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hga · 2016-11-28 · Original thread
It's perhaps a little late to tell someone who's about to turn 56 to stop doing this ^_^!

Seriously, the "Right" and "Left" are abstractions for two general philosophies about human nature, the Right believing that human nature is basically fixed, or as a favorite history teacher put it, "Original Sin is an empirical observation!", and the Left believes in the perfectibility of man. And historically, at least since the French Revolution which created the modern versions of these two, has gotten downright murderously violent when their attempts to "perfect" men failed, as we on the right believe is inevitable.

So you're asking me to drop a perfectly usable and useful abstraction that helps to make more sense of the world because of the danger I'll be disappointing by any particular politician. Seeing that my first great disappointment was Nixon in his second term, I've got to tell you I've got other tools for that, like "best is the enemy of good enough", "the lessor of two evils", and so on. And you shouldn't assume I didn't look at the actual policies both put forward, and could make a choice on those alone.

And how to you characterize a rhetorical policy against political correctness? Or an attack on a common enemy like the MSM that's more carried out by rhetoric than actions?

Or the simple fact that many if not most people simply cannot be reached by dialectical arguments, it's rhetoric or nothing (or I'm told, see Aristotle's book on the subject, this is said to be a good translation: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195064879/ ).

As for your point "'us' as a colour of skin", the best reply is the one attributed to Trotsky, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you". I'd prefer to be left alone to code up neat stuff, but that's not an option today in the US.