"Additionally, conservatives tend to think liberals are merely stupid or emotional, while liberals tend to view conservatives as evil -- and liberals use that belief to justify lying about conservatives."
On the grounds that it is simply not possible for anyone who is not actually retarded to be that stupid.
Besides, I knew a lot of hippies in early life (whence came the evolutionary form of modern "liberals" as understood in US politics), and they were not nice people. Not at all.
The whole point of the hippie movement, and its later manifestations, was to abolish morality. What happens when you decide not to follow the "archaic" moral law as it has always been understood? You become evil. That's what "immoral" means.
Later you go crazy, but that's a post for a different day.
"...liberals lie incessantly. That's not to say that there aren't conservative liars or truthful liberals; there are, but for liberals, lying is the rule, not the exception."
Here's your first clew that being "liberal" means more or less the same thing as being evil.
Another is their odd propensity for stealing. It seems weird at first, but I remember John Muggeridge once commenting that liberals are always thieves.
The origin of "liberals" as we understand the term in current western politics, is communism. One of the many ways in which communism differs from Christendom is in its concept of property. Christian thought holds that people can and should own things and that there is such a thing as rights of property. Commies think that no one should own anything.
Commies think they believe in a "stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general."
I say this is what they think they believe, but this is a bit like saying that a person can believe in a logical contradiction. Logical contradictions describe nothing real, neither anything material nor anything abstract. People who tell you that they believe everyone should own everything, are saying nothing real. They are as suspect as the people who say that there is no such thing as objective truth. Their assertion disappears in a puff of logic.
In reality what they believe is that no one else should own anything they want and can't afford. (Leftiness is evil, probably, because it is founded on the sin of envy.) Anyway, being people who believe there is no such thing as a moral absolute like "don't take other people's stuff", they absolve themselves of the necessity of abiding by what they like to pretend are merely "society's rules" about property, and will often just help themselves.
I knew a kid raised by hippies in high school (it was Victoria in the 80s; everyone in my school was raised by hippies) who was a professional thief. He used to talk about "liberating" bicycles and gas from other people's gas tanks. He grew up to become an English professor at a Canadian university.
You must write the book about being raised by hippies. There are still some of us who can't quite imagine what that would be like, and I'm sure it would be instructive to know.
ReplyDeleteI'm working it into a horror novel about a psychotic teenager.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote that the "origin of 'liberals' as we understand the term in current western politics, is communism." I think you have a category error here, but one not of your own making. What most people, at least in the U.S. where I am, refer to as 'liberals' are really progressives. In roughly the latter 1920s and early 1930s progressivism had begun to fall out of favor (particularly with the electorate in the U.S.). The upshot of this change was that those who adhered to the beliefs and premises of progressivism began looking for another term that was not laden with such negative baggage. They seized upon the appellation liberal, and it is only very recently that some of them have begun to be, at least semantically, honest about the roots of their program for remaking the world.
ReplyDeleteYou are quite correct in recognizing their attraction to communism (international socialism), which was matched, in many of them, by their intense enthusiasm for another unlovely political movement of the era, to wit, national socialism, embodied in both Nazism and Fascism.
Blessings and regards,
Keith Toepfer
As someone who calls herself a hippy I resent the implication that I am in any sense a liberal.
ReplyDeleteI would call myself a 19th century romantic but that would be anachronistic.
And I am not sure how to make that account show my real name... which is Sophia Marsden by the way.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to write a book about the experience because it is so completely disconnected from the world which created the conventions of fiction and the novel. You can argue that in fact this disconnection was done to us deliberately so that we would be unable to communicate about our past and what was done to us. Note that many people raised like this are functionally illiterate. When literate people raise an illiterate generation, they are communicting their terror of the judgement of posterity. I think this is also related to the tendency of people like this to bear only children, who grow into adults without siblings to check their memories against. Divorce and multiple households also destroy the continuity needed to construct a narrative about one's own early life.
ReplyDeleteI frequently have the experience of telling a straight narrative from my past - something that happened to me or that I observed exactly as I am describing it - and reducing a roomful of people to helpless laughter and being praised for my ability to make up funny stuff. My real life is a parody of reality.
Our hostess's solution is another way to get the material across. I guarantee you she is doing the same thing - describing real events with no frills, no exaggeration, and the result is horror.
- Karen
As far as I have seen, Keith, "progressives" is the term they sometimes use to describe themselves, (particularly in the Catholic left), mostly because the term "liberal" has such a negative connotation in the US.
ReplyDeleteNot so much in other countries, btw. In Canada is is more or less taken for granted that the term is synonymous with "good", or perhaps "enlightened".
They had to start using "progressive" in the US to force that more Canadian (and European) connotation into the public sphere. But it remains a kind of politically correct neologism; the sort of thing one uses in polite conversations like "sanitation engineer" instead of garbage man.
It has also become a kind of running joke with the rest of us (that is, the sane, non-evil people the "progressives" like to call "conservative".)
The use of the word "liberal" in politics, both secular and religious, has a long and complex history and does not mean to one group of ten historians what it means to another group of ten historians. I tend to shy away from its use, or use it with qualifications because it is so ambiguous as to cause confusion.
Sophia,
ReplyDeletethe easiest thing to do is use the "anonymous" slot in the commbox thingy, and just remember to sign your name at the bottom of a comment as Karen does.
Well, I guess there are hippies and hippies. I suppose they don't all dress and think the same way, but the ones I saw the other night reminded me that most hippies have a knack for uglifying themselves to an insane degree, wearing idiotic clothing and basically drawing attention to themselves.
ReplyDeletePerhaps they were all deprived of attention as children.