Happy Hump Day everyone!!!! FINALLY, we have our post from Stephen!!!!!
It occurs to me that watching the leftist groups coordinate, converge, target, and attack various groups espousing various conservative positions, that there are systemic problems not only in defending against such attacks, but the obvious long term suicidal nature of those attacks themselves as a political strategy.
What will that mean in time?
Perhaps that was a mite vague. To illustrate, let us review a few of the examples of this leftist convergence.
After any mass shooting which gets any significant amount of publicity, leftist emit a chorus of calls to ban the NRA, call the NRA a terrorist organization, disparage any and all NRA members. Liberal politicians follow suit and start attacking not just the NRA but their insurance agents, companies which associate with them providing credit card services, in short attack anything and anyone associated with them.
Ever since the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United from every leftist politician and academic which can be found to criticize it, we are regaled with tales of the ultimate doom of our society because corporate entities are destroying the very fabric of our republic turning us into a virtual plutocracy.
The left systematically targeted and called for massive boycotts against Chick-fil-a simply because their corporation donated money in support of other organizations which supported traditional marriages, which the perverts on parade deemed such an affront to decent society that the company ought to be ran out of town and bankrupted.
While companies are often the targets of the leftist wroth, entertainment venues like the Miss America pageant, the National Football League, and even video game makers are also targeted systematically for harassment and public derision sometimes for simply following their traditional course of conduct.
Other times, it is a more concerted attempt to coerce control of the entertainment venue, wresting it from the clutches of normal society with staged protests against America during the national anthem, demands for a vastly over-represented perversity of the LBGWHATEVER community in video games or movies, or the abolishment of women in bathing suits in a beauty pageant.
Even non-conservatives are targeted if those organizations are perceived to be on the political right, that is anything non-leftist, such as the orchestrated removal and outright banning upon certain platforms from various social media of conspiracy mongers like Info Wars, or the notorious “shadow-banning” of anyone with whom the leftists disagree on forums like Twitter or Facebook.
Numerous scientists have awoken to find that their research has run afoul of the political inquisition of the leftists because the results of their research demonstrates a reality at odds with the prevailing liturgy of the leftist clergy. Careers are ruined, research papers are retracted and shoved down the Orwellian memory hole, never to be mentioned or cited again, difficult to even find after a time.
We have become accustom and accepting of medial corporations openly biasing their reporting, though they have been known to be doing it for over a century. Shame on us for accepting so passively such obvious lying. Now we are expected to accept that same leftist bias in leftist search engines like Google, supported by operating systems of leftist companies like Microsoft.
What do all of these have in common? It is a hatred of ideas and expression itself, not merely an attack upon the people expressing those ideas. The left has openly embraced the censoring and silencing of opposing points of view; all opposing points of view.
Those who would use the IRS to keep 501(c) status from Tea Party organizations are the same people sick the FBI to spy on reporters who might disagree with them, but scream to disband ICE for enforcing immigration law. It is not the government agency which offends them, but which side of the political aisle that agency appears to be favoring.
Those who would eliminate corporate subsidies to various corporations under a number of incentive programs are the same ones who will turn around and screech at the top of their lungs that corporate subsidies for Planned Parenthood or the National Endowment for the Arts or Public Broadcasting are threatened. It is not the corporate subsidy which offends them, but which side of the political aisle that corporation appears to be favoring.
Those who pushed the hardest for “net neutrality” and a revival of the “equal time” and “fairness doctrine” regulating broadcast media (excepting themselves and their “reporters” from such restrictions), are the very people who are yelling that the sky is falling if the government were to regulate social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. It is not the government regulatory imposition of equal media access which offends them, but which side of the political aisle that regulatory imposition appears to be favoring.
Those who so oft mocked and spurned those government grants for university research which came from the military side of the budget, to improve our military capability were so public in their opposition that they would make teen college movies with our military as the bad guys, are those who live their lives for academic grants and largesse from the social services side of the government. It is not about state funding of academic research, but which side of the political aisle that funding appears to be favoring.
There are those who would censor any speech they can label as “hate speech”, would extra-criminalize any crime under the name of “hate crime”, would call any argument against their agenda as racist, misogynist, phobic, ignorant, crazy, or any other hateful descriptor they can employ. But it is not about hatred, it is about silencing opposition, bankrupting foes, mocking your detractors, and destroying your enemies.
There was a rather obviously contrived scene in the “politically correct” bad modern revival of Doctor Who where the shape shifting aliens had assumed the shape and identity of three specific humans who were then confronted by those same humans who threatened to obliterate themselves along with the aliens, but were all conveniently given temporary amnesia.
Ignoring that the new version of the show repeatedly places humans as the violent aggressors, the bad guys, and the very thinly veiled analogy of the aliens to the current waves of immigrants from the middle east, whom the show asserts “just want to blend, assimilate, and lead normal lives”, there is an occasional intelligent point brought up as if by accident of circumstance even in the new version of the classic show.
The humans and aliens are forced to negotiate by these contrived circumstances. The Doctor states that the perfect negotiation can only be achieved when you don’t actually know on which side of the issue you actually are. Perfect negotiation is an abstract concept without personal bias because you can see both sides of the issue.
This is, of course, false. But it is useful. Perfect negotiation is not seeing all sides of the issue without bias, but a discussion of the abstract principles themselves without the fear of ending up on the wrong side of the objective principle.
However, it is useful in that is clearly demonstrates that the aforementioned leftist approach never pauses to even consider that they may end up on the losing side of the issue, that their voices could be the ones silenced, their fortunes lost, the apparatus of state turned against them.
As a matter of conservative principle, none of this would ever be turned against their opponents as it would violate their principles. However, as the left continues to press this stratagem against those they have herded together on the right, the conservative may not be the voice of the opposition.
The right as of current is becoming increasingly less conservative, and more simply an opponent of the left. It is increasingly not about the principle being argued, but which side of the political aisle that issue appears to be favoring. It is becoming that way for both sides.
In a nation which is healthy and unified, this tendency would be becoming less prominent for both sides of the aisle, not more prominent.
For the result we would like to see come about of reason to win over partisanship, the worst offender must be the party to change first. It is the active party which must change, not the reactive party. Thus, as part of the conservative faction of the reactive party, it is a frustration realizing that the change needed must originate in the hearts and minds of those least likely to change.
(Post Script: it is the unique nature of science fiction that placing characters in odd settings can often lead to necessary revelations which the writers did not intend, and thus lessons can be gleaned of an abstract truth from the very nature of those circumstance despite the intended message of the writer.)
