First up, thanks again to The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!
I’ve long been a fan of Scott Adam’s Dilbert, and plenty of people I know in my industry like that comic as well; it’s a funny, insightful parody of the high-tech office world. But a lot of his fans don’t know he’s a semi-regular social/political blogger. This just in from him recently: The Bully Party. Excerpt:
I’ve been trying to figure out what common trait binds Clinton supporters together. As far as I can tell, the most unifying characteristic is a willingness to bully in all its forms.
If you have a Trump sign in your lawn, they will steal it.
If you have a Trump bumper sticker, they will deface your car.
if you speak of Trump at work you could get fired.
On social media, almost every message I get from a Clinton supporter is a bullying type of message. They insult. They try to shame. They label. And obviously they threaten my livelihood.
We know from Project Veritas that Clinton supporters tried to incite violence at Trump rallies. The media downplays it.
We also know Clinton’s side hired paid trolls to bully online. You don’t hear much about that.
Yesterday, by no coincidence, Huffington Post, Salon, and Daily Kos all published similar-sounding hit pieces on me, presumably to lower my influence. (That reason, plus jealousy, are the only reasons writers write about other writers.)
Joe Biden said he wanted to take Trump behind the bleachers and beat him up. No one on Clinton’s side disavowed that call to violence because, I assume, they consider it justified hyperbole.
So much for the party of tolerance and inclusion.
Some years ago, back in the days of Usenet (remember Usenet? I kind of miss it) a friend of mine responded thusly to a leftist commenter who was in the habit of blocking replies from anyone who disagreed with him:
The reason you do it (block conservative replies) is because you’re intellectually intolerant.
In fact, that absolute unshakable conviction of moral truth applies *far* more to leftists. Leftists just *know*, for example, that people have a “right” to free health care and forgiveness of their student loans, and they simply don’t want to hear – *refuse* to hear – arguments to the contrary.
This gets back, as this debate so often does, to a well-known bromide that oversimplifies the difference between conservatives and liberals, but nonetheless contains an element of truth and goes a long way toward explaining the inherently uncivil behavior of leftists in civic discourse:
Conservatives think liberals are stupid; liberals think conservatives are evil.
The implications of that are huge. Conservatives may think liberals are stupid, but as long as the liberals aren’t brain damaged, they may be amenable to instruction. Thus, conservatives generally don’t naturally start off being uncivil, as doing so would make the listener unreceptive to the lesson. Conservatives tend to see civility as a virtue.
But liberals, with their reflexive belief that conservatives are evil, *start* with incivility, and given their assumption, why wouldn’t they? Liberals see incivility as a virtue when dealing with those whom they sophomorically see as incorrigibly evil.
There’s a fair amount of truth in this nugget, originally floated by the inestimable William F. Buckley. It’s been on display this election cycle, not least of all with the torching of a Republican campaign office in North Carolina. It’s been observed in this election that ‘Trump says awful things, but Hillary Clinton does awful things.’ So, apparently, do her followers. I haven’t heard of any Clinton signs being stolen, or Democratic headquarters being bombed, or cars with Clinton bumper stickers being vandalized.
I think the passage above does a fair job of explaining why.
