Comment by mlthoughts2018
6 years ago
This is really not accurate. There are many topics where appealing to evidence or statistics is Not Allowed in leftist discourse. There are certain realities that are defined as not possible, politically, and permitted discourse flows from that.
The far right is even worse about this, appealing to braindead conspiracy theories, bald religion, fascism.
But the left is _really bad_ as well. Not “conspiracy theory gun nut” bad, but nowhere near “well balanced intellectual curiosity.”
That you would contrast "gun nuts" with modern leftists already tells me you probably don't have a meaningful relationship with many of us -- we love guns. There's really too much diversity of thought on the left to consistently characterize it in this way, and there's very rarely an issue where there even is a definitive "leftist" take.
While this isn't the case for far-right arguments, I also wouldn't characterize far-right as "braindead." They're usually arguments crafted very specifically to appeal to a subset of people who already aren't experiencing much distress at our nation's political trajectory. This is why these arguments consistently appeal to HN readers.