KindaSkolarly wrote:Harry Marks wrote: So if you are dangerous to tyrants, and in your eyes I am a Marxist, what am I left to conclude?
You should probably conclude that a bunch of people consider you a menace.
Refreshing to correspond with someone who can recognize the obvious, but then it should be clear why a teacher in Florida referred to Second Amendment advocates as dangerous.
KindaSkolarly wrote:Whether you know it or not (and I'm not attempting to talk down to you), but your "liberalism" is being fed to you by Marxists.
I'm not worried about being talked down to. Have at it. What worries me is the need to see invisible strings determining my views. I think things through for myself, and arrive at my own conclusions. I'm not going to argue that no one on the left takes their views from a herd mentality (or the right either) but it strikes me as spectacular when someone simply cannot fathom the idea that the other side is thinking.
KindaSkolarly wrote:Obama and Hillary Clinton are proteges of Saul Alinsky and the Frankfurt School.
Alinsky was a genius. I don't agree with all of his thinking, but he showed that major institutions care enough about their reputation to clean up their act. Unlike our current dear leader, they know enough to be ashamed of shameful behavior.
KindaSkolarly wrote:The Left is banning free speech right and left but saying we have to be tolerant of the Left's speech.
I have had a few arguments on line with people who want to ban hate speech. I read about the strange cases on campus that pop up now and then. It is approximately similar to the way "Christian" colleges exercise intolerance against people who disagree with them. None of it is pro-democratic, so all of it is foolish.
KindaSkolarly wrote:I mean, your "liberal" leaders are behaving like Nazis.
Not even close. Met any Nazis?
KindaSkolarly wrote:The term "liberal." Don't know if I've mentioned this here but Charlton Heston marched with the civil rights marchers in the 60's. His point back then was, like MLK's, that we should judge people on the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins. Judge individuals, not groups.
His courage should be saluted. Not everyone who marched in those marches survived. Their opponents freely labeled them "collectivist" and argued that violence against them was justified by the federal government "taking away freedom".
KindaSkolarly wrote:Fast forward, decades later, and Heston was a Libertarian talking about taking his gun from his cold, dead hand. He was vilified for that, but his motivating mindset was still the same as it had been in the 60's--a reverence for individual liberty. Liberty, Liberal and Libertarian stem from the same root. So how did Liberal come to mean Collectivist? Or Democratic? Democracy is mob rule by 51%.
I think most of us get that the constitution protects people's liberty from majoritarian oppression. That's what the civil rights movement was all about. It's an important reason to hold in contempt those who treat the constitution as a personal convenience to be taken advantage of.
KindaSkolarly wrote:Heston maintained a respect for individual liberty his whole life, yet at the end of his life the "tolerant liberals" in America attacked him for his beliefs.
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. People criticizing other people for their beliefs is part of the process. Personally I only ever heard him criticized for being a dupe for the gun industry and the extremism of Wayne LaPierre.
KindaSkolarly wrote:maybe you can tell me how the Left became so hateful and divisive and intolerant of individual dissent.
I think a certain part of the left is naturally intolerant, as with many other views on the spectrum. There is an institutionalized intolerance in Marxism/Leninism (the real thing, not the imaginations of people about Obama or the Clintons) that was originally a reaction against the secret police of Europe in the 19th century. The aristocracy was trying to defend its position against Revolution, the overturning of aristocratic privilege that started with the French (or maybe with the British and Dutch even earlier). They oppressed freely, so the Leninists felt that only fools refuse to be ruthless.
If you are talking about intolerance of conservative opinions, my observation is that it isn't conservative opinions per se that generate intolerant reactions. (I googled "David Brooks shouted down" just to be sure I hadn't missed some incident.) But people who freely justify aggressive behavior against others, or freely justify spreading lies in the name of freedom, or freely justify trashing constitutional protection of individuals, tend to arouse the same kind of paranoia that you are exhibiting. So these leftists seem to conclude that hate speech, to pick an example, is too much of a threat to be tolerated. I can remember when lots of kinds of speech were considered too much of a threat to be tolerated. It seems to be a common conclusion that people come to. That's one of many reasons why rule of law is important.
KindaSkolarly wrote:So, under Obama's racist Promise Program, Cruz' disciplinary issues at school were under-reported because he was (on paper) Hispanic. Obama wanted minorities to be disciplined less, so he ordered that they be given a free pass when they acted up in school.
I haven't studied up on it enough to claim any expertise, but my understanding was that the Promise Program was an effort to be conscious and intentional about discipline, to offset the bias that causes minority kids to be treated worse for the same kind of behavior. I think the goal was a reasonable one, even though it is difficult to oppose these unconscious biases without infringing on liberties. In principle that's all Affirmative Action is, and so far the courts have been pretty scrupulous about keeping it that way.
KindaSkolarly wrote:So even though Cruz was Russian-born, probably suffers from fetal-alcohol syndrome, probably was medicated to the gills, made constant threats of violence, even though he had all of those issues going on, the school looked the other way because of his make-believe ethnicity.
My understanding is that this was one of several factors contributing to the warnings being insufficiently heeded. If it was the only incident of school shootings or mass shootings then the personal factors in that case should be the predominant ones to be considered. But nobody alleges racially biased coddling caused Las Vegas, or Sandy Hook, or Columbine, or any of the others in a long list. Fine, if the Promise Program is systematically causing problems, let's investigate it and fix it or scrap it, as appropriate. But I guarantee you that won't stop school shootings.
KindaSkolarly wrote: I couldn't believe the media didn't scream about the Promise program when it was announced in 2011. Imagine if Trump ordered that white kids shouldn't be disciplined.
There are lots of articles about the Promise program online, as well as articles about Obama's other education-wrecking policies.
I've read a few of these kinds of articles. It astonishes me that people take seriously this kind of ideological polemic. Sweeping generalizations ("ordered that minorities shouldn't be disciplined", "education-wrecking") are built on a few anecdotes and often a hefty dose of misinformation. This is Rush Limbaugh's stock in trade. Do you ever think about holding these people accountable? Checking on their record of accuracy, for example?