Comment by Workaccount2 7 days ago
I'm speaking about the collectives, not the individuals. There are always deranged individuals and some of them, many of them, manage to get in power. But the ideological collectives all have pretty much the same core goals. Needs met, population happy.
Shy of a few fringe groups, I am not aware of any large suffering & death collectives. Every large collective is trying to achieve a better life for it's adherents, and is always welcoming to those who want to join. Christains might see living is the light of Jesus as the ideal life, and while not for everyone, you should at least be able to understand why they feel that way (as opposed to a religion of self inflicted torture).
Remember the goal here is not to become sympathetic to Trump, or Putin, or Sanders, or Netanyahu, or Islam. The goal is to have an accurate understanding of them, so that when you form arguments against them, you are actually attacking bedrock and not just straw.
> Christains might see living is the light of Jesus as the ideal life, and while not for everyone, you should at least be able to understand why they feel that way (as opposed to a religion of self inflicted torture).
Yes, but also we've seen how they've behaved in the past when they had vast political power in Europe. And we see what the goals of the Heritage Foundation is with Project 2025. There have always been a decent number of conservative Christians who want prayer, the bible and ten commandments in school. Who don't want legal abortion or gay marriage. And the more power they have, the more they would restrict. They also tend to believe in a lot of conspiracy theories, like the Democratic Party being controlled by satanists and communists, who have also infiltrated the "Deep State".
So you can imagine how those beliefs play out with enough political power.
What's your threshold where an "individual" becomes a "collective"? Certainly billionaire libertarians, religious conservatives, Putin and his supporters and the Trump administration (along with the judges he's appointed, the people in congress and state governments who ran on his platform and the 10s of millions of Americans who voted for them) are not individuals...
They also very obviously want different things compared to others.