While I tend to agree myself, that depicting the Republican Party as the literal vanguard of Hell might be fun, it's not only an oversimplification,
but it also isn't particularly productive.
Conservatives tend to have reasons for believing what they do. A lot of those reasons often have to do with the Zero Sum Game. As far as Islam and
racial paranoia is concerned, that has to do with the usual fascist belief, as voiced by Mussolini, that a state actually needs a constant supply of
external threats in order to survive, because it supposedly acts as a stimulus for both society and the economy.
I used to be a lot more of a socialist than I am, but recently I've started questioning some of my own previously held assumptions. I'm still not a
racist; but the one thing I've grown very tired of from the Left, is the cult of the victim. Virtually all of the government interventionism which
socialists tend to want, stems from a central rationale of wanting to "help the
victims." Just as there are a lot of things about
fascist thinking that I don't like, so there are things about the Left that are a problem; and the main one is the obsession with victimhood.
The problem with always seeing people as victims, is that when you look at a person that way, you actually rob them of their individual sovereignty,
their personal responsibility for being in the situation they're in, and ultimately because of that, their means of getting out of said situation via
their own power. The assumption that someone is a victim, generally presupposes that a person doesn't have the ability to help themselves at all.
So I'm still as much an advocate of compassion as I ever was; but I think at times that some on the Right are also correct, when they assert that
progressives' victim oriented thinking was actually devised by government themselves, so that they can use it for manipulating progressives into
gradually giving up more and more of their freedoms.
edit on 9-8-2011 by petrus4 because: (no reason given)
