Er, no. What I was saying was that we all tend to go approach people with certain assumptions and prejudices, and that we need to be aware of that phenomenon in order to be fair and not make decisions on the basis of this first impression. And that goes for what people say and do, not just how they look. I was just wondering if that was originally a useful way to think, but that in today's admittedly liberal society, it's not appropriate.
I always like talking to Brits because they can slam me, often quite effectively, without resorting to the tactic leftists in the USofA get from their Playbook: simply shrieking "racist!' or "sexist!" or some other "phobe!" or "ist!" at me in place of any sort of reasoned discussion.
Thanks for that, anyway.
As you'll see from the post directed at me by someone called "Sabbath" many here do not believe it to be so cut and dried. The reality is that it is, just as you perceive it to be: them and us. Those who ACTULLY love our country and our Constitution, and those who pay lip-service to that, or openly admit that they hate America; both are actively working to turn us into a socialist workers paradise--at least this group is honest about it.
As to your assertion: yes, we do approach people with certain fears, assumptions, prejudices, etc. This is what's called "Human." In America, it has long been assumed that this has another name: White, hetero male. Nobody else, you see, is afflicted with this. And that's not because they are not human. It's because in America, white, hetero males are not human.
This is a tiny bit of what we face here. Imagine the aggregate: slivers of this sort of thinking piled as high as the moon, each, in and of itself imminently dismissible, and regularly done so: oh, you're just a rightwingnut to think that a feminist filing a lawsuit against a guy for opening the door for her says anything at all about the left's plans for America!
But if you pile up enough of these slivers, over time...well, you can see what happens.
Worse, when someone like me points this very phenomenon, up, out come the shrieks of "conspiracy nut!! Conspiracy nut!!!" or howls of "racist!" or "sexist!" or "homo-" or "xenophobe!" and all discussion must then comes to stop, regardless of the truth or the facts. This is why here, if you oppose a female or black politicians IDEALS...you are not simply someone who opposes their destructive notions, but rather a "racist" or "sexist" and sometimes both!
According to what I've read over the decades (no...Surprisingly I don't have a link to some article I read in Science or Psychology, 20 years ago...I must be lying!), yes, thinking like that was very useful to early humans who had to be very suspicious of any other humans they came across (in the American leftist perspective, of course this only developed in N. Europeans who were male--remmber: here, based upon the barest of evidence, the view is that for 20,000 years, a peaceful, matriarchal society ruled all of Europe). Of course, initially, those humans would've looked just like the suspicious ones. As we became more "racially" diverse, and then ran into these different races again, after spreading out and changing over a million years, differences more obvious than "I don't know you" only magnified this. As we (Western civ.) became more civilized we came to understand that these differences, while real (try selling THAT at a US college campus), don't really amount to much. Try selling as well the fact that ONLY Western culture and that means mostly US and N. Europe are at all even today concerned with this.
You said: " It's pretty clear that whoever gets the upper hand and ceases being the plucky underdog trying to bring down an "oppressive" orthodoxy, once given a sniff of power simply tries to institute their own new orthodoxy, in the case of the left, probably to include new, more numerous and restrictive laws, and an imposed secular morality that is no less onerous than that of the religious right."
Indeed. Couldn't agree more. This is a very astute observation (I realize I have not grounds to make any judgment about your intellectual acuity; you are probably much brighter than I, and being that you are a Brit, almost certainly better-educated). But you are not going to get any lib to TRULY admit/believe that you've hit the nail on the head here.
Which is one of the reasons I am so vitriolic toward them. Most lefties in America are simply mindless drones that believe they are individuals just like all the other drones, and that they express their intellectual individuality best by parroting the party line. Which is why you have them (and at least one self-deluded "conservative" in here) assuming that since I am a conservative I MUST therefore be a Bible-thumping Evangelical who would like to invent a time machine so that I can go back and murder Darwin in his crib and that we should denude the planet of all life, poison the air and water and flush all arable soil into the sea so that the Rapture will happen.
Understand: in America liberals have a definition of "conservative" that starts with: stoopid, ig'nant, backwoods, un-so-fist-eye-kated, racist, sexist homo'phobic', xeno'phobic' warmongering chickenhawk hater. Everything they think or do is borne on this definition.
I don't know how deeply runs the hatred between "conservative" and "liberal" in GB, but here, because the left has been steadily building this definition to this point since about 1979, using their schools, their media, their professional organizations, etc. to drive not simply a political wedge but a social one between the two sides, that the hatred here is deep and unsalvable. That hatred came first from them, by the way. It was the left who first began asserting (1979) that the simple fact of your being a conservative proof-positive that you were not very bright and began building the above "definition" based upon their own identification of this, that or the other true nutcase in America as a "typical conservative."
Yes, I could, as does that other "conservative" in here, "turn the other cheek." But I got a crick in my neck from doing that for 20 years. Like many other conservatives in the US I either had to stop doing it or risk suffering a permanent physical handicap. And that's why SOME of us have made the conscious effort to strike back at libs by ignoring the useless--and inaccurate-- admonitions of our mothers that bullies will get tired and go away if you just ignore them, and that we shouldn't lower ourselves to their level.
We tried that for decades. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome. It didn't work. It's time to try something else. It may not work either--indeed, given the socialism of our "conservative" president, it's pretty clear it's not--but at least SOME of us are not just letting the socialists walk all over us any longer.
That's where I come from. In future, so long as you don't walk and quack like a lefty, I will not identify you as a migratory waterfoul. You might do me the favor of disabusing yourself of the assumptions you've made of me, based in part on your acceptance of the rabid American leftists' view of me in here. I can assure you I am not a Bible thumping, secluded compounder who believes dinosaurs and man lived together but that they all died because Noah thought they looked funny. Just because no leftist in America can conceive of a conservative who does not fit neatly into their increasingly strictured, movement-sanctioned definition, does not mean Noah didn't let us onto his impossibly big boat.
Best,
Tokie
