Yeah, Hate Mail

Some people seem to think that their sending me stupid things atheists say on the comment threads of blogs I used to frequent will get under my skin.  Only it doesn't.   It was way back when I was first writing for another blog that I learned it all has the potential to be material, something I didn't realize when I chose my theme, the way and reasons that the left which was in its ascendancy in my early years had failed so definitively and abjectly since the mid-1960s.   

When I first started frequenting lefty blogs and websites around the turn of the millennium, I never thought that one of the most obvious lessons I'd read is how many self-defined lefties would prove that they're the reason so many people don't like lefties.   The conceit, the snobbery the regional and class bias, the insistence on so many clearly wrong and irrational dogmas and doctrines inherited from some of the biggest assholes of the allegedly lefty past, etc. were on full display on the blogs and comment threads of so many of them that only an idiot wouldn't have noticed it.  

I mean, really, these guys figured that constantly telling most people that they're stupid, ignorant, benighted fools was the way to convince them to vote to the left.   And that was just the first lesson, eventually I realized they didn't really want the great unwashed to vote left, they merely wanted to be able to lord their superiority over them even as they whined about losing elections.  If it were about winning elections, they'd have learned why that didn't happen.   

Just as much as the Trump voters, large sections of the college credentialed, white-collar (when not unemployed) "left" are stuck in a mental maze of their own making, it's just a different maze.   There might be some partial overlap to reality but, as soon as the election is over, they'll revert to their typical ways which will not help.  No more than when we did that to Jimmy Carter.   Realistic Democrats must realize the problem these people are to them and they've, wisely, though perhaps sadly, decided they will cost them more support than they'll provide in votes.  If you want a reason for why successful Democrats who win elections don't do what you want them to, you'd be wise to consider that they've got to keep or gain more votes than they'll lose and that means you'd better pick which issues you're going to make into a line in the sand.  

But this began with the current e-mail that sent me a comment by a person at one of the typical lefty blogs in which the person says how glad they are when things go wrong because it proves there is no benevolent God, no doubt relieved that he doesn't believe in something so many plebs believe in.  You might think that is unrelated to what I said above but I think it's just one of the overriding characteristics of this snobbery.   Their atheism is, basically, a class distinction, something that distinguishes them from the great-unwashed, the ignorant masses, the unenlightened, benighted, mostly rural, often safely other-regioned hicks and yahoos they  love to imagine as being who the majority of people are.   If there's room at their top, they don't want any of those people up there.  The name for a fear of God or religion, theophobia, isn't so much a fear of God, it's a fear of anything that upsets their status as superior to most people.   It's been like that among many atheists for centuries, which you can see if you read them.  They're flaming snobs, an attitude that doesn't naturally lead to success in democratic politics.  

I have come to the conclusion that the Democrats who win elections are the ones who are the actual farthest left we can achieve at any time, some members of the House, though not those "farthest left" probably define the actual farthest left that our politics will sustain at any given time.   The imaginary left which has never and almost certainly never will control the government or even a municipality, the "left" of the official leftist magazines and the unoffical realm of the lefty blogs, demanding the impossible as they insult possible supporters of the real left who can turn things around are a millstone around the neck of that real left.   The real left has to dump them because they will never be reliable voters and they will insist on insulting and driving away more votes than they'll attract.  That's what I've learned in about the last sixteen years of reading more of "the left" than I ever could have read in the print on paper era.   I suppose I should thank the atheists who are assholes for playing such a big part in my further education in the internet period of my life, but I wouldn't want it to go to their already swollen heads.