Why the left doesn't handle disagreement

 

Leftists are notorious for lashing out at any sort of disagreement. If you take issue with one of their positions, they’re convinced you’re among the very worst sort imaginable.

Of course, since many of them also support an ideology responsible for hundreds of millions of people, so it’s more than a little hilarious they’d think that, but they do.

But why?

There are tons of theories, but Glenn Greenwald had an interesting tweet earlier today that I thought warranted some discussion.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

This is why you constantly see establishment liberals calling anyone who disagrees with them "contrarians" and "grifters." They've manufactured a happy world where their views are universally accepted Truths, so only corrupt motives could cause someone to reject their pieties.

June 15th 2022

165 Retweets1,298 Likes

Now, Glenn leans pretty far left himself, though he’s a free enough thinker that he routinely runs afoul of progressive orthodoxy.

Share

He’s also right.

Covering the Second Amendment, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people claim the only reason Republicans oppose gun control is because of corruption, because the NRA pays them to oppose it.

It seems that in their minds, everyone really agrees that gun control works. We all secretly believe it will save lives, we simply do not care.

That’s how they see it.

This fits with a 2012 study that found that conservatives could pretend to be liberals far better than liberals could pretend to be conservative.

Conservatives and moderates make an effort to understand the issues and where the other side is coming from. We understand the thinking of at least the rank-and-file liberal.

They can’t do the same thing because they can’t imagine anyone possibly look at an issue from a different point of view.

Now, can this be utilized in some way to maybe get through to them?

Not really.

But it helps to remember that any debate you find yourself in isn’t about convincing that liberal to think differently. You’re arguing for the crowd. Fantasy author Larry Correia has said arguing on the internet is a spectator sport and he’s right.

You’re never going to convince them.

Yet there are people who may be watching that debate who have an open mind. They’re not the kind who think everyone is evil and are willing to listen. Those are the people you’re trying to reach.

For those who think you secretly agree with them were it not for your own internal vile nature, there’s nothing to be done.

Then again, do you really care at that point? I sure don’t.

To the Leftwing Propaganda Media and NeverTrump: You Installed This Dying-Brained Weakling in the White House. Stop Trying to Shift Blame to "The Right" By Claiming We're Responsible for Biden's -- and Your -- Failures.

 

You're transparently attempting to shift blame from Biden and yourselves for supporting him to people who have zero influence over this.

Fuck You.

The media and NeverTrump foisted a weak, frail, brain-damaged leftist who has been wrong about every single foreign policy question of the last 40 years on us. Unsurprisingly, he failed in Afghanistan, and now has failed in Ukraine.

The media and NeverTrump obviously do not want to admit their own responsibility for this -- why start now? -- so they're proposing an alternate villain: You.

True, Biden is the "President" and therefore has all of the diplomatic and military power and responsibility for preventing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But the media and NeverTrump are proposing: Isn't the real responsibility for this Yours? Because you... aren't rooting hard enough for Ukraine?

After Afghanistan, No More Moral Blackmail From Failed Global Interventionists

 

Outstanding article by Sean Davis.  Long but worth reading.  

Excerpt:

Like one of those old magic eye posters that contained images hidden among visual white noise, once you see the American ruling elite’s reflex to resort to moral blackmail to win an argument, you can never unsee it. Every policy, every argument, every talking point asserts that you are a racist and a bad person if you believe America’s government should first and foremost protect American citizens. This is a fun game for the failed foreign policy establishment, because they reap all the benefits of using Americans’ blood and money to pump up their self-esteem while bearing precisely none of the costs.

One of the primary reasons this cadre of credentialed incompetents loathed former president Donald Trump is because, as a secular, thrice-married New York billionaire, he was impervious to the moral blackmail that had worked like a charm on everyone else for over a decade. He didn’t much care if they called him racist for wanting to secure the border and put an end to open borders. He didn’t care if they called him heartless for wanting to shut down immigration from “sh-thole countries” to preserve the wages of American workers. And he didn’t care if they called him stupid for refusing to go along with their plans for forever wars all around the globe.

For a time, America had a president who wouldn’t be bullied into doing things that weren’t in America’s national security interests. They hated him for it, and it’s why they spent every waking moment for four years, including two impeachments, desperately trying to throw him out of office.

Moral blackmail only works when the target cares what the blackmailer thinks about him. America’s interventionist elites have publicly failed in the most spectacular way possible, with the evidence of their failures playing on repeat on television for all the world to see.

Breaking their hold on power from here on out is simple: stop caring what they think, and stop caring what they say about you. Their ideas are disastrous and their rhetoric—that anyone who disagrees with them is a racist traitor—is toxic in a society built on free expression. The architects of the nation-building policies from Afghanistan to Iraq are failures and should be treated with the same disdain reserved for flat earthers or bloodletters.

The Democrat Control of the Media is Our Biggest Danger

‘If the Communist Party had retained control of the media, it could, perhaps, have survived anything’

Historians discuss the question of whether the Soviet Union could have survived.  One of the historians believes that the USSR collapsed because the Communist Party lost control of the media, exposing the corruption and problems the country faced.

The Soviet Union could not have survived, because by 1991 the Communist Party had lost control of the media and thus the public sphere. Key to the survival of any dictatorship is strict control of the media, which shapes public opinion and promotes tacit acceptance of a regime. Though many Soviet citizens may have claimed not to believe what was written in their newspapers, they were never aware of just how far removed from reality the reports were. When Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to power in 1985, it was his policy of glasnost that let the genie out of the bottle. 

In his attempt to ‘open up’ society, Gorbachev permitted the press more freedom of expression. Some historians have viewed this move as a result of the fact that Gorbachev (born in 1931) was the first leader of the Soviet Union to have cut his political teeth in a de-Stalinised USSR. But his policy backfired. Glasnost meant that news outlets could lay bare the failings of the Soviet system and the Communist Party. Perhaps more than anything else, their reporting of the horrific accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 illustrated the Party’s incompetence and shredded citizens’ belief not only in its ability to govern effectively, but also to keep them safe. In fact, in 2006, Gorbachev pinpointed Chernobyl and the resulting media fallout as the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

By 1991 the game was up for the Communist Party. Glasnost had permitted dissenting voices to be heard and political movements that had once been suppressed to gain traction and support. After a failed attempt by Communist hardliners to retake control in August of that year, the Party was banned and with it disappeared the glue that was keeping the Soviet Union together. If the Communist Party had retained control of the media, it could, perhaps, have survived anything. We need only look to the Chinese example for what can happen when a dictatorship remains in full control of the public sphere.

This is the danger the country faces today.  The media is solidly behind the Democrats.  And the Democrats favor socialist or communism. 

Media Silent As Christopher Steele ‘Hero’ ‘Spymaster’ Narrative Crumbles

Mollie Heming way names names. 

 The media liars who peddled the Russia hoax. 

 Read the whole thing. 

 For years, the media assured Americans that the dossier alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia was based on the scrupulous work of a mastermind British ex-spy and his vast network of credible and well-connected sources spread throughout Europe. 

It wasn’t true. Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. 

The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. 

The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. 

Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. 

And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth. 

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history. 

Here are the 21 primary liars that participated in a treasonous coup attempt to overthrow an elected American President.

1.  Adam Goldman 
2.  David Corn 
3. Michael Horowitz 
4.  Michael Isikoff 
5.  Evan Perez 
6. Jim Sciutto 
7. Jake Tapper 
8. Carl Bernstein 
9. Michele Neubert 
10. Ken Dilanian 
11. Cassandra Vinograd 
12. Tracy Connor 
13. Bradley Hope 
14. Michael Rothfeld
15.  Alan Cullison 
16. Scott Shane 
17. Matthew Rosenberg 
18. Luke Harding 
19. Jane Mayer 
20. Natasha Bertrand 
21. Christian Caryl

The enforcement of ideological purity: how the topic of black-on-black crime is handled by the left

Leftist write Lee Fang quotes a black man about Black on Black crime.

During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:

“I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?… Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.”

Fang is denounced and forced to recant.

It’s what you’d expect, if you’re familiar with leftist thought on race. First of all, such talk is verboten because it’s an argument that the right sometimes uses, which of course makes it racist by definition because everyone knows that the right is racist. But it’s also racist because it blames black-on-black crimes on black people, as though they are at fault, which of course they’re not because everything seemingly bad that a black person does is a result of systemic racism at the hands of white people. So to mention black-on-black crime without blaming white people for it is to be racist. QED.

Forget about Maximum Fr, whose family is outraged and grieving at what happened to their loved ones. Maximum Fr is not to be blamed, though, because in the mind of the left he doesn’t know any better. He said what he said about black-on-black crime because he’s not educated as to the real causes. He’s not an anti-black racist, he’s just ignorant. His opinion does not count. It’s the young reporter Lee Fang, whose progressive credentials are peerless (ThinkProgress, The Nation) who’s to blame because he should know better.

Even the fact that Fang was quoting another person such as Maximum Fr rather than making the statement himself is no excuse, because such remarks must be censored no matter who utters them. They inflame the tender sensibilities – not of inner city black people such as Maximum Fr – but of Fang’s mostly white leftist colleagues. Fang (who I’m going to assume is most likely an American of predominantly Chinese heritage, which would give him no favored-group status at all) has transgressed and must be made to apologize or become an unperson. One never knows if the apology will be enough, but apparently in this case it was.

Don’t Let The Washington Post Get Away With Memory-Holing Its Anti-Kavanaugh Campaign

Must read by Mollie Hemingway.

The Washington Post has a problem. The newspaper led the massive effort against the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by publishing and relentlessly hyping a completely unsubstantiated allegation of sexual assault against him.

Now, the paper is leading Democrats’ efforts to bury a similar, if stronger, allegation of sexual assault against Joe Biden. To accomplish this dramatic turnabout, the paper is collectively trying to rewrite history, pretending the allegation against Kavanaugh had more basis than it did while also pretending that the allegation against Biden has less basis than it does....

Ruth Marcus and others at the Washington Post who led the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s life based on unsubstantiated allegations know that what they did was evil. They may try to rewrite history to make it seem that Blasey Ford had evidence in support of her claim. They may try to rewrite history to make themselves feel better. They can dig as furiously as they want, but there is no memory hole deep enough to forget their behavior.

I wonder if, in the middle of the night, Ruth Marcus realizes that she is one of the baddies. 

LEFTIST BRAIN-DEAD BITCH AMANDA MARCOTTE HATES YOU AND WANTS YOU DEAD

Read Americans are Protesting- But Not For Themselves

Few business owners have the luxury of generating income by sitting on their butts in front of a computer. Fewer still get paid for each word of drivel they type. Those “big whiny babies” protesting want to get out and go back to work because they understand the basic economics of life in America

Followed by this comment:

Scott says:

April 18, 2020 at 5:51 pm

I’m a firefighter paramedic. I just lost an uncle to Covid, and have an aunt that’s hanging on by a thread. My job is “essential” (whatever that means.. and who gives these assholes the right to decide what meets that category?), so I’m still working. My father just got admitted to the hospital due to complications from a previous surgery, and I can’t visit him because of these bullshit retrictions. If I wasn’t on shift tomorrow, I’d be one of those protesters tomorrow..

Does this leftist braindead bitch want to call me selfish? (probably).. I’d love for her or any like minded (giving them too much credit for having minds??) to meet up and debate me, or go toe to toe with me.. It’d be a bad day for them.

Screw socialism, and all who support it!

From Gateway Pundit: We’re all going to die.

That is both a fact and a scare tactic. It is a fact because we are mortal, and one day through illness, injury, accident, old age, or a grudge from Hillary Clinton, all of us will die. It is a scare tactic, however, when it is USEFUL for a group or organization to instill fear in another group, thereby making them easier to control. The latter is what we will discuss today.

The Wuhan Virus (yes, I’m a racist, so sue me for using actual medical terminology in identifying the starting point of an infectious disease) is the latest tool for control against a populace. The target audience is YOU. And me. And as many American Citizens as possible. The organizations responsible for this are the Democrat Party and the FraudStream Media. But, of course, I repeat myself…

Every single day, the number of infectious cases rises. Every single day, the death toll increases. In some ways, it reminds me of the old days of the CBS News, when every night they would give the number of wounded and killed in Viet Nam. It was a tool, one to impact and depress morale amongst the citizenry. And it worked, especially with the young and stupid. Damn, there I go, repeating myself again.

The problem we have now, is we must deal with the OLD and stupid. Those who swallow whole the message from the FraudStream Media. Rampant speculation. Terrifying musical stings under blood-red headline graphics on screen. Literally unhinged reporters and anchors, coming up with incredible idiotic “predictions” that they peddle as inevitable fact. Screaming heads, because talking heads doesn’t adequately describe them anymore, shouting down anyone who dares disagree with them in the slightest. Saturation coverage of collapsing markets, celebrity infections, closing schools, cancelled events, and politicization of nothing more than a heavy chest cold that could turn into pneumonia for those of elder years and compromised immune systems.

People who should know better, who DO know better, are weaponizing a virus. Not to kill. But to instill terror in a populace already dumbed down, cowed and scolded by an “education” (see also: indoctrination) system, an “entertainment” (see also: propaganda) media, and a “news” (see also: lying liars who lie) media. They have, for decades now, reprogrammed the zeitgeist of an entire nation. And, sadly, it appears to have worked.

America was once brave, strong, kind, giving, forgiving, generous, courteous, helpful, creative, constructive, good. Now what are we? Well, thanks to the FraudStream Media, we are cowed. We are weak. We are afraid of everything, all the time. We are racist/sexist/homophobic/xenophobic/etc. We are too damn dumb to even vote, if we don’t vote the way our “betters” believe we should have voted. We are scolded for not being as “woke” as those in the new ivory towers – the newsrooms and studios of the elitist media complex.

Well, to me, that’s a load of male bovine excrement.

Some of us ARE giving in to the hype. Giving in to the terror. Fighting over toilet paper, as if Charmin was the secret cure to all disease. Buying case after case of bottled water, as if our houses don’t have this little thing called INDOOR PLUMBING! Pretty sure you can’t catch the Wuhan Virus from a glass of tap water from your own kitchen sink.

Every day, we are told about the number of infections detected. Do they ever mention the number of people CURED? People who have gotten OVER this bug? It’s a virus, people. You catch it, you might get sick, you feel rotten for four to eight days, and then? YOU GET BETTER. You may be contagious for a while, yes. So, what do you do? You stay the [insert favorite vulgarity here] HOME! You don’t put others at risk.

And when you finally get better, when you’re finally non-contagious, you go back to work. You go back to the store. You go back to watching the game or going to the movies or going out to dinner. In other words, you get back to your LIFE.

At last count, nearly 4,700 American Citizens have been found to have contracted the virus. In that time, more than HALF that number have gotten past their infection. Close to 90 people have died from this, and while that is tragic and should be mourned, where’s the mourning for the tens of THOUSANDS that have already died from the regular, plain-ol’, bog-standard influenza? Or car crashes? Hell’s bells, we’ve had more deaths from falling of ladders than the Wuhan Virus.

It’s time for this madness, this stupidity, to STOP, folks.

And the only one who can stop it is YOU.

You can stop it by calming down. By thinking instead of feeling or, worse, panicking. By using common sense. By being cautious, not crazed. By doing what your mom told you for all those years – wash your damn hands! Sneeze into your sleeve. Don’t go to work if you’re sick or if you feel like you’re coming down with something.

And most importantly, STOP BELIEVING THE FRAUDSTREAM MEDIA! They lie, on purpose, and constantly. You’ve known this for years, decades even! And yet you now hang on their every word as if it were Gospel?

They are doing this for a purpose, folks. A coordinated campaign, with the sole purpose of bringing DOWN our Great Nation. In their eyes, we were never great. In OUR eyes, we’ve always been great. It is far past time for us to put that belief into action. We will NOT cower in fear. We will NOT give in to panic. We will NOT believe one damned word these idiots spew. We will turn OFF their lies. We will turn TOWARD the truth. We will help each other, as we always have, instead of cocooning ourselves and not giving a rat’s rear end for the welfare of our fellow citizens, neighbors and friends.

The stock market will recover, folks. In fact, it is very likely that the stock market was tanked, ON PURPOSE, by short-sellers in order to line their pockets while temporarily robbing your retirement accounts. The thing is, though, we were in such a strong position before they started this Nantucket Sleighride, that we can and WILL see a stock market of 30,000 well before Election day. We WILL see business recovery. We WILL see innovation.

The FraudStream Media will do its best to hide that from you. Like they have since the day Trump was elected. They downplay the amazing recovery from the “O’biden-Bama” administration’s royal screw-ups (which they told us all was what we had to settle for), whilst ramping up the niggling negatives, the molehills of economic trivia, into mountains of despair. Don’t believe them for a damn second. They have a track record of lies, half-truths, prevarications and failed “predictions”. That alone should keep you from accepting their “word”.

This was, and is, a hoax. A manufactured crisis. The virus itself is quite real. The folks who have gotten sick, or tragically died, are also quite real. But the panic, the hype, the terror – all if it has been created, out of whole cloth, with the goal of destroying America. Destroying our morale. Destroying our greatness.

They will fail. They have failed.

But YOU must defeat them. That means standing up to the lies. Facing the truth, calling out the panic with calm and resolute strength. Being bold in the face of the cowering simps on the TV screen and in the newspaper columns. Speaking out with authority, facing facts, and sharing those facts with others.

Fact: You’re going to die.

Fact: Just not today. And almost certainly NOT from the Wuhan Virus.

Fact: America will get through this. Because YOU are an American. YOU are brave, and strong, and kind.

You just need to be reminded of that from time to time. It’s so easy to forget, when you’re force-fed a diet of how rotten you are. From people who are rotten to the core.

They are evil. You are good. Never, EVER forget

Former Deadspin Writer Calls Her Media Pals to Complain That Her New Bosses at Deadspin Wanted Her To Write About Sports for the Sports Site Instead of Insipid SJW Politics

I admit it, I don't know Deadspin at all; the name's not a give-away but as I was surfing the web this morning I saw two references (one being Drudge) to it and this stupid editor who is outraged that the owners of the site wanted the site to focus on the purpose of the site instead of ... what I assume is smearing Trump and anyone who supports him as racist White Supremacists.

The previous sentence was written before I checked the Deadspin website and - do I know these douches? - my assumption was totally vindicated.  A huge proportion of the site is devoted to attacking free enterprise, Trump, White people, Black people who associate with white people, white people who support Trump, homophobia (is that even a thing?) and vultures who poop (what?).

Ace does his usual good job gutting and filletting this bitch:

Life is so unfair!

Who do these bosses think they are?!

Deadspin's editor in chief has left the company, saying the new leadership of parent company G/O Media have made it "impossible" for her to continue working there.

"I have been repeatedly undermined, lied to, and gaslit in my job," Megan Greenwell said in a brief phone call with The Daily Beast on Friday.

...

Among the many grievances, Greenwell said, G/O leadership refused to guarantee editorial independence for Deadspin and asked for the site to "stick to sports" -- a long-running source of frustration for a staff that also covers media, politics, and culture beyond sports.

Apparently @megreenwell thinks she was treated unfairly because the bosses @Deadspin which is a sports site only wanted her to write about sports. #freethegreenmonster

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) August 16, 2019

I guess when you make no money, trash your boss, constantly bitch and moan that everything is everybody else’s fault, take no accountability, brag about living next to Puerto Rican’s you quit on your own free will. (Wink, wink) pic.twitter.com/zJyf7rmj8S

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) August 16, 2019

Never forget @megreenwell https://t.co/zwRzGonCJG

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) August 16, 2019

Seattle’s Revolt of the Elites

Since the release of Eric Johnson’s documentary Seattle Is Dying, which depicts an epidemic of street homelessness, addiction, crime, and disorder, city elites have launched a coordinated information campaign targeted at voters frustrated with the city’s response to homelessness. Earlier this month, leaked documents revealed that a group of prominent nonprofits—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, the Raikes Foundation, and the Ballmer Group—hired a PR firm, Pyramid Communications, to conduct polling, create messaging, and disseminate the resulting content through a network of silent partners in academia, the press, government, and the nonprofit sector. The campaign, #SeattleForAll, is a case study in what writer James Lindsay calls “idea laundering”—creating misinformation and legitimizing it as objective truth through repetition in sympathetic media.