DC is just doing the typical BothSides equivalency, eg liberals are the Real racists, Real low iq dummies, or Real conservatives, etc. It's readily observed to be complete nonsense trite faux-intellectualism, one of those rhetorical arguments which you claim to not care for.
My God man, I mean, clearly, this Trump fellow is a disaster, a total, unmitigated disaster, and the Neanderthal mindset he brings is a danger to society itself, no question.
And too, I am not making this simple, reductionist, "oh this side is just as bad, look at the hypocrites, look at how they do what they accuse the other side of" and so on..
No. What I am saying, and I let me be precise here, is that we should not be naive, we should not delude ourselves into thinking, oh just because the monster of the other side is a monster, and of that there is no doubt, that we ourselves are immune from monstrous behavior.
Here, and this is my assumption, I appeal to Hegel. Who is not this simple, as you know, you have the thesis, and it's opposite, and then you find a way to rise above them both, and there you go you have a synthesis and a solution: NO. I am saying that it precisely in NOT having the characteristics of the monster of the other side that, as we fall away into having any of those characteristics, we can look back to see that we immediately obtain them. And, in having them, a longing to return to where we do not have them. Now I am making a very particular point, so let me say it yet in another way.
There is no reason to think hitting a bully to defend ourselves is a bad thing, yes? We champion those who stick up for the little guy, and so on, but it is in that act, in the act of hitting the bully, that we fall away from our status as the repressed other so worthy of societal mourning. This, I claim, was the great insight of Gandhi and King; it is not the passiveness to gain, but the juxtaposition against the authoritarian alternative, that reveals the greater truth of, and I do not say passive here, resistance instead of violence. Or I will give you a story of my own upbringing, to perhaps help you grasp what I am now getting at, which I admit, was not what I was getting at when the thread started, so you will forgive me if I have learned from my interactions.
This, I say, reminds me of my time as a child growing up in a drug addicted house hold, who seeing the choice of Christianity as an alternative to a fallen world, a world filled with alcohol, drugs, abuse, hate and so on and so on. It was in this context I was drawn into the love of Christ as the active resistance against the evil world I seemed to have been born into. It is only later, as I noticed the bullying, the attacking, the authoritarian coercion of the Christian right that I realized my path forward. This was from a mature love, a realization that Christ is, for me, a means by which to express the need for, and desire to, love that is deeper than the fiction of my identity.
So I was surprised, and wanted to confirm or have denied, when I started to think that I was noticing this kind of bullying and authoritarianism on the left in some few places. I do not draw some dogmatic equivalence, or to say "both sides" or present the hate on the right as a foil against the left, My God Man, think of the human, and economic, and civil rights implications to make such a rancid argument. No, I am saying, that this is a kind of awakening for myself, a realization that, as far to the left as I, a self proclaimed socialist had run: there was a bridge too far, still even today in our liberal politics.
To say that there is a bridge too far on either side is, I submit, not to say that both bridges are equally well traveled or of equal distance away from enabling the good life. And in fact, for a mature sense, perhaps even a love, of my socialistic identity, I must embrace that I am to be perpetually the other; for I love Jesus, yes in a mature way, perhaps atheisticly, in a way that certainly my family members would call Atheistic. But so too, in a way that is completely true as far as can can fathom myself. I know this, not because it is a synthesis of past experience, but because the moment I get past that love, I get to self that, not that I fear, like some coward child beaten into not speaking a dirty word, but instead of a man who longs for home. Sad to be away.
So too was I sad when I noticed this authoritarianism on the left and a moment of falling in with it's sway. And as I return back to a cognitively aware, caring, and thoughtful socialistic left that does not seek or support or justify violence, I notice that same warmth of propriety return. It is for this reason, yes, I have greater sympathy for the people who, while factually wrong in a trivial way, are also right in the deeper sense to say no burden is too much to save a life and so on.
I hope now, it is, that you understand, and you take my meaning. I do not wish to confront you with this chatter about how each side is equal and so on, but to have an encounter. And truly, along this path, people in this very thread, have helped me along. So I thank them, and I thank you, for reflecting on what I have to say and my journey such as it is so far.
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