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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   6177 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

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This is kind of a pithy observation rather than anything else and I don't have the will to write a full effortpost on it but wondered if anyone had any thoughts on a pattern I've noticed often.

In political debates, it often seems that criticism from one side levied at the other side is often a better critique of the side making the critique than the target of the attack.

For example, the left seem to be convinced that America is a hair's breadth away from being sucked into a religious authoritarianism by the right. But it seems that the right today is extremely libertarian and not particularly religious, indeed, the opposite of a religious authoritarian state. But I believe the fervor of leftism and the shutting down of free speech by the left is essentially a sort of religious authoritarianism, much more than anything I see existing on the right.

Similarly, the right tend to characterize the left as being morally failed and corrupt and generally against the traditional family structure. But in my opinion, the left are extremely consistent in their morals and it is the right who have strayed farther from their own traditional morals and proven themselves corrupt in various ways while also having their own traditional family structures degrade far more than the left has experienced. (I don't know how I can prove this except to say that anecdotally my red tribe family and communities I've been around are having far more family problems compared with the blue tribe people I have experience with.)

I see this as a sort of psychological projection, where both sides are too myopically focused on their own experiences to see that the problems they think the other side have are actually the problems they themselves are experiencing and then project it onto the opposing party.

But it seems that the right today is extremely libertarian and not particularly religious, indeed, the opposite of a religious authoritarian state.

I don't see much evidence of this

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