This open laughing at the death of Rush Limbaugh:
It proves nothing about liberals, that's what. I know when Limbaugh died there were plenty of charitable souls on the Left who broke out and danced on his grave. That happens. But it doesn't stand to reason that all liberals are therefore reprehensible zealots who rejoice in the death of any nonconformists. It just goes to show you all groups have their bad apples.
Just a public service announcement. Especially since it's common to take this or that bad behavior on that moral petri dish of bad behavior called the Internet, and use it to smear entire demographic groups we don't like.
There are bad apples in all groups. It's the responsibility of the "good" apples to hold them to account and if need be cast them out. Question is, does the broader left do that or do they hold their peace while the radicals among them run wild?
ReplyDeleteI find the Left, largely with the help of education and the media, weaponizes the bad apples in a sort of good cop/silent bad cop way. That is, only the best, or most helpful, stories that promotes leftwing agendas ever see the light of day. Those that don't, the radicals, the extremes, the ones like the above, will never be covered by the national press.
DeleteExcept this is the same group of people who have said that if you don't fail to speak out against "white racism", or "transphobia", or the leftist dog-whistle du jour, it is just the same as if you were Hitler himself.
DeleteWith what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
There is a sort of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't, damned if you're carbon based' with the Left now. Whatever you do, outside of comply, you're Hitler. Or at least Himmler. And that's all the facts we need.
DeleteI'll agree with you with one qualification. While no one is obligated to remark on any particular comment or exchange, what goes unremarked in a population tells you something about the modal disposition about that population.
ReplyDeleteA minor example would be the blowhards who insist on making use of Facebook for political commentary. We've seen less of it on our wall in the last couple of years than previously (in part because I persuaded the distaff side to block one of the worst offenders). Very little of it rose above the level of 'irritable mental gesture'. North of 90% of it came from Democrats and what little we received from Republicans tended to be quips. Our Republican friends use Facebook to post pictures of their grandchildren.
Now, how many of these opinionated people polluting our wall ever, in the fall of 2018, remakred that Christine Blasey Ford was not to be taken seriously? It wasn't exactly a close call. She makes an accusation 36 years after the fact, the nature of the supposed event is such that the account of it could be easily shaded or spun, all four of the people she named as present drew a blank (with her friend among them later telling a magazine journalist that such a daytime gathering would not have fit in with the schedule she was keeping in 1982 and she remembered nothing resembling it on any occasion); the man she named as introducing her to Kavanaugh's circle drew a blank; it was revealed she'd given a variety of accounts as to what had happened over the years and they did not match in salient details; and neither she, her explicit supporters, or the Bezos-Sulzberger media ever came up with any evidence she'd met either of them men she accused. There were about 40,000 youths born between the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1968 in Montgomery County, Maryland at the time; neither she nor any of her siblings attended school with Kavanaugh, or Judge, or any of their siblings; and she did not live proximate to either family (six miles from one, eight from the other). Not one partisan Democrat we knew ever noticed any of these anomalies.
And here we are today. I have a Bernie-bro cousin in Alliance, Ohio. He's not much of a partisan Democrat. He's about the only opinionated leftoid we know who has remarked on the abuse of political dissent in this country in recent years. He's made occasional references to Greenwald and Taibbi.
What you learn with what's not said and not said systematically is what people are willing to put up with, and that's quite disconcerting at times.
I think you're right. I think this is a problem today, what we're seeing people willing to put up with and tolerate. Some things I didn't think I'd ever see in my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteHaving been in academia for years, none of this surprises me at this point. At first I was shocked when I saw a left-wing professor go on at length about how we need to be kind to everyone and help the less fortunate, only to swap to talking about how great it would be for his political opponents to die in horrible ways and how much better off we'd be without all those useless people in places like Alabama. But it happens so much that the shock wore off within a couple months.
ReplyDeleteThey only believe in three types of people the enlightened (i.e. people who think like them) the uneducated (i.e. people who only don't agree with them because they haven't been lectured to yet) and the utterly evil (i.e. everyone else.) When they talk about being kind, they only mean to people in the first two groups.
That was something I realized with my professors back in the day (1980s). They talked a fine talk of 'let's all respect our different beliefs', but not a few could be quite hostile and hateful toward different beliefs they clearly didn't support.
DeleteActually, Rush was a Liberal himself (Liberalism means Capitalism and Republicanism, making Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan Liberals as well). The person posting that tweet was probably a Socialist, not a Liberal. If they were a Liberal they were probably a big-government liberal as opposed to Limbaugh, who is a small-government liberal (commonly called a "Conservative," for some reason) American politics has twisted words and definitions to mean things they shouldn't.
ReplyDeleteAnd "sinister" means "left-handed". For that matter, "Baal" means "lord", "decimated" means "reduced by 10%", and "digital" means "pertaining to fingers and toes".
DeleteThen again, maybe all these words mean something different.
In the classical sense, but in the modern political discourse sense, Limbaugh was part of the right/conservative vs. the other side. The other side, BTW, often not labeling itself as anything but correct. Which is one of its biggest cards to play.
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