[ExI] Be nice to leftists

spike spike66 at att.net
Fri May 23 16:23:10 UTC 2014


 

 

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2014 8:46 AM
To: rafal at smigrodzki.org; ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] Be nice to leftists

 

>…Rightest tend to be in favor of the free market and that's good, but they also tend to be in favor of creationism and that's bad.

Eh, a lot of that kind of thing is an artifact of our American two-party system, which isn’t really two parties, but rather huge coalitions of unrelated small parties who don’t really like their own fellow travelers.  

My notion is that everything doesn’t collapse down to right or left.  It results in both sides of the political spectrum working to discredit the other by way of pointing out that their coalition includes some distasteful characters.  For instance, the left might say “YOUR side embraces CREATIONISTS!”  followed by a retort from the right “Well, YOUR side embraces radical EPISCOPALIANS!”  etc, when the huge majority of both parties quietly reject their distasteful fellow travelers.  Both parties may recognize their unwelcome others do tend to vote on the same general side, for completely different reasons, having little or nothing to do with actual politics.

I find encouraging the general realignment of US left and right around a matter which definitely does belong in politics: the size and scope of the federal government.  We have seen a most unique (in my lifetime) phenomenon where a new party (Tea) comes up wanted more strictly limited federal government, then two established parties both reject it, unite in common cause to defeat the third.  I find it astonishing in that if either party were to embrace that third, the two together could rule without significant opposition.  Yet both reject it.  This tells me that both major parties are more interested in growing federal government as a first priority, even if it means sharing an agenda with the other major party. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNU9PKWdA2A     John K Clark

Cool ad, thanks John!

spike


 


 

 

 

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