Does "Leftism" Destroy Everything It Touches? Or Is That Just Another Slogan from P.U.?

They're trying to prevent bankrupting the state. The wonderful leftists have great goals, but no system to achieve them. They want to rob Petey more to pay Paul more. There's a balance to everything. The more people are restricted (and what's more, simultaneously billed for it), the quicker they're getting the heck out of Dodge. The people with more means lead the way to greener pastures. There needs to be some fiscal responsibility to meet these goals. Those guys have my respect for standing up to the bullies trying to ramrod bankruptcy inducing legislation.

 

You'd better come well armed and proficient. We can put five rounds in a 1" circle from 200 yards. And we got lots property area.

Never felt safer than when armed. Some mental retard starts a mass shooting they will get taken down. Or tries to steal my diesel. My kids all shoot and we'll be teaching theirs soon. Could mean the difference between freedom and getting rounded up.
Why would anybody not want to be able to shoot??

 

It is illegal to vote for Mickey Mouse, because politicians everywhere are offering ridiculous tax cuts nobody can push through, and our entire electorate and judicial system have become jokes in bad taste. These assholes aren't attempting to bankrupt anyone, but to keep destabilizing the entire system, because actually cooperating with people and trusting them are unfamiliar to them. They are voted into office by the same people voting for whoever advertises the most, and know their only job is to make money destroying the nonexistent government.

 

I'm gonna tell Nancy and Chuck on you! I send them a copy of this.

 

I don't think altruism even "developed" per se. I think it always just was, due to an interconnectedness of all living things. Some of us, the lucky ones IMO, care about others for reasons that run deeper than any drive for personal gain whatsoever. And yes, this argument that people are biologically driven by selfishness is really stale and inept. We're mostly driven by pure love, on the contrary, and these people who insist otherwise, and many of the people who are orchestrating our lives, are actually going against nature. If there ever was a long run for it, it would prove to be unsustainable. We aren't just driven to procreate out of some selfish need to survive, and that is all human life amounts to. Anyone with a child can see that.

 

People evolved to live in small tribal groups that would gather periodically to prevent inbreeding. Genetic research has revealed that altruism supports evolution, because people are usually related to most of the people they know. Sociologists discovered that people living in extended families also display more altruism, tend to cultivate contentment, live up their own moral ideals, etc. In the developed world those countries which provide an extensive social safety net tend to also have the highest support for their governments and the fewest social problems. These are, of course, broad sweeping statements about entire cultures and humanity in general but, basically, what comes around goes around and the alternative to altruism is not evolution.

 

Of course altruism supports evolution, but we didn't evolve from a purely selfish species to be an altruistic one. There has simply always been caring for others that goes beyond one's personal self-interests. This even exists in the animal kingdom. We aren't, even at our root, selfish creatures. That isn't the "nature of man," despite whatever anyone says to the contrary.

 

Even on a cellular level, without reproduction life as we know it would be impossible. Even mold and bacteria obey what is known as "quorum sensing" changing their behavior dramatically according to how crowded they are and how much food is available. The more single cell organism you have, the more advantageous it becomes to organize your efforts, and you could say even the laws of physics insist on paying it forward suckers! When you are born to fall on your butt, you are a natural born clown, whether you wanna join the circus or not.

The question is not whether to pay it forward, but how.

 

I think human nature is somewhere in between - that tension between order and chaos, violence and peace, self and selflessness.

 

Human nature is the lowest possible energy state of the complete system. A race car idling nicely and purring like a kitten, can roar like a lion and leap into any higher energy state the fastest, but requires time to settle back down into a nice purr, sputtering the entire way. Relaxing on the couch and being startled by someone is another example, as is waking a sleeping baby. Only by being content to know nothing, can we learn everything.

 

You are spot on ! That's why I love Karl Marx !

 

I'm not saying selfishness doesn't play a role as well, but it isn't everything. And reproduction can't be said to just be a purely selfish drive to survive. At some microscopic level, selfishness and selflessness probably don't even come into play. Rather, it's just the way things are. It isn't a survival mechanism in any sensible way, definitely not in a way that relates to sentient mammalian behavior. Life just naturally survives. Reproducing is what it does. It isn't because microbes are "selfish."

And as cells organize into more complex creatures...their lives don't revolve purely around selfish desires, either. And ideally when someone has a child, they're making a child as an expression of love. I don't believe there is some reptilian part of the brain that is subconsciously controlling the rest, forcing us to believe consciously we want to express our love, but subconsciously just have a fear of death and want to survive. I don't believe that at all, but that is a popular theme in modern philosophy. That survival somehow equates totally and explicitly with reproduction and all we are is creatures subconsciously geared to survive. It's utter tripe.

 

Have you been paying attention to government spending since the 90's?

The Republicans cut taxes and increase spending. We're 22 trillion in debt.

 

A trillion here, a trillion there, and you'd think somebody would go to jail.

 

Getting back to the P.U. lecture on Leftism, which might double as a lecture on logical fallacies, Prager proceeds to illustrate his claim that "Leftism" "destoys everything it touches" by citing nine examples: (1) universities; (2) the arts; (3) literature; (4) late night TV; (5) religion; (6) free speech; (7) race; (8) the Boy Scouts; and (9) male-female relations.

Taking them off the top, Claim #1 illustrates his use of three logical fallacies that are favorites of propagandists: argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority), out of context quotation , and hasty generalization. The "authority" he appeals to is, curiously, Steven Pinker, who in another context might be dismissed by the Fox News crowd as a pinko (no pun intended) college professor. Here is accorded the status "liberal' Harvard university professor (as opposed to a "progressive" one), and an atheist--not the sort Prager would ordinarily place much credence in, but here he is invoked to establish that the idea that (because of the Left) "universities are becoming laughing stocks of intolerance". Actually, Pinker didn't say this was "because of the Left". He said something much more limited, in the context of a letter advising the incoming president of Harvard University about a perceived problem on that and other campuses. "Many of these illiberal antics come from a radical fringe of students, egged on by an autonomous student-life bureaucracy." so | Coffee House he was not generalizing about "the Left", and not talking about the norm on university campuses nationwide, but rather about disturbing developments at Harvard and other universities. While the problem is real and serious, it is a far cry from destruction of our universities by "the Left". Prager is surely over-generalizing on the basis of a relatively small percentage of departments in a small sample of elite colleges and universities.

The most extensive studies of the political orientations of university and college professors, by Gross and Simmons (2006),(2007), (2014) , is based on their survey of 1,417 full-time professors from 927 institutions. They found that 44.1 % of the faculty were liberal or progressive, although fewer than 10 % were radical leftists (3% Marxists); 46.6% were moderate and 9.2 % were conservative. The highest concentration of libera/left faculty were in the social sciences (58%) and humanities (52%). Conservatives are roughly as numerous as liberals in the fields of business administration, health sciences, computer science, and engineering. The ratio of leftists to conservatives is highest in New England (28:1) compared to the national average of 6:1, but eavy concentrations of left-wing faculty are also found in the Pacific Northwest and some of the great Lakes states. The Southeast has the most conservative universities and colleges.https://www.conservativecriminology.com/uploads/5/6/1/7/56173731/lounsbery_9-25.pdf https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/03/05/the-actual-politics-of-professors/ https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/03/05/the-actual-politics-of-professors/ The most conservative institutions of higher learning are small Christian colleges. In colleges and universities on the list of "most conservative", students have little risk of encountering Leftists or ideas challenging the dominant social paradigm.
Most Conservative Colleges in America The 20 Best Conservative Colleges in America
The Most Conservative Colleges | BestColleges.com The 70 Most Conservative Colleges in America The 25 most conservative colleges in America
Newsmax's 40 Best Colleges for Conservative Values

Other studies found no evidence that students' political attitudes were much affected by the ideologies of their professors. Yancy (2012); Rothman, Kelly, and Wossman (2010). And contrary to common perceptions, it's the students themselves, not the professors, who seem to be the source of "Leftist" radicalism on campus.

Prager tells us "at almost every university, and now high schools and even some elementary schools, students are taught to shut down, not debate, those who differ from them and to rely on feelings rather than reason". Really? He gives no supporting evidence other than this blanket assertion. An internet search discloses that this is a common theme pushed by right wing pundits, but with no concrete details about how or where this is taught. One might think that a video decrying suppression of rational discourse
would do better in providing arguments and evidence to support questionable assumptions.

 

The right wing's entire job is to make discourse impossible, so they can sell any bullshit they want. They are fascists and the idea they want a democratic government or to even have to listen to other people's opinions is absurd to them. The people have spoken, and its all on reality TV.

 

#2. The Arts. According to Prager, the primary purpose of the arts is "to elevate people through beauty, artistic excellence and emotional depth" But he says to the Left the primary purpose is "to shock".That's why so much of contemporary art, music and sculpture, he says is "meaningless" and scatological" (preoccupied with excrement and obscenity). Concern about modern art's decline into decadence echoes similar themes from Nazi Germany where Hitler railed : "It is not the mission of art "to wallow in filth for filth's sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength." Instead, he gave us Nazi kitsch. We don't know what Prager thinks of Picasso, Dali, Kandindsky, or Klee. My personal tastes are for abstract expressionism. I've never seen much point to representational art, since the same could be done better with a camera, but to each his own. The scatalogical reference is to the gold toilet on display at the Guggenheim in an exhibit entitled "America", which visitors were invited to use (so they could relieve themselves on America). Another example which he doesn't mention would be Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" featuring a photograph of a cross in a bucket of urine. Not my idea of art, but if he can convince the National Endowment of Arts it is, more power to him. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and a case can be made for shock and dissonance to jar us occasionally from our complacency and bring us in touch with unpleasant realities. It's a free country, and if you don't like the art, don't buy it, view it, or listen to it. I think the examples are, once again, of atypical extremes. To suggest that they're typical and somehow linked to the political Left is stretching it. Soviet artistic tastes were similar to Hitler's, except they gravitated more toward tractors and industrial plants. The Commies would agree with Prager's views about modern art, only their term for it was "bourgeois decadence", supposedly the product of capitalism.

 

#3. Literature. Here Prager continues his argument by anecdote by giving us a single example to show the Left's destruction of literature: "The English Department at the University of Pennsylvania replaced a hall portrait of William Shakespeare with a portrait of an African-American lesbian poet. "Leftist professors," he says, "have replaced the pursuit of excellence with the pursuit of diversity." A rather sweeping generalization to draw from a single example. And he doesn't even have the details right. It wasn't the English Department that did this, nor was it "Leftist professors". It was a group of students from the English Department --still outrageous, but hardly sufficient support for a claim the "the Left" is thereby destroying literature.

 

Panic

Which version of ‘capitalism’ which version of ‘socialism’ there are hundreds of permutations and ones that mix and match.

There are lots of factions within capitalism that hate each other more than they do socialist and the same goes for factions within socialism, many have commented that neoliberals often seem to hate Keynesians more than they do communist.

But in a way I agree with you, I prefer Keynesian economic models to neoliberal ones

The thing is that while neoliberalism is basically a rehash of 19th century laissez faire thinking, Keynes is at least a model fit for the 20th century but it is based on forms of industrialisation and consumerism that don’t fit in with what is coming in the 21st century.

 

As I’ve said before the first time I saw one of Dennis Prager's videos I thought it was a satirical parody of some loony right winger something like the Colbert Report.

It was with incredulity that I later learned DP’s dribble was meant to be taken seriously and with deep disappointment and despair that I leant some people took it seriously

My question is why – why do people watch things like this video and take it seriously?

I mean at the slightest examination it falls apart and as said it’s so simplistic and bias that it seems like parody, so what makes people take it seriously?