The two ends of the political spectrum are killing us

[bigrebnc1775]

For some time now I have lamented the loss of the most vital skill in civilization. The ability to negotiate and compromise.

Your post is proof that the end is near. But your beliefs won’t survive. The extreme left and right will both be extinguished. In a century, your rankings will be taught to children as the ravings of a madman.

So says an extreme leftist

 

[scruffy]

For some time now I have lamented the loss of the most vital skill in civilization. The ability to negotiate and compromise.

There will be no compromise with commies.

Commies are evil ******* bastards and the bottom line is they'll die before I will.

Your post is proof that the end is near. But your beliefs won’t survive. The extreme left and right will both be extinguished. In a century, your rankings will be taught to children as the ravings of a madman.

There is no extreme right in this country, fool.

But there will be soon, if the leftards keep going the way they're going.

 

[Mac1958]

^^ and there we have it, Mac thinks mutilating minors for the lie of “transgenderism” isn’t evil.

I let you phony Christians toss that word around. You've turned it into a punchline. You're wrecked it.

You can't get me on the defensive, Trumpster. You're a caveman.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

There will be no compromise with commies.

Commies are evil ******* bastards and the bottom line is they'll die before I will.



There is no extreme right in this country, fool.

But there will be soon, if the leftards keep going the way they're going.

Their idea of compromise they get what they want and we give up what we have.
Burn the country down before that shit happens no ******* more compromise

 

[Doug1943]

Ann Colder is a terrible hypocrite and liar. LOL. Too bad corporate MSM does terrible defense against right wing lies and BS. At any rate shouting down is a lot less than violence... that is the only spike in violence since Trump started running in 2015, Right wing violence against blacks gays Muslims Asians Jews. And whenever Trump has a rally it more than doubles in the area.

Yes, breaking up a meeting by shotuting down the speaker is 'less than violence'. Of course, leftwing students have used violence as well. Here's an article from the liberal Atlantic magazine:

A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury

Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their choice, even if they find their views abhorrent.
By Peter Beinart

A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury

Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their choice, even if they find their views abhorrent.

www.theatlantic.com

And a video of the assault:


So ... what is your position on Free Speech? What do you think of these attacks on Free Speech?

You seem to blame it on Trump. Trump somehow provokes these students into attacking conservatives. Is that correct? (It's ironic -- Ann Coulter is disliked by many conservatives because she is anti-Trump!)

Also: you say that "

that is the only spike in violence since Trump started running in 2015, Right wing violence against blacks gays Muslims Asians Jews. And whenever Trump has a rally it more than doubles in the area."

I don't believe this to be true, but I could be wrong. Can you provide some links to back up your claim? One thing I do know: the people attacking Asians are Blacks, not white conservatives.

So: are you in favor of conservatives being allowed to have meetings, on university campuses and elsewhere, without their being broken up by mobs? (There are decent people on the Left who are in favor of this -- after all, it's the traditional liberal view.)

And: can you provide some links that back up your claim that" the only violence is from Trump supporters attcking Blacks, gays, Muslims, Asians and Jews"?

 

[Doug1943]

I let you phony Christians toss that word around. You've turned it into a punchline. You're wrecked it.

You can't get me on the defensive, Trumpster. You're a caveman.

Mac: what do you think of these people? (I reckon they make a certain kind of conservative very uneasy, causing them cognitive dissonance. But most of us welcome them with open arms, whether or not they are conservatives -- as many gay people are.)

Gays Against Groomers

A coalition of gays against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of minors under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

gaysagainstgroomers.com

They seem to think there is a problem. What do you think?

 

[Mac1958]

Mac: what do you think of these people? (I reckon they make a certain kind of conservative very uneasy, causing them cognitive dissonance. But most of us welcome them with open arms, whether or not they are conservatives -- as many gay people are.)

Gays Against Groomers

A coalition of gays against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of minors under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

gaysagainstgroomers.com

They seem to think there is a problem. What do you think?

Well, first I think that "groomer" is a stupid word, now used in any situation as nothing more than an attack, just as the Left has done with "racist". Two terribly important ideas diluted, trivialized and wrecked for nothing more than perceived partisan gain.

That said, if they're sincere about the stated goal on the website, I'm all for it. And if they're sincere, this would be an excellent example of a group holding its own side accountable, unlike what we see from the two "major" parties.

 

[Doug1943]

20 years ago W Cherry picked information and concluded that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or was working on them. total BS that the Democrats believed. which side is worse? not even close! the Republican base who are against the war in Ukraine are totally baffled by total BS they've been taking in for years and years. Democracy isn't even important to them anymore their world view is so chaotic and confused yet loud mouth and hateful. The problems are all about misinformation on the GOP side Period end of story...

more than stricter schools, the inner cities need jobs with a living wage and cheap college and training so they have hope. Inner city students who are promised tuition at College ALL go to college, it's amazing. Like every other developed country already has....

It's very strange. Here, millions upon millions of GOP voters are turning against the Permanent War Party, the We Must Dominate the World Party, in a word the UniParty... and you scorn them, and cover for the Democrats ... who have led America into every major war over the last century and more up to Gulf War I. (Sometimes, for good reasons. But they're no pacifists.)

Is their worldview "chaotic and confused"? Sure. ALL ordinary people, Democrat or Republican, have a "chaotic and confused" worldview. Only very exceptional individuals have a worked-out, coherent, internally-consistent worldview, backed up by knowledge gained by reading. This is just reality.

Now... I hope any conservatives reading this do not adopt Franco's approach to political adversaries. You see, while our side has become very suspicious of wars to bring democracy to backward peoples, and unenthusiastic at best about the Ukraine war (a different situation, but one that could have been avoided if our rulers hadn't been so keen for the last 30 years on breaking up Russia) .... while our base ha changed under the impace of events ... so has the other side's base.

The hard Left component within the liberal/Left Democratic ranks overplayed their hand, with defunding the Police, wiping out American history, and sexualizing children.

Your ordinary Democratic voter -- not your Marxoid Post Modernist college professor -- knows that we must have the police, and that in 99.99% of confrontations of the police with civilians that end in violence, the police are in the right. They don't want American history to be portrayed as it is seen by some semi-literate self-centred loon who thinks it's all a history of oppression. They don't want their children exposed to sexual deviants.

So ... they voted to recall the son-of-Weatherman super-PC District Attorney in San Francisco. He lost 60/40. [San Francisco votes overwhelmingly to recall progressive DA Chesa Boudin]

And they voted to recall the crazy hate-Amerikkka Leftists on the School Board.

"One of the first issues to grab national attention was the board’s January 2021 decision to rename 44 schools they said honored public figures linked to racism, sexism and other injustices. On the list were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein" [San Francisco residents recall three members of embattled school board ]

And this was in Deep Blue San Francico, where the Democratic voters are probably all well-paid college graduates working at 'Woke' corporations. If they can vote to terminate the political careers of some 'woke' loons, think of what the blue-collar Steelworkers Union guy thinks of these Leftist spoiled brats?

So ... we must NOT adopt Franco's attitude to our base who have rejected the traditional conservative 'any-war-the-government-starts-we-support' attitude. Rather, where we can, we need to reach out to these Democrats, find ways to work with them on issues where we agree.

We're not going to move really hard-core liberals, even those who vote for sanity in policing and education. But there will be others whom we can reach. They'll be surprised, when they work with us, to find that we don't have fangs, we don't wear Klan hoods at our meetings, we don't want to electrocute gays for sodomy. In fact, some of us are Black, and are gay.

(Hey ... I don't want to upset certain people -- well, maybe I do just a little -- but one of our best thinkers is ... transgender! Long before it became a weapon on the hands of the Left. Look here: [ Deirdre McCloskey - Wikipedia ] )

What unites us is that we see our coutnry being destroyed from within, and we want to stop it from happening. And any Democrat who begins to get a glimpse of this ... however partially, however inconsistently, however 'chaotic and confused' their world-view is ... is someone we want to work with and talk to.

It's war. We must do whatever it takes to win. Divide and conquer.

 

[Doug1943]

Well, first I think that "groomer" is a stupid word, now used in any situation as nothing more than an attack, just as the Left has done with "racist". Two terribly important ideas diluted, trivialized and wrecked for nothing more than perceived partisan gain.

That said, if they're sincere about the stated goal on the website, I'm all for it. And if they're sincere, this would be an excellent example of a group holding its own side accountable, unlike what we see from the two "major" parties.

Okay, fair enough. So ... my side thinks parents should be the ones to teach children about sexuality, in all its complexities and contradictions. NOT a perfect solution, not even near. But there are few perfect solutions to human problems. It's the best we can get.

Not perfect, but better than letting 'woke' teachers, who have an agenda that we -- and I suspect you and many other liberals -- don't like. (And one other complication: the Web has totally changed what children learn about sex, and for the worse.)

I think the mainstream conservative position is: there are people who are 'born gay'. It's not a choice. They should not be made to feel ashamed of this.

The same for feeling you are born in the wrong body -- that you are really of the other sex, regardless of the biology. There are some people for whom this is just a fact. The brain is a hugely complex mechanism which we do not even begin to understand, and it can deviate in infinite ways from the norm.

Then there are probably people who are 'in the middle'. What they become -- gay or straight, sticking with their biological sex or undergoing surgery and hormone treatment to alter it as much as possible -- is something that should be left to them to decide for themselves, when they are mature enough.

In the meantime, we shouldn't deliberately attack the age-old traditional norm, the one given to us by evolution, even as we open up career opportunities for those, especially women, who have been excluded from them (A few years ago, a woman won the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics. I don't know any conservative who was upset by this.)

Here's an analogy: some people have pretty weird sexual appetites. Some of them like to be tied up and beaten. Some of them like to eat ... okay, maybe I'll stop here.

Now ... the libertarian strain of conservatism serves us well here, namely: what adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is their business, certainly not the government's.

Not all conservatives believe in this libertarian approach. Not too long ago, probably the majority didn't. But now they do. (Yes, some still think their personal prejudices have the force of natural law; others have religious reasons for wanting to give their beliefs the force of law. But they're now a minority within the conservative movement, although perhaps a majority of activists in certain states. But they are declining in numbers every year.)

So, if you want to be tied up and whipped, or eat ... recycled .. stuff, fine. Your business.

But .. that doesn't mean we should start teaching children that sado-masochism is just dandy, just another way of having fun, or that coprophilia is perfectly fine.

You can be a good liberal -- hell, you can be a Marxist! -- and believe this. It shouldn't be a Left/Right arguing point.

 

[Mac1958]

Okay, fair enough. So ... my side thinks parents should be the ones to teach children about sexuality, in all its complexities and contradictions. NOT a perfect solution, not even near. But there are few perfect solutions to human problems. It's the best we can get.

Not perfect, but better than letting 'woke' teachers, who have an agenda that we -- and I suspect you and many other liberals -- don't like. (And one other complication: the Web has totally changed what children learn about sex, and for the worse.)

I think the mainstream conservative position is: there are people who are 'born gay'. It's not a choice. They should not be made to feel ashamed of this.

The same for feeling you are born in the wrong body -- that you are really of the other sex, regardless of the biology. There are some people for whom this is just a fact. The brain is a hugely complex mechanism which we do not even begin to understand, and it can deviate in infinite ways from the norm.

Then there are probably people who are 'in the middle'. What they become -- gay or straight, sticking with their biological sex or undergoing surgery and hormone treatment to alter it as much as possible -- is something that should be left to them to decide for themselves, when they are mature enough.

In the meantime, we shouldn't deliberately attack the age-old traditional norm, the one given to us by evolution, even as we open up career opportunities for those, especially women, who have been excluded from them (A few years ago, a woman won the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics. I don't know any conservative who was upset by this.)

Here's an analogy: some people have pretty weird sexual appetites. Some of them like to be tied up and beaten. Some of them like to eat ... okay, maybe I'll stop here.

Now ... the libertarian strain of conservatism serves us well here, namely: what adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is their business, certainly not the government's.

Not all conservatives believe in this libertarian approach. Not too long ago, probably the majority didn't. But now they do. (Yes, some still think their personal prejudices have the force of natural law; others have religious reasons for wanting to give their beliefs the force of law. But they're now a minority within the conservative movement, although perhaps a majority of activists in certain states. But they are declining in numbers every year.)

So, if you want to be tied up and whipped, or eat ... recycled .. stuff, fine. Your business.

But .. that doesn't mean we should start teaching children that sado-masochism is just dandy, just another way of having fun, or that coprophilia is perfectly fine.

You can be a good liberal -- hell, you can be a Marxist! -- and believe this. It shouldn't be a Left/Right arguing point.

Well, again, I think there is plenty that can be taught in school about the human body that both "sides" can endorse. And again, all that would take is communication and collaboration.

Look, I spent the last 22+ years in finance and business, and I approach problems from that perspective. Any problem. And in a business, problems are solved and innovation is reached by collaboration and communication. This notion that there are two competing tribes who both want everything ONLY THEIR WAY, all or nothing, is just silly to me. It's profoundly wasteful and counterproductive. It's dumb. It's one of the main reason I don't understand politics.

Plenty can be taught in schools so that we know a child is getting the fundamentals. Then the parents have to be encouraged -- expected, actually -- to provide a larger context.

 

[Doug1943]

Franco is a cultist as are all leftists

Nah, c'mon. "All human life is there," on the Left, as it is on the Right. We've got our own cultists as well. Franco is actually a pretty rational liberal Democrat. He thinks we're the cultists, which is why he just insults us and doesn't try to present evidence for his positions -- some of which, he might be surprised to learn, he shares with many conservatives.

What we need to do with him, and with all honest Leftists (which most are), is to get them to explain their beliefs, and then we can discuss them.

For instance, Franco is for a 'living wage'. This means a government-mandated minimum wage higher than what would prevail if the market decided it.

Let's discuss what this means with him, and other Leftists, rather than just exchanging insults.

How much should it be, and should it apply to every employer without exception? What are the downsides? This discussion/debate needs its own thread, but here are some links (Left, Center and Right) to start off with, looking at the liberal city of Seattle's 'living wage':

Seattle’s minimum wage was the highest in the nation. Here’s what happened.

Seattle hiked its minimum wage. Here's what happened to jobs and workers

Magical Thinking about Minimum Wages | National Review

After Seattle’s hike in the minimum wage, low-wage workers are earning less money. That economic outcome is predictable.

www.nationalreview.com

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Nah, c'mon. "All human life is there," on the Left, as it is on the Right. We've got our own cultists as well. Franco is actually a pretty rational liberal Democrat. He thinks we're the cultists, which is why he just insults us and doesn't try to present evidence for his positions -- some of which, he might be surprised to learn, he shares with many conservatives.

What we need to do with him, and with all honest Leftists (which most are), is to get them to explain their beliefs, and then we can discuss them.

For instance, Franco is for a 'living wage'. This means a government-mandated minimum wage higher than what would prevail if the market decided it.

Let's discuss what this means with him, and other Leftists, rather than just exchanging insults.

How much should it be, and should it apply to every employer without exception? What are the downsides? This discussion/debate needs its own thread, but here are some links (Left, Center and Right) to start off with, looking at the liberal city of Seattle's 'living wage':

Seattle’s minimum wage was the highest in the nation. Here’s what happened.

Seattle hiked its minimum wage. Here's what happened to jobs and workers

Magical Thinking about Minimum Wages | National Review

After Seattle’s hike in the minimum wage, low-wage workers are earning less money. That economic outcome is predictable.

www.nationalreview.com

There are no good leftists

 

[JoeB131]

20 years ago W Cherry picked information and concluded that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or was working on them. total BS that the Democrats believed. which side is worse?

This is where I am going to have to go off the rails here a bit and defend Dubya.

Democrats ALSO insisted for most of the 1990's that Saddam had WMD's, which is why they kept the corrupt system of sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands. We had spent a decade- both parties - demonizing Saddam, who was a truly awful person to start with, so it wasn't that hard to get the war drums rolling.

The war was ill-considered and exposed a bunch of badly thought out military doctrine that we had practiced since the first Gulf War. But the world is still a better place now that Saddam isn't in it.

 

[JoeB131]

Dick weed if America was a democracy faggots wouldn't exist, leftists would be dead because in a democracy the leftist supported shit we have today would have been killed by the majority of Americans before the cult would have a chance to get started.

Here's the thing, guy. Most sane people (not you) see there's a big difference between "I disagree with X" and "Anyone who believes in X should be killed".

 

[JoeB131]

Yes, breaking up a meeting by shotuting down the speaker is 'less than violence'. Of course, leftwing students have used violence as well. Here's an article from the liberal Atlantic magazine:

A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury

Liberals must defend the right of conservative students to invite speakers of their choice, even if they find their views abhorrent.
By Peter Beinart

Charles Murray is a racist piece of garbage. He SHOULD be exiled from polite society. He's the one who put out the racist "Bell Curve" that stated that blacks scored lower on tests because of genetics.

He should be protested.

So: are you in favor of conservatives being allowed to have meetings, on university campuses and elsewhere, without their being broken up by mobs? (There are decent people on the Left who are in favor of this -- after all, it's the traditional liberal view.)

Given that such events are paid for by Student Fees, Students have every right to be upset when they are paying racists like Murray and Coulter to show up.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Here's the thing, guy. Most sane people (not you) see there's a big difference between "I disagree with X" and "Anyone who believes in X should be killed".

There is no here's the thing
With out the protection of rights for the minority that a Republic gives leftist would have been silenced back when they first started spewing their shit.

 

[SavannahMann]

Their idea of compromise they get what they want and we give up what we have.
Burn the country down before that shit happens no ******* more compromise

In the 1990’s it took a few years before there was a compromise on Welfare Reform.

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

The definition of Compromise is simple. Nobody is happy, but everyone can live with it.

It was more than Clinton wanted, and less than the Republicans wanted. Nobody was happy, but they could live with it.

That is but one example. Under your insane scenario there wouldn’t be an America and China would become the most powerful nation on earth.

 

[Doug1943]

There are no good leftists

Hmmm... are you simply redifing 'good' to mean 'being a rightwinger'? If so, of course you are right by definition.

And I can do the same: there are no flying mammals. (Because I have redefined 'mammal' to mean, 'not able to fly'.)

But if we use one of the normal meanings of 'good' -- however you want to define it -- then, you are mistaken. Please think again.

Here's a test: I could pick some people I know personally and tell you everything about them, except for their political views. Some would be conservatives, some liberals ... two of them, in fact, are hard-core Marxists -- one a Trotskyist, the other the head of the Communist Party in his city. You would not be able to tell who is who just from their non-political characteristics. They're all 'good' people, even if the consequences of the views of the Leftists, especially the Marxists, would be disastrous.

And here's the problem with that attitude to Leftists: it keeps us from destroying the Left. We need to argue with these people. We need to present facts that undermine their beliefs, and demoralize them, and then make them think again, and change their minds. This never happens overnight. It takes years, and above all, the impact of events.

We need to open up the contradictions within the Left -- say, between the ones who believe in Free Speech, and the ones who have the fascist attitude towards Free Speech.

Between the ones who actually want to help Black children get a decent education, and the ones who couldn't care less.

We need to pull some of them towards us.

Can Leftists become conservatives? Can Saul become Paul?

Well, of course they can. Half the founding members of the editorial board of William Buckley's National Review -- for decades the premier conservative journal in the US -- were ex-Marxists.

Here are some Leftists who became Rightists.

ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham
Second Thoughts on James Burnham - Wikipedia

James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931). Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. He later rejected Marxism and became an even more influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, speculated on the future of capitalism. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics.

Whittaker Chambers - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Whittaker Chambers (born Jay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer-editor, who, after early years as a Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet spy (1932–1938), defected from the Soviet underground (1938), worked for Time magazine (1939–1948), and then testified about the Ware Group in what became the Hiss case for perjury (1949–1950), often referred to as the trial of the century, all described in his 1952 memoir Witness. ] Afterwards, he worked as a senior editor at National Review (1957–1959). US President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.

Frank Meyer (political philosopher) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Like a number of the founding senior editors of National Review magazine, Meyer was first a Communist Party USA apparatchik before he converted to political conservatism. His experiences as a communist are reported in his book The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre in 1961.
He began an "agonizing reappraisal of his communist beliefs" after he had read F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom while he served in the US Army during World War II, and he made a complete break in 1945, after 14 years in active leadership service to the Communist Party and its cause.

Willi Schlamm - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Schlamm was born into an upper middle class Jewish family in Przemysl, Galicia, in the Austrian Empire. He became a Communist early in life, and when he was 16 years old was invited to the Kremlin to meet Vladimir Lenin. After completing secondary school, he became a writer with the Vienna Communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne. He left the Communist Party in 1929 and joined the left-wing magazine Die Weltbühne in 1932.

Later, Schlamm moved to the United States, where he worked for Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, Time and Fortune magazines. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944 alongside code breaker Jeremy Spiro.

Schlamm encouraged William F. Buckley, Jr. to found the conservative magazine, National Review, with Buckley as the sole owner. ...Schlamm is remembered for having coined the saying, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists."

Willmoore Kendall - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A liberal while studying at Oxford, Kendall strongly supported the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and opposed Joseph Stalin. In 1935, Kendall left Oxford to become a reporter for the United Press in Madrid. Witnessing the Spanish Civil War caused a shift in his political views towards anti-communism.

And these are just the 'heavy artillery'. I can name you lots of small fry who were radical leftists in their youth, but who wised up as they got older. As Churchill is supposed to have said, 'If you are not a socialist when you are 20, you have no heart. If you are still one at 40, you have no brain.'

Their morality didn't change. Their values didn't change. Their political views -- their views of the proper means to making their values reality -- changed.

It can happen again. But not if we just reject all Leftists as evil people or cultists etc.

 

[Mac-7]

Hmmm... are you simply redifing 'good' to mean 'being a rightwinger'? If so, of course you are right by definition.

And I can do the same: there are no flying mammals. (Because I have redefined 'mammal' to mean, 'not able to fly'.)

But if we use one of the normal meanings of 'good' -- however you want to define it -- then, you are mistaken. Please think again.

Here's a test: I could pick some people I know personally and tell you everything about them, except for their political views. Some would be conservatives, some liberals ... two of them, in fact, are hard-core Marxists -- one a Trotskyist, the other the head of the Communist Party in his city. You would not be able to tell who is who just from their non-political characteristics. They're all 'good' people, even if the consequences of the views of the Leftists, especially the Marxists, would be disastrous.

And here's the problem with that attitude to Leftists: it keeps us from destroying the Left. We need to argue with these people. We need to present facts that undermine their beliefs, and demoralize them, and then make them think again, and change their minds. This never happens overnight. It takes years, and above all, the impact of events.

We need to open up the contradictions within the Left -- say, between the ones who believe in Free Speech, and the ones who have the fascist attitude towards Free Speech.

Between the ones who actually want to help Black children get a decent education, and the ones who couldn't care less.

We need to pull some of them towards us.

Can Leftists become conservatives? Can Saul become Paul?

Well, of course they can. Half the founding members of the editorial board of William Buckley's National Review -- for decades the premier conservative journal in the US -- were ex-Marxists.

Here are some Leftists who became Rightists.

ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham
Second Thoughts on James Burnham - Wikipedia

Whittaker Chambers - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Frank Meyer (political philosopher) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Willi Schlamm - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Willmoore Kendall - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And these are just the 'heavy artillery'. I can name you lots of small fry who were radical leftists in their youth, but who wised up as they got older. As Churchill is supposed to have said, 'If you are not a socialist when you are 20, you have no heart. If you are still one at 40, you have no brain.'

Their morality didn't change. Their values didn't change. Their political views -- their views of the proper means to making their values reality -- changed.

It can happen again. But not if we just reject all Leftists as evil people or cultists etc.

You have ideas but are too long winded

 

[JoeB131]

Look , Fake Hippy Doug is pretending he's moderate.

The hard Left component within the liberal/Left Democratic ranks overplayed their hand, with defunding the Police, wiping out American history, and sexualizing children.

You mean the fake issues the right gets you upset about to distract from their incompetence. Let's get real. You guys have been trumpeting that horn for years, and you still lose most elections. If we weren't still using the absurd Electoral college, you wouldn't have won any election after 1988.

Your ordinary Democratic voter -- not your Marxoid Post Modernist college professor -- knows that we must have the police, and that in 99.99% of confrontations of the police with civilians that end in violence, the police are in the right.

Well, no. Most Americans look at video of the deaths of George Floyd or Laquan McDonald, and they are truly horrified. The cops are not "in the right" 99.99% of the time. I respect that they do a difficult job, but they ALSO are in severe need of reform.

US cops kill 1000 suspects/civilians a year. In other industrialized countries, even ones with decent amounts of minorities, that number is single to low double digits

They don't want American history to be portrayed as it is seen by some semi-literate self-centred loon who thinks it's all a history of oppression.

Yes, let's have Disney History. Here's the thing. If you feel good reading about history, you aren't reading history, you are reading propaganda. Slavery was a thing. Genocide of Native Americans was a thing. Jim Crow was a thing. Pretending they didn't happen, let's look at all the "Good" stuff.

They don't want their children exposed to sexual deviants.

And here comes the homophobia!

So ... they voted to recall the son-of-Weatherman super-PC District Attorney in San Francisco. He lost 60/40.

It was actually a bit more complicated than that. Crime didn't really go up on his watch. What upset people in SF was the rise in homelessness, which happened because they essentially stopped building housing in California after the 2008 crash. So the poor guy got hung for something that wasn't really in his wheelhouse.

And they voted to recall the crazy hate-Amerikkka Leftists on the School Board.

Do you know how few people vote in School Board elections or even know who is running? So, yeah, some School Boards elected some Jesus Freaks and they'll try to put Talking Snakes in Science Class until the communities say, "What the ****" and vote them right back out.

We're not going to move really hard-core liberals, even those who vote for sanity in policing and education. But there will be others whom we can reach. They'll be surprised, when they work with us, to find that we don't have fangs, we don't wear Klan hoods at our meetings, we don't want to electrocute gays for sodomy. In fact, some of us are Black, and are gay.

Yes, you have self-loathing sellouts in every group.

But this is an old game, Fake Hippy Doug, and if you were as old as you pretend to be, you'd know this.

The Republicans have been playing on the racial, religious and sexual fears of white people since Tricky Dick. Reagan refined it, Bush the younger tried to distance the GOP from it but still used homophobia to win re-election. Trump merely traded in the dog whistles for a bullhorn.