When people who are capable of reason and critical thinking challenge opinions or claims made by ‘progressives’ – they tend to take the approach of presenting counterarguments that they know to be superior. They invoke evidence and logic… operating under the perfectly justifiable assumption that articulating an indisputably more accurate, more rational and better informed understanding of the issue in question will sway their opponent to give the credibility of their perspective fare consideration.
That never happens.
This is because ‘progressives’ do not prioritise or even care about truth. Their only motivation is to insure that concepts that appeal to their egos are privileged to the exclusion of all other considerations.
You will never see a ‘progressive’ say “that’s a good point” or “I didn’t know that” or “I never thought about it that way”. The only responses to superior arguments that you will get from ‘progressives’ are deflection, obfuscation, logical fallacies and a repetition of generic ‘progressive’ slogans and memes that they take for granted prove their point for them. They will drag thinking people down their bottomless rabbit hole of ego self-preservation – literally to the point of absurdity – rather than concede to the possibility that maybe… just maybe they’ve simply accepted a fashionable position before thinking it through sufficiently.
With that in mind, I offer this short example of this very dynamic between a typically self-serving ‘progressive’ – ‘Da’ – and ‘BC’… a well informed, rational thinking person.
The context for this exchange is a piece in the National Post by columnist Barbara Kay, called : How progressives perverted the study of history
Compare ‘BC’s attempt to engage ‘Da’ in debate about the issue with my approach of zeroing-in on Da’s inadequate thinking skills and how this disqualifies his opinion from serious consideration to begin with.
Da…
At least progressives keep active by thinking and trying to improve things. Their counterpart, anti-progressives, just sit there and think society will improve and advance naturally, by itself. Well it doesn’t. Now and then it needs a push.
By just sitting there and staring out of the window an anti-progressive world stagnates and falls apart, just like the old Soviet Union did, and the Ottoman Emire before it.
The Middle East is full of anti-progressives and look at the mess it is in.
BC
Or look at Africa which was full of progressives that started Marxist marxist governments after de-colonialization. You had Libya, Egypt, the Congo, Angola, Sudan, and let’s not forget the shining star Zimbabwe.
FYI in the Middle East the governments of Syria and Iraq were marxist at one time too and the Iranians were notorious for nationalizing foreign property for the sake of the people.
And how could anyone forget Mao and Pol Pot and their views on reshaping society with their progressive visions of socialism? How many dead in China? 30 million? Maybe 50 million?
Da…
B C . Poor argument, and a baked one at that.
Not all progressives are alike. If you have progressivism coupled with democratic institutions you don’t get the ‘killing fields’ you refer to BC.
And here is my approach….
The only thing ‘progressives’ are interested in improving is the sense of their own moral righteousness. People who are truly interested in the betterment of society are invested in objective ‘outcomes’… not the gratification they feel for supporting ‘processes’ that are marketed as the one acceptable choice for the morally enlightened.
You have demonstrated this yourself with your statement: “At least progressives keep active by thinking and trying to improve things”.
Your instinct here is to emphasize the moral grandeur of what ‘progressives’ are ‘trying’ to do… that it’s their lofty ambitions that matters. Whether ‘progressive’ ideas and policies actually do ‘improve things’ or contribute to the problems in the real world is a lesser concern that is left unscrutinized.
Da…
Anyway, I find most of the arguments about progressives in our society, of the Western kind, shallow and trivial. I know things aren’t perfect about progressives. But generally progressives of the Western kind have give us open societies in which we are free to express ourselves, exchange ideas and free to live pretty much as we like.
“But generally progressives of the Western kind have give us open societies in which we are free to express ourselves, exchange ideas and free to live pretty much as we like.”
WHAT????? You can’t be serious. It’s the ‘progressive’ Left that are constantly calling for limitations on free expression. It is ‘progressives’ who advance notions of ‘hate-speech’. It’s the ‘progressive’ Left who drag comedians like Guy Earle and commentators like Mark Steyn off to ‘Human Rights Commissions’ because they feel offended by their comments. It’s ‘progressives’ who are shutting down speaking events by people like Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, Warren Farrell, Janice Fiamengo and others because they challenge the absolutism of ‘progressive’ ideology.
‘Progressives’ do NOT “give us open societies in which we are free and live pretty much as we like”. They demand that everyone live the way THEY like…. otherwise they are more than happy to elicit the power of the state to force you to comply.
Comments