Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Big_Bird]

It seems to me, that those on the right yes I know that the left/right labels are imperfect are more prone to making personal attacks and resorting to nasty name calling during their so-called discussions. Lefties seem to be far more civil.

Yes...well OK....I know I can be a very rude bugger myself at times, but you generally have to throw the first punch before I'll get cheeky.




Lefties:

Sweet peaceable ecofriendly little lefties




Rightwingers:

Vile bad tempered righties



Well?

[jinju]

And what about terrorist sympatheizers like YOU?

[Big_Bird]

[jinju]

[EFLtrainer]

The right is a rabid group odriven by ideology rather than sense. And even the ideology is a lie for their leadership. How do otherwise intelligent people give up so much intellectual freedom of movement?

[jaganath69]

[Summer Wine]

Quote:

Do you always post before you medicate? Anyhow, I used to labour under the same assumption, BB, till I worked with a bunch of lefties at an Australian university. You've never seen a more ruthless pack of so and sos in your life.

Yes, I went to a liberal leftist university in Oz and nice, polite and respectful of others views is not something you would put in the same sentence with leftist.

[postfundie]

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1626

It depends on where you are? If you are in Alabama the right sucks arse but if you are at Berkeley...man keep me away...Lately I've been more irritated with the lefties than the righties....basically because they seem to be way out there and against freedom of Speech....For example look at the representation of pro-palestians on campuses...groups like the ISM and others are not at all interested in dialogue....As we know...Middle Eastern countires are not big on freedom of speech nor the freedom to criticise religion...I definately think this has a tendency to come through in people that support them... for an example look at reception that Daniel Pipes (Pipes is not a racist) gets when he speaks at Universities...ie Toronto...he needs waaaay more protection than Noam Chomsky needs or gets....

[twg]

[Kuros]

I put this question on par with:

'Who was more brutal, Hitler or Stalin?'

[Nowhere Man]

This is an interesting question.

Personally, I can understand it better in hindsight. It goes something like this:

Ever since the Vietnam War, there has been a burbling undercurrent of hatred by the right towards the anti-war movement. Such that in places where I grew up it was common to hear people openly insinuate bad things about "hippies", "long-hairs", and "peaceniks" doing things like hugging trees and throwing flowers at our enemies. A good example of a post-Vietnam point when this was popular would be when Clinton made defense cuts and closed bases.

George Bush was a pretty much a joke of a president until 9/11. Then, suddenly, it became taboo to say anything bad about him. We attacked Afghanistan and the pro-war right was having a field day with the "patriotism". A the huge 9/11 benefit in New York, there were jokes about how we'd bomb Aghanistan into the stone age if it weren't already in the stone age (seems pretty funny now that we want those people to help us and the fighting against these stone age people still hasn't ended).

This was followed by Bush subtly parking 200,000 troops in the Persian Gulf. And throughout the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, the so-called liberal media said something close to nothing.

These early days of 2003 were the turning point. People against the Iraq War began to speak up. Yet, it wasn't popular at the time. Rather, those who spoke up faced that burbling undercurrent from the Vietnam-era now given new wind by 9/11.

The peacenik, hippy epithets came out, as immortalized by Charlie Daniels:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-daniels.htm

But it was no longer just Hollywood speaking out. It was ordinary citizens. Suddenly, in places where the anti-war movement had been cursed for decades, there were "lefties" ready to reply in kind.

And collectively, we went through several rounds of attempts to muzzle criticism of the war. First, we couldn't criticize the President. Then, we couldn't critiicize the war out of respect for 9/11. Then, we couldn't criticize it because we had to "support the troops".

Of course, as all of this failed, the pro-war croud started to have serious trouble finding new, much less substantive, reasons for people not to criticize the war. So, they did the next best thing and started attacking the people who were criticizing the war. The people who didn't bat an eye for years as hippies were regularly denigrated started to talk about how the Left was "hateful". Now that the flower power had grown thorns, conservatives wanted to talk about hate. Never mind all of the racism and bigotry in their own backyards. The anti-war people were "hateful". IF there ever was a pot to a kettle.

And that's about where we are. Except the debate is pretty much over. Suffice to say it's no longer taboo to criticize the war.

But I think my answer is no. I think both sides can be pretty rude. The difference I notice is a great propensity for the right to make grand references to the Left. The Left this. The Left that. Basically a technique to rail against an imaginary target because no real one is available.

I don't see so much of people talking about the right that way. The right this. The right that? No. There's a very real target sitting in the White House.

[Gopher]

Big_Bird: your question asks whether those on the left feel those on the right are civil and polite -- and vice versa. Or another way of stating it: you ask those on the left to evaluate or judge those on the right -- and vice versa.

You probably will not get anywhere substantial with such questions.

I rather prefer Louis's advice...

[jaganath69]

I should have added this. I was involved in student politics during my undergraduate days, mostly with a centre left group, although I am not a lefty anymore. I can count people from both sides of politics that I found to be decent, good and civil people. Neither left nor right had the monopoly on this. Similarly, my father worked in Queensland state politics for 36 years and just retired this year. Although he mainly worked for Labour politicians and only spent one term on the National (conservative) side, he counts amongst his friends people from all over the political spectrum. In short, I don't really think that political bent determines niceness or civility, no more so than one's choice of music does. This seems to be an unfortunate side effect of the current kulturkampf and its antecedent, PC, that civil political debate has been replaced with a culture of name-calling and dehumanisation. Both left and right are guilty of it at times.

[mithridates]

I'd say they're both about the same. They're more guilty of hyperbole when talking about the 'other side'. Though I'm somewhat more inclined to so-called 'left-wing' views, you occasionally come across the odd quote like this that makes you wonder when the poster decided to throw all critical thinking out the window (note the complete lack of the words some, most, many, a few, or any other quantifiers):

[Big_Bird]