4 ms·

The flipside of this is the reactionary multitudes who spout 'sjw' or 'virtue signalling' or 'socialist' when someone on the left questions the status-quo. Its

• rhapsodic 10y ago
  >The flipside of this is the reactionary multitudes who spout 'sjw' or 'virtue signalling' or 'socialist' when someone on the left questions the status-quo. A fair point, however, I think the only way to reverse the trend on the left is for the right to employ the left's own tactics back against them, in spades. The right needs to destroy the lives and careers of, for example, some university presidents who allow this sort of brutish behavior to go unpunished, sometimes even making excuses for it. Or go to war against companies who cave to the SJW demands. It has to be mutually-assured destruction, not one-sided.
  • tomlock 10y ago
    I think you're painting the left as bad and the right as good. There are pretty clearly bad actors on each side, and each side is a broad church. I think its very apt that you use MAD as an analogy, because I'm analogously all for nuclear non-proliferation.
  • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    Yes, purges will help a lot, and definitely aren't exactly what a strawman Evil Reactionary Dictator would do /s.
  • pottersbasilisk 10y ago
    So the alt right evolved because the gop was too weak. Pretty interesting. I've never thought of it like an arms race before.
• eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  It's not a "problem on both sides" when one side controls every branch of federal, state, and local government across the vast majority of the country, while the other can't seem to win an election against Donald Trump. Strength is not equivalent to weakness.
  • tomlock 10y ago
    Totally agree with your sentiment but my initial point was made against the argument that the left was intellectually weak because some of its members shout down the opposition.
    • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      At this point, I would describe mainstream conservatism as intellectually weak, and mainstream liberalism as nonexistent. Conservatism has been tried, and the flaws of its current incarnation have shown up: socioeconomic inequality has reached and surpassed crisis levels. There is mass homelessness while houses lie empty, mass preventable sickness, mass socially induced drug-addiction, blue-collar underemployment while infrastructure rots, horrifying corruption and arrogance in government, and moral hazard and fraud in the financial sector. All of this, while we also live in a time of unprecedentedly low crime and social peace, because people mostly don't want to blindly lash out at a fellow citizen who did not cause their problems. The time has come to put conservatism on the back-burner until we later encounter some problem against which it can serve as an effective tool. And yet the opposition can barely muster the chutzpah to defend the Affordable Care Act, much less to create a 21st-century New Deal! Worse, what are people focusing on? College students protesting! Can someone explain to me how stricter behavioral policing of college students is going to rebuild rusted bridges or install high-speed passenger rail? Who gets health-insurance out of telling college students to shut up? Meanwhile, the President of the United States tweets us all "letters from grandpa" material he saw on blogs, while his party plots to realize an ideological utopia that would actually make us all worse-off. Why? Because college students! And fake protesters paid by George Soros! This is insane. We have real issues that can't be solved with a hashtag, a tweet, or a cardboard sign.
      • Chris2048 10y ago
        > College students protesting! Are you talking about Berkeley? I'm not sure a lot of those were college students. Nor were they protesting...