Progressives

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Progressives by nature want progress. Since the majority of progressives are young kids (or old children), that suffer from chronic Dunning-Kruger effect (those that know the least are the most self-assured) and think they know how to fix everything better than the people who have spent their lives in those industries, progress is virtually always an immature "knee-jerk" far-left reaction on how to make things better, that results in unintended consequences and would make things much worse. If only they had the wisdom to listen to the experts before regulating/legislating. But if they had that wisdom and temperament, they would be moderates.

Progressives is kind of a broad brush, and a sloppy one -- in that different countries might have different standards. But basically they have a few sub-segments, some of them worse than others. The worst are the "College Kids" regurgitating what they were taught in Marxist Grievance Studies classes, gullibly trying to change the world, without understanding the first thing about the past, present, or able to think through the consequences of their policies (and thus the future). It is slightly unfair to paint this vocal minority as all progressives -- but then most progressives have no problems with using the broad brush sloppily, so don't they deserve a little back? Maybe. But insert some caveats here, and don't just all of them by the actions of their vocal majority: it's just the 90% that give the rest a bad name.


Issue Lie Truth
Progressives Progressives see other progressives as good (by ignoring all the ways they aren't). They see those that resisted progress as bad, luddites, or vile (by ignoring the ways they aren't). They teach their side to fear the other side: Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Trump were all like Hitler, or dangerously unstable. (Lookup the Goldwater Rule). They know their side is morally superior, because they scare their base about the opposition. Any deeper glance at their side shows some rather unsavory behaviors from the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Martin Luther King Jr., Margaret Sanger, and a rapid emotional (fearful?) attacks on anyone that points out their flaws. There's no moral high ground in taking other people's property, keeping a cut, and giving a percentage to your cronies or constituents. Teddy was a blowhard war-monger. Wilson was a racist pawn of corporate interests. FDR was one of more corrupt Presidents and nasty human being. MLK was a philander and a hypocrite. Margaret Sanger was a vile eugenicist. And so on. The world is a lot more nuanced, and people a lot more complex than the caricatures painted by leftist historians. But if they told the truth, their voters might not fear the alternatives as much. If you doubt it, point out inconvenient truths and see if they can accept them, or they attack.
Progressive Choice
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The progressive choice is like the light or dark side in Star Wars (and the Force). You can look at people who have more success, money, looks, and so on, and you can pick either to:
  • (a) You can live the life of angry progressives. You see Social Injustice, resent it, and "them" for their color, money, privilege, and give in to the hate and envy. Spend your life conspiring how to take what's someone else's, to make things more "fair". Punish wealth, success, luck, gender, or genetics, all to try to control the world and make up for past wrongs. Since you'll be addicted to imagining and obsessing over the injustices that you can never completely make up for, you're doomed to never succeed, and just die a bitter and unhappy progressive. The problem is your perception, but if you can cure that, you won't be a progressive any more.
  • (b) Or you can learn the life of a happy anything else (libertarian, conservative, Christian, agnostic, etc). You look around and see that there's people that make less, have less, had it much rougher than you did (or had more misfortunes hit them), and yet they're more successful (as in happy with what they have) than you are. They're not sweating that your pay-check or house is bigger, they're living life like it matters, and trying to help others up (instead of holding others down). They're not living their lives trying to punish, and control -- but to help and serve. You can choose to be like them, but then your progressive friends will all hate you.

I think society is better the more people b's and few a's there are. So I'd rather doom people to a realistic optimism of (b), than the cynical pessimism of (a). Life sucks and is hard for most people. But the green-eyed monster of envy or trying to force fairness on an unjust world, is dooming people to failure and a bitter existence. While teaching them to cherish what they have, will make life better for them, and most who interact with them. Emotionally happy and healthy people aren't progressives. more...

Progressive Quotes
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I generally prefer quotes about progressives that try to enlighten. There are few insightful progressives because most of them are just not that self-aware of themselves, the world around them, or what their policies would lead to. So they are often pithy, simplistic, and wrong -- but some are worth reading for the jaw-dropping barbarism that they believe, when they're being honest. (Later progressives learned to hide it better).

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Progressives gave us

You often hear advocates claiming, "if it wasn't for progressives, you wouldn't have X...", then they explain without progressives, we wouldn't have roads, schools, police, fireman, military, or some other thing we had for decades or centuries before progressives. But I wanted to compile the other side of the equation (the balances). Here's a reminder of what they gave us that wasn't so great, or started off fine but entropied into something bad, so people can decide if jumping on every new big-government bandwagon is a good idea… or if a little prudence, caution and research is warranted before gobbling up the bandwagon fallacy and putting on that Che Guevara T-Shirt.

The short list of losers would include the following:

  • Financial servitude: centralized banking/money (the Fed), fiat currency backed by debt (and the inflation that results in), they gave us the 16th amendment, the IRS, the worst tax code in the free world (73,954 pages), they fought for every tax increase and against all relief or simplification (to fund themselves), and then they piled on 174,545 pages of regulations (over 1,040,940 restrictions spread among them) in our regulatory code, and that’s not touching the 23,000 pages in our federal legal code (and over 300,000 criminal punishments burried within the discretion of administrative agencies).
  • Bigotry: centralized education with the admitted intent of reprogramming the youth (against their immigrant/catholic parents), they were champions of racism (and still are in affirmative action), supported eugenics, created our anti-immigration quotas and policies as a favor to unions (then call anyone that wants to enforce those laws a xenophobe), FDR blocked all immigration for a while, interned even 2nd generation Japanese, Germans and Italians,
  • General Statism: they replaced the constitution with federalism (jurisprudence and precedence over original intent), invented supreme court stacking and judicial activism, they gave us the 17th amendment (popular vote senate which broke the constitution and states rights completely), they gave government the power to take our property (eminent domain, national parks/federal lands), and to control what we can do on our land (via the EPA and other agencies)
  • Too big to fail: they have always been in bed with big business (like organized labor) and created the biggest cartels and trusts in the nation (utilities, unions, federal reserve, banking, Fanny/Freddy, tort lawyers, AMA, and so on),
  • Enemies of liberty: they gave us Prohibition and the post-prohibition drug war, they granted the Fed it's own unconstitutional police forces (FBI, NSA, DEA, OSS/CIA, IRS), centralized transportation (like Amtrak), used centralized road as a way to force things on the states that were unconstitutional (like the 55MPH speed limit, forced raised the drinking age, and so on), then they complain that our federally mandated highways and bridges are crumbling (the agencies they created, failing to do their charter), they invented the anti-liberty regulatory state: the FDA was created so they could control what we put in our own bodies, the FCC and fairness doctrine were created to control our free speech (so FDR could bully any TV/Radio stations that did unfavorable pieces on the administration or it’s policies), they gave us FISA warrants and invented domestic spying (look at Espionage and Sedition Acts of the 1917-1918 and how they empowered government to read our mail, listen on phone calls, and how they undermined free speech), they created American imperialism (and got us into the Civil War, Spanish American War, WWI, WWII, Kosovo, Bosnia, Vietnam, and Central/South America), they gave us conscription/draft, they took away our guns for our own good, invented the poverty industrial complex (which is over 2/3rds of our budget and 9/10ths of our future liabilities), they made it harder to save for our retirement and replaced it with a youth-tax ponzi scam calls Social Security, then they raided the Social Security Trust fund and left IOU’s in their place (for our kids to pay for our debts/sins), they invented congressional appointed agencies to give congress plausible deniability and more opacity in government, and most of all, they won’t accept responsibility for any of it. It’s all the Republicans fault.

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📚 References