Forgot to put up the link. Oh, and I really relate to this when Tim Allen said, “I’m really an anarchist. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do. Period.” It’s a bit of a joke, but I frequently feel that.
Talking about cognitive biases. I’m a psychologist, so I can diagnose myself here. Reactance bias. “The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.” I suspect a lot of Libertarian minded people like me bristle at anything that looks like authoritarianism, or an attempt to restrict freedom.
This is why I’ve always liked writing my own programs in the gym. I can indulge my inner anarchist there. wink.
Their reactions to Castro has put me in a bit of a rage. To me the reactions make it quite clear that they care far more about power than human rights. Human rights and justice are just a game to be played. That’s why they’ve worked to restrict freedom of speech on college campuses, not to mention due process. It’s about indoctrination and seizing power by slowly whittling away at opposition and rights. Did you notice how the Republican Party damned near disintegrated over Trump? Hillary was crowned and even the suppposed man of the people, Sanders, fell right into line. Party before country, power above all else. Sacrifice the working class because that’s what Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Che did.
The romanticizing of Fidel’s Cuba is hard for me to comprehend. I put up a short quote in my Freedom and Dissent thread that you might like. This is the kind of thing I want my kids to understand.
There is a race on the left, to see how stupid you can be and still be taken seriously. It’s astounding how stupid you can be and be taken seriously.
The mainstream media is of course complicit, but they seem to be choking on their own vomit these days.
All I keep hearing about is how he provided free education and healthcare to Cuban masses (which is funny because their effective tax rate is 99%). Getting a free flu shot doesn’t help me much if I starve and can’t openly speak my mind without fear of losing my freedom or even my life.
I saw an interview with Trey and Matt once where they said they were agnostic. They basically said that religions are absurd, but to say that we are all here for no reason and there is nothing beyond this life is equally absurd. It’s one of the things I love about that show. It’s hard to put them in a category because they tell everyone to fuck themselves.
@ Castro love. The logic is, Cuba would have been really great if America hadn’t hit them with the trade embargo. Any poverty over there is our fault, cause socialism is good. But, we should boycott North Carolina for their TG restroom law.
Note. I don’t like the NC law either. Just pointing out the lefty amnesia with regards to human rights abuses in Cuba.
I tend to think the lefties don’t really comprehend consequences to policy, unintended or otherwise. Friedman said something along the lines of policy shouldn’t be judged by its intent but by its results.
Most of my lefty friends seem to not comprehend this and fail to acknowledge (or blatantly ignore) any damage done by a policy but praise any semblance of success. They really can’t (or won’t) see the forest for the trees.
For all of Cuba’s terrible standard of living, routine violations of human rights, etc. a lot of my lefty friends blatantly ignore any of that to praise the 98% literacy rate (as if one can believe any statistic that comes out of that regime) and universal health “care” (while completely ignoring the quality of health care administered).
Me and my ethics/philosophy professor got into a spat about this. In it I used the spread of communism and the resulting death toll and cost of quality of living that went along with it as an argument against weighing policy on its intention rather than results.
When faced with the facts of millions of lives lost and incomparable standards of living, he pulled the “I write the grades” card.
Yeah, he did. He even acknowledged it later in private. Me and him clashed hard over a couple of subjects. I even ended up in the Deans office because I was very upsetting and disruptive to some of the other students when I disassembled a hypothetical situation and reconstructed it as it actually happens in real life.
How long ago was this? What school/area of the country did you attend?
I went to a UMass school and only had one professor that wasn’t open to any kind of respectful discourse (he was my History of Labor prof so, I’m pretty sure he was as red as they get). All of my econ professors (that I was aware of) leaned to the free market side with one or two exceptions. Shit, one of them even reminded me of Sowell in his demeanor and the way he talked (if Sowell had a Jamaican accent).
Yeah, the education is tantamount to making sure the people can read the stupid communist propaganda put out by the government. A lie often enough told becomes the truth, which is why you see the wide discrepancy between cuban expats and imprisoned Cubans stuck on the island.
You get used to what you know, and they had an entire generation grow up being told that the shit they eat is filet mignon and every misery they have is because of the U.S. not their dear leader, who lived like a king in lavish luxury. And you can bet the dear leader got the best healthcare available.
Did you ever ask them if they would be willing to emigrate to Cuba? Cuba would gladly take on American defectors, it’s great propaganda for them.
It’s amazing to me that these people would defend these tyrants, who if they lived under said tyrant would be imprisoned for most of the ideology they hold; if not murdered.
Most of my professors, if I could tell leaned left, but didn’t push it on us. I guess they have gotten more bold over the years. We were always allowed to have open and lively discussions.
My most conservative professor was my poly-sci teacher. He was from central Africa and he was black. And when I say black I don’t mean his race, his actual skin color was dark-black. Prior to him I had never actually seen a ‘black’ person. I have seen brown people we call black, but never a dark-black person.
I like him, even though most of my class didn’t. He knew what oppression looked like in person, hence he leaned more conservative than his colleges, I am reckoning from experience. He talked a little about his history, but he didn’t give too much away. Seems to me he had seen some pretty horrible shit.
Thats where it gets tricky. Other students were getting agitated when we would go at it because they couldn’t distinguish the difference between arguing an idea and attacking a person. It was probably also difficult to depart from the standard “Professor tells you something and you learn that.” format that kids are brought up in.
The SJW/crybully thing demonstrates that lack very clearly. Those kids just can’t distinguish the difference between an ideological difference and a personal attack. It all goes straight to personal attack.