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I feel that's disingenuous. It wasn't the same way on both sides. This kind of false equivalence crops up in a lot of places but it needs to be called out. Man

I feel that's disingenuous. It wasn't the same way on both sides. This kind of false equivalence crops up in a lot of places but it needs to be called out. Many high profile Remainers claimed Leavers were/are racist, ignorant, far-right, small minded, hated all foreigners, didn't know what they were voting for, were old and thus should have their vote be ignored, and worse. Leavers claimed Remainers were ... what? Afraid of independence? That's about the worst of it from what I can remember. There was not by any stretch of the imagination the same kind of smear campaign alleging terrible motives and terrible souls. And now this. Parler and Gab within a few months of each other. It's not left wing outlets getting hacked and dumped, is it? I'm afraid there's no equivalency here: whether it's the USA or UK, it's always the same: it's always the left attacking the right. They do not view opposition of any sort as legitimate any more and are determined to destroy conservatism by any means possible, both legal and illegal. Nothing like it exists in reverse.

rjsw 6y ago
> Leavers claimed Remainers were ... what? Leavers calling Remainers "traitors" seems fairly common.
thamidolide 6y ago
> determined to destroy conservatism by any means possible Sadly, a couple of websites being scraped and hacked isn't going to destroy conservatism. It'll take a lot more effort than that to wipe out this scourge of humanity.
- monoideism 6y ago
  I initially flagged this comment, but then I realized it's a great demonstration of the parent comment's claims. So I unflagged it.
  - thamidolide 6y ago
    The parent comment is a great demonstration of right-wing whining. Quite astounding how right wing ideals have penetrated our political, economic and media institutions to the point where their positions are considered the 'sensible' and 'normal' ones - despite all the harm this ideology causes - yet they still claim to be the victims.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
loopz 6y ago
First of all, having the vote was an unnecessary and idiotic political blunder. However, it did highlight not everyone agree on everything EU. There are other models that are successful too. The reaction to the vote however, has been borderline sabotage and very nasty characterizations. This is a symptom of EU being an "all or nothing" entity, of high prestige and privilege. The result being an unmitigated mess on all levels, but do represent legitimate concerns over how EU is run vs local level. There are many good decisions in EU too addressing broader concerns. So it's a highly complex issue which is hard to solve by a simple vote and by political processes. Yet, that's how they did it this time.
mrow84 6y ago
The left has largely already been destroyed within the "Anglosphere". Collective bargaining has been undermined, social programs are defunded, and income and wealth inequality is increasing. The "attacks" you are referring to come from the "centre" - the technocratic "middle way" types. They do not represent left wing thought or politics.
williamdclt 6y ago
Taking the example of France, which I know better (caution: right/left in Europe does not mean quite the same as for Americans). The left (in particular the lefter parties) accuse the right to be racists, islamophobes, antisemites, sexists, at the heel of the bourgeoisie & capitalists, hostile to the working class, and guilty of ecological inaction. The right (not just the far right, even centre-right like the current party in power) accuses the left to be at the heel of muslims ("islamo-leftist" is thrown around a lot), traitors/threats to their own national identity/culture, weak, slowing down progress, utopists. I might be missing some, I'm biased. The left's attacks are more personal, more violent. I have an overly-simplified theory of why that is, the left's values are much more centered around the human, and the right's values are much more centered around the economy. That means that everything for the left is personal, it's cutting deep, violation of these values trigger empathy: sadness, anger, feelings of injustice and outrage. Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage. Of course, being biased I also think that the left's argument are more violent because they're _more true_, the right mostly getting its way. We do live in a liberal world which is very right-wing (despite americans liberal being called "leftists", that always confused me, or even "communists" when communism is so radically opposed to the neoliberalism we have today)
- soundnote 6y ago
  There's also, I think (disclaimer, righty lean), kind of a lack of understanding that goods conflict with each other. For example, how is diversity really born? Friction, separation. That's how it works biologically, and that's how cultures have grown different as well. Japanese people figuring out Japanese solutions to Japanese problems, Brits doing that in Britain, and so on. There were a lot of these when travel was more difficult, and we couldn't just bruteforce eg. heating/cooling and water away with tech and energy expenditure. And those are the things that have created the charm of the cultures themselves. Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness. Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing. But when we run into something that triggers moral sentiment, thought often stops there. If we close borders, we will in fact be doing nasty things to people who could use help. But that doesn't have to precisely be because those outsiders are bad, them being different is enough: They will damage a good that we'd like to keep. On the other hand, letting them in helps said people, but abandons the good the friction of moving into the country created. > Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage. I think this is more because the right's grown up in an environment where the things they ought to hold holy haven't been allowed to be held holy, so we get substitutes like excessively economic politics, or the ugliness of populism: It's a moral impulse that has no dignified outlet, at least yet. Ever wonder why many right-leaning people feel like they're more or less making apologies for their existence, that there's things that should feel important, but summon the air of dusty closets and mothballs to the mind when spoken of? It's partly because the right-wing society concept was built on a somewhat different stack. Said conservatives often call themselves right-liberals, and therein lies the problem: Liberal. Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it. It's a descendant of French Revolution type thinking, an enlightened, rationalist concept where we've finally figured out via Reason how to conduct human life, an a John Stuart Mill -ish idea of freedom as the maximization of available choices being the end in itself. Liberalism is inherently universalist in conception, since it knows the right way to live. To a liberal bent, humanity is malleable given sufficient perseverance and wisdom. Rationalist Revo!Liberty is the bedrock of society, on top of which it is built. There is an inherent devaluation of the past here, since reason will tell us how to go forward, and we can't even tell what all this rickety nonsense does - it's likely a pile of superstitious junk anyway. This does not work for the conservative attitude - in a Burkean sense, law is the slow accumulation of patches onto a rickety pile, that contains a lot of wisdom on how to live that we don't even remember why they're there in the first place: A mountain of Chesterton's fences. Man is held to be fallible, but something that can be honed by society and faith. Drop the Revo!Liberty lego, let a Burkean patchwork law, religion as humans must have, and more secular tradition fall into its place at the bottom as the bedrock, and insert liberty as a product. Suddenly, the mothballs disappear. The conservative no longer needs to be a brake on Revo!Liberalism's inevitable forward march, an outdated version ten years late that will assimilate most anything their ostensible opponents push as the good status quo. The ideological stack becomes alive, and he can stand on his own two feet, on solid moral ground. The Millian concept of liberty is troubled otherwise, too: A healthy society considers its own norms Good, and thus renders the human desire to conform a moral act. If the norms cease to be that, and are just arbitrary impositions, the only real moral act is defiance, it's the only one that contains proof of moral acts having been taken. Thus we go from stained glass to obese women holding severed heads, from public sculptures to giant public buttplugs. From melodic music to Yoko Ono, from beautiful paintings reflecting the wonder of creation to random splatter driven by hype. Subversion feels radical for the while but grows empty, fast. The only real 'morality' is in not being something, and that is it. There is nothing to truly aspire to except transgression or one-upping the Joneses.

rjsw 6y ago

> Leavers claimed Remainers were ... what? Leavers calling Remainers "traitors" seems fairly common.

thamidolide 6y ago

> determined to destroy conservatism by any means possible Sadly, a couple of websites being scraped and hacked isn't going to destroy conservatism. It'll take a lot more effort than that to wipe out this scourge of humanity.

monoideism 6y ago
I initially flagged this comment, but then I realized it's a great demonstration of the parent comment's claims. So I unflagged it.
- thamidolide 6y ago
  The parent comment is a great demonstration of right-wing whining. Quite astounding how right wing ideals have penetrated our political, economic and media institutions to the point where their positions are considered the 'sensible' and 'normal' ones - despite all the harm this ideology causes - yet they still claim to be the victims.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

loopz 6y ago

First of all, having the vote was an unnecessary and idiotic political blunder. However, it did highlight not everyone agree on everything EU. There are other models that are successful too. The reaction to the vote however, has been borderline sabotage and very nasty characterizations. This is a symptom of EU being an "all or nothing" entity, of high prestige and privilege. The result being an unmitigated mess on all levels, but do represent legitimate concerns over how EU is run vs local level. There are many good decisions in EU too addressing broader concerns. So it's a highly complex issue which is hard to solve by a simple vote and by political processes. Yet, that's how they did it this time.

mrow84 6y ago

The left has largely already been destroyed within the "Anglosphere". Collective bargaining has been undermined, social programs are defunded, and income and wealth inequality is increasing. The "attacks" you are referring to come from the "centre" - the technocratic "middle way" types. They do not represent left wing thought or politics.

williamdclt 6y ago

Taking the example of France, which I know better (caution: right/left in Europe does not mean quite the same as for Americans). The left (in particular the lefter parties) accuse the right to be racists, islamophobes, antisemites, sexists, at the heel of the bourgeoisie & capitalists, hostile to the working class, and guilty of ecological inaction. The right (not just the far right, even centre-right like the current party in power) accuses the left to be at the heel of muslims ("islamo-leftist" is thrown around a lot), traitors/threats to their own national identity/culture, weak, slowing down progress, utopists. I might be missing some, I'm biased. The left's attacks are more personal, more violent. I have an overly-simplified theory of why that is, the left's values are much more centered around the human, and the right's values are much more centered around the economy. That means that everything for the left is personal, it's cutting deep, violation of these values trigger empathy: sadness, anger, feelings of injustice and outrage. Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage. Of course, being biased I also think that the left's argument are more violent because they're _more true_, the right mostly getting its way. We do live in a liberal world which is very right-wing (despite americans liberal being called "leftists", that always confused me, or even "communists" when communism is so radically opposed to the neoliberalism we have today)

soundnote 6y ago
There's also, I think (disclaimer, righty lean), kind of a lack of understanding that goods conflict with each other. For example, how is diversity really born? Friction, separation. That's how it works biologically, and that's how cultures have grown different as well. Japanese people figuring out Japanese solutions to Japanese problems, Brits doing that in Britain, and so on. There were a lot of these when travel was more difficult, and we couldn't just bruteforce eg. heating/cooling and water away with tech and energy expenditure. And those are the things that have created the charm of the cultures themselves. Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness. Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing. But when we run into something that triggers moral sentiment, thought often stops there. If we close borders, we will in fact be doing nasty things to people who could use help. But that doesn't have to precisely be because those outsiders are bad, them being different is enough: They will damage a good that we'd like to keep. On the other hand, letting them in helps said people, but abandons the good the friction of moving into the country created. > Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage. I think this is more because the right's grown up in an environment where the things they ought to hold holy haven't been allowed to be held holy, so we get substitutes like excessively economic politics, or the ugliness of populism: It's a moral impulse that has no dignified outlet, at least yet. Ever wonder why many right-leaning people feel like they're more or less making apologies for their existence, that there's things that should feel important, but summon the air of dusty closets and mothballs to the mind when spoken of? It's partly because the right-wing society concept was built on a somewhat different stack. Said conservatives often call themselves right-liberals, and therein lies the problem: Liberal. Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it. It's a descendant of French Revolution type thinking, an enlightened, rationalist concept where we've finally figured out via Reason how to conduct human life, an a John Stuart Mill -ish idea of freedom as the maximization of available choices being the end in itself. Liberalism is inherently universalist in conception, since it knows the right way to live. To a liberal bent, humanity is malleable given sufficient perseverance and wisdom. Rationalist Revo!Liberty is the bedrock of society, on top of which it is built. There is an inherent devaluation of the past here, since reason will tell us how to go forward, and we can't even tell what all this rickety nonsense does - it's likely a pile of superstitious junk anyway. This does not work for the conservative attitude - in a Burkean sense, law is the slow accumulation of patches onto a rickety pile, that contains a lot of wisdom on how to live that we don't even remember why they're there in the first place: A mountain of Chesterton's fences. Man is held to be fallible, but something that can be honed by society and faith. Drop the Revo!Liberty lego, let a Burkean patchwork law, religion as humans must have, and more secular tradition fall into its place at the bottom as the bedrock, and insert liberty as a product. Suddenly, the mothballs disappear. The conservative no longer needs to be a brake on Revo!Liberalism's inevitable forward march, an outdated version ten years late that will assimilate most anything their ostensible opponents push as the good status quo. The ideological stack becomes alive, and he can stand on his own two feet, on solid moral ground. The Millian concept of liberty is troubled otherwise, too: A healthy society considers its own norms Good, and thus renders the human desire to conform a moral act. If the norms cease to be that, and are just arbitrary impositions, the only real moral act is defiance, it's the only one that contains proof of moral acts having been taken. Thus we go from stained glass to obese women holding severed heads, from public sculptures to giant public buttplugs. From melodic music to Yoko Ono, from beautiful paintings reflecting the wonder of creation to random splatter driven by hype. Subversion feels radical for the while but grows empty, fast. The only real 'morality' is in not being something, and that is it. There is nothing to truly aspire to except transgression or one-upping the Joneses.