Debates are often viewed as two opposing sides finding some common ground in the middle.

However, this framework presumes that both viewpoints are valid and equal when in reality not all viewpoints are, or should be, considered as such.

And sometimes when you concede ground to meet in the middle, you still end up losing. And losing is the correct word. In political debates when you don’t achieve what you’re fighting for, which should be people’s benefits and rights, you’ve lost your fight.

The middle between civil rights and genocide, which means both sides have given up some grounds, is murder. No matter what you achieve, you’re responsible for the murder.

People may have some in common with their political opponent but it’s exactly the differences that matter. Common ground of believing in women rights’ to vote means nothing if one side of the debate is Hitler.

I’m sure we have all some stuff in common with Hitler. Charlie Chaplin had a mustache in common. Animal lovers and pet owners have something in common with him. Hitler even did some good stuff when he was in power.

Hitler instituted anti-animal cruelty laws. He was a well known animal lover, and was accompanied frequently by his pet dog, Blondi, which he killed near the end of the war to test a cyanide capsul to see if it would work if he ever needed to commit suicide.

Hitler instituted laws to prevent smoking in public. He abhorred smoking, and as Führer made laws that made smoking in public illegal in many places.

Hitler helped to start the automotive company Volkswagen. He was a primary endorser of the Volkswagen Beetle, a “people’s car” intended to be affordable for all Germans.

Hitler started the first major construction of the Autobahn, plans for which were divised and badly started by the Weimar Republic. The Autobahn is a prominent highway in Germany today.

Hell he even started the tradition of Olympic runners carrying the torch to the Olympic stadium and lighting the Olympic torch. While people forget the origins of this tradition, Hitler started it as a marketing tool for Germany.

But the fact that he killed millions of people, did war crimes, and committed genocide prevents us from making him an ideal in out political positions. Hitler will always be remembered as a monster he was, no matter how many animals he saved or how many poor people he rescued.

When we talk about political debates, it’s not the wins we care about, because the wins were our basic rights, but it’s the losses that matter, because those are rights we lost.

You either have your abortion rights or you don’t, there’s no middle. Part of your rights is not enough. You either have all of or you have nothing. You either have your freedom or you don’t, there’s nothing in the middle.

Don’t get tricked by those who urge you to sacrifice your rights to accomplish something. It’s a trap to lessen your freedom, trick you to accept less, and finally abolish your freedom completely.

You remember the campaign Jon Stewart promoted years ago? It was “The Rally to Restore Sanity” which was all about people being more moderate. The message of the rally was that if the media stopped giving voices to crazy people on both sides, maybe we could restore sanity.

It was an urged non-partisan cooperation between moderates on both sides. What they forgot was that Obama tried that and found out there are no moderates on the other side.

Jon Stewart believed that the national convention is dominated by right-wingers who believe Obama is a socialist and people on the supposed left (Democrats) who believe that 9/11 was an inside job.

But there weren’t any Democratic leaders who said 9/11 was an inside job but Republicans who think Obama was a socialist? All of them.

It was official Republican policy to claim Obama is a dangerous socialist. Like tax cuts pay for themselves and gay men just haven’t met the right women.

As another example of both sides using overheating rhetoric Stewart cited the right acquainting Obama with Hitler and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except for thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded but calling Bush a war criminal is the opinion of General Antonio Taguba who headed the Army’s investigation to Abu Gharib.

Republicans keep staking out a position that is further and further right and demand the Democrats meet them in the middle, which is now not the middle anymore.

That is why healthcare reform is so watered down. It’s Bob Dole’s plan from 1994. Same thing for cap and trade, it was the first President Bush’s plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it’s a hoax.

Two opposing sides doesn’t necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King spoke at that mall in the capital and he didn’t say those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German Shepherds have a point too. He said “I have a dream”, they have a nightmare.

This isn’t Team Edward and Team Jacob. Liberals and Progressives must stand up and be counted and not pretend that we’re greedy or mean or shortsighted as they are and if that’s too polarizing for you and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands with someone on the right, try staying there, because they suit you more.

In Persian, sometimes curse words are different than other languages. For example, people sometimes refer to another person as an animal. In English you may insult someone by calling them a pig or a donkey, in Persian you can insult people calling them a calf or cow, in addition to pig or donkey.

A principal in a middle school tells this story. He says one day, just few minutes to break time, a gentleman with a nice suit and a very calming tune and behavior walked into my office. He asked to speak with a teacher. He wanted to ask about his child’s behavior and education. I asked him to introduce himself and he replied “I’m the cow, the father of the calf!”

He said the teacher knows him. Tell her I’m the cow, she’ll know!

I was surprised. I told the teacher about this and she was surprised as well. She said maybe he has some kind of psychological disorder. What does he mean? I don’t understand. I asked the teacher to meet the parent and she accepted.

The man greeted the teacher very politely and introduced himself: “I’m the cow.” The teacher greeted him back and replied with a wondering voice: “but…”

The man continued “you know me well, I’m the cow, father of the calf! I’m the father of that girl you called calf yesterday.” The teacher stuttered and said “but, you know…”

The man then started to talk. “You know, maybe my daughter has a problem, and I fully understand that you may get frustrated but wouldn’t it be better to share her problems with me before insulting her? I could help you, even if it’s little, with this problems.” The man and the teacher talked a little more after that.

After their conversation ended, the man handed a business card to the teacher. On it, it was written “Dr. [name]. Professor and Board Member of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at University of [name]”

Few days later I asked him to speak for us and the teachers and he accepted. He delivered an amazing touching speech.

Violence, unlike what we think, is not just physical. Usually we consider hard physical interaction and sexual assault as violence but the reality is that the domain of violence is too wide and it includes verbal violence as well as many others.

When we insult someone, ridicule a race, mock the believers of some belief, when we accuse someone of something that one is not, when we threaten a person, all of these are acts of violence; the only difference is that verbal violence is without bleeding.

Verbal violence kills people from inside. Have you ever seen someone visit emergency room or go to police because he was bullied or insulted?

Victims of verbal violence don’t have scars on their bodies or a sign or mark that shows they were violated. Violence is first shaped in mind, then transformed into verbals and they eventually form physical violence. It affects mental health as well as physical health.

When a political leader calls its opposition dumb and corrupt, we as their followers are getting ready to walk on them or hit them with our cars. Why? Because we no longer consider them worthy of living. We blame them for everything that is fault and we form violence towards them.

When in a stadium, hundred thousand people shout insults and derogatory phrases at the opponents team, we set the stage for the post-game showdown. We’re forming violence against those people.

When we call the opposition movement the traitors and enemies’ puppets, then the physical removal and physical elimination of the other side will be justified for us, because we formed the violence in our minds before that.

When we call women chicks, the next lane driver an idiot donkey, the customer a fat cow, the student retarded, and regular people dumb, all of these will form violence in our minds which will prepare us for physical violence, from fist fights to sexual assault.

What should we do? I believe the first thing we should do is learn and practice conversational skills. The lack of conversational skill will result in lack of proper communication, because people won’t be able to word what they mean properly, and then they’ll try to communicate aggressively and violently, because the violence is formed in our minds and the blame is on others.

Practicing communication and conversation and practicing to empty our minds and hearts will help us to act more properly and less violently.

Second thing we should do is to repeat with ourselves that killing people is not just stabbing them in heart or firing a bullet at their head. A man or woman whose personality and individuality is broken inside, whose integrity is violated constantly, whose self-consciousness and respect is destroyed won’t have a normal life anymore.

We should remind ourselves that the opposite movement, the opponent team, the believers in something we don’t believe are just human beings like us. They are affected by their environment and they are formed by what they have been in. We should repeat that forming violence against them is not OK.

We should learn to use the word cow for cows only.

A common argument conservatives often throw is that the Founding Fathers would approve of a behavior or political/societal practice. For example, they say the Founding Fathers would not approve of separation of religion and state, which I previously wrote about on a different post.

Aside from how dumb is such argument in any sense, the idea of justifying anything morally by saying someone 300 years ago would approve of it is pathetic.

Using the Founding Fathers argument, they should also believe in slavery or at least segregation. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Patrick Henry were all slave-owners.

Among American presidents, twelve of them owned slaves. Eight of them owned slaves while in office. George Washington is believed to own more than 1,500 slaves while in office. George Washington’s slaves were not freed even when he was passing Northwest Ordinance, which banned slave ownership in north of the Ohio river.

Jefferson fathered multiple slave children with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, the likely half-sister of his late wife Martha Wayles Skelton.

Despite being a lifelong slave owner, Jefferson routinely condemned the institution of slavery, attempted to restrict its expansion, and advocated gradual emancipation. As President, he oversaw the abolition of the international slave trade.

Founding Fathers were not hypocrites, were they? I’m not sure what to call it but owning slaves while trying to free them seems a lot like hypocrisy to me.

Did Founding Fathers approve hypocrisy? Should we be hypocrites and justify it using the Founding Fathers argument? How is a moral practice justified because someone in 1801 was doing it?

James Polk became the Democratic nominee for president in 1844 partially because of his tolerance of slavery, in contrast to Van Buren. As president, he generally supported the rights of slave owners. His will provided for the freeing of his slaves after the death of his wife, though the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ended up freeing them long before her death in 1891.

The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved people. Many southerners who could be considered Founders were pro-slavery. Their children fought against northerners in the

James Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution because of his pivotal role in the document’s drafting as well as its ratification. He is also a slave owner, believed to own more than 100 enslaved people.

Madison occasionally condemned the institution of slavery and opposed the international slave trade, but he also vehemently opposed any attempts to restrict its domestic expansion. Madison did not free his slaves during his lifetime or in his will.

When Madison was writing the Constitution, the Fathers did not give women right to vote. They didn’t consider all human beings equal. They did not believe a woman is suitable to work in politics.

I don’t blame them though. I think they should’ve done much much better but ethics were much different back then. It’s not ethical to restrict a woman or control here today, because we believe in a different ethical system from then, which is a good thing. We don’t get our ethics from 1800’s.

Slavery is just one example of many wrong things Founding Fathers or American presidents did, of course.

Let’s not even mention that those people were colonizers and they stole land and killed indigenous people of those lands brutally. Let’s not mention their behaviors toward each other, even white people, and other countries. We can even forget about the massacres and anything else.

If you get stuck in an island of cannibals, will eating a human be justified? If all your neighbors beat their wives or daughters, will you do it too? If all of your family members smoke crack, would you do drugs?

I don’t believe a sane person would do anything wrong or immoral just because others do it. Trying to justify a wrongdoing with “but he did it too” seems just stupid, doesn’t it? It’s childish.

Aside from that, why just get wrong things from the Founding Fathers? I previously have explained how Founding Fathers resisted the idea of involving religion in laws.

Thomas Jefferson was a deist. George Washington belonged to a church, but may or may not have been a believer, he was silent about it. Thomas Paine was a deist and an opponent of organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. Ben Franklin was a deist, but sympathetic towards Christians.

Will conservatives shut up about religion, Christianity, and the separation of Church and State because Founding Fathers did as well? I guess not. Maybe they got the hypocrisy from the slave-owning Fathers.

In a predicted event, SCOTUS overturned the Roe v Wade decision and decided that every state in U.S. should decide on its own about women abortion rights. This overturn holds that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion.

While those in Germany are abolishing Nazi-era laws, forbidding doctors from providing information about abortions, those in Supreme Court of the United States are bringing them back. While those in Germany are making progress about human rights, Those in United States are taking America back to the Middle Ages. I’m pretty sure if they could, they would’ve burn some women accused of witchery.

“For almost a century, doctors have been forbidden and punishable by penalty from providing factual information about methods and possible risks to women who are considering terminating a pregnancy,” Justice Minister Marco Buschmann of Germany said in a statement.

“Today, this time of distrust in women and distrust in doctors is coming to an end.”

Any criminal court sentences handed down based on the law since October 1990 will also be repealed, and any ongoing proceedings will be discontinued.

However, in America, English speaking Taliban is taking power and enforces sharia laws on people. Speaking of which, neo-Republicans are constantly emphasizing the lie of Christian foundation of United States. I guess they know how to repeat a lie just enough times to make people believe it. After all, they are professional liars from Middle Ages.

1. Disagree with Democrats, even if you truly agree with them.
2. Resist understanding.
3. Lie.
4. Be racist.
5. Claim to be an advocate of freedom while passing laws that violates people freedom.
6. When you feel there’s no attention on you, spread conspiracy theories; or make them.
7. Use the word “regime” to scare people.
8. Claim anything wrong happening is because if Obama.
9. If you disagree with someone or something, say it’s Marxist.
10. Anything goes wrong, blame it on Antifa and BLM.
11. The only science that matters to you should be the ones that may suit your agenda.
12. Claim to be working for people while in fact you’re serving capitalists and the rich, only.
13. Claim banning people from social networks is bad, then ban books and information.
14. Blame every destroyed family on homosexual and trans people.
15. Spread conspiracy theories like white replacement.
16. Embrace hypocrisy.
17. Bully ones you don’t like, then act like a victim.
18. Claim elections are rigged while you’re in office as a result of those elections.
19. Get roasted and owned frequently by media that reveals your lies, but never give up and feel ashamed.
20. Never be good for anything. Serve your masters, yourself, and whatever benefits you personally, and don’t care about anything or anyone. Be absolute garbage.