{"id":68,"date":"2002-06-10T18:59:00","date_gmt":"2002-06-10T23:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=68"},"modified":"2002-06-10T18:59:00","modified_gmt":"2002-06-10T23:59:00","slug":"after-reading-too-much-political-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=68","title":{"rendered":"After reading too much political news"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Top Ten Reasons I&#8217;m Not A (Left-)Liberal:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Gun control.  Liberals are completely wrong about this.  A fair number<br \/>\nof them know better, too, but they sponsor lies about it as a form of class<br \/>\nwarfare against conservative-leaning gun owners.<\/li>\n<li>Nuclear power.  They&#8217;re wrong about this, too, and the cost in<br \/>\nboth dollars and human deaths by pollution and other fossil-fuel<br \/>\nside-effects has been enormous.<\/li>\n<li>Affirmative action.  These programs couldn&#8217;t be a more diabolical or<br \/>\neffective plan for plan for entrenching racial prejudice if the Aryan<br \/>\nNations had designed them.<\/li>\n<li>Abortion: The liberals&#8217; looney-toon feminist need to believe that<br \/>\na fetus one second before birth is a parasitic lump of tissue with no<br \/>\nrights, but a fetus one second afterwards is a full human, has done<br \/>\nhalf the job of making a reasoned debate on abortion<br \/>\nnigh-impossible.<\/li>\n<li>Communism.  I haven&#8217;t forgiven the Left for sucking up to the monstrous<br \/>\nevil that was the Soviet Union.  And I never will.<\/li>\n<li>Socialism.  Liberals have never met a tax, a government<br \/>\nintervention, or a forcible redistribution of wealth they didn&#8217;t like.<br \/>\nTheir economic program is Communism without the guts to admit it.<\/li>\n<li>Junk science. No medicical study is too bogus and no environmental<br \/>\nscare too fraudalent for liberals.  If it rationalizes bashing<br \/>\ncapitalism or slathering on another layer of regulatory bureaucracy,<br \/>\nthey&#8217;ll take it.<\/li>\n<li>Defining deviancy down. Liberals are in such a desperate rush to<br \/>\nembrace the `victimized by society&#8217; and speak the language of<br \/>\ncompassion that they&#8217;ve forgotten how to condemn harmful,<br \/>\nself-destructive and other-destructive behavior.<\/li>\n<li>William Jefferson Clinton.  Sociopathic liar, perjurer, sexual predator.<br \/>\nThere was nothing but a sucking narcissistic vacuum where his principles<br \/>\nshould have been.  Liberals worship him.<\/li>\n<li>Liberals, by and large, are fools.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Top Ten Reasons I&#8217;m Not A Conservative:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Pornography. The complete absence of evidence that exposure to<br \/>\nsexually-explicit material is harmful to children or anyone else doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\nstop conservatives from advocating massive censorship.<\/li>\n<li>Drugs.  We found out that Prohibition was a bad idea back in the<br \/>\n1930s &#8212; all it did was create a huge and virulent criminal class, erode<br \/>\nrespect for the law, and corrupt our politics.  Some people never learn.<\/li>\n<li>Creationism.  I don&#8217;t know who I find more revolting, the drooling<br \/>\nmorons who actally believe creationism or the intelligent panderers<br \/>\nwho know better but provide them with political cover for their<br \/>\nreligious-fundamentalist agenda in return for votes.<\/li>\n<li>Abortion.  The conservatives&#8217; looney-toon religious need to<br \/>\nbelieve that a fertilized gamete is morally equivalent to a human<br \/>\nbeing has done the other half of making a reasoned debate on abortion<br \/>\nnigh-impossible.<\/li>\n<li>Racism.  I haven&#8217;t forgiven the Right for segregation, Jim Crow laws,<br \/>\nand lynching blacks.  And I never will.<\/li>\n<li>Sexism.  Way too much conservative thought still reads like an<br \/>\napologia for keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.<\/li>\n<li>Anti-science. Stem cells, therapeutic cloning &#8212; it doesn&#8217;t matter<br \/>\nhow many more diabetes, cancer and AIDS patients have to die to<br \/>\nprotect the anti-abortion movement&#8217;s ideological flanks.  Knowledge &#8212;<br \/>\nwho needs it?  Conservatives would try suppressing <em>astronomy<\/em><br \/>\nif the telescope had just been invented.<\/li>\n<li>Family values.  Conservatives are so desperate to reassert the<br \/>\nrepressive `normalcy&#8217; they think existed in Grand-dad&#8217;s time that they<br \/>\npretend we can undo the effects of the automobile, television, the<br \/>\nPill, and the Internet.<\/li>\n<li>Ronald Wilson Reagan.  A B-movie actor who thought ketchup was<br \/>\na vegetable.  His grip on reality was so dangerously weak that the<br \/>\nAlzheimer&#8217;s made no perceptible difference.  Conservatives worship him.<\/li>\n<li>Conservatives, by and large, are villains.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>a href=&#8221;http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=77590690&#8243;>Blogspot comments<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Top Ten Reasons I&#8217;m Not A (Left-)Liberal: Gun control. Liberals are completely wrong about this. A fair number of them know better, too, but they sponsor lies about it as a form of class warfare against conservative-leaning gun owners. Nuclear power. They&#8217;re wrong about this, too, and the cost in both dollars and human deaths&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=68\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">After reading too much political news<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}