
obviously, the Right does oppose Communism, but the only time I've seen a leftist party falsely described as Communist in recent memory was when Austria's socialist party, SPO, was described as communist by an SPO
supporter who I assume was engaging in wishful thinking. elsewhere it seems to be a byword for authoritarianism (someone told me i was a communist because i enforced a decision handed down by a staff team that i believe he expected me to ignore), or used literally for the few actual communist parties still in power.
if i were a strategist with lots of money, i suppose i would seize on this opportunity to promote the idea that conservatives are just cowards living 25 yrs in the past, worried that anything to the left of the party line means a slippery slope into
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCOMMUNISM, while the actual conservatives will devote their attention to the real issues, mostly social issues these days, but also opposing the Democrats' economic policies for what they actually are.
that brings me to my last point.
nortaneous wrote:In addition to being cartoonishly evil, it's monumentally stupid of them to hitch their entire national brand to nonsense that no reasonable person would ever endorse in response to total non-issues, especially after the 2016 election when they ran a moderate who didn't even go in for the bathroom bill thing the apparatchiks were pushing, although unfortunately once Trump was in office he appointed the same repulsive insects voters were hoping he'd obliterate.
Nort, while I agree that Trump was a moderate on social issues and probably still is in his heart, the fact is that Trump could not have won the election without social conservatives. He really, really needed Mike Pence on the ticket and it would have sunk his campaign if he had chosen Pence and then gone on to flatly contradict Pence's own positions on topics such as abortion and LGBT issues. I think that remains true today, and that the Republican party cannot win elections by simply conceding defeat to the Left on social issues ... what exactly would there be left to stand for ?
