Gonz said:
The weak, tired excuse is quite telling. A huge number of people with strikingly similar poilitcal viewpoints acts in a strikingly similar way. Using the term LIBERAL is a shortcut to aviod having to spell out all the other flawed ideology that espouses these (you) people.
Are you serious?
And so that makes you and your ideologies, what, completely flawless?
There is NO ideology on earth that is completely right or wrong - none better than the other - it is only the die-hard proponents of a certain ideology that claim so.(ALL DICTATORS HAVE THIS ONE THING IN COMMON -regardless of political orientation)
To me, it seems entirely appropriate to identify the fact that those that claim their ideology is apparently virtuous above all else, the same one ones that resort to finger-pointing and name-calling in order to draw a line in the sand between their highground and "the rest" of the ideas they don't agree with- are quite clearly the ones that - if you sincerely care about freedom- we not only need to watch out for but also are required to if you have any sort of social conscience as opposed to an entirely self-serving one - make a serious stand against .
If you live in a constant binary divide between the virtues of your own ideology as opposed to everything else - you are no different than so-called "liberal" die-hards either - if you fail to see that things aren't so simple and black and white, and I think that it is only then you will see that it is quite a different matter all together.
As I see it, most people that you target to be "liberal" are actually those that are mid-way on the spectrum in what is an entirely healthy and democratically (in the true sense of the word) feasible place to be.
GO too far one way or the other, and then you are in dangerous waters - then you start the finger-pointing, the jeering, the cutting off of any voice that happens to disgree with your political ideas. The same thing happened both in, for instance - Maos China as well as Hitlers Germany - both opposite ends but both with lethal agendas and ideologies that sought to isolate the "good" from the "bad" the "moral" from the "immoral" the "right" from the "wrong etc..
The penalties for dissedence were obviously far more rampant and taken out - but the point is - in attempting to do the same by SMOTHERING everyone else with opinions or ideas or behavior that don't align themselves with your ideology under one bland and nondescript blanket you are effectively ideologically carrying out exactly what such dictators were enabled to do effectively in action through their own power over the people.
Therefore it is an entirely questionable and precarious situation - if somebofy devoutly starts to refuse to acknowledge or even show some respect for the diversity and independence of people and their rights to freedom of speech. instead wipe them out (literally or figuratively) through bigotry and blatant stereotypical white-washing (or should that be BLACK-washing?) *snigger*. Not a very intelligent thing to do - and continue to do - without reasonable support other than the fact that you don't like them because they aren't compatible with you.
I think this is a major cop-out - because by doing this sort of labelling all the time you are effectively doing nothing but dodging the issues, and distracting yourself and in the process attempting to distract everyone else from actually confronting and THINKING seriously about the information at hand.
Quite a deliberate and standard media practice mind you - I'm not surprised you take the easy way out by effectively mimicing every piece of propaganda force-fed to you through your favourite mainstream news.
