The Left Destroys EVERYTHING It Touches

[simplicity]

... like slavery. Like child labour. Like monarchies and aristocracies. Like the 60 hour week.

Slavery? I'll give you child-labor but that would have changed anyway. There will ALWAYS be an elite. Yes, anybody [potentially] can join the corporate aristocracy, but the dynamic is essentially the same.

If you can keep a lid on corruption and have an efficient check/balance system in place, the best system BY FAR is a representative democracy with several viable political parties.

Top-down governance doesn't work as the days of the benevolent dictator/party never were. The U.S. [for all it's issues (and it has plenty)] came up with a structure of governance that created the greatest freedom and prosperity the world has ever seen, not only for itself, but also for much of the world. I'll take that choice over a competing system that has only brought misery to billions.

[trokanmariel]

The use of information, in order to avoid boredom - which side is the side of this?

[FlashDangerpants]

Also if I'm a lefty in your book then I was right to doubt your ability to spot a moderate.

This is about policy and results. How have all the left-policy governments made out over the previous century? Despite all the warm and fuzzy feel-good, "we're going to make the world a wonderful place for everybody," the results are nearly the exact opposite as leftist policy ALWAYS results in authoritarianism for the masses and luxuries for the party elite. It just doesn't work.

And I have no idea what you are. This isn't about you.

Nobody really can tell what you mean by "left" because you seem to be using the term as a synonym for all authoritarianism, which makes no sense at all. By any reasonable standard the right can be just as authoritarian as the left. you make as much sense as Henry with his bullshit about 'slavers' which includes traffic wardens and just anyone else who annoyed him today.

You were complaining about open borders in your OP, how is it authoritarian not to prevent people enterring your country?

This thread is shit because you haven't put together any semblance of a coherent argument for whatever the fuck it is you are whining about.

[Immanuel Can]

... leftist doctrine seems to fill a religious need...

It does. But not perhaps in the way most people think. It doesn't self-present as religious; it just presents as the obvious option when one has abandoned the idea of God.

It's very simple. If there's no God, then anything that is going to come about is up to me. Individually. If I do something, things might change. If I don't they won't. Either way, I have a limited lifespan, and then darkness forever. Any moment in which a better world is not being realized for me is a tragedy. And perhaps I'm a person of genuine goodwill as well -- I want to see values like "justice" or "fairness" or "sharing" achieved.

But here's my problem: I'm only one guy. I have very little power. Left to myself, I will almost certainly fail to realize any even slightly better world, and certainly not an ideal one. What can I do?

The obvious answer: collectivize. What I cannot do on my own, perhaps can be achieved by pulling others into the program and mobilizing everybody. So I need a whole bunch of people to buy into my program for making the world a better place. And I can do this in one of two ways: one, I can start my own vision for the future, and if I'm charismatic and clever, maybe pull a whole bunch of people into helping me. But that's hard. So way two is that I can join an existing ideological program of world-betterment, and lend them my support. Then, perhaps, we'll all make the world a better place together.

But I'm miffed when my new world never comes. And I look around for explanations, and find them in the faces of those who failed to buy into "the program," or who perhaps failed to buy into it with a level of fervour I think they should. And I'm angry with them from keeping us from our utopia, and I see them as miserable spoil-sports who are standing between all of us and the universal good. So...expropriations for them, or off to the gulags with them, or the re-education camps, or, if all that fails, we'll shoot them in the back of the head and roll them into a ditch. Such is the end of the betrayers of the Revolution!

And this whole time, I'm convincing myself I'm a very good person. Why not? Am I not dedicated to justice, to equality, to anti-racism, to fairness, to social responsibility, to environmental salvation, and all things good? So what if we must break a few "eggs" to make our utopian "omelette"? There is a price to pay for Heaven-on-Earth; but what choice have I got? After all, if it's to be, it's up to me. That's my axiom. And I have no higher meaning, and believe in no chance that justice will come from God.

That little drama plays out over and over again, every single time Socialism raises it's head.

These folks need to be shown the door so they can try to implement their socialist utopia somewhere else.

Except that the "folks" are you neighbours. They rise up from inside the country, more than they are imported from outside. And today, they're a byproduct of the longest period of relative peace, prosperity and longevity that the World has hitherto known. They're culled from among the children of affluent, spoiled, selfish Westerners today, not from the ranks of the poverty-stricken Bolsheviks of yesteryear.

But you're onto something important, and something that explains why Leftists have such a weak regard for history and such a passion for the future. Whereas Conservatives are always comparing the present state of the world to the way it's been in the past, Leftists are always comparing their world to some idealized state they aspire to in the future.

So it doesn't make much of an impression on the Left that we were putting an end to poverty in the Developing World until recently, that polution has been reducing and technology exploding, and that the standard of living in the West is the highest in history. They don't compare the present with the past. That makes the present look to favourable, and that seems to rationalize at least some measure of gratitude. That would be bad, because it might issue in contentment and a reluctance to destroy the existing benefits. We might become so concerned about not losing all the good we've already achieved that we are no longer willing to bust enough stuff up to produce the Revolution.

No, they compare the present with an idealized future state, one of, say, perfect equality, sexlessness, universal welfare, free everything, unrestricted experimentation, universal peace and brotherhood, technological perfection, environmental purity, and so on. That way, their people are in a continual state of high ideological fervour, resentment, discontentment, rage and willingness to act destructively. Revolutions take violence, and violence takes the stupifying and then the mobilizing of the strongest and most primitive impulses of the masses. No whiff of gratitude for the past can be allowed to interfere with the production of Leftist belief, and of revolutionary action. No voice of caution can be allowed to interrupt the clamourous call toward utopia.

And until this world become that idealized world, they take little stock of what they destroy in the effort to "get it there." Anything at all can be put on the altar of the ideal.

And that's rather religious of them, actually.

[Scott Mayers]

After witnessing the mind-boggling atrocities of the 20th century, the fact that another leftist movement has amassed the power it has says a great deal about the social structure of humanity. If you can not leave something so horribly vile behind after witnessing the approximate 100M deaths accountable to leftist policies a century ago, then the long-term hopes for humanity might be worse than thought.

Although leftist doctrine seems to fill a religious need [moral code] in some, the reality of what happens in practice is just the opposite as those who accumulate power past critical mass apply their programs with bayonets and brutal psychological coercion attached to their diktats.

The world celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union and the nightmare it unleashed upon the Russian [and other] peoples just a couple of decades ago. How is it possible that the lessons have been forgotten so soon after? How could nearly an entire elite establishment give in to this idiocy?

Even in the watered-down version of left-leaning policy the Biden administration has foist on the American people has been a complete disaster, where politics is the first and most important reason for doing everything. The corruption of this third-world style of doing business is so blatantly obvious, the lying so transparent, that failure is not only probable, but guaranteed. It's simply a matter of how much damage will be done before the American people have had enough.

From open boarders to vaccine mandates, this top-down social engineering ruins life for all but the party elite who seem to somehow save just a little bit of freedom and wealth for themselves. These folks need to be shown the door so they can try to implement their socialist utopia somewhere else. People came here [and still come here] to be free, not to be dictated to by idealists who haven't a fucking clue.

You fit your namesake. Being 'simple' minded to exclude all political ideological abuses except the "Left" is just intentional maligning rhetoric that proves up front that you are not here to debate but to proselytize your religious anti-democratic beliefs.

Not worth reading any further knowing how you operate. Note to others but the anti-democratic anti-rational speakers here: this tactic sets its agenda to create intentional misinformation used to discourage those thinking that these people are sincerely willing to discuss or debate.

[simplicity]

You were complaining about open borders in your OP, how is it authoritarian not to prevent people enterring your country?

This thread is shit because you haven't put together any semblance of a coherent argument for whatever the fuck it is you are whining about.

We all know what the basic definition of the left is... emotional utopian types, feels sorry for almost everybody but does nothing to really help anybody [except themselves], top-down power structure, collectivist, group more important than individual, anti-capitalism, anti-free speech, divisive identity politics, pro-intolerance, pro-something for nothing, and downright nasty [in general].

Perhaps you should open all the windows and doors in your house/apartment and then advertise that all are welcome to come in and browse around for whatever they feel would make them feel more equal.

Was that a serious question?

[simplicity]

You fit your namesake. Being 'simple' minded to exclude all political ideological abuses except the "Left" is just intentional maligning rhetoric that proves up front that you are not here to debate but to proselytize your religious anti-democratic beliefs.

Not worth reading any further knowing how you operate. Note to others but the anti-democratic anti-rational speakers here: this tactic sets its agenda to create intentional misinformation used to discourage those thinking that these people are sincerely willing to discuss or debate.

Yeah, you've kind of got the left thing going on but most are much nastier than you. Keep working on it and you'll be downright intolerable soon enough.

[henry quirk]

Henry with his bullshit about 'slavers' which includes traffic wardens and just anyone else who annoyed him today.

I live in your head: how nice.

Too bad the space between your ears is so small.

[FlashDangerpants]

You were complaining about open borders in your OP, how is it authoritarian not to prevent people enterring your country?

Perhaps you should open all the windows and doors in your house/apartment and then advertise that all are welcome to come in and browse around for whatever they feel would make them feel more equal.

So ... the authoritarian thing ... your excuse is that there is some authoritarian solutions you do like. By doing that, you are failing to make the case that the left is authoritarian and the right isn't, which is supposed to be your whole thesis.

You have no coherent argument to make.

[simplicity]

And until this world become that idealized world, they take little stock of what they destroy in the effort to "get it there." Anything at all can be put on the altar of the ideal.

And that's rather religious of them, actually.

Well stated. Thus the saying, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

The human intellect might have discovered some pretty amazing things over the years, but the degree to which the average man can be manipulated [in the same regard] makes this evolutionary development a losing proposition [although technically, there's an equal amount of good/bad in everything].

If nothing else, perhaps this [hopefully] last gasp of leftism will motivate those on the side of sanity to deal with the corruption pandemic that has been ravaging Western institutions over the past 50 years. Provide opportunity [decrease political corruption, adopt real money, a moral system of credit/market interest rates/transparency/price discovery, protect free speech, encourage peaceful dissent] to those who wish to better themselves, their families, and their communities. To those rest who wish to leech-off productive folks, go elsewhere and perhaps you can find others who will be willing to fund your lethargy. And for those who are truly needy, it is the measure of any society as to how they take care of those truly dependent through no fault of their own.

[simplicity]

You were complaining about open borders in your OP, how is it authoritarian not to prevent people enterring your country?

Perhaps you should open all the windows and doors in your house/apartment and then advertise that all are welcome to come in and browse around for whatever they feel would make them feel more equal.

So ... the authoritarian thing ... your excuse is that there is some authoritarian solutions you do like. By doing that, you are failing to make the case that the left is authoritarian and the right isn't, which is supposed to be your whole thesis.

You have no coherent argument to make.

We're chatting about the left. If you wish to chat about the right, that's another matter. As stated, I am a-political.

So you're saying that you're [the left] not as authoritarian as the right? Does it matter whether the bullet that pierces your skull is a .38 or a .45?

[FlashDangerpants]

Perhaps you should open all the windows and doors in your house/apartment and then advertise that all are welcome to come in and browse around for whatever they feel would make them feel more equal.

So ... the authoritarian thing ... your excuse is that there is some authoritarian solutions you do like. By doing that, you are failing to make the case that the left is authoritarian and the right isn't, which is supposed to be your whole thesis.

You have no coherent argument to make.

We're chatting about the left. If you wish to chat about the right, that's another matter. As stated, I am a-political.

So you're saying that you're [the left] not as authoritarian as the right? Does it matter whether the bullet that pierces your skull is a .38 or a .45?

No ... you complained about the authoritarianism of the left in that directionless screed of an OP.... in that same screed YOU accused them of running open borders, and performing "top-down social engineering".

So it's YOU that wants the authoritarian solution, not particularly the right or the left. You want authoritarianism that suits you, to choose who lives where on a top-down basis of your own social engineering. But you also you want to complain about authoritarianism itself while you are doing that. Because you are a hypocrite.

[Immanuel Can]

And for those who are truly needy, it is the measure of any society as to how they take care of those truly dependent through no fault of their own.

Yes, that's the important bit: take care of the truly needy. It doesn't mean "treat everybody as needy."

[simplicity]

So it's YOU that wants the authoritarian solution, not particularly the right or the left. You want authoritarianism that suits you, to choose who lives where on a top-down basis of your own social engineering. But you also you want to complain about authoritarianism itself while you are doing that. Because you are a hypocrite.

If you deem controlling your borders authoritarian, so be it. Without border control, you have no country. Every country controls their borders. It's number one on the list of things to do when you set your own country.

The left believes that a [select] group of people needs to get together to tell everybody else every fucking thing. In representative democracies, it is [was] believed that you give all the power possible to the citizens because they will act more prudently in their own interests. Look at the results of both systems. Did you grow-up under Communism or far-left socialism?

[Immanuel Can]

So it's YOU that wants the authoritarian solution, not particularly the right or the left. You want authoritarianism that suits you, to choose who lives where on a top-down basis of your own social engineering. But you also you want to complain about authoritarianism itself while you are doing that. Because you are a hypocrite.

If you deem controlling your borders authoritarian, so be it. Without border control, you have no country. Every country controls their borders. It's number one on the list of things to do when you set your own country.

Remember what I said earlier?

The Left believes that the reason utopia never comes is because not enough people are going along with their program. That's one of the excuses they use, in order to explain Socialism's 100% pattern of abject failure.

So even a whole country isn't enough people for them; Socialism will work when we have globalism and global unification, they'll tell you. So for them, borders are considered "immoral," and one of those things that keep us all from achieving their "heaven-on-earth." If you were a good person, they'll tell you, you'd be a globalist-Socialist. And then their program would finally work, they assure you. How they know that the critical mass of people needed (assuming that was the real problem, which it's obviously not) is on the globe at the present moment, they never even try to explain.

They'll keep making that excuse to the end: it's always the fault of "not enough true believers buying in," so far as they're concerned. And your desire to keep yourself or your country autonomous is, in their view, part of the problem.

So don't expect them ever to agree that your freedom or your country matters.