Anger and Hate as a political weapon.

I shamelessly clipped this from Denny's place.  I was working a post about "Che Guevara" the marxist that somehow became a t-shirt phenomenom with the college students and other leftist.  But I ran across this and it pertains to the stupidity that I see going on today.


George Will wrote a column about anger: Anger is all the rage: George Will, March 26, 2007
I think that he missed the point.
Anger turned to hate, along with fear, has become a political weapon. Hate and fear are dynamic while their opposites, love and fearlessness, are passive. So if you want to build a constituency and mobilize people you need only give them something to hate or something to fear. Love and contentment will result in their sitting back and enjoying their good fortune.
Because of this reality, politics has degenerated into the demonizing of opponents and scaring the public with issues for which no one has a viable solution. Then the demagogues can claim that they have the solution and that if you just throw the evil rascals out and give them control life will be wonderful.
They claim that if they are in charge they will save the planet and end poverty, homelessness, hunger, illness, crime and war. Oh, I forgot, and they would also guarantee total freedom. Wouldn’t that be paradise? If only you would support them and put them in charge.
One small problem. Free will and paradise are incompatible. As long as one has free will he is able to make bad choices as easily as good choices. Those choices not only effect the chooser but invariably have ramifications beyond the chooser. When bad, they result in the tribulations listed above. Whether you believe that Genesis is the word of God or an interesting fairytale, the message is the same. Adam and Eve were in paradise. Adam and Eve had free will. Adam and Eve made a poor choice. Adam and Eve were banished from paradise.
The question you must ask yourself is: How can these demagogues give you paradise without taking away your freedoms and making you totally dependent, which is the definition of bondage? They can’t.
The main difference between the Left and the Right is that the Left lives in a theoretical world while the Right tries to understand reality. The Left believes that more government is the solution, the Right believes that too much government is the problem. The world is a dangerous deadly place and as long as there is free will man will make choices that result in the above listed tribulations.
This is not an argument for giving up and ending the fight to reduce these tribulations. Nor is it an argument for ending freedom. It is an argument for recognizing the complexity of the problem and rejecting simple, feel good solutions offered for the purpose of gaining political advantage.
Another problem with the Left is that once they formulate a theory they marry it. No matter how many time it fails, they cling to it “till death do they part.” A classic example is Communism (Socialism). Instead of questioning the theory every time it fails, the left just proclaims that it wasn’t done right but if they were in charge they would do it right.
Since the Left emerges out of the theoretical world of the university, their influence spreads even to the world of science. The most important attribute of a scientist is to be skeptical about his own findings. Due to the influence of the Left, scientists are more and more becoming advocates for their initial findings. Scientists talking about a “consensus” is an oxymoron. Either the experiment rising from research can be consistently replicated or it can’t. If it can’t, then the theory that initiated the research is flawed and therefore should be discarded. There should not be a poll as to how many scientists agree with the theory. It is just as foolish to accept scientific evidence without question as it is to reject empirical evidence out of hand.
Finally, it has been my experience that any attempt to have a philosophical discussion with a Leftist is turned into a “right fight” by the Leftist. If you offer them an unassailable fact, they ignore it, go off on a tangent, or make an ad hominem attack (Bush lied, Bush is Dumb, etc.) They are right and anyone who disagrees with them is evil because they are just trying to make the world better. Of course whenever a theory fails, the theory wasn’t flawed, it just wasn’t properly implemented.