Why I’m a Liberal and Hate Most of the Far Left Anyway
By Dan Seitz
When I wrote an article about Free Republic and the dolts who frequent the site, a lot of the sulky feedback from conservatives wasn’t “We’re not all like this” or “This is only a very narrow subset of conservative thought” (both of which are completely accurate); it was “You’d never do an article like this about Democratic Underground!” Which, you know, you’d think you’d want to emphasize that Freepers were all loons like we did in our article, but whatever.
So, I tried, I really did. But I failed, because I know far-left douchebags way too well and thus my satire meter is broken. I’m a victim of Poe’s Law; some of Democratic Underground may be satire by conservative trolls, but it’s all seemingly legit to me.
I spent my teenage years in and around a small town in Vermont that was literally crawling with organic-food-munching Phish-listening douchebags that would make Abbie Hoffman cry with their failure. Eight years around these kinds of people quickly teaches you something important: there’s no practical difference between a far-right douchebag and a far-left douchebag. They want the same thing: to be absolutely, incontrovertibly right, even when they’re not, and for you to obey every word that drops from their god-like lips.
In short, they’re bullies. And worse, they’re stupid.
A little backstory as to how Vermont became infested with douchebags: in the ’60s, all the hippies moved to Vermont because they wanted to be one with nature and the land was cheap for communes. Then they figured out that the guy founding the commune was a psychotic control freak and that being one with nature got boring fast when you weren’t stoned, so they moved to small towns in Vermont, and started trying to create the free, open world they wanted by telling everybody what to do and how to do it, because Vermont was theirs now and Daddy said so.
Let’s use shopping giant Wal-Mart as an example.
Pictured: Walmarthos, the ancient, murderous god Walmart is named after.
There are many valid reasons to hate Wal-Mart, none of which were actually used by the people opposing the presence of Wal-Mart in Vermont when I was growing up. It was all about not despoiling Vermont with chain stores, despite the fact that the town had a strip that was nothing but chain stores for a mile or more.
Wal-Mart wanted to come to my town, because a place called Ames had just closed and thus, there was a huge space available, right on the commercial strip. It was an eyesore, it was vacant, and Wal-Mart wanted to fill it. No problem, right?
The douchebags rose as one and roared that Wal-Mart wouldn’t violate Vermont here, no sir no how! “It might hurt local businesses that they neither bought stuff from nor cared about! It’s fundamentally anti-capitalism! Or something! Whatever!…No Wal-Mart!”
So instead, Wal-Mart went across the river to New Hampshire to a spot literally less than five hundred feet from the other major business district in town, which held their precious Co-Op, dynamited the side of a mountain, built their store, and not only drove a few local businesses off, also managed to make the town’s traffic problems about 100% worse.
Which could have been solved with a roundabout, but there was a crappy little park (nicknamed Wino Park because that’s where the hoboes slept) that nobody used, and we can’t pave our precious greenspace! The douchebags shot that down too.
So, just to review, instead of filling a vacant space (which stayed vacant for years), collecting sales tax from a major corporation, and preventing serious traffic problems, the hippies succeeded instead blowing the shit out of “Mother Gaia” and all the businesses they were worried about shut down anyway. This was soon followed by huge traffic problems with lots of extra pollution, and no tax revenue. Good job!
The collected short-sightedness of hippies is one of earth’s most highly reactive natural resources
And the racial politics were even worse.
Something you have to understand: Vermont has all the diversity of a Klan rally. The Census recently came out and it was discovered Vermont had finally broken the 5% non-white barrier…5.1% of Vermonters didn’t identify as Caucasian. Leave that out and it’s 94.9%. We’re less diverse than Idaho, and Idaho has a Nazi problem.
So, anything about race is already blitheringly retarded, because it’s a bunch of white people arguing over, say, the Black experience without bothering to consult anything other than a VHS copy of Roots. There’s nothing more ridiculous than a white man taking offense on behalf of a group of people he probably moved to Vermont to get away from in the first place.
For example, my high school mascot was the Colonel, basically an off-brand Colonel Sanders. Why? Because the town was in the southern part of the state, so it was “the Pride of the South”. Most Vermont schools have stupid sports team names: our big rivals were the Cosmos, from a town that had probably never seen a telescope, and the Terriers, from a town that even hicks made fun of. It’s a dumb joke that I’m pretty sure nobody has ever, ever found funny.
While I was in school, some white guy decided to get all offended on behalf of the Black teenagers attending my high school, who one and all really didn’t care and told him so to his face. Apparently, he felt that having a Southern anything was automatically demeaning towards Black people, because as we all know, all those race problems in Boston in the ’70s were secretly elaborately staged and all Southern people just hate them the shit out of those uppity n-words.
This became a huge flap at my school, for no discernable reason, because nobody in the school cared about our mascot. We all thought it was retarded. Not even the sports teams cared; mostly they were annoyed the Terriers had the same color scheme. So, faced with the apathy of the entire student body and the obvious stupidity of this…it derailed school board meetings for weeks and nearly ensured the budget didn’t pass, meaning we wouldn’t have been able to go to school because some honky with a trust fund didn’t like other white people.
Then it got more stupid. The hick kids, who had never left Vermont, forget going to the South, started putting up Confederate flag decals on their trucks. I have never met a Southerner, of any color, who didn’t find this absolutely hilarious. These kids were doing it to piss off the hippies, and probably because the flag looked cool on their country albums.
The only flag that can be considered an internet troll
The Confederate flag is a divisive and flawed symbol, to put it mildly, and there have been serious, intelligent discussions about what it represents and what it means to different groups. None of which were held in my town. Instead a bunch of the douchebag kids nearly beat up a redneck in the hall of the high school.
Yes, really.
If all of this sounds insane, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. After I left, these dimwits tried to protest the war in Iraq by impeaching Bush, because the head of the free world is completely accountable to small Vermont towns that didn’t vote for him in the first place, and actually forced the town to put public nudity laws into place after they started running around naked. Compare this to San Francisco, with supposedly a much higher nutball quotient: the closest they got was trying to name a sewage plant after Bush, and according to South Park, everybody on the left in San Francisco smells their own farts.
No wonder I can’t mine satire out of these people: they’re self-satirizing.
If you liked this, follow FunnyCrave on Twitter and Facebook!
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 8:59AM
Nobody can lampoon the left like the left. Ah, we know us so well. :) Guilty as charged and I, as a frothing-at-the-mouth, barefoot, free-love, hippy Lib'Ral, will accept this ribbing. 1) Because many of the allegations are true. 2) Because it was delivered with just a smidgen of love.
…Can't say the same for everybody though!
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 11:48AM
wow. You're quite the radical idiot. I'd put you in the 'far right douchebag' catagory. There are always going to be ignorant people who want you to believe everything they say. Suck it up and be a big boy. You're going to run into shitty people your whole life. It's nothing new. Sit back and make fun of them with your friends, but there is no reason to get your panties in a twist about it. For fucks sake, you're going to give yourself an ulcer.
On another note, don't group people who like to eat organic in with the far lefters. There's nothing wrong with not wanting your body polluted with herba/pesticides. And there's nothing wrong with thinking that our society needs a little straightning out. So the next time you decide to blog about 'why I'm a liberal and hate most of the far left anyway' maybe consider that there is a spectrum of left and right, that might be hard to distinguish. You're essentially attacking everyone, because the points you were attempting to make were backed by examples of children in high school. How fuckin old are you anyway? 19?
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 11:50AM
Brilliant and hilarious post, Dan. I'm a rock-ribbed Conservative (actually considered naming my kids Ronald, Wilson and Reagan) but I completely concur with you about the idiocy on the extreme end of the political spectrum regardless of what side of the aisle they are on. The concept of reason, common sense and logic is completely foreign to them. They'd much rather deal with the reactionary.
I think I really realized this when I made the mistake of signing up for various conservative newsletters and started seeing the nuttiness that they were trying to sell and of course being someone who actually does do research and actually verifies information given to me without taking it a face value the only thing I could think, "Oh my God, I can only imagine how many people are falling for this bullshit." I find myself getting into far more political pissing matched with "conservatives" who buy this crap than I ever have with liberals. I have to explain to them point by point how the information they have received is propaganda and cite numerous objective sources, but these jokers still don't want to hear it. The two big ones recently is the birther nonsense and this crap about Obama and the UN Small Arms Treaty. These people just want to believe this shit so much and they aren't alone. The far-left works the exact same way, making crises where they don't exist in order to rile up that certain segment of their audience that buys into it every time.
I loved this:
“You’d never do an article like this about Democratic Underground!”
Because this is exactly what the idiotic far-right has become. They can't stand up for themselves so they flip around the argument to make themselves appear as victims being picked on… just like the far left. These shitheads should date each other. Done with both of them personally.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 12:15PM
Right, and there are interesting discussions to be had, which to me is the real loss. I don't agree with David Frum, for example, on a damn thing, but I always learn something when I read his work. Opinions are best when honed by debate, and all that.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 12:34PM
He said the FAR LEFT, did he not. Stupid fuck.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 12:46PM
Hit a little close to home, did it?
Godamn hippy.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 1:11PM
I do wanna ask you one question, even though I agree with your entry.
Do you think the far left should just stop fighting all together? They never knew what ramifications Wal-Mart would have cause had they stepped up.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 1:20PM
What is the point of this article? That a group that comprises a good 50% of the American population has some crazy people? Wow, so insightful.
Honestly, this kind of writing is the kind of cynical crap that the internet loves. Don't actually LIKE anything, but feel free to criticize the hell out of everything. That you pepper your paragraphs with grade 11 worthy vocabulary like "douchebags" and "retarded" is not a surprise.
That said, your idea of who makes up the "Far Left" is pretty funny as well. Those who don't like Wal Mart are Far Left? Kids in high school? If I were to talk about the Far Left, I'd talk about communists (some do exist), and perhaps a good chunk of the intellectuals that make up the university system. But I'm going to guess you don't know what communism is other than something that existed in that big red country back when you were six, and haven't actually heard a "Far Left" professor speak.
Sorry for being insulting, but your article is insulting to those of us that consider ourselves even moderately "left".
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 1:47PM
[...] Article by Dan Seitz. ——————————————————————————————————— [...]
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 11:38PM
I am moderately left, and I didn't find his post offensive at all. You're kind of being a dick.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 12:25AM
This is hilarious!! If you took every instance of the word "Vermont" and replaced it with "Boulder, CO" it would fit perfectly. Native Coloradans like to refer to it as "The People's Republic" because they're all about personal freedom and love, but don't smoke outside because it's against the law! My personal favorite is "30 square miles surrounded by reality"
They had an issue similar to your WalMart story with the old Crossroads Mall. Over time it became a vacant eyesore and when a company came along and wanted to renovate it, the aging hippies cried foul. What did that company do? Moved just outside the city limits and built a huge mall, which is now surrounded by even more businesses (one of which being a WalMart). All of which is fed by a freeway straining under the traffic. Meanwhile the little incense shops and hippie clothing stores on Pearl Street still can't pay their rent, which if you ask them, is all because of "the man"..
Classic article. I don't think stuff like this is necessarily a far-left thing, but an issue with people who see the world through only one set of glasses and refuse to change prescriptions. Even when it's BADLY needed.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 7:58AM
I observe mildly that Wal-mart conceivably bears some culpability for Gaia bashing and traffic/pollution problems, etc., but on the other hand, if you want to solve a problem, it helps to actually solve it–short-sighted, limited scope solutions do, as you say, tend to come of reactionary sentiment, and typically fall short. It's what happens when people are desperate for a win, any win, rather than for a real solution, which takes a long time, a lot of work, a lot of resources, and an ability to withstand a lot of active resistance–and an acknowledgment that some folks ain't gonna make it in the process. Still, this does not invalidate having one's heart in the right place. Leadership is a lost art–assuming it ever existed to begin with…
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 8:09AM
Jason where the heck do you get your numbers? 50% of the nation is Liberal? are you serious?
http://www.gallup.com/poll/120857/conservatives-s…