Nikki Haley-What was the cause of the Civil War

[CJD]

(01-16-2024, 02:20 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: At their extremes both ideologies have more in common than they would like to believe.  Once you get towards the poles the behavior becomes identical, the only difference being the justification for said behavior.  It's actually one of the major flaws on this board, and a microcosm of the problem we have a society at large.  People are engaging in the exact same behavior they decry in their ideological opponents, but they are either blind to it or justify it.  See cancel culture as an example. 

I think the idea of "Power corrupts. absolute power corrupts absolutely." applies to the "extremes" argument here. I think a left wing government is possible and I think it is possible for a government to be run with the interests of the people in mind, as long as there are sufficient ways to remove and replace representatives if they begin to be corrupted. The problem occurs when a centralized group of people gain the power to run a country with the understanding that they need to run it in the interest of the people. Once they are given that power in good faith, they twist the government and its rules to maintain that power, even if it is not in the interest of the people.

Humans are imperfect animals and our cardinal sin, above all others (in my biased opinion) is greed. If you give one person too much power, especially if that power involves twisting things in a way that would gain them more power, I think corruption is almost inevitable. That is what seems to be the downfall of nearly every left wing government. Even Lenin, as flawed as he was (and I don't want this to devolve into a "was Lenin actually good or just another dictator?" question, as that is not my intent here), seemed to care at least a bit about the people of the USSR but when he died, Stalin gained power through murder and twisting of the rules and power gained in the chaos of Lenin's death and the subsequent power vacuum that left, as he did not seem to name a successor and his criticisms of Stalin as he was nearing death were apparently suppressed. If the USSR was technically a leftist government under Lenin, I think it lost any semblance of that under Stalin due to his corruption.

But that may just be my coping with how a "left wing" government went so horribly wrong. I can't say for sure.

Quote:The right was, correctly, up in arms about people being cancelled for things they did and said years, sometimes decades, ago.  Or being cancelled for having an unpopular opinion.  Yet the exact same people are now rejoicing in people losing their jobs over their stance on the war in Gaza.  Sometimes for taking down posters of hostages, sometimes for expressing their opinion on Zionism, sometimes for other reasons.  The justification is different, but the outcome and method is the exact same.  Ans you'll find no shortage of people justifying it with the shoe being on the other foot excuse.

Cancel culture is a tricky subject. Whether we like it or not, our opinions and personal views will have an impact on our work lives. If it's discovered that a CEO of a company used to be a virulent racist, customers may not want to buy that company's products anymore, which is bad for business, so that CEO may lose their job to protect the company's image and/or sales.

Smaller firings, such as actors or even regular people, are the same thing on a smaller scale. 

That's why social media was a mistake. A person's inner most beliefs or rash decisions/thoughts/actions should not be available to review 15 years later. It's just a bad ***** idea. There are too many hot button topics and, if you tweet enough, eventually you'll say something that enough people will be angry about that they may try to do harm to you (and the quickest way to harm you is to tarnish your reputation and/or income stream). I don't think this an ideological issue. I think it's just, again, a human issue. Just like there are assholes on both the left and right, there are cancelers on both the left and right.

Having a particular political ideology does not definitively make you a better or worse person (most of the time. I think we can all agree there are no "good Nazis"). There are piece of shit socialists and there are piece of shit libertarians, just like there are heart of gold socialists and libertarians.