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Progressive Quotes

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Progressive Quotes

“Individuals can only volunteer their will. The collective has no rights if not by the use of force and coercion. Collectivism is not a collection of individuals; It is the complete denial of the individual and its rights. Socialism is not cooperation of individuals; it is the denial of individual rights and individual dignity.”

“This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.”

“The greatest hero for a country is the person who gave a progressive vision, a peaceful soul, a modern mind and an unshakable belief in science to his nation. And for the Turks, this honorable name is Atatürk, an immortal revolutionist!”

“The same progressive activists who campaign against microaggressions might also call for the banning of conservative speakers, for the forbidding of displays of support for certain political candidates, and for the creation of safe spaces where progressive ideas can go unchallenged by opposing views.”

“Sensitive to slight, they police even unintentional verbal offenses; concerned with the oppressed, they champion minorities and vilify the privileged; reliant on help, they publicly air lists of grievances. The university is the epicenter of victimhood culture. As such it is the epicenter of microaggression complaints, as well as trigger warnings, safe spaces, and hate crime hoaxes.”

“The claim that nations and nationalism are modern ideological constructs invented by intellectuals and spread by means of state authority and the state's apparatuses is a misleading half-truth that is itself a modernist (or postmodernist) ideological construct originating with intellectuals and requiring deconstruction.”

“Just as the symbol of Christ's crucifix encapsulates the triumph of the victim and has been exploited historically as a means to exert power over others, the rainbow Pride flag now serves a similar function.”

“The struggle for gay rights was about equal treatment before the law and making visible those whose persecution by the state had driven them into the shadows of society. Now that equality has been achieved, Pride has descended into a corporate orgy of identitarianism. The rainbow flag and all its tawdry spin-offs are a marker of virtue for companies that wish to sell products to the gullible and declare their commitment to -diversity and inclusion-.”

“It is only through reckoning with the truth that we might seek to ameliorate the many inequalities of our world. For all the emphasis on -lived experience-, objective truth still matters. We should be wary of those who tell us otherwise in order to preserve the delicate scaffolding of their pseudo-reality.”

“And why is it the women who have to be virgins? Why suffer torment to satisfy an asshole? Because the man who demands "virginity" from a women is nothing but an asshole! Why don't we behave as Westerners do!? For them, since the problem of sex is resolved, they can move on to other things! This is the reason they progress!!!”

“[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't stick to trade…they colonize environmental labor, and consumer issues of grave concern (in terms of health safety, and livelihoods too) to many, many hundreds of millions of people - and they do that by subordinating consumer, environmental, and labor issues to the imperatives and the supremacy of international commerce. That is exactly the reverse of how democratic societies have progressed, because over the decades they've progressed by subordinating the profiteering priorities of companies to, say, higher environmental health standards; abolition of child labor; the right of workers to have fair worker standards…and it's this subordination of these three major categories that affect people's lives, labor, environment, the consumer, to the supremacy and domination of trade; where instead of trade getting on its knees and showing that it doesn't harm consumers - it doesn't deprive the important pharmaceuticals because of drug company monopolies, it doesn't damage the air and water and soil and food (environmentally), and it doesn't lacerate the rights of workers - no, it's just the opposite: it's workers and consumers and environments that have to kneel before this giant pedestal of commercial trade and prove that they are not, in a whole variety of ways, impeding international commerce…so this is the road to dictatorial devolution of democratic societies: because these trade agreements have the force of law, they've got enforcement teeth, and they bypass national courts, national regulatory agencies, in ways that really reflect a massive, silent, mega-corporate coup d'etat…that was pulled off in the mid-1990's.”

“Because leftists are more likely to believe in the innate, inner quality of all people, they attribute the world's inequalities to outer, structural injustices. In particular, the left sees many power hierarchies as unmerited and exploitative. Leftist morality is rooted in the imperative to equalize, to various extents, discrepancies in power (especially through education). Compared with conservatives, leftists have a lower tolerance for inequality. In this leftist worldview, evil comes primarily from undeserved inequalities in strength or power: from capitalists who exploit workers, unscrupulous corporations that deceive consumers, colonialists who leach off third-world countries, soldiers and police who abuse civilians, men who mistreat women, humans who disrespect the animals and plants in their environment, and so on.”

“Most of us who champion free speech also believe in the idea of etiquette and the social contract. We simply do not believe that such parameters should be legally enforced by censorship or compelled speech diktats.”

“Collective guilt, the damaging impact of cultural appropriation, our servility to amorphous power structures, the primacy of identity politics; all of these concepts and more are now uncritically accepted by many of those in positions of authority. When politicians use phrases such as 'white privilege' and 'systemic racism', for instance, they are deploying the language of Critical Race Theory without necessarily understanding the full implications of the ideas behind the buzzwords. They are the unsuspecting agents of applied postmodernism.”

“That racism still exists is taken as evidence of the failure of the liberal project, but of course nobody has made the case that it has been eradicated. If a disease is cured but a few symptoms linger, one does not claim that the treatment was ineffective. Social liberalism is an ongoing process because it recognizes the imperfectability of human nature.”

“Whereas democracy is founded on the negotiation of diverging viewpoints, ideology is sustained through intolerance of dissent. You are, as the saying has it, either with us or against us. This is the essence of bigotry.”

“The ongoing culture war, whose existence if often denied by its chief antagonists, is no longer something that any of us can afford to ignore. Culture warriors have always been small in number, but lately, they have inveigled their way into positions of power and influence. As a result, the sphere of combat has extended into our homes, our schools, our places of work. Families, friendships and other relationships have been ruined. Many of us would prefer not to participate, but weapons have been forced into our hands. Culture warriors threaten to divide us even as they claim to be healing division. They couch their regressive ideas in progressive terminology, and those who attempt to slow their momentum are quickly subdued.”

“There are all sorts of examples of how we have been urged to take on trust a variety of extraordinary claims. Practitioners of 'Fat Studies' maintain that there are no authentic health risks to obesity, and that the seemingly irrefutable evidence to the contrary is the product of the inherent bigotry of the scientific method. An image of an individual with a bloodstained crotch is shared online to prove that men can menstruate, when we can all quite clearly see that this is a biological female who identifies as male. According to the new puritans, the observable realities of existence are a mirage. Only they have access to the truth, and we are all invited to jettison verifiable facts and nod along. Is this really any different from a preacher who insists that his supernatural interpretation of the world must be uncritically accepted without any evidence to support it?”

“For the new puritans, nothing need be explained or rationalized, because objective truth has become subordinated to -lived experience-. Where Marx saw society as an ongoing competition for resources and power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (a development from Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic), the high priests of Critical Social Justice see society as stratified according to identity politics.”

“The belief of the apparatchiks of Critical Social Justice - that all our problems will magically disappear once we outlaw certain points of view or words that cause 'harm' - is a utopian delusion.”

“Los estoicos comprendieron que las palabras no causan estrés directamente; sólo pueden provocar estrés y sufrimiento en una persona que interprete esas palabras como una amenaza. Puedes optar por interpretar a un orador invitado como dañino. Puedes elegir tus batallas, dedicar sus esfuerzos a cambiar las políticas que te importan y a hacerte inmune a los troles.”

“Las palabras que generan estrés o miedo a los miembros de algunos grupos a menudo se consideran ahora como una forma de violencia. Las palabras no son violencia. Tratarlas como tal es una decisión interpretativa, y esa elección aumenta el dolor y el sufrimiento mientras que impide otras respuestas más eficaces, como la respuesta estoica (cultivas la no reactividad) y la respuesta antifrágil.”

“One problem with taking on a physical or mental disability as an identity is that it disincentivizes any possible mitigation of the disability.”

“Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts -forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice- that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist of sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms). sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.”

“Mental health activism also frequently regards mental illness as a marginalized identity. One problem with this approach is that people tend to get attached to their identities and this may discourage some from seeking treatment and trying to recover.”

“Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, l even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of "the greater good".”

“Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative.”

“People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they're free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.”

“And just as some conceptualize racism as an inherent property of all white people, there are those who view trauma as a collective and hereditary condition shared by all members of an historically victimized group.”

“Manufacturing a case of victimhood allows the aggrieved to elicit sympathy or even to mobilize third parties such as legal authorities against their enemies. Since a victimhood culture is one where this status is most valuable, we should expect it to be especially prone to false claims of victimization.”

“There are different kinds of false accusations. In some cases, the accusers might genuinely believe what they say. People accused of witchcraft are innocent, but those who condemn them might genuinely believe that they are witches. In other cases, the accuser kwnos the accusation is false. Such cases can happen because the accuser and accused were embroiled in a conflict over something that third parties would not treat as a matter for intervention.”

“There are different kinds of false accusations. In some cases, the accusers might genuinely believe what they say. People accused of witchcraft are innocent, but those who condemn them might genuinely believe that they are witches. In other cases, the accuser knows the accusation is false. Such cases can happen because the accuser and accused were embroiled in a conflict over something that third parties would not treat as a matter for intervention.”