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ORIGINAL: BoscoX

quote:

ORIGINAL: vincentML

Historically, there is a case to be made to lay responsibility on the West.

Bingo

You nailed her reasoning perfectly

Muslims slaughter thousands of innocent civilians to please Allah, leftist trash instinctively blames America first

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ORIGINAL: heavyblinker

quote:

ORIGINAL: BoscoX

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ORIGINAL: heavyblinker

America has killed half a million in Iraq alone since 2004.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24547256

Terrorists are amateurs.

From your article:

Iraq study estimates war-related deaths at 461,000

Not people "America has killed"

People who, for the most part, Muslim terrorists slaughtered

And they counted heart attacks and suicides and honor killings etc too - every naturally occurring death, they attributed to the liberation effort

How many people would Saddam have slaughtered by now? He was responsible for the slaughter of nearly a million prior to the Iraqi liberation

Yeah, it's not like America started the war or anything.
And I guess that we will never know how many Saddam would have slaughtered.

Those dead people should be happy that they were killed as a result of American actions as opposed to Saddam's actions.

quote:

ORIGINAL: heavyblinker

No, you stupid worthless piece of shit.

The point is that you in your unfathomable ignorance focus exclusively on what Islamic terrorists have done as if all of that death is such an atrocity, and then completely ignore, forgive or otherwise justify what the US has contributed to the conflict.

If all the killing is what makes Islam so evil, why doesn't it also make America evil?

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ORIGINAL: BoscoX

quote:

ORIGINAL: heavyblinker

No, you stupid worthless piece of shit.

The point is that you in your unfathomable ignorance focus exclusively on what Islamic terrorists have done as if all of that death is such an atrocity, and then completely ignore, forgive or otherwise justify what the US has contributed to the conflict.

If all the killing is what makes Islam so evil, why doesn't it also make America evil?

We kill the killers.

We bully the bullies.

We wear the white hats. That's why.

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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ORIGINAL: CreativeDominant

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

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ORIGINAL: CreativeDominant

Leaving the left

Before 9/11, I was liberal-left.
After 9/11, in the winter of 2001-2, like thousands - maybe millions - of others, I converted to libertarian-right.
Above all else, I was shocked by the left's response to 9/11. I was so naive as to think that the left I had grown up with hated fascism, especially religious fascism, and would be the first to join a war against it.
Instead they have emerged as the war's opponents, often with open sympathy for the fascists.
Secondly, I was impressed by the neo-conservative right's analysis of the problem (that it was not caused by poverty, for example), their understanding of human nature and of the mind of the enemy. Leaving the left is not about "selling out" to mortgages and money, or anything so mundane. It is about growing up and understanding better unchanging human nature and the bleak tragedy of the world.

So this person decided to turn right because the left opposed the war in Iraq.

15 years on, and with the benefit of hindsight, guess who turned out to be correct? There were no WMDs, Iraq is in ruins, hundreds of thousands have died, trillions have gone down the gurgler, what's left of Iraq is now a province of Iran, the entire disaster spawned the hideous thugs of IS ..... and everyone with a functioning brain now agrees that the neo-con-inspired invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated catastrophe.

If this person had any intellectual honesty they would admit that their decision turned out to be the wrong one.

Actually, it wasn't the opposition to the war in Iraq that did it for her, it was the left's blaming of America for the 9/11 attack and it's support for the fanaticism that perpetrated it. Nice spin on her reason, though.

Historically, there is a case to be made to lay responsibility on the West.

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ORIGINAL: BoscoX

Dr. Danusha V. Goska was a lifelong liberal who “could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist.”

Her fantastic column, “Top Ten Reasons I Am No Longer a Leftist,” details how and why her philosophies changed.


From DownTrend:

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.

I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It’s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors’ meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said “Yes” or “No.”

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. X.” Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists’ announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned. His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X’s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others’ pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this — “Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.” But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

More

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ORIGINAL: BoscoX

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ORIGINAL: heavyblinker

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ORIGINAL: BoscoX

quote:

ORIGINAL: heavyblinker

America has killed half a million in Iraq alone since 2004.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24547256

Terrorists are amateurs.

From your article:

Iraq study estimates war-related deaths at 461,000

Not people "America has killed"

People who, for the most part, Muslim terrorists slaughtered

And they counted heart attacks and suicides and honor killings etc too - every naturally occurring death, they attributed to the liberation effort

How many people would Saddam have slaughtered by now? He was responsible for the slaughter of nearly a million prior to the Iraqi liberation

Yeah, it's not like America started the war or anything.
And I guess that we will never know how many Saddam would have slaughtered.

Those dead people should be happy that they were killed as a result of American actions as opposed to Saddam's actions.

America didn't start the war, Saddam Hussein did when he invaded Kuwait and then violated his cease-fire agreement with coalition forces

Hillary voted for war too, btw, as did most Democrats. Bubba The Rapist Clinton bombed Iraq as president

The Iraq war was used by leftists to attack president Bush. They screamed "Nazi" and "Bushitler" then when Obama was doing the bombing they put their hands in their pockets and looked away

Now leftists want war with Russia...

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ORIGINAL: CreativeDominant

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

ORIGINAL: CreativeDominant

Leaving the left

Before 9/11, I was liberal-left.
After 9/11, in the winter of 2001-2, like thousands - maybe millions - of others, I converted to libertarian-right.
Above all else, I was shocked by the left's response to 9/11. I was so naive as to think that the left I had grown up with hated fascism, especially religious fascism, and would be the first to join a war against it.
Instead they have emerged as the war's opponents, often with open sympathy for the fascists.
Secondly, I was impressed by the neo-conservative right's analysis of the problem (that it was not caused by poverty, for example), their understanding of human nature and of the mind of the enemy. Leaving the left is not about "selling out" to mortgages and money, or anything so mundane. It is about growing up and understanding better unchanging human nature and the bleak tragedy of the world.

So this person decided to turn right because the left opposed the war in Iraq.

15 years on, and with the benefit of hindsight, guess who turned out to be correct? There were no WMDs, Iraq is in ruins, hundreds of thousands have died, trillions have gone down the gurgler, what's left of Iraq is now a province of Iran, the entire disaster spawned the hideous thugs of IS ..... and everyone with a functioning brain now agrees that the neo-con-inspired invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated catastrophe.

If this person had any intellectual honesty they would admit that their decision turned out to be the wrong one.

Actually, it wasn't the opposition to the war in Iraq that did it for her, it was the left's blaming of America for the 9/11 attack and it's support for the fanaticism that perpetrated it. Nice spin on her reason, though.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Marini


I have been disappointed with the "Left" for a VERY long time, and did not need this article. to "enlighten" me.


The question is, will or could the "right" fill the void for those of us disillusioned with the "Left"?
For many, not all of us, the answer is NO.
Being fed up with the "LEFT", does not make ME, want to join the "RIGHT".

So many of us are in a conundrum these days, stuck right in the middle, not wanting to go "Left" and not wanting to go "Right".

May I live to see a viable 3rd party, or some other REAL viable WINNABLE alternatives.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

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ORIGINAL: CreativeDominant

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

ORIGINAL: CreativeDominant

Leaving the left

Before 9/11, I was liberal-left.
After 9/11, in the winter of 2001-2, like thousands - maybe millions - of others, I converted to libertarian-right.
Above all else, I was shocked by the left's response to 9/11. I was so naive as to think that the left I had grown up with hated fascism, especially religious fascism, and would be the first to join a war against it.
Instead they have emerged as the war's opponents, often with open sympathy for the fascists.
Secondly, I was impressed by the neo-conservative right's analysis of the problem (that it was not caused by poverty, for example), their understanding of human nature and of the mind of the enemy. Leaving the left is not about "selling out" to mortgages and money, or anything so mundane. It is about growing up and understanding better unchanging human nature and the bleak tragedy of the world.

So this person decided to turn right because the left opposed the war in Iraq.

15 years on, and with the benefit of hindsight, guess who turned out to be correct? There were no WMDs, Iraq is in ruins, hundreds of thousands have died, trillions have gone down the gurgler, what's left of Iraq is now a province of Iran, the entire disaster spawned the hideous thugs of IS ..... and everyone with a functioning brain now agrees that the neo-con-inspired invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated catastrophe.

If this person had any intellectual honesty they would admit that their decision turned out to be the wrong one.

Actually, it wasn't the opposition to the war in Iraq that did it for her, it was the left's blaming of America for the 9/11 attack and it's support for the fanaticism that perpetrated it. Nice spin on her reason, though.

It appears that you are having reading comprehension issues. As I have bolded above, the author states:
"Above all else, I was shocked by the left's response to 9/11. I was so naive as to think that the left I had grown up with hated fascism, especially religious fascism, and would be the first to join a war against it.
Instead they have emerged as the war's opponents, often with open sympathy for the fascists.

The author makes it crystal clear that opposition to the Iraq war was her primary motivation "Above all else ... " she was shocked by what she saw as the Left's response to 9/11. She was of the view that the left should have been "the first to join a war against it (religious fascism)" rather than oppose Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Sorry but the left's principled and with the benefit of hindsight, absolutely justified and correct opposition to the invasion of Iraq was her primary motivation, as she makes absolutely clear to anyone reading her words with an unjaundiced eye.

Her secondary motivation - "Secondly, I was impressed by the neo-conservative right's analysis of the problem - is just as indefensible as the first. The neo-con analysis has been abandoned by many who advanced it after 9/11 - having seen the appalling consequences of acting on the basis of that analysis - and is now considered totally discredited by just about everyone except hard and looney right wingers.

As this disastrous military adventure was her primary motivation, then she should be revising her views in the light of subsequent experience proving her reading of the situation to be completely wrong.

quote:

ORIGINAL: heavyblinker

Leftists are often critical of each other

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ORIGINAL: BoscoX

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ORIGINAL: heavyblinker

Leftists are often critical of each other

Leftists march in lockstep to the orders of their 1% overlords George Soros and the Amazon Post

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Pedestrians walk past a Whole Foods Market just down the street from the headquarters of Amazon in Seattle. Amazon, already a powerhouse in a number of markets, will bind its customers even more closely once it completes its $13.7 billion bid for the organic grocery store Whole Foods. (Elaine Thompson/The Associated Press)