What’s with the serial killer tangent?
As Anne says, right views the third world as savages, left views them as repressed people. Says enough for me.
And more servicepeople died taking Iwo Jima than were killed at Pearl Harbor. I think we should dig up FDR and hold him accountable.
It’s a pointless exercise to point to the behaviour of a few individuals like Coulter or Moore and use them to label the entire right or left. They are individuals. If some rabid nut comes along tomorrow and associates himself with the left, will that suddenly make “the left” meaner? Or does it mean they just picked up an asshole?
So if you want to decide which side is ‘meaner’, you need to look at the general behaviour of the movement. How does the right behave, in general, compared to the left? I would offer up the numerous left-wing demonstrations as examples of thuggish behaviour. Having been shouted down by red-faced screaming maniacs on many occasions, I can testify to how nasty those demonstrations can get.
To be fair, there are some on the right who employ the same tactics - namely, abortion protestors. But it’s a much smaller group.
Or if we want to get personal, we could count up the number of abusive people on the SDMB on the right and left, and see how that count matches up. Certainly around here, the left is far meaner than the right. But this analysis suffers from the same problem as the first - a small sample size. We could pick up a couple of right-wing assholes tomorrow and balance things out, but that would tell us nothing about “the right” versus “the left”.
I hate to bring this up, but the left hardly is known for going around blowing up doctors performing operations they disagree with.
I mean, I don’t hear about prisons and executioners getting mailbombs very much.
As for getting shouted down in protests… well, it is a protest. If you show up at a protest and start arguing with them, what the hell do you expect?
I’ve seen the Berkeley Republicans “ambush” anti-war protests, and I’ve seen Berkeley democrats tear down the big pictures of aborted babies the Berk Reps hang up every so often. They’re all assholes.
At least the left doesn’t shoot their political opponents with shotguns, or booby trap their offices with bombs. What the abortion protesters lack in numbers, they make up for in violence. I’ll take red-faced screaming maniacs any day.
Are you now claiming that there are about equal numbers of people on the right as there are on the left on SDMB? I thought you believed you righties were massively outnumbered here. Wouldn’t the tremendous leftist bias here result in a disproportionate number of leftist assholes?
You might want to be careful about pursuing this line of reasoning, or I might propose an experiment. How about I go to, say, Free Republic, and post a nice calm, reasoned argument supporting, say, gay marriage. And you can go to GD, and post a nice calm, reasoned argument supporting, say, tax cuts for the upper class. And we’ll see which post brings forth more frothy-mouthed venomous posts. Now, while this proposal obviously isn’t fair, we could also let you pick a different message board that actually is populated by left-wing loonies, and then I suspect we’d get a pretty close match on the venommeter. The only question then would be whether the demographic represented at FR is more representative of the general populace of whatever geographic region we’re supposed to be talking about than the demographic represented at your chosen left-wing loonie board, and that, of course, would be impossible to determine.
I think you mean oppressed people. The phrase “repressed people” would apply to a lot of American conservatives.
:rolleyes: 
Sam, are we even posting on the same board? In this forum, the right-wing posters are a whole lot meaner than the left-wing posters.
Er, right.
It’s early. :-p
I think this issue merits further discussion – but in this thread it would be a hijack – so I’ve started a new GD thread: “What is the difference between a liberal and a leftist?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=262432
No, but they do spike trees, destroy research labs, and send letter bombs to scientists.
I really don’t think you want to compare the violence on the left versus the right. On the right you have a handful of people who have attacked abortion clinics. On the left you have the ALF, the Unabomber, various environmental terror groups, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and oodles and oodles of vandals.
Remember why John Kerry left the VVAW? He left because the leadership starting talking about targetted assassinations of American leaders.
If we want to get all philosophical about it, I think the fundamental difference is that the left sees a collective good as trumping an individual good. This is what led to the horrors of the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and other left-wing tourist destinations. Once you concede that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, you’re not far from the Gulag and hanging a few capitalists. Alll you have to do is convince yourself that it’s really for the best.
I believe the same logic, toned down an order of magnitude or so, is what leads groups like Earth First to decide that it’s okay to spike trees. It’s really for the best for everyone, and if a logger gets a chainsaw smacked back into his face, well, you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelette, right? Besides, if he hadn’t been trying to rape the earth he wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
The most peaceful group of all, by the way, would be the Libertarians. When’s the last time you heard of a Libertarian terrorist? Or Libertarians forming a human chain to prevent people from getting to work?
Give me a break. If you’re going to include the Black Panthers on the left, you have to include the KKK on the right. If you’re going to include “oodles and oodles of vandals” on the left, you’ve got to include oodles and oodles of gaybashers on the right. Et cetera.
Frankly, this entire pissing match is stupid. People are mean. Debating which group of people is meaner when using such broad categories as ‘left’ and ‘right’ is worse than useless. That does not, however, provide license to make ridiculous statements like yours.
Yea, those Black Panthers and the Unabomber have sure been hell recently! While we’re at it, let’s talk about the KKK!
Come on, Sam. You’re smarter than that. One would hardly call the Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia left-wind ideals any more than you call the banana republics the plateau of righties. One of the fundamental points of being a lefty, you see, is human rights trumping individual prosperity. None of those cases you mention has anything to do with human rights. However, in your global free market…
May I remind you that the title of this thread is, “Who’s meaner, the left of the right?” And you come right out, declare all lefties Soviets who want to hang freedom loving capitalists.
Way to show your true colors. Makes the debate lots easier, thanks.
Now you’re talking about stuff – the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, etc. – that completely died out in the mid-'70s. That’s all irrelevant – out of another time, just like Pol Pot, and the Ukraine famine, and the gulags, and Hitler’s arresting all the Communists and socialists and social-democrats in Germany, and Sukarno’s massacre of the Indonesian Communists, and the Spanish Civil War (lots of meanness on both sides in that one, BTW, but the Right was way meaner), and the massacre of thousands of Paris Communards after the government re-took the city. . . . If we’re going to tally up all the crimes and sins of all right-wing and all left-wing political movements in the whole world since the French Revolution, we’ll never finish. The topic under discussion is, which is meaner, the right or the left, at this stage in history?
BTW, the Black Panthers only talked mean. So far as I know, they never actually committed any terrorist acts, like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army* did.
*Free the oppressed people of Symbia!
Gorsnak said:
Oh, is it any more ridiculous than using abortion protestors as an example of violence on the ‘right’? Did you miss the context of what I was saying? I said, “IF you want to compare them like that, then we have to start comparing the fringe groups on the left to the abortion protestors. I don’t think you want to go there.”
And it’s nice that you singled out the two organizations I mentioned that are no longer active (which seems hardly relevant), but how about the ones that are currently active? For example, the Earth Liberation Front, which is a large terrorist organization?
So now my argument is ridiculous, but the original one about abortion terrorists is right on the mark? Or what?
Zagadka said:
Unless of course we’re talking about the right to buy what you want, the right to work for whom you want, the right to keep what you make, the right to leave an inheritance for your children, the right to…
Frankly, you’re the one who should be smarter. Go read the history of Soviet Communism. It started from the same ideals you’re talking about - “Human rights tumping individual prosperity”. The Kulaks were today’s bloodthirsty capitalists. They had the money, they had the big farms, and the Communists decided that wasn’t ‘fair’, and took their property by force. Of course, the Kulaks disagreed, and resisted. So, well, the Communists hung a few from trees in town squares. Once you’ve decided that there is a great good that you are pursuing, and that that good outweighs things like property rights, you’re not far from hanging a few capitalists to make your point. Then of course, it turns out that the apparatchiks you installed in the newly ‘liberated’ collective farms don’t know what they hell they are doing, so food production goes down. Time to expropriate a little more property. Then you can convince yourself that you need to solve the problem of unrest in the central areas due to food shortages, and well those Ukrainians are a bunch of scum anyway, so let’s ship all their food out and let them starve. All for the greater good, of course. You’re a benefactor of humanity.
Then, as production drops even further and you’re on the verge of civil war, you realize that the Church is very wealthy. It’s not fair! The people are starving, and these rich priests in their bejeweled palaces are hording the wealth! Time to expropriate that too. But before you do, you’d better demonize them a bit so the faithful don’t get too riled up…
You can go back and trace the history of Communism and other left-wing dictatorships, and see the chain of little decisions, all made for the very ideals you’re expounding, that let to genocidal horror.
Right-wing dictatorships are just as bad, but they generally don’t have the tremendous scope of the left-wing ones, because they have no grand vision (other than Hitler’s thousand year Reich, I suppose). Most right-wing dictatorships are all about a few people taking power so they can be rich and live like kings. This tends to limit how destructive they become. But when the goal is to reshape an entire country along communist ‘planned’ lines, or remaking society in a new agrarian vision like the Khmer Rouge planned, you can achieve truly spectacular levels of destruction.
And I’ll put my experience with abortion protestors against you being shouted down any day of the week. Because while you may have been shouted down, I kinda doubt that you were fearful of your life. World of difference there, don’cha think? Hysterical screamers vs. people who have threatened your life? I know which one I would prefer to deal with.
Face it, Dad. People are assholes. It has nothing to do with their political stance, it has to do with their humanity.
Oh, and whether they were beaten as children.
Nope, just about the right to medical care, freedom from prosecution, fair wages, no monopolies…
But since we’re equating “left” with “Soviet Communist” today, sure, whatever you say, spud.
Sam, Sam, Sam. On a thread about who is meaner, on a board where the only rule is “don’t insult other people”… you resort to wandering around insulting other people very easily.
I think I understand Imperial Russian history a little better than you do, Sam. How many years did you spend studying the topic at university?
Now you’re just ranting.
As was mentioned, would you like to trace the histories of every single rightist dictatorship, and you think they’ll come up smelling like roses?
Hey, just because your side are miserable failures because they are too greedy for their own good means bupkis.
But wait, let me get your reasoning straight.
Leftists are bad and evil because they are humanitarians, so their scope is larger, whereas righties are good and just, because while they may be just as evil, they are so greedy that they can’t comprehend an existence beyond their bank vault.
Riiiiiiiiight.
As far as I’m concerned, as soon as you execute someone, you stop being a leftist. But according to you, all leftists are Soviet communists whose goal in life is to execute capitalists. I begin to see where we disagree.
WTF do you mean by that?
It was a remark, see. And, since it issued forth from me, it was a smart assed remark.
See, it works like this: Sam Stone gets all worked up and makes some asinine comparison. In this case, protestors of the left vs abortion protestors. I, being me, come in and point out the idiocy inherent in comparison of whatever. Then, because I feel that time spent speaking without being a smart ass is time wasted, I cap it off with something that could be considered snarky. D’you see how that works, now?
Waste
-Proud member of IASAB (Int’l Assoc. of Smart Asses and Bastards) since 1972.
[QUOTE=Sam StoneAnd it’s nice that you singled out the two organizations I mentioned that are no longer active (which seems hardly relevant), but how about the ones that are currently active? For example, the Earth Liberation Front, which is a large terrorist organization?[/QUOTE]
Maybe you’re right, but I can’t remember the last time I heard a reported incident of ELF treespiking or monkeywrenching. That’s like, so early '90s.