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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

They're not.

Not only is "The only good Tory is a dead Tory" not a popular refrain at all [1], but a quick search for "The only good Republican is a dead Republican" returns a lot of hits for the "[...] dead Democrat" quote and almost none for the search phrase.

These attempts at false equivalence reliably appear in these situations, and there's reliably nothing to back them up.

The difference is the right is trying very hard to move the Overton Window and make "[...] dead Democrat" an acceptable mainstream sentiment suitable for national news.

[1] You certainly won't hear it from any left-leaning MPs or in Labour constituency meetings. And if that weren't true, recordings would be all over the media.

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Republicans use "Democrat" as a swear word. Democrats more commonly resort to epithets to describe their opponents.

Relevant Google autocomplete for "the only good ...":

The only good cop is a dead one

The only good pig is a dead pig

The only good fascist is a very dead fascist

Nothing there referring to liberals/progressives/Democrats.

I also gave it "the only good c..." to see if it would give up "conservative" and it gave "christian" instead, so there's that.

A quick note: Anti christian sentiment is very much not a left wing stance. Quite the contrary, I’m more like to find crap like that in libertarian circles. The left wing are often the ones jumping in to defend religious tolerance.

About the dead cops and dead fascists... sure I’ll admit to that. However that is very much not the same. Fascism is an ideology that is a direct threat to a large number of people’s livelyhoods. To declare militant intentions against such an ideology of hate is a matter of self defense. The same applies to cops (albeit to a lesser extent).

> Quite the contrary, I’m more like to find crap like that in libertarian circles.

Libertarians with philosophical disagreements with Christians are perfectly entitled to them. "Libertarians" who murder Christians are, by definition, not actually libertarians. See also non-aggression principle etc.

Also of note, libertarians are not "left" or "right" -- see that political compass thing they're always using -- because "left" is economic restraints with social freedom while "right" is economic freedom with social restraints and libertarian is both economic and social freedom.

Christianity is quite pro-social restraint, which is adverse to both the left and libertarians, but the libertarian position is something like "you can believe whatever you want but don't pass any laws forcing it on others." Which, of course, becomes a conflict if the Christians want to pass laws forcing it on others. But ask a Democrat what they think about a law prohibiting contraception.

> Fascism is an ideology that is a direct threat to a large number of people’s livelyhoods.

There is another thread in here about how there aren't that many real communists in the US and the people who get described as such aren't literally communists. You could easily say the same thing about fascists.

Opposing fascism is very different than opposing "fascism" while defining it as anything to the right of Bill Clinton.

Libertarianism literally started on the very far left - an anarcho-communist named Joseph Dejacque. Right libertarianism is about a century younger, and the main distinction is view on property rights, which left libertarians tend to see as oppressive government overreach. (Dejacque enthusiastically supported Proudhons famous 'property is theft')

Left libertarianism and right libertarianism agree on nearly everything. It's not like "left" and "right" which are effectively polar opposites.

Right libertarianism has an antitrust problem -- if the state establishes corporations and enforces property rights then corporations can become powerful enough to be de facto governments. Left libertarianism solves it by deleting property rights, which of course has its own drawbacks.

A middle ground that might work is to allow humans to own property but not corporations, because the largest accumulations of capital have always taken corporate form.

Obviously the non-purist can also solve it by having government-enforced antitrust laws.

for what it's worth "The only good fascist is a very dead fascist" is the title of a song by Propagandhi

Google autocomplete is not as reliable as you think it is. There have bbeen been many articles and complaints about the algorithm it uses to autocomplete, but one thing is clear - it is not mostly based on the popularity of what other users have typed.

> You certainly won't hear it from any left-leaning MPs or in Labour constituency meetings. And if that weren't true, recordings would be all over the media.

I didn't/wouldn' claim we would hear it from left-leaning MPs.

> a quick search for "The only good Republican is a dead Republican" returns a lot of hits for the "[...] dead Democrat" quote and almost none for the search phrase

This is muddled by one particular incident with a video Trump posted. Searching the "democrats" phrase in quotes gives 160,000 results. Searching it with -trump -president gives only 4,000 results, and even then some (maybe most) of those results still seem to be about the incident (but spelling his name as "Dump" for example).

In my experience edgy calls for violence are indeed more common from the right than from the left, but this is a bad way to try to measure it.

The overwhelming majority of terrorism in the United States is committed by right wing extremists.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-...

The anti-gun, peace-loving left may not be the most polite online, but they emphatically are not as violent. Not by a long shot.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or lying through their teeth to push an agenda.

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