Whenever you see me making a calm attempt to correct someone that also calls them stupid and crazy, you may feel free to infer that I’m not all that invested in them changing their mind. If I really want to change somebody’s mind, I don’t try to lure them with vinegar.
You get more flies with honey than with vinegar. Shit works best, of course…
Thank you for that: I have been striving diligently to make the flies go away and here you are encouraging people to attract them. What the hell do I want with flies?
That’s always been my answer to the flies/honey claim.
But my post was really meant as an ‘in general’ thing, not aimed at begbert2.
Never argue with an idiot. They’ll drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. You’ll also make the rest of us wade through pages of that shit looking to see if there might be a different conversation hidden in the weeds.
I don’t have WillFarnaby on ignore because I have very, very few posters on ignore. You never know when you might miss out on something entertaining and unintentionally humorous.
I must admit that I even respond to him sometimes, because I can’t resist the easy mark, like a putdown against an annoying four-year old that you happen to dislike intensely. I don’t actually engage with him on an ongoing basis for the reason you imply. He’s not so much an extreme ideologue as he is a mental patient, the kind of psychopath that might be found on a street-corner soapbox.
Putting someone like WillFarnaby on ignore is like using that hand sanitizer: if you avoid exposure to pathogens, you will be ill-equipped to deal with them when you have to.
Eh. If you’re so far Left you think Chomsky is a simpering pinko who has no taste for TRUE COMMUNISM, then Leftist means, basically, in favor of such madness as voting and compromise and individual liberties as opposed to Democratic Centralism or, you know, screaming at people about how Anarchism is so a grown-up political philosophy and we must implement it RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW WAAAAH!
Seriously: The fastest way to get a true, stone Leftist to screech at you is to call them a Liberal.
Which means WillFarnaby is an Ultra-Left agitator, somewhere out beyond the merely Wobbly and into the Fell Over territory.
As my Dad once explained to me: radicals want to free the slaves; liberals want to improve their working conditions.
Trolls like this make you really appreciate good old SamuelA’s efforts. Sammy took more than one post to piss people off and even then, you didn’t know if you were pissed or sympathetic,
Perhaps your right wing echo chamber makes you think this is a deadly insult. God knows you people have spent 10 year or more trying to make it a swear word. :rolleyes:
But “Liberal” is a label I wear proudly. 
I was amused and sympathetic.
I have to wonder if HD is paying these people to make posts that make him look less irrational.
Why would you even want to put him on ignore? It’s comedy gold, intentionally or not.
Gold? No, more like Comedy Pewter.
More like comedy mercury. It will eventually drive you insane.
I’m fairly certain Derleth isn’t on the right( though maybe I’m misremembering ). Regardless he is quite correct. The far left( Marxists in particular )do consider “liberal” to be an insult. I should know, I have some in the family ;). Here’s a classic sarcastic example from Phil Ochs.
If you self-describe as a Liberal, not only was I not talking about you, I likely have more in common with you than you likely suspect.
Right. Or, well, correct, although to a Burn The World Revolutionary Socialist, I am on the Right, politically, because I’m not a utopian, I’m not an idealist* or someone else who thinks that the world is spinning along a fore-ordained path made of either holy dogma or dialectical materialism. I want policies and governance, and I regard a revolutionary zeal as infantile, a way of dodging the hard problems of compromise and, more generally, dealing with people you disagree with peacefully. I’m a Progressive, in that I want accelerated social progress and do not view groups different from mine as inherently impure or dangerous, but I don’t pretend to have a master plan and I certainly don’t intend to follow anyone who claims to.
*(Another word some of the Extreme Left have turned into an insult. To be fair, calling something “idealist” was quite the grave insult in the USSR. Everything had to be practical and pragmatic. You know, like Lysenkoism.)
Of course, I’m an American. Most of the important infantile revolutionaries in my country are self-described Conservatives, right in the mold of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and the rest of the Conservative Movement.
(But in a broader historical sense, the entirety of the mainstream political spectrum in America is Liberal in the sense of broadly being Free Trade-ish Capitalist Republican, often with Welfare State characteristics, instead of Mercantilist Divine-Right Monarchist. The United States of America was founded on strong Liberal values, and the American Revolution was a Liberal revolution. Tell that to a self-described American Conservative today and you just might make their head explode.)
… right into the gulag.
If you held a gun to my head right at this moment, I’m not sure I could come up with a universal definition of political “left” vs. “right” that I’d be 100% comfortable with. But whatever nervous gibberish I did spit out as you cocked the hammer, I doubt either idealism or utopianism would figure into it.
I mean both communits and radical libertarians are utopian. And earnest young neoconservatives can be just as idealist as earnest young left anarchists.
I may be a Liberal, but as I have said (in many variations) on this board repeatedly;
“If your Ideology requires people to not be Human, then your ideology won’t work.”
Communism (the ideal) requires people who are not Humans, since Human Nature doesn’t work the way the ideology assumes.
Star Trek Utopianism is also bullshit for the same reasons.
I feel the same way about American Conservatism. It requires some really odd beliefs about how humans can and should act that just don’t fit Human Nature. All the more so when I see people espousing and demanding that people act in ways the people making the demands do not act.
You cut an important part of my sentence, but you picked up on an important point in my diatribe.
Increasingly, my first-cut division in political matters is Idealistic (or, when I’m feeling less charitable, Teleological) versus Pragmatic: Does this person believe the world is governed by a Big Theory? Will this person deign to talk to those they disagree with? Is this person capable of governing? Because governing is the process of compromising grand ideas to get measurable victories. If you can’t do that, you lose and lose and lose until you fade away or go to war, at which point you’ve given your movement over to the killers, who are infinitely more pragmatic than even the most pragmatic politicians because pure ideology is a poor meal and a worse hand grenade.
In extremis, it’s a decision between humans as they are now and trying to bootstrap Humanity 2.0, Now With Less Bad Stuff! And, of course, getting from humans-as-they-are to humans-as-they-should-be never involves, you know, not killing people, that would be ridiculous.
I should note that being an Idealist and being an Ideologue are not quite the same thing. An Ideologue is simply fixated on an idea, but is possibly willing to compromise on their way to implementing it. An Ideologue who’s good at governing can be effective, and can do quite a lot of damage or quite a lot of good, depending on what you think of their fixed idea. An Idealist relates everything back to their Big Theory, so any compromise looks like a defeat to them. The stupidest things become purity tests, and woe betide anyone who fails.
Pragmatists cluster around the center of the spectrum, because that’s where the action is, and that’s where decisions happen. So, in the converse of the Narcissism of Small Differences, which involves emphasizing the small distinctions of groups similar to yours, you get the Myopia for Distant Differences, or the false conclusion that all groups distant from you are homogeneous. Therefore, to someone out in the Trump Swamp, I’m a Liberal CommieSocialist Eurofag Pinko, and to someone in the Marx Mire, I’m a Fascist Republican Brownshirt.