Polemic®

When this site was launched years ago, it was because the ideas of the left were getting tired and needed to be reinvented for the 21st century. Scratch your head and try and remember what the left was all about 10 years ago.

I remember Amy Goodman venting her spleen against Bill Clinton for bombing Sudan. World peace was something that could be advocated for in the 90s. Now it’s a joke. I think peace is a high priority, but people who think that just because it worked for Ghandi against the British and MLK against the Americans think it will always work everywhere are just as incorrect and unscientific as people who think war will solve any solution.

That is the problem with beliefs. They need to be reexamined if you are going to hold them in good faith. If they fail, drop them. In the 90s, possibly 15% of the Republican agenda was more reality based than faith based, and in the last 10 years, probably 75% of the liberal agenda was reality based. But that’s not 100%.

Another big issue in the 90s was the environment. Not just global warming. The whole environment. Again, that was possible because the climate in the 90s wasn’t an idiocracy. But the belief of many on the left was that you had to be a vegan that used no electricity not to be scum. Most of those people forgot about the old liberal idea of feeding hungry people. 

This sounds like a bunch of right-wing concern trolling. It would be that if it was just rhetoric, all fake. But the truth is, you have to keep the goal in sight and reexamine your beliefs. I believe we can feed ourselves keep the lights on and not destroy the planet. I’m a vegetarian, but I don’t think meat is murder, even if our current means of producing meat are broken.

I also think we can defend ourselves without waging war for sport.

But looking back over 6+ years of blog archives, I noticed how after Iraq I stopped writing about ideas as much, and more about politics and opposition to Republicans.

When I was walking precincts for Obama, no one at the office asked me what kind of car I had (though it was a Prius), whether I ate meat (though I am a vegetarian), or whether I’m religious. That was because we all banded together to bring home this last minute win, which may actually have been too late—we’ll see.

In the late 90s, though, I was cross examined for ideological purity when I went to meetings like that. I usually left.

I guess it’s time for me to part company with the activist left again, because they’re already becoming a force for division, already launching a fusillade against Obama.

They are really mad because the are being shown that they aren’t as powerful as they pretended to be—just like the ideological right often was. This is childish. They think they deserve an equal return on their investment. No one in politics gets that. You’re lucky to get pennies on the dollar and are more likely to have your dollars simply taken.

But, like children, if you capitulate to their demand for a toy, they play with it for a while and then just want another new one, when other kids get nothing.

Well, kids, we got the equivalent of a new bike, a puppy, a Nintendo, and a treehouse all in one day and we’re mad that we didn’t also get a remote control car.

Seriously—if you give up this easy, get out of politics. There is no “when are we done” or “when do we get our reward.” There is no end game, no teleology. It will go on forever.