Is horseshoe theory an overrated concept?

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Are you going to tell us the core of what makes the right right and the left left?

To be fair, a large portion of the anti-nuclear hysteria comes from right-wingers like Alex Jones.

Additionally, people in the Christian right tend to oppose GMO for religious reasons.

Overall, there is a lot of variation in both the right and the left, though the right seems to be primarily motivated by nostalgia whereas the left seems to be motivated by universal human rights.

There is some variation. Some right wingers are motivated by greed, religious literalism or racism, rather than nostalgia. Some leftists are motivated by hypersensitivity, revenge or arrogance rather than universal human rights.

... though the left-right conflict is mostly a conflict between nostalgia and universal humanism.

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess conservatives the world is a good place (or was in the recent past) so they want to either keep the world as it is or roll the world back to how it was one or two generations ago.

Personally I think the mid-twentieth century wasn't as great as people think it was. People were genuinely frightened that they'd be nuked without warning.

I guess if the conservatives think the world is a good place and they want to keep it that way the liberals think that the world is currently a bad place that needs to be improved. I don't think this is a pessimistic outlook. A pessimist would say the world is unfixable. Liberals are optimistic in a way because they think the world's problems can be fixed.

Personally I think the world is a pretty good place now. I'd rather live in 2018 than in the middle ages. However, I think there's still room for improvement. Unlike the liberals I'd prefer for that improvement to happen through cultural evolution rather than through progressive laws.

That isn't the case here in Australia...

Dja know what’s the best solution? Let’s burn all coal and oil reserves already and squander all the uranium at once in an epic, all-out nuclear World War III. Renewable energy sources will be the only ones available to survivors, so they won’t need to waste any more time arguing about this subject.

True. It all comes from the Luddite Party. Er, I mean the Green Party.

It makes no difference if we burn it all in a day or if we burn it slowly over a hundred years. The same amount of oil and coal will still end up getting burned.

That's why I don't think fuel efficient cars can prevent global warming. It makes no difference if we all drive Cadilacs and use up all the oil in 50 years or if we all drive Priuses and use up all the oil in 100 years, the same amount of oil gets burned either way.

The only way to prevent that oil from being burned is to leave it in the ground. That, or use it to make plastic instead of fuel. If we burn all the oil does that mean we'll have a plastic shortage one day?

Now that’s a point I’d never thought about. I’m sure there’s no way we’re leaving it in the ground, so whatever the disastrous consequences of global warming are, we can take for granted they will happen.

But my point was that the sooner we get this out of the way, the sooner we’ll stop arguing about it

Right so since fuel efficient cars won't reduce the amount of oil that gets burned, the next way to avoid global warming is with some sort of geoengineering. I have a feeling the green left will be against this as well.

Remember these are the same people who blocked a hydroelectric dam that would have produced massive amounts of green energy because it required one valley to be flooded. They can't see the forest for the trees.

Sometimes almost literally. I've heard environmentalists make a fuss when a few trees are removed to widen a road. Shouldn't they be more concerned about millions of trees being cut down for land clearance? Shouldn't they be more concerned about entire species going extinct due to global warming?

We can't save every inch of the Earth but we should try to save as much of it as possible. If we refuse to use any solution that isn't absolutely perfect we won't have any solution at all.

The extreme right and the extreme left are more alike in many ways than they are different.

If either extreme "wins", it means intolerance of everyone not in their own named group.

Why avoid global warming? A warmer Earth is a more productive Earth. The disaster is not warming, it is cooling.

When this warm period of our current ice age ends and we begin the next glaciation, the climate is going to get much colder, possibly very quickly. There will be massive food shortages that are completely unavoidable. Starvation will become the norm. The only thing that might cause more deaths than starvation will be the many wars over the rapidly dwindling amount of resources.

Anyone who isn't deadly afraid of cooling knows nothing.

There's one thing that seems nearly universal. It doesn't matter whether someone on the far left tries to describe the right or someone on the far right tries to describe left, their entire analysis is nonsense. Neither side understands the other well enough to say anything that is at all accurate.

It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

Rapid warming and rapid cooling would both cause millions of dollars in property damage and take thousands of lives.



The last ice age ended 11,000 years ago. The previous interglacial period lasted 28,000 years.

Gadzooks! The earth is going to freeze over in 17,000 years! The horror!

Pay no attention to the rapid warming which could kill most of humanity in one century!

To put it simply; the left to its core is anti-authoritarian. The radical left opposes social hierarchies; because social inequities limit the freedom and development of people as individuals.

Under capitalism, a class of people control our means of subsistence. Because of this, most people are forced spent most of their lives under the boots of business bureaucracy.

Right "libertarians" have no concern for the loss of autonomy, and the resulting alienation under the capitalist wage system.

This explains why so many alt-righters are former "libertarians".

"I used to be a libertarian, but then I realized that capitalism isn't working properly because of Jews and sexual degeneracy."

I've heard that same story a thousand times.