An unflinching stare into the cold, dismal heart of leftism

When you have five jobs (print journalist, broadcast journalist, music performer, music instructor, university lecturer), the pace of contemporary life presses upon you. As you readers know, I am fairly diligent about posting regularly to LITD, but much that I'd like to dive into curls ephemerally upward into the ether of unrealized intentions.

I have a fairly full plate again today, but this one can't wait. It requires our immediate attention.

The Left gets uglier by the hour.

It's obvious in a number of recent national-scope developments, but for the first time in a while, I've had the grim opportunity to look directly in the face of leftism and see its full horror.

Let's start with the stack of headlines in the upper left - apropos, no? - corner of today's Drudge Report:

SUSPECT TRIES STABBING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE WITH SWITCHBLADE...
CAMPAIGN SIGN USED TO FEND OFF...
COPS: CURSED PRESIDENT BEFORE VIOLENCE...
MASS SHOOTING TWEET THREATENS TRUMP HOTEL EVENT...
Secret Service probes actress calling for assassination...
WYOMING GOP OFFICE SET ON FIRE...
Conservative Columnist Goes Into Hiding After Rape, Death Threats...
SCALISE WARNS: LEFT INCITING... 

Read each story. Unless you're a leftist yourself, your heart will break for the current state of humankind.

Let's take the D.C. McAllister story as an example. (There's a lot more to present, so in the interest of respecting your time, one of these is going to have to suffice for this portion of this post.)

She tweeted this:

At the root of #abortion hysteria is women’s unhinged desire for irresponsible sex. Sex is their god. Abortion is their sacrament. It’s abhorrent as women have flung themselves from the heights of being the world’s civilizing force to the muck and mire of dehumanizing depravity.

The Left reacted with this:

"They are threats outside of Twitter, stating they know where I live," McAllister said. "Threats of rape and strangling. I spoke to the police. I am on home watch."
"My children are very frightened," she added.

On Sunday, she went public about the threats. "I am facing legit death & rape threats because I have dared to call out women who are hysterical about abortion and to challenge them to be responsible and not to elevate sex to the point that they’re willing to kill human life to avoid their responsibilities. How sick is that?" McAllister tweeted. 

Some people responded with sympathy ... to the person making the death and rape threats!
"People don't react well to your extremism," a user named Monika D. responded.

And have you heard about the phone messages (and a letter) being left for Senator Collins, in an effort to pressure her to vote against Kavanaugh?

One caller on Friday, September 7 at 6:11 p.m., left a message saying, in part: "If you care at all about women's choice, vote 'no' on Kavanaugh. Don't be a dumb bitch. F*** you also."

In a second voice mail, the caller calls Collins "a feckless, feckless, feckless woman standing there letting Trump and his appointees steal the right to choose what women do with their bodies. And you stood by, 'Oh, I don't know. I'm so naive.' F*** you. F*** you."

And in a letter sent to her Portland, Maine office, the writer on August 9 says that "EVERY waitress who serves you is going to spit in your food, and that's if you're lucky, you f***ing c***! Think of that every meal." 

Honest, this post is not going to focus solely on abortion, but because it is such a fundamental level on which the leftist worldview plays out, we'll continue to look at its presence in the latest uptick of progressive darkness.

So let us turn to Kamala Harris's histrionics during the Kavanaugh hearings, and her remark that he wants to be on the Supreme Court so he can "punish women." Not only is that a display of infantile outlandishness, it is an appeal to the rage against nature and the architecture of the universe of the same sort that has made for the transgenderism fad. The reason feminism puts abortion front and center among its concerns is resentment at being the gender that houses people while they gestate. That anatomical fact in turn makes for all kinds of variances in life choices and resultant societal outcomes from the male sex. Of course, the other way of viewing being equipped with a uterus is to see it as a sacred charge, but that would entail recognizing God as the designer of the arrangement, something that absolutely must not enter into the discussion, as we'll examine shortly.

So, in the leftist formulation, the only alternative to "punishing women" is to use government's monopoly on the coercive use of force to make taxpayers finance the ripping of unborn people's limbs from their torsos. Oh, and classified it as "reproductive care," as Duke University law professor Jedediah Purdy does at the New York Times this morning:

Economic citizenship also has important meaning for abortion rights. All liberal justices support the freedom to choose, but it is worth much less to poor women far from services, as many are in the South and West. Decades ago a divided court ruled that Medicaid and other federal programs can refuse to fund abortion while paying for live births and other reproductive care. This is a breach of the usual principle that government may not penalize people for exercising a constitutional right. (Imagine student loans only for those who agree not to vote.) It is time to reopen this question.

Human life is utterly expendable to leftists.

The feigned pity for particular demographics that has long been a core feature of leftism has come into even sharper relief as leftism has become exponentially uglier. Consider this paragraph from Jill Filipovic's CNN piece today, one of many capitalizing on the approach of Hurricane Florence to sound the alarm about the utter fiction that it the storm is being caused by human advancement:

Like nearly everything else in America, the bad outcomes of this setup fall along racial and class lines, borne disproportionately by those who already have the fewest resources. People who are wealthy or even stable and middle class can afford to think ahead and buy insurance for their homes; those who live month to month -- a vast swath of the American population -- may not be able to afford it. Or, more likely, they may be renting a place to begin with and will find themselves homeless after a storm.

And those without reliable transportation will have a harder time fleeing; if they do manage to leave, they're less likely to be driving their own vehicle, which means leaving more of their possessions behind. Imagine what this is like.

Those with the power of education, money and time can navigate insurance bureaucracies to ensure they are made something close to whole when the waters recede. Those who don't have those privileges will inevitably lose out.

Really let that phrase I've put in boldface sink in. "Can afford to think ahead." In the leftist worldview, there is this fixed class of people called "the disadvantaged," and their situation is an inescapable cycle of needing some kind of material circumstances to be able to take charge of their lives, and never attaining those circumstances as a result. Per Filipovic, some people can't afford to think ahead and need a collectivist effort on the part of society as a whole to do their forward thinking for them.

Now, on to the level of recent personal experience.

I'd been really proud of myself for resisting the temptation to weigh in on smart-ass hard-left Facebook posts for a long time. Alas, the other day, I succumbed. Somebody had posted a video - a really lame video, by the way, shot through with flimsy arguments and attempts to compensate for with inane attempts at humor - featuring some lady "refuting" what she claims are conservatives' main objections to socialism. They aren't even the main objections. She cited shortages of goods and services and dull cultural uniformity, but those are mere outcomes of socialism's core flaw: the crushing of freedom.

By the time I joined the comment thread exchange, a lot of the predictable angles had already come up. One was the idea that America has always had public infrastructure, i.e. government involvement in citizens' lives.

Here's my first weigh-in:

Here's the thing about that "people helping each other" business. Americans have always been a very civic-minded and charitable people. DeTocqueville noticed it when he visited. Church groups, community associations, nonprofit agencies have always been involved in that kind of outreach. But government is the entity in our society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That's why the Framers of the Constitution sought to keep its powers very limited. Any time it takes citizens' money, it's a coercive act by definition.

And that's why the business about roads doesn't hold up. Government does have some proper functions. We obviously can't have anarchy. But everybody drives on roads. That's a proper function of government. But redistribution - taking Citizen A's money to meet the specific needs or wants of Citizen B - i.e., me paying for some kid's school lunch out in Montana - is not a proper use of government resources.

Here's what that deteriorated into:

But everybody needs to eat. Why are ok paying for Road you will never drive on, yet you protest feeding a human you’ll never meet? I believe you value asphalt over life.

So I responded thusly:

The roads are for any and all of us. The kid half-way across the country needs his lunch paid for - according to somebody, anyway - because of his and his family's particular circumstances - that is, the results of the choices they've made as free individuals.

From there the deterioration accelerated:

That kid had a choice? What choices did you make when you were 7 years old in the 2nd grade about paying for lunch?

and . . .

Haha...this is so much BS Barney. You’ve just disproven your own statement about how charitable this country is! I agree. It’s not. Your arguments are the reason capitalism or any economic system doesn’t work. You have to be coerced to feed some starving kid. Like trying to shove a camel through the eye of that needle. First defund the military, it does more harm than good...no problem feeding the world napalm and torture. Just that damn hungry kid keeps inconveniencing us with his pseudo-sobs. This is where the real charity in our country is. A homeless guy would split his sandwich with that kid.

Then the rank falsehoods started entering into the proceedings:

We have never been charitable. The first thing the first Congress did was to declare that worthless continental script could be redeemed dollar for dollar. George Washington and others in politics who knew had riders mounted ready to head west to redeem that same script 100 to 1. before word got out, then return it to Washington. That was the beginning of charity in our country toward veterans who had sacrificed. How do you get more uncharitable from there? Acharitable? Non-charitable?

Redolent of Filipovic's feigned pity and assumption that being rich and poor are fixed states and that people not fortunate enough to be of the former variety need government to run their lives, one of the commenters offered this:

Barney Quick if all Americans are as uncharitable as you appear to be then we don't live in the charitable fantasy world you mention in an earlier comment. You would begrudge a child "halfway across the country" a lunch? I'm happy to pay for a kid's lunch, halfway across the country or on the other side of the planet, despite all the "bad" choices the kid's parents may have made, like for example, being born not rich. And by the way, if you had a lick of sense or civic duty you would want that kid to be well fed and mentally alert enough to do well in school so that she has a chance to learn how to think critically and inform herself and be a good citizen. But fuck all that I guess if it means me having to pay a dollar more per year in taxes. Right? Yeah, we've always been a charitable country alright.

Me again:

If I’m going to contribute to the kid’s lunch, it will be of my own volition through private sector means. It’s not right for government to force me to at gun point

The response:

Barney Quick which means the kid will starve because you think he deserves to be poor because of choices she or her parents have made. But I understand your christian perspective; it's exactly like when Jesus multiplied the loaves of bread and said, "Don't give give any to the poor! They've made bad choices!" (from the Gospel According to Ayn.)

And a reiteration of the falsehood that Americans are not charitable, couched as such a sweeping generalization that an attempt tp refute it would be like nailing Jello to the wall:

Barney Quick But it IS right for the government to do so, because you don’t send that child money or bologna or even think about him or her, just like most of the people in this country. Do you know how many kids die of hunger in America each year...ready? Hardly any, because we steal your money and feed them. Not because you and the Koch Brothers donate old cheese to them.

The thread branched out into several sub-threads. Throughout them all, as you see, I kept my participation on the level of principles

This was offered:

 My main disagreement with Barney's line of thought is that items like education, roads, fire, police, etc. are thought to be for the public good and I believe we should look at other areas that would also be for the public good. The 'every man for himself' argument is part of the reason the US is far behind other countries in health care quality, personal happiness, income equality, and ahead in medical bankruptcies.

. . . to which I responded:

Health is something experienced by individuals, not by the public.

It is morally wrong for government to take Citizen A's money - at gunpoint; remember government takes it from us by coercion - to address the particular situation of Citizen B.

The particular person with whom I was engaging here was one of the few who was likewise trying to keep things on the level of principles and ideas, and for that I respect her:

Without individuals having good health, then you don't have a healthy workforce... just one reason. I've never had anyone show up with guns demanding taxes to pay for services that I've used, whether roads, public schools, police officers or firemen.

 . . . although she was wrong, which I pointed out to her:

It is not government's concern whether the "workforce" (an awfully vague and broad term) is healthy or not - particularly at the federal level.

This comment of mine catalyzed a 106-comment sub-thread:

The thing to remember is that moves toward universal health care are predicated on the notion that health care is some kind of right. It is impossible by definition for health care to be a right. And let's not construct the false dichotomy that posits "privilege" as the alternative of what it is. Health care is just a broad category of services and products. That's all.

As I say, the "arguments" leftists trot out in these situations are utterly predictable, so it was inevitable that someone would try to claim that the Declaration's mention of the pursuit of happiness necessitated a collevisist approach to health care.

Me in response to that:

Happiness is a subjective thing. Also the right is to its pursuit, not to having it guaranteed. We all have conditions affecting how we’re able to pursue our happiness. For some it’s serious illness.

This led to a line of debate I actually relish whenever it comes up: what a right is and is not. I was accused of making up my definition of rights (actual way it was put: "You can tell by the gross inconsistencies that he's making up shit as he goes along"), to which I responded:

Actually, it’s the definition distilled from the great thinkers on the subject of human freedom: John Locke, Frederic Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Frederic Hayek, etc.

It finally got to this level:

Barney Quick I would think that with two degrees in higher education you would know that citing your own made up fictional narratives as evidence is pretty lame shit, not to mention narcissistic.

Me:

You can tell when hard leftists have run out of gas. Out come the ad hominem attacks. Happens every time.

The response:

Barney Quick in your case it should have happened a lot sooner. You've been called out by more than one person on your innumerable instances of flawed logic and unsupported claims, and now you're name calling as if "leftists" is a magic incantation that magically and automatically shuts down your opponents' argument. Talk about running out of gas; quit projecting. Provide some real, credible evidence.

Then came the unveiling of the true nature of what these people want to impose on the world:

 I think Barney is still an 1870s cowboy who wants his individual freedom. I concur. Me too. Unfortunately there are too many damned people on the planet for that to work anymore.  I’m afraid we’re living in the past and what the millennials see is that individual rights are secondary to the rights of individuals, and they are willing to make this sacrifice for the good of the species and wo/mankind. I am too. Now we are teetering on the edge of a fascist totalitarian country led by silent oligarchs who rule with $$ and buy politicians and presidents...trump AND Hillary! So is there coercion in taxes and government and education and healthcare? Absolutely. The choice is: do you want this mess to be ruled by the likes of trump kissing oligarchs’ asses (this is where Putin and other Russian money launderers and power brokers and others come in) or do you want to trust voters and the American people to decide where the money they take right out of our pockets, yes, through coercion, is to be spent? I can only see one side of that. I sure as hell don’t want the Koch Brothers and the Eric Prince/DeVoss and the Clinton families and the owner of Amazon Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Soros making these decisions for me. They are now. And our money is going to the rich and the war machine. This is what Bernie Sanders is trying to say. Social democracy puts these decisions in the hands of the people for good or bad and with coercion. But right now in America it’s our only choice.

And I was the one getting accused of making cartoonishly sweeping unsubstantiated generalizations!

At one point the subject turned to where rights come from. One of these leftists kept talking about legislatures creating rights, and I of course set the record straight by asserting that rights only come from God.

Here's the bone-chilling response I got to that:

Barney Quick 
Rights come from God? Which one?
What creative fiction, a/k/a "theology", do you subscribe to?

"We know, well we understand, that mighty God is a living man.
You can fool some people sometime..."

This is the 2018 Left in post-America, folks.

It is not wrong to characterize them as jackboots.

They hate freedom, God, common sense, and human dignity. They're historically and economically illiterate.

And they are fiercely determined to take this country over.

Given the opportunity, they will trample you and me into the dust.

One last note: Trumpism is not the antidote.