Liberalism is a mental disorder: example 3,847,942.

Kathy Shaidle dug this Brit chick up on the Intertubes so we don't have to. I'm going to mercilessly hash this chick's article here, no pretence of fair play at all.

How I tried to quit the liberal guilt machine and failed.

If you have otherwise normal liberal friends, every few weeks they'll post something online akin to cult propaganda. It's a combination of an assertion and a warning that anyone who disbelieves is, in their words, "not a decent human being". This is fine when you agree with the party line completely, but that kind of conformity of thought is neither healthy nor desirable.

Uhm, yeah. Gotta agree.

 So I tried to quit the liberal guilt machine. I would make some new friends who would be conservatives.

So far so good.

Luckily, I go to this old, stuffy university overrun with them, who I usually go out of my way to avoid.

Looking for conservatives at an English university is like looking for unicorns at the zoo. So, fail on that one.

Cambridge Revolver and Pistol Society'? Now we're talking.Their website was full of pictures of guys in blue dinner jackets, like one of those photos of David Cameron in his younger days. Their Facebook group was full of posts about how the government was bad for banning foxhunting. It was perfect. I registered for a trial session.

Hey, I thought stereotyping was supposed to be a -bad- thing. WTF?!

The session was in the evening, around 8pm, and it was getting dark. The 'gun range' was this dingy room under a bridge somewhere on the outskirts of Cambridge. I was getting cold feet. My pacificst side was shrieking. But it was too late to turn back now.The first people I met at the range were these weird ex-army types who told me all this random shit about the war in the Falklands. To be honest I could not point to the Falklands on a map. They were the people who ran the range and were puzzled as to why I was there."Have you been doing shooting sports for very long?" one asked. "No, I've never done it before" I said. "Why did you decide to start now?" I couldn't give him the real answer,and it was too late to try my usual trick of pretending not to speak English. So I just mumbled and waited for the university club members to arrive.

Sounds like an old sergeant-major checking to see if you were a jihadi-wannabe, stupid girl.

Sakunthala: I hope she's better at math than at life.

 Looks like that one went right over her head.

Hanging out with conservatives is weird, a little like experiencing a foreign culture, without having to travel. I felt like the girl from the Pulp song 'Common People', except in reverse. Instead of drinking, they played charades, and instead of checking Twitter, they read classical literature. Out of habit, I wanted to blurt out that things they said that were 'problematic', but I held back. They didn't get my crude humour, and assumed some of my lewd jokes were an embarrassing social mistake. The men were aggressive in hitting on me in a way that a leftie feminist man never would be. It was amazing how little they seemed to care about being cool.

Girl acts all surprised when she shows up at a place where women -never- go and the boys hit on her. And gee, they didn't act like a bunch of beta-hipsters! How amazing.

What surprised me most was how they really didn't believe most of the things liberals accuse them of believing. Almost none of them had a delusional belief in their own ability to 'work hard', nor did they think people who are struggling deserved their fate for being lazy. I think those arguments are ex post facto justifications, that some conservatives respond with after they've been accused of being callous. The flow of logic starts by wanting less government interference, and ends by not objecting to the consequences of that. It's not meanness at all, but rather denial. I think they felt more responsible for social ills than liberals, but just chose not to face them. I was also surprised to realize that they weren't racist, homophobic, sexist bigots, no more than my liberal friends. I realized that social conservatism was dead or dying, which made 'libertarian' just a euphemism for conservative.

Oh wow, she discovers that liberals have been slandering conservatives since forever. And that conservatives like to use logic and facts, unlike liberals. Holy cow, whadda revelation!

Maybe I could do it? Perhaps I could be one of them, ditch the Guardian for the Telegraph, escape the crushing guilt. After all, I did read Ayn Rand as a teenager. And I love bitching about government bureaucracy. This plan backfired in the most epic way when I, and I shit you not, ended up crying for a whole day with guilt for even considering it.

Deprograming is a beeotch, girl. The longer the brainwashing, the more it hurts when you try to break out.

The cure came when I visited my favourite city in the world, San Francisco. I didn't feel like a villain anymore, because instead of being labelled by some bizarre insult inspired by the British class system, I was called a 'queer, polyamorous person of color'. I felt what I'd liked about being a liberal all over again, that warm optimism for a better future. Eager to return, I asked some of my friends, whether thinking about this justice stuff made them feel guilty, and the answer was almost unanimously no. You see, I'd been doing liberalism wrong. You're not supposed to feel personally responsible for injustice, you're supposed to feel smug that you're aware of the injustice and conservatives aren't. It's meant to make you feel better.

There you have it. Liberalism is a cult whose purpose is to make its adherents comfy, smug and superior to others, and there is no evidence, no argument, not even any direct experience short of almost dying that can shake them out of it. Everything she believes is shown to be a lie, and she goes back to it like a pony going back to the barn that burnt down.

Later that week, I sat down to watch the 'Stepford Wives'. It made me think about all my feminist heroes, from Gloria Steinem, to Emma Goldman, to bell hooks, and I was filled with inspiration. Liberals, I love you, even though you don't understand economics, even though you sound like a band of shrieking harpies, even though I wish I could strangle you sometimes, even though you have ruined Twitter forever, even though half of the things you say make no fucking sense. Your heart is in the right place, and even if most of your ideas are unworkable, we should at least give something a try.

I have an idea! Why not give something a try that has a ghost of a chance of succeeding instead of all the usual liberal feel-good bullshit? Gee, like maybe a massive tax cut and a wholesale trimming of government power! Its the only thing they haven't tried yet.

Oh, and irony of ironies, when asked if she liked the shooting she says: "Yes, actually. Felt like Lara Croft!"  Gee, people like shooting because its fun and enjoyable, not because they are psychotic nutjobs who want to kill everything. Who'd a thunk it?

Stupid girl.

The Phantom