From my friend John Hawkins (Culturcidal), a post named “Is This Liberal Right That It’s Wrong to Own Pets?“. The relevant part from his post (emphasis mine):
…The piece is obviously building up to what I like to think of as a “standard authoritarian liberal approach” to the whole issue that you see over and over again. It’s an approach that goes something like this, “I am a good and compassionate person and to prove that, I am proclaiming that I have no interest in owning or using (fill in the blank here with cars/SUVS/Bitcoin/gas stoves/pets/meat/the police/cross country airplane flights/oil, natural gas and coal/incandescent light bulbs/etc., etc.), so, therefore, it’s bad for society and should be banned because it takes up unnecessary resources, which therefore means it’s bad for the environment.
Simplified, it looks something like this. “We don’t need this” (which, by the way, often turns out to be pure hypocrisy) becomes “No good people need this,” which eventually turns into, “We need the government to make this illegal.”
Bazinga! Go read the whole thing – there are a couple of parts where I chuckled because he was so honest about his “self-interest.”
Now, I think pets are really great, and I have two dogs currently and love’em to death, so I totally disagree with the Guardian post he quotes. However, what John says in the abstract really is important, is very useful for Conservatarian purposes in strategy and tactics, and lays out what I was fighting over at Treehugger for years and years.
That last sentence is EXACTLY the mindset that has taken over. It used to be a stepping-stone process over time in times past.
No longer. As our political polarization has increased, that “stepping stone time” has shortened. Most stock cars off the lot have a “0 to 60” time as a way to judge how fast a car could accelerate (faster being better). Muscle cars (e.g., Camaro, ‘Cuda, Mustang) were always faster than the family sedan or minivan). Nowadays, an electric Tesla can turn in 2-3 seconds times at an upper-middle-class price range that normally would have taken a rich man’s bankroll to buy a gas-powered supercar (starting around $300,000) to come close to that speed.
So, too, has the normal Progressive going from “You shouldn’t” to “Government mandate.” All because of their perceived Moral Superiority over you stemming from that first step of:
Well, I don’t have one, don’t need one, or ever would do so in the future
That’s the initial surge off the line. Nowadays, that’s the “slow” part of their thinking/reasoning/ ideological bent. The rest (I’m good, so you’re not – lose your liberty) happens at faster and faster speeds, almost to the point of being reflexive.
And then what happens is that their ears shut down, and the blinkers go up. They won’t listen, can’t be convinced to debate, and they will work hard to take x, y.z away from you because you ARE a bad person.
This brings me to my last point: Progressives are selfish. And they have no or to little sense of freedom or liberty that can or should be ascribed to anyone but themselves.
They want what they want when they want it and are not about to let anyone opposite of them deny what they want. If something is good enough for them, it will be good enough for anyone else (regardless of circumstances). The converse also holds true:
If I don’t want it, I’ll see to it that YOU won’t have it either.
Go ahead – as Crowder says: Change my mind.
Or John Hawkins’ mind as well.
