You keep talking about this monolithic "left" that wants to impose things on you. Like what, specifically? Are "they" trying to make your kids be gay? Or to become atheists?
All the above and more. If my kids turned gay, did drugs, or did some kind of crime, the leftists on SI who know my posts would be overjoyed. And they definitely would see it as a victory for the left. I posted iktomi's post where drug use, homosexuality, gay and lesbian student clubs in schools, secularism, an absence of school discipline, the spread of atheism, agnosticism or non-western religions among young people was identified as leftist victories. Note that the post was well recieved and praised and no one on the thread took exception to it. This on a thread for people who think of themselves as thinking leftists - the ones who think they're smarter, more intellectual than the crude Sioux Nation types (NY Times editorial page types vs Daily Kos types).
Now if thinking leftists explictly see the destruction of our cultural values as a leftist goal, why should any of us disagree with them? It would seem to me we're just deceiving ourselves.
How do they gain from killing the golden goose that is America?
I didn't say it made sense. Most people on the left aren't as conscious of their goals as iktomi. A lot, may be most, are deluded. They think you can tear down a people's sense of morality and what you'll have left is a society filled with nice non-bigoted tolerant broad-minded people. They're wrong. You'll mostly have savages without any values at all who live for momentary pleasures and follow whatever the crowd is doing.
IMO, you are flailing at ghosts. Threats that are either wholly imagined or that you have blown way out of proportion to reality.
Tell iktomi and suma and the rest of their gang they're ghosts. I'm merely taking them at their word. Tell the ACLU which is fighting to drive the Boy Scouts out of parks, schools, military bases - all because they don't allow unmarried gay scoutmasters - and which is working to protect pedophiles rights. Tell the folks who are writing homosexually themed childrens books and putting them in elementary schools. Tell the universities that don't allow military recruiting - supposedly because the military discriminates against open gays. Right now, it looks like gay-themed issues are on top of the agenda, but there is more coming after that - polygamy, group marriage with adoption rights, bestiality, necrophilia, you name it. See the Beyond Gay Marraige ad placed in the NY Times not too long ago:
weeklystandard.com
Was it some ghost outfit that exists only in my imagination which placed that NY Times ad?
So if you want to talk threats, let's be more specific. Let's narrow it down to specific activists, or agitators if that describes some better, and pick apart their motives and their deceptions. Rip apart moron.org or their friends who cozy up to the likes of Hugo Chavez and Iran's Ahmadinejad. Even challenge the otherwise center-left pols who often seem fearful of repudiating the extremists because they don't want to become their targets.
I do all that. And thats good as far as it goes. But its not all the left is about.
I knew that post would have trouble being understood by many.
Heres how I see it. We have inherited a set of cultural values which instruct people as to what kinds of things are right and what kinds of things are wrong. (You can look at things like the 10 Commandments or the various lists of Cardinal Virtues* as a shorthand version. ) You can view these values and their application as either given to humanity by God if you're religious or you can view them as a product of social evolution in which those values and rules which "work" have been enshrined over time by wise people. These values protect both individuals and the greater society from all kinds of troubles and make for a better more prosperous life for the individuals who live by them and for the society they live in.
*
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Here's an example where cultural values are identified as being of importance for societies political and economic success:
amazon.com
The more people live by traditional virtues, the less poverty, less drug abuse, less alcoholism, less children raised without whole families, less sexually transmitted diseases, broken families, less crime, etc etc. there will be. The less people live by traditional virtues, the more of these and many other bad things we'll have.
childtrends.org
futureofchildren.org
princetonprinciples.org |
