And Why The Non-Left Needs To Disavow Trolling
This article by Selwyn Duke was posted on American Thinker on January 9, 2018.
I'll insert a few comments throughout.
Date: January 9, 2018
Title: Why Liberals Need to Look Down on Conservatives
By Selwyn Duke
🤔Selwyn Duke: A common theme among progressives is that conservatives aren't just wrong; they're dumb. Reagan was dumb. G.W. Bush was dumb. Trump is dumb. "Knuckle-dragger," "mouth-breather," "stupid," and "uncultured" are typical pejoratives hurled at conservatives, who apparently tend to live in trailer parks, require dental care, handle snakes, and marry first cousins.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: You forgot one, leftists also love to slap anyone on the non-left with the "troll" label.
🤔Selwyn Duke: Why, I had a liberal actor (excuse the redundancy) tell me once that I wasn't necessarily bad, just not as "evolved" as he was.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: What a typically trollish thing for him to say. And I specifically used the word 'troll' because of something said later in this article that irks/chagrins me.
🤔Selwyn Duke: (I had a great retort at the ready, but I decided just to lash him with my tail instead.)
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: 😒 You should've gone with the retort.
How about reminding him that his viewing you as some kind of subhuman was the same as the view slave-owners held about the people they oppressed?
🤔Selwyn Duke: The reason for this arrogance isn't as simple as many may think. Rather, it relates to a deep psychological phenomenon that makes it difficult for those afflicted to evolve out of the leftist primordial soup.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Haha, ah yes, the magical soup created by the big bang that atheists believe in.
🤔Selwyn Duke: I'll introduce this with a story. Many years ago, I was at an affair attended by a very chauvinistic, left-wing Greek fellow who would expound upon the superiority of Greek culture while at times demeaning the U.S. He was like the father character in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, only with an anti-American twist.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Sounds like a real charmer. Ugh.
🤔Selwyn Duke: Desiring to take him down a peg and do a little face-to-face trolling,
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Stop right there!
😠
This is where you really messed up!
🤦♀️
In case you aren't sure, trolls are spammers, bullies, bored attention-seekers, Obnoxious fandoms. Memers. Flamers. trouble-makers. The act of trolling can be any or all of the above. The leftist 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Daily Kos, and tons of fandoms are full of trolls and trolling. Hillary Clinton has trolled. In this video about furby-killers, a troll subculture that perpetuates anti-furby memes, Clinton, talking about Bernie Sanders supporters, actually used a trolling meme by saying they live in their mom's basement.
Chelsea Clinton trolled the internet by wishing the church of Satan, an atheist church, a happy new year. The leftwing article being mangled, really went out of its way not to point this out. Instead, it went out of its way to accuse the idiot who started the whole stupid Twitter drama, of being a troll.
The left really wants people on the fence to believe that trolling is a conservative thing.
Do NOT help them out by denigrating what you said here, as trolling!
🤔Selwyn Duke: I finally said with a smirk, "If all that's true, why is Greece now like a third-world country?"
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: That definitely is not trolling. It's a good counter to his blather.
🤔Selwyn Duke: (For those offended, know that I have great respect for ancient Greek accomplishments, just love moussaka, and have the physique of a Spartan hoplite.)
Ocean Elf. I don't care.
🤔Selwyn Duke: Well, I exaggerate not when saying he turned red and, with veins popping out in his neck, exclaimed, "Don't say that! Don't say that!" It was the kind of situation where you get the feeling the guy might take a swing at you.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh goodness. That is what social justice, or more like, social cleansing warriors do. They get triggered right out of their minds.
🤔Selwyn Duke: His intense reaction wasn't hard to explain. His self-esteem, his self-image, was wholly dependent upon the idea that he was a member of an elite, a superior group, with which he identified so closely that there was little to no separation in his mind between it and him. This was something deeply ingrained, part of the fabric of his being. Thus, any challenge to this idea struck directly at an intractable self-image, threatening to upset his ego's world order, which had him, through group association, at its very pinnacle.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Wow, bang on. And that describes so many of these hive mindsets, from him, to otaku, to bronies, to anti-bronies, which are more trolls BTW.
🤔Selwyn Duke: This phenomenon is common. It's often exhibited by those considering themselves part of a "master race" or any kind of special group. It can be comforting: a person may not be accomplished, intelligent, or gifted and might otherwise feel inadequate. But his group association saves his psyche's day, for whatever he is or isn't, at least he's not like those other people, those untouchables.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: No kidding, that sounds like so many fandoms with their obsessions. Case in point, otaku, anime fandom. Some of these people really lose it when they are confronted with the fact that some people do not like anime or its many fandoms.
🤔Selwyn Duke: Remember that at issue here isn't a mere intellectual appreciation. For example, I truly believe that Western culture (which did originate with ancient Greece, mind you) is superior to all others. Yet I derive no self-esteem from being a "Westerner"; it's just not part of who I am. Rather, the phenomenon in question here is a deeply emotional one.
For this reason, it's wholly resistant to intellectual appeals. You can't logically talk someone out of something irrational on which his self-worth is based. In fact, if it begins to dawn on such a person that his notions of superiority – and hence his self-image – rest on a lie, it will be intensely painful and depressing. The individual will thus have a strong incentive to rationalize away this realization.
I don't claim that every single leftist derives his self-esteem from the notion that he's part of a superior group called "liberals," nor does this phenomenon completely explain leftist resistance to reason. But it is common among devoted liberals, and it's part of why, as a group, they can't give traditionalist views a fair hearing. Doing so doesn't just threaten their ideology; it threatens who they are, their entire self-image. Any argument that may give them even an inkling that they're wrong can induce a bit of panic and is thus quickly rationalized away – often as the rambling of uneducated, un-evolved mouth-breathers who just don't know any better.
This phenomenon is exacerbated by two related factors. First, liberals are generally dysfunctional, vice-ridden people who embrace what we call liberalism because its underlying relativism and nihilism help them justify their sins. (They become the arbiters of their own "values." "Everything is gray, a matter of perspective. I have my own 'truth.'") Simultaneously, liberalism allows these virtue-bereft people to virtue-signal by paying homage to the day's fashionable values. In other words, liberals are generally morally "unaccomplished" people who often have nothing to cling to but the illusion of intellectual, and often moral, superiority.
(As to the left's actual moral inferiority, I urge you to read the excellent 2008 piece "Don't listen to the liberals – Right-wingers really are nicer people, latest research shows.")
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: The only problem with that article is that it brought up marriage and having children, as if those things should have anything to do with whether or not you're a conservative or a liberal. Marriage is not for everyone, and certainly neither, then, is having children. Procreation is a drive that's within all species. But no one or group of people should ever make any individual feel as if they aren't living the right kind of life unless they 1. get married, 2. have kids or at least try to, 3. don't get married, 4. don't have kids, or 5, have or try to get a date/bf/gf.
So let's cut out this implication that most conservatives think it's some kind of requirement for a good, happy life, to get married and have kids. That's up to the individual...
What the article should've done instead was compare and contrast conservatives and liberals by marriage VS. living together, which demo values marriage most, and which is more in favour of shacking up.
Some liberals are all for what they call "marriage" gay marriage, and gay couples acquiring children either by adoption or sperm/egg bank... It isn't so much marriage and children they oppose, but the Christian ceremony and that it's heterosexual. And anyone who is proud not to have children, surely should not have children...
"I'll have babies if you pay for them" said a lefty blogger according to the Daily Mail article.
Besides that person should never have children, she is exactly what the left keeps calling the right, and the non-left needs to stop thinking is so cool, or okay when done by one of their own - a troll! That left-wing blogger is a troll.
The DM article posts an appalling statement from Ted Turner, who, after having five kids, regrets having that many. This is because of his typical liberal environmental extremism, a religion that believes the world is overpopulated. And it is this tenant of the liberal religion, not "the right to choose" they keep pretending to be so concerned about, that is what's behind planned parenthood and movements like it. Misanthropy is at the core of leftist ideology.
The rest of the DM article was an excellent read, about lefties and their lust for money.
🤔Selwyn Duke: Second, conservatives are more likely to have authentic faith, while liberals tend be to avowed or de facto atheists, which is why church attendance is one of the best predictors of voting patterns. This has an effect. Theists may, and I hope will, recognize moral differences among people and groups; any tendency to become haughty, however, is often tempered by a divine injunction prescribing humility and the knowledge that we're all sinners, part of a fallen race. Love for others is also demanded. Atheism involves no such requirements; in fact, its correlative moral relativism or nihilism (explained here) makes "if it feels good, do it" the ultimate guide for behavior. Moreover, unable to look up at divine perfection, and with the individual becoming his own source of (pseudo-) "morality," the self is often exalted, the ego deified. As with a pharaoh believing he's a god on Earth, it then becomes easy to look down on others.
Just as liberalism is defined not by an unchanging set of doctrines, but by opposition to conservatism and what it defends – the status quo – godless liberals can judge themselves only relative to other people. And being moral train wrecks, they can't really be happy. But hey, whatever they may or mayn't be, Mr. Conservative, at least they're not you. And that's one status quo they're dead set on maintaining.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: "Mr. Conservative" That reminds me... They really dislike "Miss Conservative" and black conservatives, because by existing at all, women and black conservatives blow the left's "Conservatives are racist and misogynist!" myth/hoax narrative meme all to heck. They also hate it when their racism and sexism is pointed out for what it actually is. The way they go on and on railing against "white males", screaming for quotas of certain numbers of people with this skin tone or that gender should be here or there, and whine "It's because I'm a girl/not white!" every time they don't get their way. The way they boil everything down to make a race/gender issue out of it is, wait for it - racism and sexism.
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