19 August 2006

Demonization

President Bush is a malevolent moron, and only the most naive fool could believe that he might ever do anything for good motives or make an intelligent decision. The Islamic terrorist menace is an illusion trumped up to serve as a pretext for insane military aggression. All uses of American military power are evil. Conservatives in general consist of the rich -- a reptilian, utterly-selfish cabal -- and a vast Middle American population of semi-literate Bible-besotted troglodytes. All conservatives are either covertly or openly racist, and they hate homosexuals too. They probably spend their free time strangling adorable kittens.

Leftists all hate America and love to burn flags. They support terrorism and want the terrorists to win. They support Communism, too, and were heartbroken when the Soviet Union fell. They think the schools should have mandatory classes on sodomy and on the relentless onslaught of evil inflicted by the malignant West upon the peaceful, egalitarian, Kumbaya-singing non-Western world throughout history. Through their absolute control over Hollywood and the mainstream media -- both of which are completely homogenous, monolithic entities -- they work ceaselessly to poison the minds of the public against all that is good and decent. They probably spend their free time strangling adorable kittens.

I submit that if you hold one of these viewpoints, you probably have more in common with those who hold the other one than you do with normal people. The most important division in American society is not between rightists and leftists, but rather between the extremists on each side who demonize everybody on the other side and the people with more moderate views who don't do that.

The extremist on one side looks at the extremists on the other side, gathers their most stupid and outrageous statements and actions into a broad brush, and proceeds to tar the entire other side with that brush. The trouble is, many individuals who start out as moderates read what the hard-liners on their own side have to say (since those hard-liners are over-represented among people who write about politics) and are gradually swayed by it, so the country gradually becomes polarized into two camps, each convinced that the other has gone crazy.

When somebody makes a blanket denunciation of "the left" or "the right", our suspicion should be directed first against the person who is doing that, rather than against their target.

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