1: There is a slight concern that I have fallen into the trap of the ideologue. I read a lot, but it’s become for its own sake. On politics, I have largely lost even the lurkers since I now make a point of saying “read the whole thing before you mouth off”. But that’s politics, and that’s probably the only time the anyone asks anything especially taxing of anyone, especially the progressive politico. God knows their ideology doesn’t demand anything of them. 

This makes strengthening one’s views rather difficult. We only rise, individually and culturally, to the level of the toughest opponents. Individually and culturally, this makes a “cancelling” views we personally don’t have the courage and intelligence to contend with a “solution” that makes the canceller weaker.. Jonathan Haidt has done a great deal of research into this, the results of which gave us “The Colliding of the American Mind” (a brilliant reference to Alan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind”) and “The Righteous Mind”.

The only place where it is impossible to strengthen one’s views through the strength of the opponent’s argument is in the realm of gun control. In every major case, it is clear that the left simply does not believe in self-defense. If they do, the standard for justified use of force is that you are allowed one shot, in highly specific circumstances, after having run through a checklist. A checklist that takes 15 seconds to run through and you have less than 5 seconds to react.

That’s not even a mischaracterization, at this point. I saw it twice with the Minnesota ICE case, and I still remember the Rittenhouse arguments. On the (oddly comfortable) progressive/activist left, the self-defense guidelines are written by people who haven’t read a pamphlet on life-threatening situations and can’t conceive of why someone wouldn’t be stone cold rational -in- that situation. In the last dustup since the shootingI have seen self-defense “standards” such as the defender being allowed one bullet maximum, and on a sperate thread, the idea that a car isn’t being used as a deadly weapon until it actually hits you. I don’t care what it was -designed- to do, I care about what it -can- do. Anything -can- become a threat, deliberately or not. Most car accidents are not, for example, deliberate. Most negligent firearm discharges are not deliberate. But if someone dies in either situation, it still counts.

2: Activists speak almost exclusively in terms of what they’re against and who the reason for our current malaise is. In order to keep their jobs, and keep the anger oven warm, they only in vague terms about what they’re for and how it will functionally be achieved. And yet, those who most often talk of virtue speak of things they don’t appear to posses. Meanwhile, the “terminally online” crowd has grown to include the older set that is less likely to be able to determine a reliable source from AI slop. Meanwhile, those who -are- technologically literate are coming out of the educational system barely reading above a 6^th-grade level.

And somehow, some way, this stupid, directionless, perpetually angry people is going to create something good by themselves. They can’t define good, they don’t have the personality to bring people to their side. They -do- have rules, though. However, those change at a moment’s notice and are retroactive. So it is that we have a revolving door of cancellations, this is what the Left is known for and it is becoming a larger problem on the right.

Suppressing instead of dealing with views one disagrees with is part of the reason insane views like MAGA’s hatred of the “other du jour”, if you will and the progressive moral zealotry that has existed for at least the last decade has managed to take hold. And now we, as N.T. Wright observes, do not know how to properly deal with this evil since we’ve never really taken the time to understand the concept. He writes: 

“It may be that one of the reasons we love the sea is because, like watching a horror movie, we can observe its enormuous power and relentless energy from a safe distance…We would, of course, find our relight turning quickly to horror if, as we stood watching the waves, a tsunamie were suddenly to come crashing down on us…The sea and the movie, seen from a safe distance, can be a way of saying to ourselves that yes, evil maye well-exist-there may be chaos out there somewhere- but at least, thank goodness, we are all right. And perhaps this is saying “evil may well exist in ourselves as well-there may be forces of evil and chaos deep inside us of which we are at best only subliminally aware—but they are under control; the sea wall will hold, the copes will get the gangsters in the end.”

When this comfort and optimism is threatened by the real world, it reveals the three step program to tribalism. First, we ignore evil except when it hits us in the face. And we each have different definitions of evil, usually meant to maintain that the evil is mostly or entirely in THOSE people and THOSE ideas. Meanwhile, we are so clean that if we do problems (which we’ll insincerely allude to) they are comparatively so small that we can deal with at a later date once we’ve saved America/the world. And we’ll definitely admit to and fix those problems, don’t you worry, in, as we all know from the lockdown era, “two more weeks”.

The second stage is that we are surprised by this punch in the nose, which leads to the third stage; immature and dangerous responses. This includes cutting off family members over online arguments, insisting that our version of authoritarian government (MAGA or the lockdown cult and the moral majority of the left) is acceptable because it just is, the cancel culture the left made a calling card which has been co-opted by the right, endless moral proclamations made by people who supported things that knee-cap their moral credibility at most two years prior and so on and the endless use of “what ‘our side’ did is bad, BUT” as a way to kind of concede without conceding.

And somehow, a better world is going to come from that.

3: Just because history has one shining element of success that those who haven’t read a book since high school know about does not mean the act itself is in the same vein. When discussing the no-stakes uselessness of today’s protests and activism, one is likely to hear something about  truly successful protest movements like the Civil Rights movement and….the Civil Rights movement, and hope that the perpetual afterglow from that success shines upon protests of every sort and tactic even now. It’s the “if you’re against X, you must also be against Y” gaslight, but with only one frame of reference. 

This is not saying “don’t protest”, but that there should be at least two caveats in this act. The first is an understanding that it is highly unlikely to work, given they are so common and rarely have anything useful to say. The second is that if it turns violent or disruptive -and- has nothing new or useful to say it damages not only the cause but the effectiveness of protesting itself. Bluntly, however, one could argue at this point the effectiveness is long gone. (See “Does the Size of a Protest Matter” New York Times, 2017, and “Protesting Does Not Achieve Anything” Lotus Eaters October 2021). The third, is the people who have appointed themselves the spokespeople for a given people or cause are usually the kind of people you absolutely do not want speaking and acting “on your behalf”.

4: It is amazing how much leftist argument hinges on dragging the middle to the edge and attacking that point, whatever drags the person to “racist” or “bootlicker” or “bloodthirsty” territory, so the leftist doesn’t have to contend with the argument in front of them. Those who say the modern kind of protest is useless, destructive and counter-productive “would be against the Civil Rights movement too” because that too is a protest movement. No, riots with nothing useful to say are both violent and empty.

Those with self-defense standards that go beyond the insane line of “allowing the defender one bullet” and “only if the attacker shoots first”, who consider the psychological elements of a law enforcement job want them to have essentially unlimited power in terms of use of force.

No, we’re just considerably more likely to understand the human element of the job than you. Frankly, it’s not hard to improve on nothing. Much of leftist argument now is trying to avoid saying “I want these people killed” but setting the standard for defense so high that such is the natural result and accusing those who disagree of having this desire first.

There needs to be a new rule when debating progressives on self-defense, at a certain point, the only thing left to do is to realize that they’re never going to say out-right that they don’t believe in self-defense. They will say they -do-, “it’s just that”, the standard for lethal use of force is so high as to be completely useless. This is very in line with the standard “I support the Second Amendment, but” and “I support free speech, but” carving out specific caveats to slide in room for further restrictions later (seriously, ask a progressive to draw a line on restrictions they will not cross and watch the contortions). The slippery slope is not a fallacy, it’s a trend. More importantly, the creation of this trend is deliberate. In other words, gaslighting is the foundation of the progressive speech generally and firearm arguments in particular. If you’ve ever lived with a gaslighter, you know the line they draw is never permanent. In fact, that very phrase indicates two things; one, you have given the abuser power over you in what you don’t realize is a misplaced sense of trust, trying to make happy someone who is never happy and doesn’t plan to be happy. Two, therefore, by letting them define the standard, you will never know what the standard truly is. It’s not a hard line, it’s bait. 

You will hopefully come to find it as degrading trying to pursue their standard. The beginning of a better, calmer head-space then, is to reject their input completely and see it for the product of a sick (most likely -very- comfortable-) mind that it is.