Darth Vader chokes his officers from across the room. The Empire builds a planet-killing weapon to force compliance. Every storyteller in history understood the same thing: the villain is the one who points the gun. You root for the rebel, the smuggler, the man who refuses the king's tax. You always have.
So explain why the modern left loves coercion.
The same people who cried during Braveheart, who cheered when Katniss raised three fingers against the Capitol, who hung posters of the lone man facing tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989, now demand that the state seize half your paycheck, dictate which words you may say, and lock you in your home for eighteen months because a bureaucrat in a press conference said so. They saw coercion on the screen and hated it. They live coercion in policy and love it.
I think the trick lies in the costume. Coercion never announces itself with a black helmet and ominous breathing. It arrives wearing the language of compassion. "Universal healthcare" means men with badges extract your earnings to fund a system you cannot opt out of. "Wealth tax" means the government claims a portion of property you already paid taxes to acquire. "Forgiving student debt" means a plumber in Ohio who never set foot in a lecture hall pays for a sociology degree in Brooklyn. Strip the adjectives and you find the same thing every time: someone with a weapon making you comply.
Ludwig von Mises spelled it out in 1944. Government is the negation of liberty. It is, at root, the apparatus of compulsion and coercion. Every program, every mandate, every subsidy rests on that single fact. Keep your own money and watch what happens if you refuse to pay. The fines come first, then the court summons, then the men who carry guns for a living. There is no gentle version.
The left has not abandoned its hatred of villains, it has simply learned to write itself into the hero's role while doing exactly what the villain does. You were taught to spot the man pointing the gun, they are telling you to thank him.
"A socialist can set up a company, give shares to all the workers, put workers on the board, pay executives the same as everyone else and if there’s any profit remaining they can freely donate it to the government.
There is absolutely nothing stopping any socialist from living according to these values under a capitalist system." - @DanielPriestley
He's wrong about that. There is something that stops them.
Common sense.
My dude, stop.
It isn't "2 billion Muslims" that is being blamed.
It is ISLAM.
Islam itself. It is a creed. It believes things and teaches things.
And many of these things are evil.
If a self-described Christian launches into a campaign of mass murder, claiming he is following the teachings of Christianity, people can and will say "That's not loving one's neighbor. That's not in line with the teachings of Christ."
But when a Communist launches into a campaign of mass murder, claiming he is following the teachings of Marx, people will just nod and say "Yes, that's right. Marx does want to murder the bourgeoisie in a bloody revolution. That is what he teaches."
And when a Muslim goes on a campaign of mass murder, claiming he is following the teachings of Islam, people rightly also say "Yes, that's right. Muhammed does actually command killing the kaffir in blood jihad. That is what he teaches."
What the rest of the world sees is
• Muslims who do the evil stuff, which is entirely consistent with their faith (the ones you call "extremists")
• Muslims who don't do it themselves but support it (which appears to be the vast majority of the 2 billion Muslims)
• Muslims who don't like the evil stuff in Islam, but appear to simply be hypocritical Muslims who in fact reject any parts of Islam they don't like
That is, almost everyone in the world agrees that what "the extreme Islamists" are doing is genuine Islam, whether they are for it or against it.
I think it is very much real Islam, which is why Islam needs to be kept out of any countries which it hasn't already invaded and rooted out of any it has but hasn't devoured.
Muslims who want to disavow the worst parts of Islam, like you apparently, are still a danger because they BRING IN ISLAM.
And Islam leads to all the bad stuff you disavow.
They fact that you are a Muslim and ALSO disavow the worst parts of Islam is a property of YOU, not a property of ISLAM.
Just as there are professing Communists who wouldn't hurt a fly. If such personally harmless Communists nevertheless spread Communism, before long hundreds of millions of flies do get hurt.
So even your sanitized version of Islam is a danger.
And all that assumes you are honest about your own beliefs — which one wishes in charity to assume, but since one tenet of Islam is the moral goodness of lying about Islam to further the cause of Islam, one cannot even be sure you aren't running a stealthy justification for the kind of Islam you denounce, working to spread Islam by falsely convincing as many people as you can that any bad Islamic things "wasn't real Islam."
When a Communist tells us that the horrors of Communism "wasn't real Communism", we aren't inclined to think he is being particularly honest.
Believing that "people wouldn't do crimes if their basic needs were met" while also believing that "greedy rich people are stealing from everyone" never registers to the people who say this shit as inherently contradictory.
All beliefs have consequences, but deranged leftist beliefs often have deadly consequences. I was in France during the 2003 heat wave that killed 10's of thousands. They didn't learn from that tragedy to put the weak, the elderly, and the sick first, rather, they doubled down on environment first and people second.
Leftist ideologues will happily trade 10's of thousands more lives to maintain their beliefs.
My dad was a cop for 25 years and he said, “The police are for investigating crime and then arresting the perpetrators. They are not a crime prevention unit. That would require Big Brother watching over you for thought crime. YOU are the only one who can prevent crime happening to you. A. Don’t go where criminals are. B. If criminals come to you, be prepared to defend yourself.”
“Why do you need an AR-15?”
Ask the police.
Because they have them.
They have the rifles.
They have the 30-round magazines.
They have the gear politicians keep saying is too dangerous for you.
And nobody asks them why they need it.
Why?
Because the answer is obvious:
They carry it to confront violent people.
But here’s the part everyone skips…
Who meets that violent person first?
You do.
The cop shows up after the threat starts.
You’re the one already there.
No badge.
No backup.
No radio.
No team.
And the Supreme Court has already said police do not have a constitutional duty to protect you as an individual.
So if the state keeps these tools for the people who arrive second…
Why does it want to take them from the person who has to survive first?
That’s the question.
Drop your answer below — and send this to the person who still asks, “Why do you need that?”
If women weren’t almost all leftists we’d hardly have any leftists to speak of. Interestingly, the best predictor of a woman not being a leftist is motherhood.
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” - Orwell
All beliefs have consequences, but deranged leftist beliefs often have deadly consequences. I was in France during the 2003 heat wave that killed 10's of thousands. They didn't learn from that tragedy to put the weak, the elderly, and the sick first, rather, they doubled down on environment first and people second.
Leftist ideologues will happily trade 10's of thousands more lives to maintain their beliefs.
Totally! That had an impact on me too.
Everyone is an atheist with respect to the gods he does not believe in, I just believe in one less than the Christian (or whomever). Its so funny how they often find unbelief incomprehensible, yet they have no problem rejecting the claims that some 18,000 other deities exist.
For me, i thought “nothing designs itself or orders itself so there must have been a designer of some kind. Something must have created all this.” Plus I always had a deep spiritual feeling, for whatever that’s worth. I reasoned there must be some creator, it makes sense that if it made an intelligent creation that it would communicate with its creation. The Bible made more sense to me than any of the other religious texts I read so I pursed Christianity further.
I was born in the mid 70’s and literally everyone everywhere took it for granted that there is a loving god. But similar to you, I was exposed to the new atheists (specifically Shermer, Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins), who simply made more convincing arguments. I learned about diffeasability where there is a point that your argument or belief is unlikely to be true. I learned that ~1.5% of homosapiens of Northern European ancestry have Neanderthal dna and I thought “well, I guess that’s a wrap on my faith in the Bible!” Like, what are the chances an all powerful all knowing loving god forgot to mention other intelligent hominids coexisting with us in the creation story verses the writers were humans with limited knowledge and just didn’t know about the other hominid species? 😂
Additionally, the concept of faith always bothered me. Nowhere in the world do we simultaneously valorize credulity and threaten basic skepticism. Skepticism is a simple human cognitive tool from the basic need for confidence in novel and unproven information or situations, not heresy.
Was there a particular argument(s) from one of the new atheists that changed your mind?
If you treat it like the sparing part of a Jiujitsu class, it’s a great way to learn the arguments and the errors common to different subjects if you are shoe to emotionally detach from being insulted on the internet by people who will often twist your words in order to save face. lol
@michaelmalice 💯 this is generally really good advice.
I have to admit I do enjoy arguing with people tho. Learning to catch errors in people’s thinking that are common to different topics is a fun exercise.
Also I’ve always wanted to quote the Bible to the pope bc every pope in my lifetime has hypocritically violated the very word of God they claim to uphold.
And I find they’re often bootlickers of the very worst political and economic systems for the people but which are best at centralizing power to their benefit. They are a nest of snakes.