Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Maybe the reason I come into conflict with the left more often than the right these days is I don't consume American news media (posting in a thread about American politics is unusual for me). So the fact a bunch of nutjobs in Ohio or Kansas deny evolution and are arming themselves against the government is no more than a social curiosity to me. It doesn't affect me any more than the far right movement in France, or ultra-nationalists in Russia. Scary and weird, but not part of my political landscape.
In the social landscapes I do travel - forums like this, the CBC, the Globe and Mail, the local music scene, forums dedicated to my hobbies of gaming and speculative fiction - I'm far more likely to come across left-wing zeal and dogma than right-wing. And the people who parrot the left-wing talking points seem even less self-reflective than their counterparts on the right. Maybe it's because they're younger, and because the mainstream media has adopted many of the shibboleths of the left, but many on the new left seem to have never had their beliefs challenged, or had to defend them with reason and empiricism. And the prospect of a whole generation that holds very strong opinions that are unchallenged and unexamined is troubling. So I don't hesitate to challenge and poke and question them, even though it often brings down a pack of righteous puritans on my head.
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I think a counter point to this is that a lot of those beliefs haven't really been tried in the forms that we, the left (I hate pigeonholing myself but whatever), are advocating for, and the defenses that seem to come up are based around "well you can't do that" or "that's impossible" when we have seen many "impossible" things become possible or even ordinary. And you combine that with what seems like a fundamental problem with adapting to new information and the perspective that the "right's" ideals have been in practice for generations and are currently crumbling around us, yet the right trots them out like they are the only things that ever have, ever can, or ever will work. And that's frustrating, because the evidence is mounting all over the place that it doesn't work, and probably won't for much longer.