What the Fuck is Wrong With the Left & Right? - From an Outsider's Perspective

[Jewelsmakerguy]

The title mostly sums up my feelings, but allow me to elaborate since a title's not enough to go on:

In recent times, I have noticed that in the US, the Left and the Right have jumped far off the deep end then they should have. And more specifically, where they stand on certain matters. Me being Canadian, and thus an outsider looking in on this mess, I have to wonder just what in the mother of God happened to both sides of the US political system. Especially among the people who support the Dems and Republicans.

More specifically, I've noticed that their beliefs are the polar opposite of what I'd expect from them. Like if the Right is all Patriotic and follows the Bible almost to the T. Then why are they the ones who believe in shit like 9/11 and Anti-vaccination while the Left, the people I would have suspected be far more fearful about the government or be into new age nonsense are the ones who (in theory, anyway; execution's a whole other matter) that follow the whole "Love thy neighbor" and "Jesus loves everyone" things the Bible preaches. COVID's another thing I thought the two of them would have had differing opinions on. Again with the Right, being as patriotic as they are, telling people to mask up in the hope to save America while the Left would be the ones to question the whole narrative and effectiveness of vaccinations. Instead we have the Left doubling down on the masking and vaccine laws, and the Right being batshit insane and actively protesting and effectively killing their own because of their selfish behavior and their supposed "patriotism".

Now before you go bashing me about how I'm mostly focusing on the Right here, note that I don't find the Left any better. Liberals in my eyes are just Conservatives of a different name and slightly different motives. Both sides have their anti-miltia groups, both sides have their share of retarded dimwits who can't accept that anyone other than themselves have opinions. What I hate about the Left in particular is that, in keeping with their whole "Conservatives of the 2010s/2020s" motif, is that their crusades are often just a load of shit. Last I checked, "Well-Meaning" doesn't mean "Burn down buildings because cops killed another black man". That's terrorism right there.

But that's just what I take from the whole situation. Now I ask the people who do live in the US - What the fuck went wrong?

 

[Dergint]

The problem is you grounded yourself in wrong place and allowed the MSM to tell you where left and right are.

Like if the Right is all Patriotic and follows the Bible almost to the T. Then why are they the ones who believe in shit like 9/11 and Anti-vaccination

I don't know what believing in 9/11 has to do with patriotism or the Bible, I didn't even know that people didn't believe in 9/11. Closest I can think of off the top of my head is "Some people did something" where both sides agreed 9/11 happened and they just disagreed on if it was important.

The positions on vaccination used to be flipped. The right wanted it developed and for the economy to go back to normal, Trump funded Operation Warpspeed, the left strongly insisted that they wouldn't trust any vaccine Trump funded or approved of. They changed their mind shortly after the vaccine was rebranded as Biden's vaccine, even though Biden hadn't even taken power yet and he definitely did not have the opportunity to undo the lax standards the left was worried about Trump permitting.

the Left, the people I would have suspected be far more fearful about the government

What? The right are stereotypically the party of limited, localized government. The left are the party of using big government to beat big business back so they don't let a factory full of woman burn alive or employ child labor or force people to work 80 hour weeks.

"Love thy neighbor" and "Jesus loves everyone" things the Bible preaches

The left has this sentiment too in the form of hippy dippie peaceful protesters who replace God with Mother Nature (seriously, the right says hurricanes are God's punishment for the gays and the left says hurricanes are Mother Nature punishing us for Trump).

Both sides believe they are the compassionate ones and both sides believe in some higher power sending us natural disasters to punish us for our wrongs, it's just that they attribute these beliefs to different things.

COVID's another thing I thought the two of them would have had differing opinions on.

They did have differing opinions. The right had to live through the left not giving a flying fuck and getting called racist for panicking and not wanting to allow the virus into the country. By the time the left got on board the right had lived through the worry for a few months and realized they were still alive - and the right didn't have the benefit of it being socially acceptable to wear a mask when they were worried about it. Wearing a mask everywhere - if you could even afford to do it properly with like 3 N95s a day! - would make you look like a terrorist and get you accused of planting bombs all over the place.

Instead we have the Left doubling down on the masking and vaccine laws, and the Right being batshit insane and actively protesting and effectively killing their own because of their selfish behavior and their supposed "patriotism".

Again, the narrative flipped and you just weren't paying attention. You missed the left effectively killing their own by telling us to go to Chinatown and hug a Chinaman and go watch the Asian movie of the week because otherwise we'd be racist. You missed them laughing at Trump for being so stupid that he thinks viruses respect borders, you only started paying attention after the left decided it was reasonable for other countries to shut down their borders.

I almost want to believe you're fucking with me, but if you're not, what went wrong is the media you get is biased and is only telling you half the story. They won't tell you the other half that matches your stereotypes and makes everything make sense.

For example, people on the left who try to act like they aren't just being a partisan hack will say that Jan 06 was bad not because of who did it, but instead because it is "normalizing violence against your political opponents" and they don't want riots to be the new normal. They act like this is the worst thing to ever happen to our democracy:



When asked about the months of violence leading up to that? Crickets. "Peaceful Protesters". "Make sure to vote to defund the police!"

When asked about this image from just 1 year and 1 week earlier?



I never got an answer for how allowing this to happen and condemning Trump for rescuing our ambassadors from this didn't normalize violence against political opponents first.



Stop blindly trusting the narrative and you'll see that not only are things often backwards, they're often replicated on both sides at different points in time. If you allow yourself to only be told of the half that's convenient to whoever you get your news from, of course things are going to look nonsensical.

If you open your eyes and can go back a few steps before where "the narrative" begins, then you'll start to see how fucked everything is and how easily manipulated things are by just strategically selecting where to start the timeline.

Or for a simple picture, imagine if I started this graph in the year 2001, it would look like a massive spike that kept on going. But with more years to the left you can see that I specifically called out the low point of a dip for my hypothetical misleading image.



To a lesser extent there are also problems with dealing with both sides' beliefs and if the means or the ends are more important. But I'd say before that, just being able to see the whole picture is pretty important!

 

[Ser Prize]

Man, you make me somehow more ashamed to be Canadian. I hope this is a wake up call that you can't let the main stream media define your worldview.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Why are canadians so politicly confused?

 

[Mr Bunny]

Why are canadians so politicly confused?

They don't even know what a man or woman is, so trying to navigate even more complex topics is hard.

 

[Uncle Remus]

Politicians are liars by default, they all just ride the wave and fuck the common man regardless of ideology, most european countries dont even have a serious conservative element the country I live in definitely doesn't

 

[Ser Prize]

Why are canadians so politicly confused?

They don't even know what a man or woman is, so trying to navigate even more complex topics is hard.

Canadian politics don't matter to most of the world and especially to Canadians. We have a culture of political apathy, bordering on outright nihilism.

For many Canadians the only politics they know is "Gosh darn those crazy americans sure are right wing!"

 

[Dergint]

Canadian politics don't matter to most of the world and especially to Canadians. We have a culture of political apathy, bordering on outright nihilism.

For many Canadians the only politics they know is "Gosh darn those crazy americans sure are right wing!"

As an American, the only Canadian politics I know is " if the black president would sooner endorse the Canadian Blackface Prime Minister than his own vice president, then that vice president must be really bad news. (Also why is that not considered foreign interference?)"

Or in other words, I basically only know Canadian politics where it intercepts with American politics. But not in the useful way like trade treaties, only in the identity politics way.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I agree with you about the arbitrary nature of the left and right's reaction to Covid, that could have gone either way.

I feel like if Covid happened in the 2000s the left would have been fallen on the side of anti vaccine, that was the peak "adbusters" era and "big pharma" was one of the main boogeymen, the post 9/11 right meanwhile probably would have been on the pro side and seen it as part of keeping America safe being caught up in the wave of post 9/11 "duty"

 

[Synthetic Smug]

Why are canadians so politicly confused?

Because Canada is nothing but a thin wrapper around natural resources and sentimentality.

 

[Quijibo69]

Pretty much going into a new human revolution of time because of internet.

 

[Burned CDs]

They have become a caricature of themselves.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

Why are canadians so politicly confused?

Simple, we hate all our parties and want to look more into what the rest of the world is up to. We're incredibly cucked that way and I'm surprised we survived this long without killing ourselves.

@Dirgent, I don't even follow the MSM unless I'm bored as shit (and even that's rare), all this is just based on what I've seen on 4chan, Reddit and here. Not particularly the best sources I admit. And I've always been under the belief that both sides are fucking retards no matter what they do as far as political agendas are concerned. No amount of CNN or Fox News painting biases will ever change that. The point I was trying (and failing) to get across was more why are their ideologies are so fucking warped on a fundamental level. Especially in this day and age of social media. To wit, this is all I genuinely know about politics both US and otherwise:

- Trump sucks outside of the hardcore dicksuckers who claim otherwise.
- Biden sucks outside of the hardcore dicksuckers who claim otherwise.
- Canada, the UK and pretty much every other government outside of China, Russia, Japan and North Korea are almost entirely irrelevant unless they're the subject of controversy.
- Justin Trudeau only got in power because of nepotism, and because Steven Harper was so insufferable that anyone would take any candidate at that point.

 

[TerribleIdeas™]

Because Canada is nothing but a thin wrapper around natural resources and sentimentality.

Canada is basically some mining companies that created a fake country that revolves around mediocre coffee, and chasing a black rubber disk across a sheet of ice.

 

[Book Thief]

Then why are they the ones who believe in shit like 9/11

I'm sorry, but are you somehow suggesting that 9/11 didn't happen? That those smoldering buildings I saw on the television when I was a kid was just my imagination? This has to be the worst possible way you could've phrased this.

 

[Synthetic Smug]

Canada is basically some mining companies that created a fake country that revolves around mediocre coffee, and chasing a black rubber disk across a sheet of ice.

That's not fair. They also placed hamlets full of drunks here and there to improve the feng shui.

 

[Tepuys]

Many people who have fallen down the alt-left/right rabbit hole are basing there opinions not on their own intuition and feelings, but rather as the opposite of whatever the "bad guys" believe in. Nobody can agree on anything because the entire point of the current political climate is disagreement. Hypocrisy is rampant because nobody has any "true" beliefs they hold.

 

[Dergint]

@Dirgent, I don't even follow the MSM unless I'm bored as shit (and even that's rare), all this is just based on what I've seen on 4chan, Reddit and here.

Oh come on, you've been registered years longer than me and have way more posts. If you aren't going to quote me then can't you let the post assist autocomplete my name? Something that will allow the system to ping me properly? This weird amalgamation of addressing me without alerting me stinks of yogscast cowardice, but at least I didn't need some third party to ping me back here.

Anyways I'd say reddit is biased and 4chan is some kind of weird controlled opposition containment zone. Definitely not the best sources.

I question how much information you actually get from here considering your interpretation of the Coronavirus/Vaccine situation. I got a lot of my information from the megathread here - especially back when acknowledging the existence of the virus was done far right alarmism - and I came to the opposite conclusion as you.

Maybe instead of community curated content, you should find a specific few sources you trust to wade through the bullshit and see if they have podcasts. Or adjust the balance between your sources. Even if you don't seek out MSM deliberately, if you primarily get content curated by people who don't go beyond the MSM, you aren't going to get many opposing viewpoints.

The point I was trying (and failing) to get across was more why are their ideologies are so fucking warped on a fundamental level.

They aren't though, not really. It all depends on where you set your anchor point.

I used to be aligned with the left because I felt they were more pro-freedom. They were the people to go to if you wanted to be able to just do your thing and be left alone as long as you weren't hurting anyone. The right were the Bible thumping kiddy diddlers with a sense of moral superiority who still had the gall to tell me what the right thing to do was.

Then I realized that one day, it felt like everything was backwards. Why were the left demanding I engage with their sexual activities? I do not consent. Why were they telling me I was obligated to give people I didn't feel any attraction to sexual attention for fear of being labeled a bigot? Why do they tell me I don't know my own self interests, I have internalized racism and internalized sexism and it is as unfalsifiable as the Bible thumpers' original sin? Women's liberation sure feels more like trading a master for a mistress, it doesn't actually feel liberating. And does the left have a lot of kiddy diddlers on their side too!

I realized that although they seemed to keep their goals the same - gays good, religion bad, rich people bad, environment good - the thing that changed was the reasoning. For them, the ends justified the means, but I agreed with them because of the means, so the moment they stopped supporting things because personal liberties and instead supported things because they're the good guys, I found myself stranded in bizarro world.

And I've come to learn that if I go beyond my temporal anchor of when I became first politically aware, things have been flip flopping since even before that. If you really get a decent chunk of information from here, you've surely heard that Planned Parenthood was started by a eugenicist to control the black population. The words the left uses may say blacks good, but their actions have always (within the time frame that I've thus far expanded my horizons to) said blacks bad. They were the party of slavery, then they set up clinics to kill black babies under the guise of helping black mothers, then they destroyed black families and trapped black kids in shit schools (if the kids went to schools at all), and they admitted that blacks are stupider than everyone else and they need affirmative action and the soft bigotry of low expectations to get anywhere. But it's okay, really, because they say they're helping blacks when they do this! Even if studies have shown that liberals will dumb down their speech for known smart black people more than conservatives will, they totally aren't racist. And the new racial segregation under the guise of safe spaces? Not racist. Nope. Not at all.

Is that an ideology warping, or is it just that the core beliefs don't need to be spoken in order for them to be played out? If you're allowing blacks to destroy their own neighborhoods and make their food deserts worse, does it really matter whether you say that you're allowing it because they're too dumb and emotional to engage in society or because you just like seeing the plebs burn? At the end of the day, whether you've rationalized it as helping or hurting them, they have to live with the consequences.

This is why I say that there's something to be said about determining whether each side's beliefs are defined by the means or the ends. Everyone acts like they have logic and reasoning on their side, but for some people if the world changes around them such that the new context combined with the old logic results in the opposite conclusion, then they'll engage in mental gymnastics to keep the old conclusion. They'll argue that even if women are equal and can be the bread winners, they shouldn't have to pay alimony or register for the draft. They'll argue that even if you go to Africa or Asia, Whites still aren't the minority and so they're privileged. They'll argue that everyone is a little bit bi so straight conversion therapy works, even if gay conversion therapy is child abuse and Bible thumping pseudo-science.

And then there are some people who actually do believe in the logic, and when they see that "their side" has changed so much they get confused. They don't realize that their side was defined by the ends, but they individually believed in the means.

In order to fully tease out the difference between these groups, you must be able to look at them over time so you can see which things they hold dear and keep constant even as the world around them changes. You have to be able to go beyond what they claim now and what sanitized stories the MSM is willing to tell, go into the dirty past and do your own analysis.

But if you're only willing to analyze to this degree about present day topics, you're doomed and should just nope out.

- Trump sucks outside of the hardcore dicksuckers who claim otherwise.
- Biden sucks outside of the hardcore dicksuckers who claim otherwise.

Come on I get that you're trying to be fair to both sides but can't you at least come up with one way they each uniquely suck? You'll never be able to do an analysis if you simplify everything to "They're both bad". You could probably get away with relatively little controversy if you said one of them cares too much about urban issues and the other cares about rural issues. Or if you wish to offend both sides, one cares too much about the gated communities and ivory tower, the other cares too much about bumfuck nowhere flyoverville.

---

I mostly speak to the left side of things because I used to identify with the left so I understand what the relevant topics there are a bit better. If you want to see more of the right side of things - particularly from a religious point of view - there's some thread in A&N about the Pope right now with a couple informative posts that shows promise and may become educational if you let it sit long enough.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

I'm sorry, but are you somehow suggesting that 9/11 didn't happen? That those smoldering buildings I saw on the television when I was a kid was just my imagination? This has to be the worst possible way you could've phrased this.

Should have elaborated on that point. I meant the conspiracies like how Bush was involved with 9/11 directly and that it was an inside job (or that the Jews did it). Not that it didn't happen. I saw it unfold when I was a kid too.

And regarding you Dergint, I'd ping you, but apparently the Farms won't let me either do that or even quote you. If it could let me, I'd have done that already. Fuck if I know why I can't.

As for your points:

Oh come on, you've been registered years longer than me and have way more posts.

True that may be, but I've always been a bit of a brainlet with politics (most of my posts have been criticizing people like Andrew Dobson and the Channel Awesome crew, or talking about shows and movies), and almost completely anti-political. With most of my politic talk mostly just mocking who people support in the long term -- be they Trump, Biden, Hillary, Cuckstin, Boris Johnson, the Tubby Asians or whoever. Or it's politics adjacent like wars or the internet. I've otherwise mostly been just following the shit that gets shared on those sites. Anything I get from the MSM regarding politics I either tune out or mock because it generally doesn't interest me unless someone is being an idiot and it shoehorning it into their beliefs. That or I just browse the cancer that is A&N if I want anything newsworthy that isn't a natural disaster if I'm really desperate.

They aren't though, not really. It all depends on where you set your anchor point.

This again, might also be due to my own biases thanks to most of my internet culture being that of 4chan and Kiwi. But it's also something I noticed when browsing several conservative and republican supporting people on Reddit and YouTube. Usually the fanatics who support Trump and hate everyone and everything they disagree with or they try to tie in everything with Trump or QAnon (or both). And most of my information as far as the Left is concerned I really only get from the other threads on this site at most (and even then, being that I only just returned after a 6-7 month sabbatical, is pushing it). I'm not someone with any social media account, nor am I always in the know. All I know is that I see what I see, and I don't like what I see. Feel free to disagree with my opinion if you want.

And Like I said, I'm not too keen on the left either. I'm not at all fond about how they disguise full-blown riots as "peaceful protests" and treat anyone who isn't black or LGBTQ+ as Satan spawn. And I definitely hate their attempts at "Representation" that honestly comes off as more racist than it has any right to be. Nor do I appreciate them parading around their fetishes for all to see. I was definitely oversimplifying things in the OP, I won't lie.

Come on I get that you're trying to be fair to both sides but can't you at least come up with one way they each uniquely suck?

Again, I was mostly summarizing what I've heard from both sides of the coin as they rarely, if ever, tend to go into specifics other than "your president sucks, mine is/was good!". I have my own reasons why they both suck -- Trump was nothing but a man who promised everything including the sky (in this case, de-escalation with North Korea) and failed to live up to those promises, instead taking almost all of his time during his second half of his term on Twitter whining like a pissbaby liberal would. While Biden was the absolute worst candidate the Democrats could have chosen, especially with how old he is. It's clear he's only doing the bare minimum of what a president should do because he knows he has little time left and could die at any given moment.

But again though, I'm an outsider looking inside what is basically a mess. And I mean that not only as a non-US native, but also from the point of view from someone who ultimately knows little about politics other than the opinionated shit he's seen from CNN, Newsmax, Reddit, the chans, Facebook, Twitter, the Farms, etc. It's part of the reason I made this thread to begin with. I ultimately just want to know what's wrong with both sides on the grand scale of things, and any little detail helps greatly, even if my OP was oversimplified and admittedly quite shit.

 

[TerribleIdeas™]

@Dergint, I can't quote the post, but I'll answer this, at least partially -

but can't you at least come up with one way they each uniquely suck?

Trump is a narcissistic blowhard that was convinced he didn't need help, and prone to letting the people that blew the right smoke up his ass be among the few people that were permitted to be any kind of an influence on him. He had the opportunity to effect some serious immigration control, and sure, I'm willing to agree that the UniParty™ collectively circled the wagons to fuck him over, but that doesn't explain his complete inability to occasionally just shut the fuck up, and maybe extend an olive branch or two, so shit might get accomplished. Whether the election was stolen or not (and for the record, I absolutely believe the UniParty™ definitely had the means and the motive to arrange the results we saw), Trump was a complete Boomer tool, in the aftermath. He would have been far better served to shut his spray-tan caked donut depository, and make plans for 2024. Also, his comments on "video games cause violence" is some retarded shit, and it's been repeatedly shown that's the furthest thing from the truth.

Biden is the architect of some of the most outrageously racist legislation to be signed into law, over the last 40 years, he was "friends" with Byrd, he's been elbows deep with the Clintons and all the rest of the "usual suspects" on the DNC side of things for fucking near 50 years, his behavior around women and children is mindbogglingly creepy (at best), and I'm 100% certain that we got the watch, in real time, the MSM burying the biggest laundering and influence-peddling story in modern politics. I'm 100% certain that he's cognitively impaired right now, and Kopmala and some other members of the Cabinet and DNC bigwigs are actually running the show. Speaking of Kopmala, she outright (and correctly) called him a racist during the debates, and then got bodied so badly by Gabbard that she couldn't win the delegates in her own state, and was out of the race before Elizabeth Warren, who was the laughing stock of the 2016 election. There is no planet on which him selecting her over Sanders, Gabbard, or the New Age Authoress made any sense, and yet, he was steered into selecting someone that was arguably his largest detractor, during the debates. Hell, he could have picked an outright dumpster fire made up of nuns, orphans, and puppies he personally set on fire, and it would have been a more popular choice than her.

I could go on, but it's late, and I honestly think the USA will be best served by the entire middle of the continent, from Alaska and the Cdn territories, all the way down between the mountain ranges, to collectively agree that "The American Experiment" is over, and the 2 coasts can go fuck themselves, while the rest of us actually put together a country that functions, and has some amount of political commonality.