"Ten Reasons Why I am No Longer a Leftist."

Read this article by Danusha V. Goska.

I've never been a leftist, but my reasons for not being a leftist are found on Danusha's list.

What a fine crop of special snowflake the leftist culture of politically correct victims is turning out.

"Trigger warnings"?

After hearing about the tough, competent feminist went into vapor lock over something a man said to her - said to her - I find this on the blog of a "Left-libertarian" SF author:

At this year's Fourth Street Fantasy Con, Lynne Thomas announced that Apex Magazine would put trigger warnings on stories from now on. That surprised me a little, but what surprised me more was a small group applauding with fierce partisan fervor, as though Fort Sumter had just fallen and the Confederacy would soon be free.

I get the usefulness of warnings for fanfic and personal accounts on a blog. But magazines and anthologies provide a context: if a story doesn't fit the editor's agenda, why is it being published there? You should know that you'll find an Apex story at Apex, just as you'll get a Disney story from Disney.

I can't imagine a warning that doesn't weaken the first-timer's experience. Googling "Lynne Thomas Apex Magazine Trigger Warning", I came on someone's link-sharing that included this description:

[TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence.] What I like best about this story is that it starts out in an unexpected way given what’s really going on (which you understand at the end).

The person giving the warning has told you to watch for something that the writer hoped would surprise you.

Life is full of unpleasantness.  We can either unsuccessfully attempt to control every one else so they never make us feel anxious, or ...and follow me on this...we can toughen ourselves up.

That last may seem difficult but it seems that self-discipline is scientifically the road to happiness.  

The Eloi's last stand.

This description of Los Angeles as "Lefty paradise" by Dr. Helen remindsd me of H.G. Wells' description of the Eloi before the Morlocks move in for the harvest:

I have been looking around LA while I visit here and see the contrast here with what is going on in the rest of the country. I am staying in a nice part of town where people live in a beautiful bubbly, cocoon riding their bikes to work and congratulating themselves on their rent-controlled apartments. It’s lefty heaven and honestly, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking the lefty utopia is not too bad. Until you start looking underneath the belly of the beast and realizing that lefty politics looks pretty on the outside but inside lies a cesspool of hurt for our country if things don’t change. Sometimes I want to walk up to one of these lefty hippies and just yell, “WTF are you doing?”

You drive a Mercedes or BMW and complain about the gas prices, not understanding that it is you who is driving the price into the ground. If you had your way, all of us in fly-over country would be following suit and be as regulated as you are. You think that your utopia will somehow save the day, but it will eventually result in a country that goes down not with a bang but a whimper.

Many of those on the left who are female would sell their soul for a package of free birth control pills and some morning after pills given out to teens on demand. I have an image in my mind of a bunch of liberal women fighting over a pack of free birth control pills while our economy and our kids’ future goes up in fiery smoke right next to them without them even noticing. Call me sarcastic, but I fear for our children’s future and their ability to get a job more than I care about whether or not they have to shell out 10 or 20 bucks a month for a pack of birth control pills.

I wonder how our health care will proceed if Obama is re-elected? Sure, maybe women can get free bc pills, but will it be at the expense of other areas of health for themselves and for men without the illness du jour that is popular with our government overlords at the moment? Because remember, breast cancer gets a lot more money and time spent on it than prostate cancer. Or what if you have heart disease like I did and not breast cancer? Will medical research continue to pay and do research on expensive devices like an ICD? If you think health care is bad now, wait until it’s regulated totally by government. But hey, maybe that pack of free pills was worth it.

Many business owners are afraid of Obama and his policies; they are battening down the hatches and readying themselves for another round of abuse if Obama is re-elected. Our free speech rights are at risk in our colleges now more than ever, and our ability to speak out in ways that the government doesn’t like without being arrested is frankly, questionable. Our kids have no jobs and the situation will probably get worse if we continue down the path of the past four years. Our future and freedom are up in the air, but utopia is just around the corner.