Left-wing BS versus right-wing BS

The right makes a lot of understandable mistakes. They often start out with facts, but then draw the wrong conclusions from those facts. Here's one that the religious right might make: "abstinence is the only guaranteed way to avoid pregnancy/STDs, therefore abstinence-only sex education will reduce teen pregnancy and STD rates". The first half of that statement is objectively true. But the second half is not a conclusion that you can logically draw from it. It relies on incorrect assumption that abstinence-only sex ed somehow leads to teens not having sex.


Now here's one that the alt-right might make: "black people make up 13% of the population but commit 52% of crime (or violent crime), therefore we need to gas the Jews". I checked and the first half of that statement is a slight oversimplification of a real statistic: black people committed 52% of homicides between 1980 and 2008. But "homicide" is a pretty broad and potentially misleading category, as it can include justifiable homicides, such as killing people in self-defense. And I definitely don't see what any of it has to do with the latter half of the statement, but it no doubt has something to do with George Soros, and it's definitely not word salad.


But what do you see if you look at the left? Utter bullsh*t. Not even an attempt at dealing with facts or even meaningful English phrases. Living wage? That doesn't mean anything. It's not a phrase that any economist on the planet uses. "Living wage" just means "whatever minimum wage the left is pushing for at any given moment". Or how about "assault weapon"? Again, this doesn't mean anything. An "assault weapon" is just "whatever kind of gun the left is trying to ban at any given moment". There IS such a thing as an assault RIFLE, but those are already illegal in the US and have been forever, so the left can't use them as an excuse to push their idiocy. How about microaggressions? Cultural appropriation? Or one of my favorites, "environmental justice"? Again, these don't mean anything to anyone except insane people who spend all their time making up new genders on tumblr. They're just part of the giant mountain of word salad that leftist ideology is based on.


To a huge degree, I think this is why I can tolerate right-wing idiocy more easily than I can tolerate left-wing idiocy. When I'm debunking right-wing bullsh*t, the people I'm arguing with at least speak the same version of English as the rest of the f***ing world (aside from being peppered with the occasional "cuck" or "based") and we can have an actual f***ing conversation.


And then there are the libertarians. The events of 2020 were the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of my break from libertarians, or at least from calling myself a libertarian. I remember picking up on the concept of "essential workers/jobs" pretty easily. You can't just give EVERYONE $1000/month and lock them in their homes until the plague goes away. Food still needs to be grown and shipped. Power plants need to keep running. These are qualitatively different from the jobs that more or less only exist so that people can do them so that they can pay rent. I tried explaining this to libertarians and they just didn't get it. "All jobs are essential because people need to do them to pay rent and if you give people free money to pay rent that's SLAVERY" jesus f**king christ. No. That's not how it works. Libertarians need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that reality is often complicated and messy, and that "just because a problem exists doesn't mean the government should try to solve it" isn't the only time when you're allowed to use nuanced thinking.