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Originally Posted by rubecube
To be fair, I think both you and CHL don't acknowledge your own biases when dealing with these topics. You both appear to rest your beliefs in the supremacy of liberal values and don't acknowledge the possibility that perhaps the "new left" are consciously rejecting some of these values or replacing them with what they believe are more considerate, compassionate, and cooperative alternatives.
That's not to say I necessarily agree with the tactics or ideologies of the so-called "new left," just that evaluating them under the liberal framework is inherently biased, and often misses the point of the debate.
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I agree that the left are rejecting liberalism, though for the most part they don't seem to be aware they are. However, I think it's a huge mistake on their part. And not only because I'm an unabashed liberal. But because it's liberalism itself that has laid the groundwork for all of the progress we've made on social issues. And now that we've benefited from a society that tolerated dissenting views in their infancy - views that were not long ago very much in the minority and regarded as offensive by the majority - they want to pull up the drawbridge and defend the new pieties against dissenting speech and ideas.
What the left never seems to ask themselves is why, if the West was historically such a patriarchal, authoritarian, sexist, and reactionary culture, is it the most progressive culture on earth today? Why didn't feminism, gay rights, and racial equality take root in China, India, or Egypt?
The answer seems evident to me. The Enlightenment and liberalism. Empiricism, individual liberty, and tolerance. But the trade-off of a society where you're allowed to defy norms and pursue your own notions of happiness is that you're going to rub shoulders with a lot of people who have different notions of happiness. And some of them are going to say and do things that make you uncomfortable. The freedom to say as you please comes with an implicit understanding that you will hear things you don't like. And if that's scary, if you want to circumscribe speech and behaviour to enforce peace and conformity, then you better understand that those tools of enforcement can - and almost certainly will - be turned on you some day.
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Originally Posted by MattyC
The left rage stems from seeing stuff like what Trump is saying, and being astonished that there is a significant portion of that population that agrees with him. I can't even comprehend how that's possible. And then listening to the Republicans, who are supposedly less crazy, and have them be Carson, and Rubio and Bush, all of whom have said things that are just straight up, flat out wrong, and no one seems to say anything about it. It's entertaining until you think that one of these clowns could have their fingers on the button of an arsenal of nukes. The right is mostly afraid of the government taking their money and giving it to poor people. The left is mostly afraid that these people are actually going to cause/perpetuate (usually in exchange for the invisible force of money) real, physical problems (like our environment going to crap, or full blown wars).
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Then there's the left who are obsessed with policing language and representation in pop culture, and the gender of superheroes. But maybe that's just our culture - economics and math are hard, and class remains a taboo subject, so pop culture ephemera becomes the battleground.