And I feel like I've gone full circle.
The one thing that the Left and Right seem to share is this desire for purity.
Is it possible that Jon Stewart is actually right on some things and wrong on some things?
Of course! That's the rational response, and yet for some reason, I can't divine, people like something someone says until they find something
that they don't like and that person is persona non grata. Or they are part of the "deep state", or "globalists" or whatever have you.
Sometimes... hell, most times... someone is just wrong on things.
Alex is right on a ton of things (IMHO) and dead wrong on Climate Change, and dead wrong on a global conspiracy with COVID.
That's okay. It changes in NO way my appreciation for the things he's right on.
Joe Rogan has had a ton of people on that the Left would love- Bernie Sanders, Cornel West, Krystal, Kyle, David Pakman etc... but you have one anti-vaxxer and suddenly he's a right-wing ideologue at best, or a neo-nazi white supremacist at worst. It's baffling. The man said he'd vote for Bernie if he had the opportunity. You don't vote for Bernie and are a far right-winger.
Jon Stewart totally gaffs it when he talks about the specials of Dave Chappelle. He said, "That's just people giving feedback."
But then, he's unable to make the same cancel-culture connections when people take out of context his "Harry Potter Jewish tropes" joke.
People are blinded by their own ideology. Hell, so am I. But being able to recognize that people have things they aren't so good on, is a word we have forgotten to utter. NUANCE.
We live in the age of removing nuance.
Everyone is either a hero, or a zero (as quoted from above). They are the best or they are the worst.
We don't want to recognize the obvious. People are HUMAN. They make mistakes. We want to somehow think they have it all put together.
I bring this up time and again, and right now in Canada we're seeing this dangerous polarity that has inflicted the United States for some time.
I read "The truckers are Flu Klux Klan" or "These brain-dead anti-vax assholes" or the like, and the same kind of nastiness from the other side, although, a whole lot less. As I pointed out. This has been one of the safest protests of such a large scale, people need to keep that in mind.
Even though, as one would expect, there were a number of arms confiscated by the RCMP.
We love complicated and dynamic characters in fiction, but for some unknown reason demand flat charactures of human beings in real life? Why is that?
Justin Trudeau isn't some idiot globalist. He's not some tyrannical dictator (oh and while we're at it, he's not the son of Castro).
He's a rich kid who was brought up by a mom who was complicated and broken, and a father who was a distant and brilliant man. His brother died at a young age in a Kennedy family-like accident. He was pressed into service because his father's shadow looms so massively in Canadian politics.
And we all love our dynasties in politics. Because the son of a great man, has to be great.
But, he's been great copy, attractive, and pretty good at following what the plutocrats in the Liberal machine want him to say.
There's a saying in Canada, "Liberals campaign from the left and govern from the right." This continues to be true. They steal votes from the NDP and then steal comfort in ruling from the Conservatives. But, Trudeau has done things that Chretien (one of the other great Canadian PM's) never would have done. Trudeau has tied his fortunes to the Woke movement. He's pushed for legislation, and he's tied his empathy towards women's issues and native rights. But, of course, saying something and actions are different. If they can get by without doing anything other than empowering the capitalist elite, they will do so.
What we've found with the woke crowd is that because it's performative, they are afraid to speak out against it. After all, "are you against Black Lives Matter?"
I have been and always WILL be #nojerseys. I think the whole idea of picking a team based on ideology and not the actual facts of what's going on means you're headed down one tunnel to another to disaster.
We need to pull back from these strange times of polarization. Or we can start taking bets as to how much longer Rome 2.0 will take to fail.
J