Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
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The democrats who’ve been running the country into the ground over the last two years, did not receive vindication. The Republicans did not earn confidence as any sort of replacement for them. I’m taking that to mean the populace is giving up, for the time being, on Washington solving our problems. Well that would be good. There are those who would insist, if Republicans decisively won this thing, they’d just spend money every bit as fast as the democrats ever did. I can’t call that wrong. Maybe the nation’s resolving to give up on big government and look within. Fire them all, get to work, and generate enough assets to maybe climb our way out of this debt spiral.
But, it’s a little worse than that. You’d have to admit the democrats did something right here, and the Republicans need to up their game at whatever that is. Besides the obvious cheating, there’s something else.
Suppose Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the premiere embarrassment of today’s democrat party, says something I don’t like and I confront a democrat about it. How do you think that would go? Let’s see…first there would be some denials that AOC is anything but a low-ranking, marginal player who doesn’t really represent anyone. If that doesn’t play, there’s going to be some “actually” stuff about how AOC is courageously calling it as she sees it, and there’s some meaningful nuance in there that’s escaped my notice. She’s the bright one here, I’m the ignoramus for not seeing what she actually meant. We know it would be something like that. Some sort of apologia. Something to soothe the tensions and soften the blows. Take it to the bank.
Now let’s say Donald Trump says something I don’t like and I confront a Republican about it. That will be like lighting a bottle rocket. Oh look! Someone (else) who doesn’t like Trump! Maybe we can make a wave out of that! There will be no apologia. There will be no “Maybe what he meant was…” There will be no “Actually that’s not so bad.” There will be plenty of “Yeah, and you know what else he did?”
A highly polarized, depressed and disenchanted electorate sees two political parties like these. A disengaged, distracted, weary electorate. Two sides jockeying for power, neither one worthy, both tried and both found wanting. But one side eats its own.
This is all twenty-twenty hindsight, which is gutless. But, gutless things are gutless because they enjoy advantages. We often frown on this kind of hindsight because it’s too easy to see things with clarity, looking in our rear view mirror. Right now though, clarity is a good thing. The democrats beat the Republicans here, and it happened that way because one party is united and the other one is being eaten alive by these Trump-hating parasites who have no vision for success and just want to hate.
So perhaps it’s just as well that we all learned this lesson.
So, my blog just turned eighteen, yay. As it does so, we’ve been waiting on key House and Senate races, three, four, five days past Election Day. It occurs to me that when I first started it, there had just been an election, the smoke had cleared and nobody was waiting on anything. Four years before that, of course, there was the Florida debacle of 2000, and there was shame. Shame led to fixing things and elections became much more passionate but still much more decisive. One and done. Now we’re back to “Oh, lookee, hold up, I found a dimpled chad, or a station wagon full of ballots…”
Some people crave the drama. They don’t see anything wrong with this.
Well, to be fair, let’s break it down. There are three reasons to defend the status quo.
1. Partisan advantage. There’s a certain party that consistently wins, or at least benefits, from mushy/nonexistent definitions and inefficient, unreliable counting with convoluted variables tossed in the mix that shouldn’t be there. When the goalposts move several days after the deadline, they consistently move in one direction…which isn’t suspicious at all.
2. Fear. It has often been said that “If the public is polarized, and both sides of the polarization think they’ve been cheated whenever they lose elections because they lack faith in the process, that puts us in a REALLY bad place!” That’s certainly true. What’s not true is that you have to maintain faith you don’t really have, to avoid going to this bad place.
3. By default. A lot of people will defend the status quo just because it’s the status quo. Given doubts, they will award it the benefit of all these doubts, when it doesn’t deserve such benefit. Perhaps they don’t want to integrity-check the reform proposals for ulterior motives, so they figure it’s less work to leave things the way they are — forgetting about potential ulterior motives in those who want to keep the status quo. So they harbor the serpent to their bosom, hoping it isn’t venomous.
After those you get into emotional stuff. It’s fun and exciting to play-act like you’re in possession of some nugget of information that completely changes the game; everyone who agrees with you gets it, and everyone who opposes you is some ignoramus who hasn’t managed to catch on to the fundamentals and it isn’t worth explaining it to ’em. Trouble is, nobody can define what that nugget is. There has been a “branding,” of sorts, that you’re a cool sophisticated and good American citizen if, and only if, you maintain a belief that our elections are sound — without any evidence to support it. And if you’re hounding “election deniers” for evidence to prove the opposite, especially if you’re adjudicating consistently, and arbitrarily, that what they can bring you is inadequate. If you join those deniers and maintain any doubts, or just ask inconvenient questions, then you’re a slope-foreheaded rube type, best-case. A buck-tooth. Maybe a terrorist. A pariah, in any case. So the fashion-verdict is clear.
These are all terrible reasons to defend anything.
All three rely on this tactic I’ve heard so much over the last two years: “There is no evidence of widespread fraud, so unless you have some, STFU.” It genuinely shocks them when I tell them that’s not how it works — when I remind them that if you have integrity, but you lack transparency so you’re left just hoping the integrity is there, and assuming it’s staying in place, you might as well not have the integrity at all. So prove to me the results are honest. They look at me in genuine horror. They don’t know what to make of it.
But that IS right.
You really think, when countries dump democracy, they stop holding elections? You think that’s how it works? Give me five examples. Heck, give me just one. That’s not what they do. When countries get rid of democracy, they hold sham elections that are pure theater to make it look like they’re still holding them. That’s not what our elections are, even today? Prove it.
Technology has done amazing things over the last forty years. It hasn’t done anything to make our elections transparent. Look around. Derp dee doo, waiting on the counting, waiting on the counting, day five, day ten, day thirty…derp derp derp. You’re really that easily manipulated? Or you think you’re living in the 1830’s?
Anyway, if there was cheating, it’s only cheating that can be done if the numbers, pre-cheat, are close. And of course if there wasn’t any cheating, the numbers were close. What makes them close? What happened to the Red Wave? There are many thoughts about this.
One of them is that we did have one, and this is what it looks like. We’re living in an age in which all waves are reduced to trickles. Interestingly, this coincides with the age in which it takes several days or weeks to noodle out the results. That’s certainly suggestive of engineered outcome. But then there is this “Dump Trump” idea that has bubbled to the surface. This time we really got him! The public is fed up with Trump, and the Republicans better cut him loose.
Okay. Let’s give that a fair hearing too.
I say often that if we should be arguing about something, it’s important to argue about it honestly. People think that it’s easy and comes naturally. No. What’s easy is to get people to lie to themselves about what a thing is, when they argue about it. Seeing things as what they truly are is hard. Remembering what they truly are, throughout an entire session of arguing, is even harder.
Trump’s rudeness: Good or bad? Okay, what is that. Is it…making fun of a disabled reporter? That was resoundingly debunked, even by left wing “fact checking” sites. It didn’t happen.
And yet, Donald Trump certainly is not a model of refined, polite behavior. There’s something there. We call it “mean tweets” on both sides…so what is that exactly?
If we’re going to argue about something, then as always, let’s do it honestly. Donald Trump is “rude” because he says things like “Hillary managed such-and-such a thing very, very badly.” That is an example of his rudeness. He points out coherent reasons to vote against his opponent, which is something everybody who runs for office is supposed to be doing.
Argue honestly. Someone, somewhere, at sometime over the last forty years, give or take, came up with an “etiquette” rule that only democrats can talk about mistakes or missteps of their opponents. Republicans, somehow, are obliged to portray democrats as competent in all things…but, uh, vote for me because, uh, I love my wife and I’m a nice guy or something.
Trump is “rude” because he colored outside the lines of that stencil.
Argue honestly. There’s this big push to make Trump go away since Tuesday…but it didn’t start then. It’s been around awhile. A lot of people want to return us back to the way it used to work, the status quo pre-Trump, because that worked out well for them. Not for the rest of us though.
Everybody’s wondering what happened and what it means. My answers are:
One, because of the factors up top, a lot of people are defending highly suspect, sluggish, sneaky, shady elections because the results are providing opportunities for them to push their ideas. Republicans better cut Trump loose, keep abortion around forever, etc. They’re frustrated because they haven’t been able to achieve instant-victory with these ideas until now, and they see these sneaky, suspect elections as a handy tool to potentially generate enough lift to overcome the drag. They’re not focusing on the problem where it actually exists: Right or wrong, they never learned how to argue. How to attack an idea. Or how to defend one. They want the sneaky, shifty election to do it for them.
Two, when you advance the Republican argument, that the party in charge has to be dislodged because things are miserable, you’re thinking like someone over thirty-five. That’s not to say you’re wrong. But, kids don’t think that way. To them, the two parties are like two old guys, and it’s a “Devil you know or devil you don’t” thing.
I am among the people who have to face facts, and admit to error. I was walking on clouds toward the end, looking forward to an end of this chapter in which democrat party tutelage leads to economic misery, and economic misery leads to more democrats winning as their party escapes accountability, and it becomes a vicious cycle. It’s been going on since the 1930’s. Somehow, I had been lulled into looking forward to a bookend. I would have done well to remind myself of the hundreds and hundreds of densely-packed, blue-state cities in which this whirlpool of despair persists. The chapter’s not closing. The democrats bring misery, and then they thrive on it, that’s just how it works.
People lose sight of any vision for a cure. They get depressed — that’s why we called it The Great Depression. Your public schoolteacher will tell you FDR got re-elected three times because he was so bravely standing up and fighting the economic blight. Evidently that’s not really what happened. We’re living in what really happened, which is: The public’s desire for things to get better, wanes. They lose hope. They start to defend those who have been tormenting them, and to attack anyone else who comes along offering the potential of relief.
On this “fake it ’til you make it” thing…
It occurs to me that we could think of this as how humans are built. We settle ourselves into communities, and at the community level a decision is made somehow about whether we’ll put up with fakery. This is why certain people don’t fit into certain communities. If you’ve watched people for a very long time like I have, you’ll notice certain people don’t fit into certain places: Alice invites Bob to live in Aliceville, and when Bob makes the move, things don’t click. Like much of nature, this is a simple thing until you take the time to study it, at which point you discover layers of complexity. “Bob couldn’t make it because Bob is a jerk” makes perfect sense, until Bob relocates to Bobtown, where he gets along just fine. Then: “Alice can live in Aliceville but Bob is relegated to Bobtown because Aliceville has a higher standard…and Bob’s a jerk” makes perfect sense. Until the day Alice visits Bobtown and can barely stand it. Then, you could keep things simple by saying: “Alice is a giver, and the people of Aliceville make it tolerable for her because they’re not a bunch of manic takers like the inhabitants of Bobtown who just take take take, until she has nothing left to give.” Which, again, makes perfect sense. Until you find the citizens of Bobtown are kindly counseling Alice, on her way out of town, not to let the doorknob hit her in the ass.
Deductive reasoning makes it clear, therefore, there’s something deeper and more complicated happening here. Neither side has a monopoly on civil behavior, or mutually rewarding associations. There must be flavors of communities; unwritten codes of conduct.
It’s got a lot to do with why you keep getting sent to jail on Facebook. Why Elon Musk is making such mighty waves as he takes over Twitter. Why we have red states and blue states during our elections.
It isn’t the people, it’s the “towns.” Certain people can’t co-exist with certain communities. The community might envision it as a flaw or shortcoming on the part of the person, but a lot of the time if you ask the person, you’ll find it’s a “principle” or some such thing. You can see that as a flaw. But not without being forced to admit that we all have flaws. The communities commit to prevailing narratives. It’s hard to see this when the narrative has something to do with recognizing what’s true and what’s not true. A lot of communities do this without realizing they’re doing it: “There’s no point to discussing climate change with someone who doesn’t admit to climate change.” “You shouldn’t be allowed out of your house without a mask.” “You shouldn’t be taking up precious medical resources if you won’t get vaccinated.”
All the people have the “but” in their “I’m a tolerant person, but.”
All the communities have the “but” in their “We’re an accepting and broad-minded community, but.”
The Book of Genesis, taking on the daunting subjects of what exactly we are, what are our spiritual problems and how did we get here, fulfills. It provides the hints. With the Expulsion, we came to realize we are corrupt, and we’ve become something different from what we were supposed to be when we were Created. With the Deluge, we found we can build communities that are corrupt, making spiritual recovery impossible, because you have to become a jerk to survive; a hard reset is the only fix. With the Tower of Babel, we found we can’t all live among each other, nor can we build communities that are truly welcoming to everyone, and any effort to do so is doomed.
Haven’t you noticed? To some among us, it’s ridiculous, risible and unworthy of discussion that Biden’s win was a cheat. To others among us, it’s ridiculous that it wasn’t. People assert Biden really did win, and they “win” the argument at this, by taking over the community in which the argument takes place, and regulating the information exchange. “Election deniers” must not be allowed to speak. If they are so allowed, “fact checkers” must have the last word. Those are the rules of the community. So there. They “won.” With their thumbs on the scale. Very impressive.
We’re to believe they have to exercise such iron fisted dictatorial control over arguments about the election…but the election itself was as free as…well. I guess that’s a whole different topic.
Observation: Where Biden didn’t win, there’s no squabbling. Even though information can flow freely there. Information Control is the one tool of cleanliness, order and refinement the human race has built, that works perfectly in reverse. It does nothing to retard or repel chaos; it draws the chaos in, where it sticks, like cockleburs to your wool socks. It does the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do.
In the states where we don’t do this — communities — people say what they think. They aren’t playing the “fake it ’til you make it” game. They worry about what does & doesn’t work, rather than about what does & doesn’t soothe passions, or ensure their long-term survival within the evolving culture. If information flows freely and some of it turns out to be nutty, the people hearing it make the final call as to whether or not they believe it. There is trust in the individual, who doesn’t need a “fact checker” to tell him what is and isn’t so. Like competent musicians, they can play solo. If they screw it up, they can learn, and get it right themselves. They can also make the final call as to whether they were fooled at all.
We squabble in these other locales, the ones in which the bad musicians, the fake-it-til-you-make-it people, the “Random Bullshit Go!” people, are struggling to achieve dictator status. Where they want to run everything, but don’t yet…or, their bid to run everything is in the process of failing. Arizona. New Mexico. Wisconsin. Michigan. Georgia. Pennsylvania.
The United States of America, as a whole.
And Twitter and Facebook.
The Control Communities. The places where people say “We know it’s like this, we’re one hundred percent sure, because if anyone doubts it we don’t allow them to say anything.” Everyone has to consent to that, and those communities are unstable because everyone doesn’t consent to it.
My observation is that in those other places, where the “Random Bullshit Go!” people don’t run everything, or have been pushed off to the gutter the way they’d like to push others, you don’t have this instability. You have genuine freedom of speech, which is supposed to bring all sorts of dysfunction, confusion and conflict in perpetuity. But you don’t have that in those places. That’s what you have in the places where the fakers run things, where information flow is restricted and regulated by the bad performers, the fake-it-til-you-make-it people. Everyone else pays the price while their little emperors struggle for concertmaster status, when they can’t even hit the notes. And then everyone else is forbidden from talking about it…while the Elephant in the Room that has such an influence over their daily lives, grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and the pressure builds.
In less than two weeks we’re having a contest with our friends, the liberals, to figure out who gets to have influence for the next two years. There are those who attach unusual importance to this election, and there are others who are tired of the biannual drumbeat-of-superlative and refuse to attach any. I’m in between the two. But, like many others, I’m struggling to figure out who these people are. More precisely, what exactly it is they want.
Their answer to rising prices is abortions. Who are these people? After spending a good chunk of a lifetime trying to figure it out, I’ve gained some better insight by looking within. Music. Music helps me to understand the liberals.
There is this passage in Romeo and Juliet by Tchaikovsky that fills me with shame when I hear it. It’s the part I should have practiced more when I was playing it, and I didn’t do the necessary practicing so I was one of those mediocre players who did the “Random Bullshit Go!!” thing when the time came, counting on others to cover for me. Tsk, tsk. It’s actually a common practice among musicians who are not great. It is here, time index 13:07. Yes, I can see the problem: Just two seconds earlier, and ten seconds later, I know exactly what to do and I sound okay. At least, back in the day. So this was just a few moments of muddled mess, and after that it was over. My sin seemed small, and so the necessary practicing was just something I never got around to doing. But you know what? That makes it all the more egregious. In fact, this right here is the difference between a musician who should stick with it, and one who should give up and move on to something else. The practicing I needed to do, to make things better, was very slight. My sense of commitment must have been beneath even that.
Other pieces, other passages, I might have been good enough to play solo but I didn’t ask because I knew what the answer would be: You’re good enough to play solo all of it, or else none of it. Do the practicing you know you should be doing or else don’t waste anybody else’s time. For this reason, I never asked. In fact, I stopped playing. Anything. I’m not right for music. The years that came after I had this realization, I have spent concentrating on things I’m good enough to do without hiding behind anyone. I’m still not perfect, not built to be; but I’ve enjoyed better satisfaction that way, better life-fulfillment, and I have no regrets. I don’t do what we call “fake it ’til you make it” anymore.
But a very long time ago, in other pursuits, I did. And so I can start to understand.
How does this correlate to liberals? It’s got to do with living location and population density. Some of us congregate in tightly packed cities, others of us spread out over the sparsely populated farmland. A high population density offers an option of hiding behind others, to those who need such a thing. To the substandard performers. The softies.
The blue-state fantasy is that wisdom should proliferate outward, from the tightly packed cities, invading the sparsely populated farmland. This isn’t evident to the casual observer, because there’s too much emphasis placed on what should be taught. The truth is that the liberals don’t care. They want to do the teaching, they want us rubes to do the learning. That’s their wish. It’s a wish that can never come to fruition, and that’s because of the way people are made. When the population density is high, and it becomes possible to play piss-poor because you didn’t practice enough, hiding behind others, pretending you know what you’re doing when you really don’t — that’s what people will do. You can’t do that out in the farmland. It’s not merely a matter of being happy alone, or being tough or big or strong. You have to know what you’re doing so you don’t need to hide behind anyone else. It’s a process of gestation. An organism that gestates in a tough environment, reaches maturity with a hardness that’s missing from things that grow up in kinder, more forgiving environments. Since this attribute of kindness to the growing organism and forgiveness of any missteps, is linked to pretending, there is a truth-fiction dichotomy linked to the hard-soft dichotomy.
They’re soft. They hide behind each other.
We’re hard. There are consequences involved in our mistakes, so if we don’t know what we’re doing, we go get help. And then we figure out what we’re doing before we do anymore.
They pretend. They recite talking points they don’t really understand, like “Sure there was fraud, but not enough to change the results,” or “No human is illegal” or “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”
We don’t pretend. We can’t. And we can’t compress the work we do into a slogan.
They don’t define…really, anything.
We have to define everything. If we don’t, someone gets hurt.
Big-city-center denizens who pretend to know what they’re doing when they really don’t, hiding behind others, can’t invade the prairie, orchard or farmland. They may want to, but they’re not suited. It’s not because they’re stupid and we’re smart, or because they quit too easily and we’re stubborn. It’s the hard-and-soft thing, period, full stop. It would be talcum penetrating diamond. The softer material is going to have to yield. It’s physics. How do you argue with physics?
That’s the inherent futility of liberalism, in America, in a nutshell. Soft people who don’t know what they’re doing, pretending to know everything, seeking to impose their way of doing things on others who know what they’re doing. Softness trying to invade hardness. Every time it doesn’t work, and it never will, they get more and more grumpy and upset. Then they try to use their anger as an ancillary tool, to do the invading they’ve already learned they can’t do. Now you understand American politics. This is why we’re being told, with some legitimacy, every two years that “This election is the most important one of our lifetime.” It’s the liberals trying, once again, to invade the hardness with their softness, just like Sisyphus in the afterlife struggling to push his boulder up the mountain, only to see it roll back down again. That’s their struggle, and ours. It lacks even the faintest prospect of success, but they lack the understanding to realize this, so around and around we go.
Their champion is a senile old man who doesn’t know where he is, who likes to eat ice cream.
It’s gross and disgusting, so we all like to move on from it after briefly taking note, if we pause to take note at all.
It’s an established pattern. After they’re embarrassed from seeing their “joke” reach the wrong audience, they excuse it by insisting that’s all it was, and there’s something wrong with anyone who noticed it at the time, or remembers noticing. The liberals who are above making such jokes, join in on this ritual of scolding anyone who notices/remembers. They may agree this is subhuman behavior and the joke isn’t funny, but after all, these are just edge cases that don’t signify anything meaningful about liberals in general. And hey! What about conservatives? Here’s an example or two of some of them who’ve said something equivalently nasty…judged by the liberals, of course. A little bit of “Only our side gets to do Whataboutism” with a side dish of “You have to see things my way but I don’t have to see anything anybody else’s way” washed down with a sip of “Stop watching what I tell you to stop watching and forget what I tell you to forget.”
Well…after seeing as many iterations as I’ve seen, having mulled it over awhile, I’m inclined to concede they have a point. Only one, and a small one at that. It’s not accurate to sweep these aside as exceptional cases; we keep seeing them after all. They’re predictable. But at the same time maybe it’s a mistake to assume we know what’s going on there, that the same thing happens when liberals wish death on people as when ordinary people do the same thing.
Liberals, I have noticed, have an unhealthy fixation on the Butterfly Effect. You see they launch into this special, years long white hot hatred against people who have altered the course of events in some way that they don’t like. Reagan, both Presidents Bush, Trump, Dick Cheney. As Ann Coulter pointed out ,”There’s no website called ‘Stop Lamar Alexander before it’s too late’!”
They only hated John McCain for a little while. When he was a threat. For that reason they hated Sarah Palin much longer and with a much greater intensity.
I think they deny cause and effect with regard to appeasing tyrants and taxing the most effective and efficient capitalists, and they know that’s wrong. We say “If you tax honest and productive business, what effect does that have over time and what does that do to your tax base?” They pretend not to understand, but I think they get it on some level. If they want to tax tobacco and use the proceeds to fund school programs, again we say “What effect on behavior does your new tax have, and what happens to your revenue when people smoke less?” — again, they pretend not to understand, but I think they do in fact understand. But their ideology doesn’t permit them to understand it audibly, and this drives their frenzied fascination with serendipity. I remember one found out the older George Bush ditched an aircraft during WWII, years before conception of the younger Bush, and so made some “jokes” about going back in time and telling the Navy rescuers to put him back in the drink. Haw, haw.
It bears repeating, in finding legitimacy in their defenses, I’m finding diamonds in the rough. Most of the defense is all bullshit. “Jokes?” No. No joke worth telling has exactly the same punchline as a long menagerie of “jokes” that came before. Everyone over seven years old gets that.
Anyway, that’s my point. They’re not wishing ill fate to befall someone. They’re after the ultimate result. They’re signalling to their comrades, not that they lack compassion for their fellow man, but that they’re devoted to the cause.
I think the lack of compassion is already understood among them. But it’s just passive, not active. It’s a shared understanding that when they show the rest of us how compassionate they are, it’s fake. But that doesn’t mean they would go out of their way to hurt people, like the Terminator coming after Sarah Connor.
After all. That would be kind of like having a job.
So I’m staying in hotels again a tiny bit. Which means I get to look at this special “news” outlet, spewing its stuff to the weary business traveler. This unique medium. The elephant being squeezed through a garden hose.
The alarm goes off at three and I’m showered & out the door by four. Rather typical timeline. Maybe some are getting their day started a bit later, but have the idiot box tuned into the “news” for the same number of minutes. Maybe a few more, if they go down to the hotel lobby to meet someone.
Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump…
You all are saying something about too much coverage of the dead queen? Not seeing it.
He incited unrest on January 6, 2021.
He took classified documents to his home.
He inflated the value of his real estate holdings.
There are reasons why Trump supporters, and non-Trump supporters as well, think all this is bullshit but let’s dispense with that because the arguments go back & forth and get quite involved. Trump-haters think they got ‘im. To get ‘im, they have to dispense with the concept of innocent until proven guilty, on all three, which is something I don’t see happening with any of the three.
But let’s just sidestep all that. You all realize he’s not President anymore?
There are those who think he’ll be back. I am among those. The Trump haters who think the walls really are closing in, best I can figure, don’t think he’s coming back again ever. And yet they’re the ones who act like he is. Without that indictment coming, which they think surely is coming, he’ll access those “levers of power” again and then we’ll have some kind of disaster.
As opposed to what we have now.
So there’s a logical wrinkle here. Trump, supposedly, has come and gone; it’s the MAGA voters who are crying in their beers, have yet to gel with reality and accept this. Everybody hates Trump. His defenders are few and far between and he hasn’t got the popularity to win an election again, not even close. Our elections — of COURSE — are beyond reproach, you can trust them to the moon and back. We have to do something extraordinary, like indict him, to make sure he never gets elected again.
Trump-phobes are a hundred percent sure of all three of those. But all three cannot be true. You can have two.
Let’s walk through it.
If everyone hates Trump and you can trust our elections, we don’t need to do anything to make sure he stays out of power. The voters will do what’s right.
If everyone hates Trump and we have to indict him to make sure he never is elected again, that would have to mean you can’t trust our elections.
If you can trust our elections, and it’s necessary to indict him to keep him from ever being elected again…that would have to mean not everyone hates Trump, and he’s a force with which to be reckoned. This would have to do with denying the “MAGA Republicans,” who still carry enough numbers and enthusiasm to elect a candidate of our choice, the opportunity to do that. All this Trump coverage has to do with distrusting the electorate. It, not Trump, is the affront to “democracy.”
I think it’s the last of those. Well I don’t trust our elections. I think the Trump phobes trust our elections as long as the elections give them a result they happen to like, and they’re not feeling that frisky or confident about the next two of ’em. They cheat, but they can only cheat up to a certain magnitude, and in 2020 they had to push it to the max to make sure Trump lost, so it got awkward. Now they’re memory-holing all the details and “fact checking” to keep us from remembering too much about it.
But for the weary business traveler consuming his or her twenty or so minutes of “news” before heading out the door, that’s not really necessary.
Suppose I’m wrong, though. Suppose they really got him. Trump-ism, or Trump at least, is genuinely over. What happens then?
Well…I guess that will really show us people out here in flyover country. Or Manhattan, for that matter, if we’re talking about a well connected celebrity who’s been “red pilled” and thinking of shaking things up in Washington. Don’t try it. Leave the “revolutionary” stuff to the fifty-year beltway blowhards. Or face jail.
But at least we, the citizens, will benefit from…
…a better foreign policy situation around the world? Hmmm.
…a stronger economy? Hmmm.
…a better, stronger, more robust, less laughable pandemic response? Hmmm.
…a more dignified, less vengeful, aura of cool, competent authority being given off by the occupant of the Oval Office? Hmmm.
…cheaper gas at least? Hmmm.
Here we come to the sobering conclusion: No matter how you feel about Trump, or about Biden for that matter, we have slowly but surely, bit by bit, sacrificed everything positive about what we used to call “news” for this mystery package, and when we inspect the contents of the box we see there’s really no upside to it. The booby prize at the end of it all is just a rush of euphoria, for just a few among us, those who don’t think things through all the way and just want to do some cheering. United by a common hatred focused on a common target, they’re cheering on something that isn’t good for them, or any of the rest of us. They’re piggies applauding the bacon factory. Meanwhile, we can’t have any real news because it’s all Trump, adorable pit bulls wearing Halloween costumes, hurricane advisories, and don’t forget to wear your mask.
Trump is a lightning rod. And not in a good way.
Those who seek to manipulate, say to everyone else “Look at Trump. Look how wrong that is.” And those who are easily manipulated — or have a desire to be manipulated — look at Trump…and look no further. Oh yes! How awful! He hasn’t got the temperament for the job…that…he doesn’t have anymore. He is unfit for the job that…according to our narrative…he will never, ever hold again, no matter what. And somehow this is a huge crisis.
The rest of us try to tell them: What about the guy who has that job now? And they accuse us of “Whataboutism.”
Meanwhile, there is something terribly broken, and it hasn’t got anything to do with Trump. It hasn’t even got anything to do with conservatives & liberals. Twenty-one years ago today, radicalized Muslims who hate the U.S., launched an attack against our country and killed three thousand people. Now, we elect them to Congress.
The guy who has Trump’s old job, is inept.
The Vice President who fills in for him if something happens to him, is inept.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, who steps in if something happens to those two, is inept.
Parents are supposed to teach their kids to be dignified and respectable in all that they do, and whatever position or stature they earn in life, will depend on that. How are they supposed to make that stick? We’ve allowed crap to rise to the top three slots in our national bucket. The kids can see the crap floats. That’s three chances they have to see it, and we’re three-for-three.
Marriage is no longer between one man and one woman. That was supposed to be a harmless change. It was supposed to stop there. Well…now no one can define what a “woman” is. Marriage is a joke now. Everything that has anything to do with men and women, is a joke now. Even these pledges to “Put a woman on the Supreme Court,” are jokes. The job has to go to a woman, and that’s what…uh…er…ah…whatever someone says it is.
A “beautiful woman” is even harder to define! Now someone has decided a fit, strong, healthy woman is out of fashion. Obese, gross, chubby women who sit on the couch, and it shows, they do nothing to get in shape or stay in shape…that’s our “new standard of beauty” and they’re all over the fashion magazines.
We’re going through a terrible mental health crisis now. It’s a little hard to miss, really. Crime is up. Violent crime is up. Murders are up. The border is out of control and illegal aliens are invading by the hundreds of thousands. Texas ships a few dozen of them off to “sanctuary cities” and the mayors of those cities have an apoplectic meltdown, so we know those mayors are strutting around acting like they have a solution, when they don’t. They just want other people to deal with the problems they’re making and growing.
All the service branches of our military are running into extreme problems with recruitment, and why shouldn’t they? Have you been paying attention to what the young people are being taught about their own country? You’re expecting a sizeable chunk of that generation should be enticed to sign up, and put their lives on the line to defend…what? A good country or a bad country? But they don’t see the United States the same way previous generations did. They haven’t been taught to see it that way, they’ve been taught to see it another way.
You’re in trouble if you refer to someone by something besides their “preferred pronouns.” But they can change their minds about what those are, day to day. It’s obvious now that’s just a way to screw with people, and we keep putting up with it.
Your problem is not Trump.
You don’t look smart or clever when you carry on as if he’s the problem. It takes just a little bit of critical thinking to realize there are other problems. You only have to watch things a little bit. Might be good to stay quiet if you’re not up to the task. Like the old saying goes, “Better to be silent and thought a fool, than to bitch about Donald Trump and remove all doubt.”
The California liberal is a very special kind of liberal. If you had to pick a picture to put next to “Intransigence” in the dictionary, you could do far worse than to simply insert a picture of a California liberal.
It’s a one-party state, but it’s their party and they see nothing wrong with it. So their bosses can tell them…the wildfires are climate change…the power outages are climate change…the budget shortfalls are due to climate change…crime is out of control because of climate change…we’re just forcing you to suck up smaller sodas through these paper straws, and use these grocery bags, and buy an electric car you can’t charge, because of climate change. And they’ll buy all of it. There are no signs of possibly incompetent management. None are needed. It’s their guys running things.
Constant oppression requires a constant oppressor, so they have lots of bad guys picked out ready to be isolated and excoriated. That these bad guys run exactly nothing in California, doesn’t concern them in the slightest. They have their scapegoats. Tucker Carlson gives them nightmares. They can’t function if they see the letters T-R-U-M-P written on a sidewalk.
They’re full of criticism for the rest of us if we let our passports expire, because wisdom supposedly begins with visiting other countries. If only they visited other states within this country, they’d see it’s possible to turn down a thermostat to keep a room cool on a hot day, without setting the whole state on fire. But they won’t.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has announced his upcoming retirement. His office is not supposed to be political, but we see hagiographies on the left, and scorn on the right…everywhere.
I’d sure like to know why the liberals are swooning over him. I mean, of course I know the real reason; Fauci finally got rid of Trump. But of course that’s not supposed to be the reason. The reason they’d give, I imagine, is that he’s the nation’s #1 infectious disease expert and “saw us through the crisis.” Kinda like FDR saw us through the Great Depression, which, in actuality, lasted as long as it did because of his policies. So now, like then, they’ve got their figurehead and they’ve got their narrative, and we know from long decades of past experience that those two things are all they need to build their shrines and break out the candles and prayer rugs.
I think what a lot of people miss on both sides, is that Dr. Fauci’s best advice, by which I mean the stuff that has held up with the passage of time — didn’t require a “Number One infectious disease expert.” You could have gotten the same counseling from your nearest CVS pharmacist. Certainly, we would have heard the same things from the nation’s #2 through #5 infectious disease experts: Stay home if you show symptoms, avoid large crowds, test if in doubt. Fauci’s contribution was the creation of an environment in which we couldn’t hear from #2 through #5. There’s something about modern liberalism, they’re just suckers for this. They want a single point of control. I think, maybe, they like him because he took sides. He claimed to “represent science” but he never showed the tolerance for a dissenting viewpoint a real science practitioner should show. Conservatives noticed his advice seemed tailor-made to get rid of Trump. After awhile, Fauci came out and admitted it, he wanted Trump gone.
In addition to discussing whether Fauci was giving us the right advice, we could also have realized a benefit from discussing Fauci’s culpability in creating SARS-Cov-2 in the first place. Maybe this would have established his innocence; maybe not. Fauci made sure we never got started on it.
Our response to this hundred-year outbreak event, overall, has not been good. It’s been a model for how not to do it, and Fauci has led the way. He stifled the dissenting viewpoint at every turn. He pretended to be 100% sure of what he was saying, when he wasn’t. He politicized it when it wasn’t at all necessary for him to do so. He preened in the public eye to build up his image. He conspired against the sitting President of the United States.
He didn’t represent science. To me, he represented the people who ask complicated questions but demand simple answers. People who want one answer, and only one, and can’t cope with uncertainty. That’s who Fauci represented. God forbid we should ever see this happen again, but if we do, it’ll be a good thing Tony the Tyrant is gone. We need to handle that next one in a wholly different way from how we did it this time. We need different and better leadership next time. That’s our one saving grace in this, that our country is now experienced in how to do it the wrong way.
Haven’t got much to add to this.
“Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared,” Harris recently told the Triggernometry podcast. “There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.”
“It’s like a firefly to the sun,” he added.
“It doesn’t even stack up to Trump University. Trump University, as a story, is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden’s laptop, in my view,” Harris continued.
Harris then acknowledges—and defends—the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post published in October 2020, just over two weeks before the presidential election.
[snip]
“Now that doesn’t answer the people who say ‘it’s still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account,” Harris explained.
“‘Like that, that’s a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.’ Absolutely it was,” he admitted. “But I think it was warranted.”
He then replies to the accusations that this was a left-wing conspiracy to deny re-election to the sitting President, and his candor evaporates. Oh no, not left-wing…Liz Cheney isn’t left-wing…oh no, not conspiracy…this was out in the open…
Here’s what I think a lot of people are missing about this.
One. This wasn’t really “out in the open.” Experts confirmed, we were told, the whole laptop story was simply Russian disinformation. How did they determine that? I dunno. You dunno. It was just a thought from “experts,” meaning everyone else was supposed to echo it. With the benefit of hindsight, we see it wasn’t Russian disinformation after all, so this must have originated either from benign wishful thinking, or a malevolent…uh…what’s the word…conspiracy.
Two. To the extent this was “in the open” — so what? Had the “laptop thread” been pulled from the sweater, we don’t know how much of the sweater would have been wrecked. Today it looks like a whole bunch. If it’s in the open, but the questions aren’t being answered because no one’s asking them, then even that much isn’t so much out in the open. This is a power our “free press” has always had that people don’t think about much. We allow them to determine, in large part, what we as free citizens discuss. If they decide something like this is not to be discussed, and a bunch of us disagree, they pretty much win. We go off and exercise our right to free speech over on blogs or discussion forums or whatever…the citizenry in large part discusses what’s printed in the mainstream press. For just a few moments. Before turning the page to sports and entertainment.
Three. When the subject turns to the integrity, or lack thereof, of the 2020 election we know how that all works. We’re to presume the integrity was there, by default, and “there’s no evidence” of fraud. At least, not any fraud sufficient to change the result. And any of us who don’t follow along, or think of something to disrupt that train of thought, are to be mocked. Well gee; when those ballots got shot out to all corners of each state in this ramshackle “vote by mail” scheme, and when they were collected again, and counted, all of that was done by, and subject to the whims of, handlers. It’s a legitimate question to ask: Are those handlers like Sam Harris?
I guess I’ll just leave that there, and allow the reader to ponder the ramifications.
Something weird is going on with democrats and ice cream.
I’m guessing someone has made a discovery somewhere, that if you want to convince the hoi polloi that you’re one of them, you should make it known you like ice cream because of course all the riff raff like ice cream. Someone forgot to include in their little research project or whatever, that the humble classes like ice cream because everybody likes ice cream — it doesn’t distinguish you in any way. It doesn’t make you look like a normal when you go around bragging about how much you like ice cream.
As a matter of fact, given the understanding that you want more babies murdered and you like gas prices to be high…tacking on to the end of that “Also, I like ice cream” is a bit weird.
What am I to think of someone devouring a huge ice cream cone? Well, first thing in my head is, it’s probably hot. They’re probably outside and it’s a hot day, when ice cream would taste darn good. After that, kids might be involved. Maybe they’re on an outing with grandchildren. The third thing, most applicable if it’s a person known to me, in an important and influential occupation is: The work must be done. What could be more natural, and pleasant, if you have a high stress and important job, than to get it all the way done when there’s still a lot of daylight left, and celebrate by wrapping your lips around a huge ice cream cone? But only when the work is completely done. Our hands are going to be sticky and messy afterward, so it’s understood this is a final terminus, not a break. The ice cream cone becomes a symbol, much like a cocktail: Things are right and good. All objects involved are in a satisfactory state. Everything that needs piloting is on auto.
So democrats — running everything right now — are eating ice cream cones because they must think all the work is done. They must like things the way they are, with crime high, gas prices high, antiquated and absurd COVID rules still in effect where they aren’t going to do any good…Putin…North Korea…supply chain…everything’s all good to go, time for some ice cream.
So no. To me anyway, they’re not making themselves more relatable by eating ice cream.
In fact, if this bit of research exists, there’s a good chance a Republican mole put it together, to do damage from the inside.
Liberals don’t discuss.
I recently saw someone blame Donald Trump for the fact that more people have died from COVID with Biden being President. Yes you read that right. This would not stand up to reasoned discussion, but that’s okay because of course there won’t be any. All of the premises on which liberals think and work, are not merely premises, they’re “settled” axioms that they won’t open to inspection.
Some would object to this. Some have. Liberals love to “discuss” how high gas prices are not Joe Biden’s fault, but that’s merely denying something. When you or I talk about a discussion, we’re referring to a process involving, at least, a fair hearing to the other side and a fair engagement of the other side’s points, and counterpoints. There’s an old rule that if you think you’re ready to discuss something, you should be able to express the position of your antagonist in such a way that he’d be satisfied with your summary. I don’t even know what that test would look like, were it imposed on liberals. I’ve not seen it done, haven’t seen them take up such a challenge. I know, based on what I’ve seen of their performance, it would be a sustained and spectacular failure, likely one inspiring laughter.
But, we don’t like to impose burdens or tests on liberals. Being a liberal is all about not having to pass any. Somehow, the rest of us comply with this. We let ’em skate.
We have gun violence because of “all these guns lying around.” How many guns per acre does it take, to make violence? I don’t know the answer to that and you don’t either. Liberals refuse to discuss it. All-electric cars over hybrids, makes no sense. How come they don’t push hybrids instead? They refuse to discuss it.
They “know” Biden’s victory was legitimate and they’re plainly frustrated that they’re not winning any converts. Well, they’re not winning converts because they don’t discuss it. When does life begin? They refuse to discuss it. Now they’re in the hot soup because abortion is no longer “the law of the land,” and refusing to discuss now means it’s the other side that wins. Still, they refuse to discuss it. It’s not by choice. Forty-nine years of atrophy have left them unable to make a convincing argument because throughout all that time, they’ve enjoyed the advantage of “We don’t discuss it, we win”…and now they don’t win.
If they see any signs anywhere that anyone is following a Christian faith, they have to get rid of those. Even if it’s just prayer. They say it’s because of an intimidation factor or some such thing. This is a lie. Christianity is something they have to drive underground so as few people as possible ever see it. Atheism can be out and proud. So can a lot of the other religions. But they have to hide Christianity, bury it down deep.
They will “point out” that atheism isn’t a religion. But they won’t discuss it. I’ve got a list of reasons why it is one, but none of it matters. “Atheism is not a religion” is a punchline; it’s intended to stand on its own, with no rebuttal. There isn’t supposed to be a “Yeah but how come this” or “Yeah but what about that.” You’re just supposed to say “Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that” and move on to the next subject. They won’t discuss it.
Jussie Smollett proved truth doesn’t matter with these race-baiting incidents. Their solution to that is to mock and ridicule anybody who notices the Smollett hoax, and by extension, any of the other hoaxes. They refuse to discuss it.
They think this makes them look assertive, and smart.
What a shame, what a shame. Some of them really are smart.
But it’s an ideological positioning for mental midgets.
Unpopular opinion of mine:
Leftists are liberals. Liberals are leftists. This comes up every so often because I’m usually in pursuit of some other point, and I just use the generic term “liberals.” Classic liberals, of course, were pretty much the opposite of today’s leftists. They cared about the sovereignty and dignity of the individual, limiting the oppressive power of the state.
They’re not monsters in disguise of yesterday’s liberals. They’re not the bug-monster from “Men in Black” wearing the skin of the farmer.
That isn’t what’s happening at all. “Liberals” are the caterpillar, leftists are the butterfly. They’re corrupted. They believed in the autonomy of the individual and the virtue of dissenting opinion; they held a revolution over it, they succeeded and became the new power. Then they decided autonomy of the individual, and allowing a forum for dissenting opinion, aren’t that great after all.
“Question authority until we’re the authority, then cork it” should be their motto.
I use the terms interchangeably. Because they got interchanged. The grape became a raisin.
They lacked maturity to play nicely with others, from the very beginning. They wanted a power shift because they were on the side of the spectrum that didn’t have the power. Now they’re on the other side and their beliefs have shifted, but they’re still the same people, with the same foibles and handicaps.
You might compare them to your idiot brother or cousin who isn’t old enough for Monopoly, and wants the “roll doubles to get out of jail” rule to work differently, depending on who’s in jail. In the end, there are tantrums, tears and the pieces go flying across the room.
They have always been the kind of people you don’t want running anything. Now they’re running everything.
We’re surrounded on all sides by people who are working awfully hard to maintain a fantasy that the two sides, conservative and liberal, maintain similarities with each other. That they both have goals, and some maintain that the goals are similar although the methods are different. That each unseemly thought held by one about the other, is neatly reciprocated, with equal justification. A tat for every tit and an equal and opposite reaction for every action.
They must have scrambled around like mad, that weekend when Sen. Ted Kennedy sunk that poor woman in his car, for a Republican senator who did exactly the same thing.
Here and there, now and then, some people outgrow this idea. They’re usually conservatives, who’ve figured out the liberal attachment to truth is threadbare or severed altogether. They get drowned out by liberals and “moderates” who want to maintain the perception of a symmetry that doesn’t exist. Here and there, now and then, events rouse those who’ve been paying attention, from their slumber. “Critical Race Theory is not taught in the public schools” might be the most recent example. The air cackled with the talking point as it flew around thick and fast. This nonsense makes people tired. They read about yes it is, no it isn’t, yes it is and nearly every single one of them, reliable as rain, will tune out of the whole question forever. Well, somewhere someone is taking note of that. So just lie. Say it isn’t happening. You won’t fracture any trust relationships by lying, you’ll tire people out of paying attention to the issue, which is good for you.
Bad for everyone else though. The “middle of the road” people tire of it first, and come away thinking they’re the ones with the right idea, that all the bickering is just that and nothing more.
That’s not what’s happening at all though. Somewhere, detected or not, there is a truth of the state of things. The cat in the box is either alive or dead; one or the other, and it can’t be both. These parlor tricks are being used to tire people out of the whole notion of what’s true. So that they give up on following the whole thing. And it works like a charm. If it didn’t work, we’d stop seeing it, and quite to the contrary it’s become a sort of de facto way of propounding this propaganda.
Which brings me to this excellent article: “That’s not happening, and it’s good that it is.” It doesn’t mention “liberals,” instead it mentions “regimes.” Which is interesting, because a regime is supposed to be a structure of power preexisting, using its various resources to keep itself where it is. But that’s an observation I’ve made before a few times. Our “liberals” these days are what “conservatives” are supposed to be.
The seven methods summarized here are:
– Law of Merited Impossibility
– Celebration Parallax
– Law of Salutary Contradiction
– Smails Exhortation
– Lie-Back Imperative
– Enmity Counteraccusation
– “You’re worthless, baby; and if you even think of trying to leave me, I’ll kill you”
It isn’t hard to see what’s happening here. Relationships with other people are being built, sustained, maintained, replenished and in some cases destroyed based on the taking of sides. Professor Harry Frankfurt drew a distinction between liars vs. bullshitters, the latter of whom don’t need to know anything about what’s false vs. true, because they don’t care. Bullshitters, unlike liars, are just spewing stuff. Well that’s what’s happening here. The allure of building and preserving the right relationships crowds out what used to be a desirable goal, the preservation of integrity. People aren’t worried about damaging a relationship by saying false things, they’re far more worried about damaging a relationship by taking the wrong side. So they say things like “CRT is not being taught in the schools,” not to represent whether it is or isn’t being taught in the schools, but to show that they’re on the right side. If they get caught later with the revelation that it’s being taught in the schools and they fastened their identity to the notion that it isn’t, it doesn’t matter. They showed they were, and are, on the “right” side and they don’t care about anything else.
In other words, they’re bullshitters.
– It’s just a clump of cells, not a baby
– Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist
– The 2nd Amendment only applies to muskets
– High gas prices are not President Biden’s fault
– “Replacement Theory”
– Men can get pregnant
– Masks work
This is playing with fire. I don’t recommend it. But, they don’t listen to me; the “regime” has all the “fact checkers” on their side, and so they’re going around saying questionable things in anticipation of what friends they’ll make, not so much in anticipation of whether they’ll be proven correct or not. Because there’s no reward for being proven correct. They just want to keep the right friends.
But it won’t end well for anyone.
Supposedly there’s a “red wave” coming. I’m pretty sure it won’t be enough to make me happy. Large numbers of people who voted democrat last time, or who stayed home, shaping up to bring about a better result this time aren’t going to do it for me. Even as power shifts for the next two years, that’s a blip. That’s a course correction, forgotten in another two years’ time. I want to see some attitude, some synapses permanently closed, some “I’ll never do that again.” Like the cat who walked on the hot stove. I want to see feelings of bitter betrayal. That’s what this was, right? Oh…Trump is overseeing slightly lower unemployment rates here, and there, but the Forgotten Man! People being left behind! Put us democrats in charge…oh, ha ha ha you put us in charge, buckle up bitches here comes gas three and four times as expensive as it used to be, to push you into an electric vehicle. Wear your mask, stupid!
You don’t respond to that with “I’ll put these other guys in charge for just a couple years, teach you democrats a lesson.” That would be a legit response to honest error, not to betrayal. The lesson to be learned here is that these jerks aren’t on our side.
Am I asking too much? If my fellow citizens are thinking, and want to succeed in life, this shouldn’t be too much.
I can’t think of a worse political opinion to have, than one that has recently prevailed right before everything got worse, with demonstrable and definable lines of cause-and-effect between what you wanted done & what got worse. One should expect even the faintest desire to have a good opinion, would inspire serious introspection. If not “I can see my idea wasn’t good,” then at the very least, “I can see my idea was open to misinterpretation in ways I did not foresee.” There should be some kind of learning…
But in American politics, we often don’t get that. Instead, the constant shelter of the bad-idea-people, the architects of pain, is some running narrative about nuance and complexity. Oh no, just because I wanted to get rid of Trump, doesn’t mean I’m pro-Biden, Oh no, just because I’m pro-Biden doesn’t mean I hold him blameless for the high gas prices. Oh no, just because I hold Biden blameless for high gas prices, doesn’t mean I want them to be high. Oh no, just because I want gas prices to be high, doesn’t mean I want the economy to sputter. Oh no, just because I want the economy to be wrecked, doesn’t mean I hate people. Oh no…you misunderstand…
It’s like paying back yesterday’s awful ideas, with more awful ideas today, to avoid admitting how awful they were.
For all of us though, if your paramount goal is to avoid ever having made a mistake, well…hope you enjoy that a lot, because that’s about all you’re going to achieve. If you want to accomplish anything else, the time’s going to come sooner or later you’ll have to admit to your own fallibility. That if you do indeed know everything worth knowing now, you didn’t before, and you made a mistake.
Truth is, it’s these “My ideas are so nuanced and complex” people who don’t understand. Their ideas are not complex at all. They are simple. “I hate Trump” is simplistic thinking. It is canine thinking. If a dumb dog doesn’t like you, he doesn’t distinguish “You’re immoral” from “You’re annoying” from “I don’t like the way you throw my ball” from “You support unwise economic policies.” He mixes all that stuff together and barks at you. This is why we don’t let dogs vote.
When you want to get rid of Trump, and you manage to do it and then things start sucking, and you don’t admit your idea was a bad one, it means you’re making the overall collective poorer by way of your participation. It means the rest of us would be better off if we could lie to you about Election Day, or your registration for it, so you don’t vote. Repeating the exercise three more times, or ten, or a hundred, would be pointless because you don’t learn. That’s what that means when you replace Trump with Biden, and with gas topping out over $8 a gallon, start playing these “Oh no I wanted this not that” games.
You opposed Trump because you wanted to be popular.
Now you’re popular like the guy who shit in the hot tub. Serves you right.
Let us dispose, I say, of the following bits of sticky persistent nonsense. I can see here there’s work for me to do, because I’m seeing lots of people crying out for “new solutions that will work,” and then answering their own plaintive pleas with a lot of garbage that everyone’s heard lots of times before. Into the breach I bravely step.
1. This is unacceptable! We have no place for this!
Congratulations on the good intentions. Like any decent, not-crazy person, I wish you luck in what you’re trying to do.
But what I see here, is what it is. More of that dreadful mannerism. The indignant, matronly yard-duty teacher talking down to the dimmest third-grader in the class, letting him know she has had plenty enough of his crap. These shootings are overwhelmingly male-centric, and if we’re going to take a look at something to try to make this the last one, we need to be looking at how we get along with the males…which we haven’t been doing. The message to younger, developing males has been one of: Finger-waggling fists-on-hips nanny nanny boo boo stuff. You’re a pain, my approval decides everything, you can do nothing, you’ll never amount to anything. You are ineffectual, or at least, should be. As the profile of the school shooter develops and sharpens, we consistently see it’s a disengaged male who’s been made to feel ineffective, and this is his way of saying back to society at large, “Oh yeah?”
There is also the problem of accuracy. We do have a place for this violence. We’ve been making one. These shootings happen often at places that have strict anti-gun policies, so that shooters know they won’t run into armed resistance. They don’t want anyone shooting back, and we have been accommodating them.
2. What we’ve been doing up until now isn’t working! When are we going to finally do what we all know we have to do?
What we have been doing is cobbling together in each state an unworkable, byzantine briar patch of zany gun laws. Anti gun activists, like our predator President, like to say stuff like this as if they’re only just now being empowered, potentially, to constrain and curtail lawful gun owners. We’ve already been doing that. That’s what isn’t working.
3. We have to make sure people get the mental health services they need.
Such services are provided by practitioners, and practitioners carry with them a variety of different agendas. To say “more services” and then just leave it at that, is irresponsible, especially now when we know the practitioners have been “treating” kids who start out without anything innately wrong with them. “First do no harm,” remember that? It used to be, as they say, “a thing.” Primum non nocere. The fact of the matter is, too many boys-becoming-men are brought to adulthood without any vision of ever being functional or whole, and “get counseling” when there’s nothing wrong with you, just exacerbates the problem. How about…teach young males what we teach young females? That nobody’s perfect, you can be anything you want to be when you grow up, and you have within you already what it takes to make the world better? You’ll notice it’s popular to say that to girls. And grown women rarely shoot up schools.
4. Toxic masculinity!
The “Morgan Rule” is my invention: “If I’m gonna be accused, I wanna be guilty.” But let’s be clear, I only invented the words to stitch the ideas, which came along way before I did, together into a coherent statement. Right or wrong, this is how people function, and it has always been how people function. If the verdict is already in on me behaving badly, I have no incentive to behave any better. Anti-masculinity activists, you just got done telling a whole generation of males that they’re monsters just because they’re males. Now you’re wondering why they’re shooting up schools. Hmm.
As noted above, our sadly acquired cumulative wisdom continues to reinforce the observation that these are ungrounded, unattached, disoriented boys-becoming-men. Amid all this talk of “sensible gun laws,” can someone please enlighten me with the complete inventory of our recent efforts to ground, attach and orient growing boys? I’m sure the localized and isolated efforts exist here and there, but that’s clearly not enough. What about the widespread, intensive, sustained efforts to ground them, attach them and orient them?
As noted earlier, there’s a lot of social upward-mobility involved in plying encouraging messages onto the female; hardly anybody ever thinks of doing that with males. Make her feel “powerful”; make sure she “thrives.” Also noted earlier, chicks aren’t shooting up schools, it remains a dude thing. Once again: Hmm.
5. Medication to make his brain work right…
Actually, we saw our current spate of these terrible, violent acts after you amateur chemists got super slap-happy with your faddish psychotropic drugs. Some, like me, have been asking the question of how these drug patients should ever learn how to function in society without a constant dosage year to year, day to day…y’all never did get around to giving us a straight answer. Maybe the shooters have finally given us the answer! It’s not an answer I like too much.
There. Now that I have “fact checked” you, let’s go ahead and have our discussion about what’s broken, and how to fix it. Just don’t go swaggering around Beto Style, like you’re the genius who’s finally going to restore sanity and deliver us to peace, love and harmony, after we empower you to do so at long last…when the reality is, we’ve already been doing things your way.
I can’t put into words how scary it is, watching these rotten old ideas dressed up in new activewear, and paraded around under this phony pretense of “Now let’s do something about it” as if we’ve been sitting on the sidelines for years and years just letting these young men shoot people. And now Sparky here is going to offer up his revolutionary new idea: Make everybody else defenseless. It’s scarier than — an active shooter, barging through the door, crazy as a fox, looking for his next target, making eye contact. Because that guy, at least, would be intentionally shooting things.
These assholes are more like a toddler with a flamethrower who hasn’t quite figured out the connection between the hot bright stuff coming out the muzzle, and the trigger he’s pressing.
I can understand coming up with silly stuff in the immediate aftermath of a terrible event like this, letting the emotions gain the upper hand. It’s an emotionally charged thing.
But I can’t excuse it. That’s different from understanding it. The whole phenomenon carries all the tell-tale signs of a societal problem that’s getting worse because it isn’t being handled the right way. And these local-vocals, whether they realize it or not, are just reciting the wrong-way we’ve been handling it up until now, in a different tone of voice. If we conclude they just don’t know what they’re saying, we conclude as charitably as we possibly can, for the alternative explanation is an intent of harm. But either way, they haven’t got the right idea, and they’re still monopolizing the sound space which is something that doesn’t have to happen. That part reflects poorly on everybody else.
Catching up on e-mail, I see I have been embroiled in a number of Facebook arguments without realizing it. Abortion, mass shootings, gas prices, etc. As I’ve noted before, I’m some 35-40 years into figuring out what makes liberals tick and I’m an extremely slow learner, but I couldn’t help noticing something.
All I can do is infer based on what I see, but it seems like my sparring partners do not care that much about whether an unborn baby is a baby, or how to prevent the next mass shooting, or who’s to blame for high gas prices. There’s this pattern of abrupt sign-off with some kind of “I give up, this is a stupid argument”…maybe that’s because I really am stupid and they’re bright enough to see it. They certainly seem to think so. But if that’s the explanation, wouldn’t they be toiling away without my involvement trying to find ways to be fair to both the unborn baby and the mother, or to prevent the next mass shooting (apart from coming up with new gun laws that aren’t related in any way to the tragedies that inspire them)…or, making gas affordable again? Instead all I see them do is mock, ridicule, and re-ignite these arguments on social media that they end up saying are too stupid to justify their continued immersion after a few exchanges.
Liberals, I have determined, don’t care about the end state. They don’t revisit it, like a farmer revisiting a crop he planted, to face a potential abrupt forced about-face, to engage in a forced confession of having had the wrong idea…to exercise good old fashioned humility. They’re not interested in learning anything new, like they say they are, and they’re certainly not interested in learning something new if it comes at the cost of admitting to a mistake.
Liberals are liberals because they want to ratchet up their social status. Rush Limbaugh used to say the whole damn ideological positioning was the most gutless move you could make: Just be for…everything. Don’t see a problem in anything, don’t figure out any weak parts in an argument, don’t criticize, just go with the flow and think happy thoughts. He was right.
They love to start arguments but they can’t stand finishing them.
I can see, when I’m the one poking the bear, or when I’m the bear being poked, there’s a panic setting in that others aren’t seeing. The whole thing is a bribe that goes back to middle school: “Believe, with us, that two and two make five, and your social status will elevate.” And here comes someone like me who knows 2+2=4, but much worse than that, is and has always been unpopular…not willing to make the trade…never has been, ever. And you can see the panic and the fear. Oh shit! Someone we forgot to bribe!
And then they engage in this whirling-cyclone thing, this desperate mad butterchurn-spin, spewing the arguments they have been using on themselves to keep themselves comfortable in their nonsensical positions. It comes off looking like they can’t tell the difference between a strong argument, that could win over a convert, versus a weaker one, just the soothing pablum one says to oneself for sake of self-assurance that no learning is needed. I presume that they simply have no strong arguments available, because they haven’t needed any for a long time. They haven’t been challenged. It is a charitable presumption I am making, for the alternative is that they’re entirely unaccustomed to strong arguments and that’s why they can’t distinguish.
They panic because it’s too late to bribe me, and they can tell. They can’t invite me to any parties, or if they do, they can’t impose this believe-what-we-want condition because I’m past caring, I’ll shrug it aside and accept or refuse the invitation on its own merits, like a grown-up. The social conditioning has zero effect on people like us, we who have achieved adulthood the way you were always supposed to achieve it. We’re not going to pretend water is dry to get along, or that men can get pregnant.
And they DON’T. KNOW. WHAT. TO. DO. About that. Sheer panic.
Maybe this is why so many people in software are liberals: They’ve been conditioned, and the conditioning was manufactured out of necessity. Without it, you’ll be like me, forming whatever conclusions are logical and rational as you bounce from one crime-ridden, blight-invested, oh-so-progressive blue-state unicorn land, to another, working the computer software jobs and seeing with your own eyes how their policies consistently end in the same disasters, which aren’t present in the red states where they grow the food.
Where, if you go around thinking like a liberal, you’ll have your arm ripped out of its socket by a harvester or some such thing. And so people don’t.
After all I’ve seen, if someone wants to spend a lifetime they’ve only just started, writing computer software for a living, as a contractor or FTE, I would have to incorporate this into my advice if they come asking. You can get these jobs in red states, I’m told…for this reason or that reason, that has not been my chosen path. By default, you’ll be working in deep blue, one gig after another after another. And so before we get into data structures and algorithms, first get yourself accustomed to living in places governed by “leaders” who have neither the time or inclination to admit to mistakes, or to learn anything new. Get used to the signs of liberalism. Tents under bridges, needles and human feces on the ground, etc. Lots of tightly packed “income inequality,” together with loud opinionated people complaining about it. Get used to all that, first, then let’s talk about the bubble sort and the binary search trees. Also get used to “middle of the road” types telling you to pay no attention to politics or liberals…while the politics and liberals are literally in your face, all of the time, whenever you’re not in the office coding.
The blue-brains can’t answer simple questions about their own positions. “If recent policy changes are not responsible for high gas prices, then what is?” “If the unborn baby is not a baby, then what is it?” “How would this latest round of new gun laws have prevented that shooting?” They can’t answer these questions. They have no wish to do so. They just want to be popular…like in sixth grade.
Having never been offered even the potential reward, people like me have never cared. And so the two sides end up talking past each other. Others notice this, and pronounce the whole exchange to be futile. They’re right about the first half of that, wrong about the rest. Nestled inside the tire-spinning and other wasted energy in these dysfunctional exchanges, are secret answers to why the things that suck so much lately, suck so much. This is not insignificant. Real people are being hurt, by these policies, for real.
There’s this mythology that persists, that anyone with a political opinion different from the default must “like/love to argue about politics.” It’s conspicuous because in these current times, the default opinion has a lot to do with starting up conflict where it didn’t exist before. So we seem to be systematically confusing people who just want to go about their lives free of unnecessary conflict, with pugnacious Twitter-denizens spoiling for a fight, and vice versa.
I see if you want to get a fight started where there wasn’t one before, but want to look like you’re just a harmless little mammal on the bottom of the food chain just seeking to co-exist with nature, you just portray yourself as either threatened, or feeling threatened. Oh no. I’m worried about hate crimes. You’re using the wrong pronouns on me. Climate change! Such-and-such a bumper sticker could be construed as a call to arms for people to attack me. It’s reached the point where we can’t get away from this kind of talk anymore, and the truth is that this kind of talk is just the sound bullies make when they want to act like non-bullies. For the record, throughout all of human history an important aspect of bullying has been to put up this false imagery that the bully is a non-bully, and the person getting bullied is “the real bully.”
Because of this, the people who can least afford to get immersed in and distracted by politics, end up being the ones who must.
Speaking just for myself, I don’t actually relish political arguments because they tend to lead to me getting scolded. The people who have yet to make a persuasive argument to me, seem to think when all else has failed, it’s time to do some scolding.
As a child of the 1970’s, not conspicuously one of the brighter males in the class, usually the last one to “get” whatever is the thing all the kids are supposed to get…throughout my lifetime I’ve been scolded a lot. It doesn’t quite enmesh the teeth in my cogs. It strips them. I have a tough time picking out the vowels and consonants with scolding. And it doesn’t inspire me to show much respect. Over the years I’ve learned to recognize it as the one tool left in the bag, of someone who didn’t start out with too many others. It’s a clarion call to me that someone is seeking to WinTheArgument at any cost, when they don’t deserve to win it at all.
When I see a mentally handicapped truant Swedish child scolding an international body of delegates and the delegates cheering for the scolding — at them — what I see is a room for mental health patients, filled to capacity plus one. Nobody of sound mind should cheer scolding at them. It tells me all the “civilized” nations of the world are maintaining a habit, without borders, of investing real authority and influence in mental midgets. I don’t know why all these supposedly advanced nations have all slipped off their rockers this way at the same time, and I don’t really care. It’s evidence that I can’t trust what authorities say, because the authorities by default are cuckoo. It really doesn’t help matters that the “facts” being dished out by the young Swedish mental patient are nonsense.
But seriously. If you have so much passion invested in what you’re saying and you don’t think I’m taking it seriously enough, don’t scold. That’s like finding yourself in a hole, and digging some more. That’s just how I work. But I doubt like the dickens I’m the only one. Since the above-mentioned 1970’s, females and effeminate types scolding males and masculine types, without anyone considering it with the gravity it deserves, has settled in as a sort of default configuration. It’s obvious we have a lot of people with loud voices and influence who can’t seem to get enough of it, nevermind whether they get to play the part of the person scolding or the person being scolded. It hasn’t resulted in any pattern of good decision being made. We’ve arrived at a point where it might be a good idea to take an extended break. Leave those little fists un-balled up and off your hips for a few years, ladies and Justin Trudeau, and throttle back on the whole “how dare you” thing. You don’t need to confront all of the time. It doesn’t look to others the way it looks to you.
I don’t think these things because I deserve scolding and haven’t gotten enough. I think these things because I’m normal, sane and of sound mind. I’m capable of dropping one opinion and picking up another if I can hear a rational argument as to why I should, but I don’t respond to scolding from intellectual indigents. That’s the way we all should be.
So, Elon has made his move on Twitter. And now we’re all talking about free speech, and those awful terrible billionaires doing…stuff.
This debate over “free speech” is about to drift over into “Yeah but what about truth?” The narrative is going to be that we can’t have speech that’s so free that people can sling about untrue things. So it’s like a hose, you see? Or a coffee filter. You can constrict it and be anti-free-speech, but if you open it up too much, a bunch of “disinformation” gets in there…so we have to find a happy medium.
Back up the truck. Before we even get there, let’s inspect this.
Anti-free-speech advocates deleted posts and restricted accounts of people who said Hunter Biden’s laptop was a real thing…and then it turned out to be real.
They deleted posts and restricted accounts of people who were calling bullshit on the “COVIDE came from bat meat at a wet market” thing…which turned out to be bullshit.
We aren’t arguing about whether to let Bill Clinton’s “truth detectors” restrict free speech. No no no. This doesn’t have anything to do with truth. We’re arguing about whether to let “fact checkers,” younger than the socks I’m wearing now, who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit ’em square in their hairless balls — take a SWAG about what’s true and, based on that, play whack-a-mole with the posts and accounts.
You’re better off asking a Magic-8 ball what’s true, than these clowns.
So let’s not even go down that road.
it isn’t free speech versus truth. It’s: Allow free speech so we can hear the story from all sides, and figure out for ourselves what’s true. Because Silicon Valley is not to be trusted. Even if they knew what they were doing they still wouldn’t be trustworthy. But they were in Kindergarten when the World Trade Center fell, and they don’t know what they’re doing.
So when all’s said & done, the prosecution couldn’t get a conviction in the Whitmer kidnapping case for lack of evidence. You might say they couldn’t convict anyone of kidnapping, or plotting to kidnap, because there was no kidnapping and there was no plot. This would mean a lot of people who were sure they were right, were actually wrong, and things we were all told had been done or plotted, were never done or plotted.
Is anyone anywhere going to reverse course, pull out of the cul de sac, or maybe just change bearing or velocity…a little tiny bit? No? Hmmm.
You’ll all still make fun of me for “believing in conspiracies”? Fresh off watching our government unsuccessfully attempt to railroad people — yet again?
It’s a lot of conspiracies. Let’s see, what have we got now…
1. Steele Dossier, hookers peeing on bed, all that stuff.
2. Coordinating the “mostly peaceful protests,” and reporting on them that way.
3. Covering up Hunter Biden’s laptop.
4. Circling the wagons around Hillary Clinton and her zillion plus deleted e-mails.
5. Keeping the China Bioweapon secret after it escaped the Chinese lab, the red-herring treatment with the “wet markets,” etc. Gain of Function research. Fifteen days to slow the spread. Playing down natural immunity, playing down Ivermectin, calling it horse dewormer, playing down Hydroxychloroquine, all the China Bioweapon lies.
6. The masks were “the MAGA hat of the left.” Yes that was a conspiracy. Let’s stop pretending. Masks everywhere you look, in the middle of an election year, that was an in-kind contribution.
7. January 6. A setup.
8. Now we have kidnapping Gov. Whitmer. A setup.
9. Counting votes in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada.
10. Calling Kyle Rittenhouse a “white supremacist,” and setting up Nick Sandmann.
Now look. You can tell me something is a certain way, for the very first time, and then immediately ridicule me for not believing it, or for questioning it, or for doubting it…or for merely hesitating to believe it. Or for listening to other people who have a different take on it. You can ridicule me for those things if you want…
But, you’re essentially ridiculing me for doing what any logical, sensible person is going to be doing at this point. When you do that you don’t look smart, or sophisticated.
You look like someone doing P.R. for unscrupulous types, for free, the same P.R. work someone else is doing for lots of money. And no, you’re not fooling anyone into thinking you’re sure of what you’re saying just because you act like it. You look like what you are, which is a bullshitter. We’ve been bullshitted so much. Everyone should be questioning pretty much everything.
In my previous post (and on earlier occasions) I explored these two different ideas about how government should operate, and what exactly it is it’s trying to do. Here we are dealing with something much more fundamental. If you could layer your ideas like the modules in an extremely well-designed and mature software product, at the bottom of it all that has to serve as a foundation, the “kernel” if you will, supporting the primitive operations of everything else, you would find what we could call a “concept of truth.” What exactly do you mean when you say something is true?
Remember what Ronald Reagan said: “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” He was on to something. Conservatives and liberals don’t agree about what’s true, because they don’t agree about what truth is. This is what we explore when we ruminate about such simple things as “two and two make four.” A conservative says that’s “true” in the sense that all correct math equations are true; in the field of math, generally, there is one and only one correct answer. Three is not the correct sum, and neither is five.
To a liberal, it is “true” that Hunter Biden’s laptop is really just Russian disinformation, or that Trump schemed with Vladimir Putin to ratchet up gas prices after he left office. Liberals live in a universe in which everything is an attempt, because everything is a revolution. Someone, somewhere has power and doesn’t deserve to have it, and “we” are going to take it from them. This is why they are most destructive, peculiar and clownish when they already run everything. In California post-Wilson, and in the U.S. after the beer summit (except for you-know-who being President), in Chicago, DC, New York City, Atlanta, DFW they’re like the dog that caught the car. This is where they’re conducting their glorious revolution against a boogeyman that doesn’t really exist.
So they’re always trying to get the ball rolling. Always trying to generate momentum…behind…something.
It’s “true” that the planet is going to die in twelve years if we don’t do something — means — Look, what we’re trying to do is generate some momentum behind the idea that, if we don’t do something, the planet will die in twelve years. That’s not what conservatives hear when they’re told “We only have twelve years to save the planet.” They take that literally. And twelve years afterward, when we’re all still here, someone, somewhere, should be atoning. Someone should, at the very least, be admitting they thought they were right about something, when they weren’t, if for no other reason than to restore confidence in the notion that they’re at least trying to make a good call, or to learn as they go.
But that’s not going to happen because that’s not how liberals think. Passing on the word that Sarah Palin is borderline-retarded, or someone tried to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, or the United States has enough nuclear weaponry to blow up the world seven thousand times, is the liberal equivalent to tossing a ten-spot into the church collection plate. Remember, everything is an effort, everything is a revolution. What passes for their connection to “truth,” is nothing more than an effort. In addition to adding their contribution to the effort, they’re making a spectacle out of themselves as they do so, preening to their fellow liberals, hoping to elevate their own social status. They couldn’t possibly care less if there was a plot to kidnap Whitmer.
So there’s no need to atone for it later when it turns out to be wrong. In the liberal universe, it wasn’t wrong. Rather, it was spent, like the money in the collection plate, now it’s on to the next thing.
When I say — Never let liberals decide for the rest of us what’s true, right, equal or unequal — this is what I mean.
They actually know nothing. They measure nothing. There is no “truth” in their world as the rest of us know it. There is only the glorious revolution that’s always just around the corner. There is only the effort to generate momentum behind…whatever.
I won’t forget the China Bioweapon, ever, in part because now we know China develops bioweapons. The question remains whether they release them on purpose or by accident, but it’s settled that they develop bioweapons and they lie about them.
Also, I’m not inclined to forget about the conflict I saw paraded in front of me for two solid years. We don’t all agree about how a government works or how it’s supposed to operate. I think we elect leaders who we count on to make good decisions, and when they don’t, they’re accountable for the results. I think they’re like captains obliged to go down with the ship. I think, if there are bad consequences from wrong decisions, and these consequences loom larger for the governed than for those doing the governing, something is broken and it was already broken before the decisions turned out to be bad ones.
There is this other mindset, clung to by all sorts of people walking around and living their lives…I have no idea how they do, how they get dressed in the morning. They think the position of governing people is kind of like owner equity. If you’re a “leader” you “own” everything involved in your decisions. If you make a bad decision, it’s like a child breaking a toy he owns, it isn’t anybody else’s business. Momma go buy me a new one. According to this, leaders don’t really make “wrong” decisions because there’s no way for them to make mistakes. If they break something, it’s like the child breaking the toy. They get to do that. If they won an election, or were appointed by someone who was, and the term isn’t up yet then it all belongs to them. Everything they do is their right.
It’s the difference between trustees laboring under the burden of making weighty decisions for others, who will hold them to account; versus, a farmer attending to a flock of dumb beasts. Disposable beasts. Not like cows that cost a certain number of dollars per head. More like fleas in a flea circus.
“The science changed!” That’s just a fancy way of saying your talking points changed. And you still don’t want to be accountable. Science never changed.
It’s the difference between remembering the constituents are real people with hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, living real lives…and, forgetting all about that.
The era of living under the dreaded China Bioweapon may have passed, but this difference in visions about what government is, is still with us. A yawning gap.
Many among my fellow citizens have no desire for citizenship. It isn’t true of all of them, but it’s true of far too many. They don’t want to be citizens at all.
And my “leaders” told lie after lie after lie, and then orchestrated witch hunts against the citizens who had the audacity to notice the lies. They produced bogus “science” strongly suggesting, and occasionally coming out and saying, that if you don’t wear a mask everywhere you go, you must not care about people and you’re trying to kill Grandma. That if you don’t get vaccinated, you’ll spread the pathogen quicker, or more surely, or more times, or something. They lied to get more people to do what they wanted them to do, and half my fellow constituents thought this was wonderful to lie this way. Clapped for it and demanded more, like dumb circus seals.
I will never, ever forget. Not if I live to be five hundred.
Sometime in the last fifty years, and I get the impression this has been changing faster lately — liberals stopped arguing. It used to be they’d rely on appeal to authority, which, say what you want about it, at least it is some sort of an appeal. I think that’s the last appeal to disappear. We saw it throughout the China Bioweapon crisis…and maybe that’s the pivot point. “Who are you to question Dr. Fauci” lost its value as a “This ought to convince you” sort of argument, and subtly shifted its weight toward something like “This magical incantation ought to drown out the sound of your voice.”
In these post-Bioweapon times, they don’t seek to persuade at all. They just sort of repeat their talking points half heartedly. The most charitable way to describe what they’re giving you, is as a rationalization for them thinking what they’re thinking. They aren’t telling me, for example, why we should defund the police. They’re telling me why other people think we should defund the police. This is a significant shift, when the same shift applies to all of their positions about everything.
Maybe it’s the “High gas prices are not Biden’s fault” thing that slipped their center of gravity over the brink. After all, you can’t prove that, even if you believe it to be true. So it’s really just nonsense. It sounds better than “I can’t hear you la la la” but that’s what they’re saying. They’re not indemnifying Biden. They’re just talking over you when you peg Biden as the problem…accurately.
Half a century ago, when they said “We need lower taxes on people who make less money because they need a greater percentage of their income to fulfill the basics,” they believed it…and, they were persuasive. It may or may not have persuaded you. Perhaps it should have. Perhaps it should not have. But the argument, at least, made sense on some level. It was based on fact and/or easily observed situations and it relied on provable basics of economics and household management. It relied on logic, lesser things being treated as lesser things, and greater things being treated as greater things. It play-acted, with some degree of legitimacy, at being grounded in compassion.
If any of their arguments did any of those things today, it would be truly remarkable. What changed?
Here’s a theory: This “argumentum ad poopheadidum” thing, for lack of a better term — in which they call you a terrible person for believing the wrong things, or for not accepting their version, has become a sort of “golden hammer.” They ply you with their version of what you should be thinking, and you buy it or you don’t. If you don’t buy it, they call you a dirty rotten jerk or whatever, show off for each other, and walk away, cowardly. If it were more dignified, it would be canine-like behavior: Bark at the thing, pee on it, walk away.
It’s a change that doesn’t help them in the long run.
It’s really not too good for the rest of us, either. People may not realize it, but there’s a point to arguing about politics. If you’re really right, you should be able to defend your position from someone who is out to attack it — so long as they attack it honestly and in good faith.
Obama said the question of when life begins, is above His pay grade.
Judge Jackson said she can’t define the word “woman” because she’s “not a biologist.”
Weird that liberals know so much that the rest of us don’t know, until a question emerges with some clear practical ramifications to it. Then suddenly, they can’t answer the basics.
When liberals refuse to define things or profess to be unable to define things, we all need to remember it’s not because they can see “nuances” or “shades of gray” that have eluded the rest of us. That’s the story they’d like to sell. But that’s not what’s happening. Not even close.
The acid test is: If being unable to define things keeps them from forming an opinion, will they still be unable to define it? In all test scenarios, the answer is no. They’ll go ahead and define the thing so they can form the opinion. Usually, to get pissed off and bent out of shape over something.
It’s an issue of maturity. The desire to win all the arguments comes way before the ability to do so.
This is why a lot of liberals cut discussion short by cracking some sort of lame-ass joke. It’s all about arousing that feeling of winning the argument, with or without actually saying something enlightening or persuasive.
Liberals can define things just as well as anybody else. They can answer these basic questions just fine. What they’re refusing to do is commit, because that would require some intellectual honesty.
I can find conservatives willing to concede the United States should not have invaded Iraq, but I can’t find any liberals willing to concede Saddam Hussein ever did anything threatening.
I can find conservatives willing to concede that the global climate changes from time to time, but I can’t find any liberals willing to concede Al Gore’s house consumes a lot more energy than necessary, or that this might constitute a messaging problem.
I can find conservatives willing to concede Truman should have fired MacArthur, but I can’t find any liberals willing to concede communists successfully infiltrated the government under Truman.
I can find conservatives willing to concede the Capitol Penetration on January 6, 2021 was a WrongBad thing, but I can’t find any liberals willing to say the same thing abut the George Floyd race-riots all throughout the previous summer.
I can find lots of conservatives willing to concede they’d been toyed with, with the prospects of Hillary Clinton, James Comey et al going to jail, but I can’t find any liberals willing to let go of the fantasy of “Walls are closing in on Donald J. Trump!!”
I can find conservatives willing to concede Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and not Kenya, but I can’t find any liberals willing to concede the “Trump hired hookers to pee on a bed” story had ever been debunked.
I can find conservatives ready to concede businesses don’t always do the right thing, but I can’t find any liberals ready to concede government agencies don’t always do the right thing…unless those agencies assist the military, or are operating under a Republican president.
I can find a lot of Republicans who thought Trump should have been impeached. Of course I can; they voted that way. I can’t find any liberals or democrats who will concede the stuff and nonsense about “Trump is a Russian asset” was exactly that and nothing more, just stuff and nonsense. It’s been debunked and they won’t go against it, won’t even mention it anymore except to repeat it a few more times.
Conservatives, all over the place, confess that Donald Trump might not be a good role model for boys. It isn’t even a concession. A lot of them are eager to agree to this, in fact will advance it, waiting for others to agree. I can’t find any liberals wiling to concede HIllary Clinton or Kamala Harris make poor role models for girls.
Being a liberal, I’ve concluded, must have a lot to do with never conceding anything, anywhere, at any time. Never admit to having been wrong. Never make a single U-turn. That’s for lesser people.
It isn’t that liberals have a frayed or worn-down tethering to truth, or that they have their own truth, the problem is that they don’t have any. Liberalism is its own “truth.”
A financial analyst or economist who is a liberal, is a liberal first.
A lawyer who is a liberal, is a liberal first.
A scientist who is a liberal, is a liberal first.
It’s a cult.
So yes…when you say 97 out of a 100 scientists agree to X, I want to know how many of them are liberals. I know too much not to ask, and I know too much to remain impressed if you can’t prove to me all the liberals were scrubbed.
I know that when the truth stares a liberal right in the face, and it goes against doctrinaire liberalism, the liberalism will go against what’s true, forsaking it for the doctrinaire liberalism. I mean, it’s not like I have to work at remembering this. We all get a front-row seat so we can watch it, multiple times per week, 52 weeks a year, for years and years at a time.
It’s so strange. I have heard from people who voted for Reagan, and were sorry for having done so. Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump. Losers, too, have repentant voters who would like to have done it differently. Mondale, Dukakis, Perot, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney and yes, even her, the Smartest Woman on the Planet Hillary Clinton. They all had voters who wished they could take back their vote and do it differently.
Even JFK, back in the day. Here and there, now and then, you could read about them. Should-a voted for Nixon, gosh darn it.
But, the 81 million have no regrets.
The guy who hid in his basement…can’t put together two words…is not popular…time comes for him to brag, he’s got nothing…far-and-away record number of votes received, ever, since the nation’s founding, and no one regrets anything?
Oh okay. So they wanted World War III and gas at $7 a gallon?
People who follow politics only casually and haven’t seen a reason to commit to either side, get to be loud in our country. It’s the price we pay for our affluence; our populace, or certain portions of it, get to enjoy bizarre, unfitting luxuries and that is one of them. Some of these neutrals figure they’re neutral because they know something the idealogs don’t know, although they typically can’t say what that is. But while they’re running around being loud, one of the ideas they tend to purvey is that the committed conservatives and committed liberals argue more-or-less the same way, just in different directions. And this is attractive to people who haven’t been paying attention at all.
It’s a case of the blind leading the blind.
It’s quite wrong. Or at least, if one dedicates oneself to paying attention to figure out what’s really happening, rather than just to pick up casual, surface-level observations to drop into the next coffee table conversation with friends, co-workers or relatives, this is the first domino to fall.
Liberals, I notice, generally don’t believe in cause and effect. They certainly act like they do, but they don’t. Conservatives say “Increasing the minimum wage costs jobs” and liberals say “No, it actually creates jobs” — seems like here we have an earnest point of discussion. But…we don’t. Conservatives can offer a cogent rationale: Raising the price of any product or service, will generally reduce demand. This is not only strong reasoning, it is the basis of economic theory. Supply, demand and price are interrelated, and this is how markets work. The liberal rebuttal seems to consist of little more than “Paul Krugman says, and who are you to question him,” infused with some “If you get to do that, our side gets to do this” verbal nerd-slap-fighting.
I’m noticing this lately because conservatives have noticed Putin had left things alone while Trump was in charge, a notion that the dedicated liberal overlooks, or rejects, just because it doesn’t gel well with his feelings. As I wrote earlier, we as a country would do well to seriously discuss this idea that bad guys are intimidated into inaction when our leadership is, shall we say, hawkish. Such a discussion might be short, but we wouldn’t know for sure because our liberals don’t want us discussing it. But history seems to support the idea. And again, there is a cogent rationale: Bad guys who run around doing bad things, make decisions about whether or not to do them before they act, and they decide these things in their own self-interest.
Liberals say “inequality” — whether they’re talking about wealth, or income, they typically don’t say — leads to social instability and upheaval. How this works, I don’t know, and you can’t tell me because you don’t know either. They won’t say that part either. It seems to have something to do with the emotions of the people who are causing the social instability and upheaval. Left to guess, I would have to surmise this is a threat that if we don’t redistribute income so that unproductive people get some of it, the unproductive people will march through the streets BLM-protest-style, smashing things. On the other hand, that’s not fair because I’m going beyond what the liberals are actually saying. On the other other hand, that’s the best I can do because they’re not being clear about it.
They establish some link between capitalism and “climate change” that is trashing the planet, but it looks like communism is harder on the planet than capitalism ever has been.
They link some good things to their purported causes, too, like electing Barack Obama President led to the termination of Osama bin Laden. Gotta give ’em that one. Except for one thing: How? What specifically did Obama do to make this happen?
Conservatives say if we let entrepreneurs and other business types keep more of their profits, we’ll see economic benefits for all. Liberals smear that as “Trickle-Down,” but history supports it, and so does common sense: You want more of something to happen, you make it easier and more rewarding for the people who are doing it, you get more of it. Liberals say if we have more infrastructure and education, we’ll reap the same benefits. But when we don’t, they move the goalposts and begin indulging in bizarre arguments that we never should have wanted what we thought we wanted in the first place. Education, so goes the goalpost-move argument, should not be all about making more money, it should be more about making the student into a well rounded individual. On this issue, we could see some agreement between conservatives and liberals, if the liberals would just hold still: Educate the kids, so they grow up with practical skills, learn to provide for themselves, and there’s a benefit for all while we make some serious inroads on that inequality problem. Seems doable. But the liberals tailor their arguments for people who can’t pay attention or remember anything.
It seems a lot of the time like liberals appreciate inequality just fine. Replacing the ABC’s and three R‘s with gender studies, would be a great way to perpetuate inequality.
It is a solid, cogent argument to speculate that Putin invaded Crimea when Obama was President, because Obama was President, and he invaded Ukraine when Biden was President because Biden was President. When Trump was President Putin invaded nothing, because Trump was President.
“COVID happened under Trump’s watch,” on the other hand, while true, is not solid or cogent. Again, it’s just “I get to do this if you get to do that” verbal nerd-slap-fighting. The question remains outstanding: Why? What is it about Trump being President that caused the pathogen to escape the Chinese lab? Or motivated the Chinese to release it on purpose? The most obvious answer would be “They wanted Trump to lose the election so the whole thing was a setup.” We don’t have supporting evidence for all that just yet, but if it emerges, it would hardly be a reflection on Trump himself. Rather, it would indicate that someone had something to hide, and were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep it hidden, which would suggest that replacing our President was the wrong thing for us to do.
What we have here is truly a remarkable thing: We have an ideology dedicated to the proposition that events are spontaneous, that nothing happens because of anything else. An ideology that is unaware of the simple concept of cause-and-effect. And that’s something that, on an individual level, its adherents must realize is a real thing. I mean, to go about their day-to-day lives, they must get this, right? What do liberals do every day? Maybe…go to Starbucks to get a seven-dollar daily drink before bitching about how hard it is to make ends meet? So they must know, to get the drink, you have to reload the card…? My point is, the politics apparently are making them stupid. They understand, when they just do their daily-routine things, the events cause other events to happen, and then when they immerse themselves in politics and start spamming conservative blogs with nonsense, suddenly they don’t understand this anymore.
They think “the January 6th insurrection” was such an awful, terrible thing. Conservatives come back and say “Well yeah, BLM had been rampaging through our cities all the previous summer, law enforcement did little to nothing about it, and that sent the message that political violence was okay.” Pretty simple summation, and you get here before you’re obliged to condemn this act or uphold that act. It’s an old, respected custom, that if we don’t prosecute crimes, they become okay and we shouldn’t be surprised when the crimes happen with greater frequency and with more damage done. But somehow, when you get to that point in the discussion, liberals activate their amnesia-shield of “I don’t comprehend cause and effect because it’s too complicated,” and start topic-drifting, goalpost-moving, or filling the sound space with nonsense and noise in some other way.
The longer I watch them, the harder it is for me to chalk it up to true amnesia, lack of focus, or any other kind of incompetence.
To harp on the point that COVID happened under Trump, and then waste time on bogus “fact checks” that say high gas prices aren’t Biden’s fault, is worse than hypocritical. It’s flagrantly dishonest. It says something about our discourse, and the environment in which it takes place, that liberals not only engage in the duplicity on a routine basis, but feel comfortable doing it.
Cheeky hot-pants girl from Eat My Dust says…
You know the thing I’ve always hated about cars, is they’re so gorgeous on the outside but so ugly and dirty under the hood, ya know?
It’s supposed to be a stupid one-liner that helps build on the character’s superficiality…and it is.
But in light of current events, it’s quite profound. Consider what would happen if Darlene got her wish. Start with draining the five quarts of motor oil and replacing it with potpourri, after scrubbing every last remnant of that awful icky slippery black stuff from every machine part. Turtle-wax the engine right down to the core of the crankshaft.
What you are then left with, is a beautiful thing indeed — inside and out — but it will also be immobile. The engine won’t run. If it runs, it will overheat. If it doesn’t overheat, the valves won’t work right and if they do work right, the brakes will fry. The car will self-immolate because you made it into a grease-free, bright, shiny, waxed, non-functional, self-destructive thing. The crankcase smells like cinnamon, the gas tank smells like lemon, all the guts are smooth, colorful and appealing to your delicate sensibilities, And the damn thing is inoperable, melting into a puddle when anyone turns the key.
That’s why there’s a war on now. You assholes got rid of Trump because he was coarse, salty, abrasive and he didn’t tickle your fancy.
The analogy breaks down a bit because without some actual gasoline somewhere, the motor doesn’t run long enough to fry itself. And a “Biden-mobile” doesn’t smell that sweet. Rumors of Grandpa Joe being more congenial and friendly, showing the proper behavior in the selected setting, discretion superior to his predecessor, etc….they’re greatly exaggerated. Not that any of this matters though. A mistake is a mistake.
By all means, extend your compassion. Hopes and prayers. Donate money and blood for the humanitarian crisis coming. But we’re living in your world. You wanted things your way and you got ’em. Never forget that, because I won’t. Not letting you off the hook.
The dumb throwaway line from the 45-year-old movie is there to show that some people, even if you could get them close to the innards of a machine, shouldn’t be allowed there. Well, in 2020 we allowed them there. Yes it’s that simple.
Well, since I wrote the previous about the ninnies among us refusing to think about things because it’s just too scary, it happened. Putin invaded the Ukraine. China may be involved, which inspires all sorts of dark thoughts about where this might be going.
Arguing on the Internet doesn’t help anything, people keep telling me. Then they go and argue about it on the Internet…
Well, I dunno. If we’ve just toppled out of the frying pan into the fire, we have done so because of the way people are. Blame this guy, or that guy, we’re supposed to all be the same, right? Or at least related. And the Internet, or before the Internet I guess it was just the arguing — exposes the human frailties that lead to situations like this. The “Too Frightening To Contemplate” fallacy mentioned in the previous post is one of these frailties. And, for those who were blindsided by this, it has led to the blindsiding. Oh no, World War III can’t start in my lifetime, that’s too frightening to contemplate. Well oops, what’s this?
Trump kept it from happening. At least, while he was in, it didn’t happen. Coincidence? A lot of people seem to think so, I notice…and this is based on…squat. Here’s another frailty. We see it in the endless debates about gun control, and criminal incarceration. I remember the debates about it during Reagan’s time in office, and immediately thereafter. Here and there, now and then, we discuss it but we don’t even bother with giving it a name. For lack of a better term, we could call it “malevolent intent properly intimidated into inaction” or some such thing. It applies to domestic issues as well as foreign policy: The house with a sign that says “We believe in gun control” gets burglarized before the one that says “Prayer is a good way to talk to Jesus, trespassing here will get you a meeting with Him.”
Liberals, and sweater-wearing, pearl-clutching Trump-phobes, think of bad guys and their bad deeds like random weather events, such as hurricanes. It’s odd. People who are sure the “economic sanctions” will somehow push today’s Bad Guy, Vladimir Putin, into the correct behavior, are all done with anticipating the Bad Guy’s moves once they’re done with that. They don’t really want to do this. Making a little bit of noise is fine, but they don’t want to play Chess. And so they don’t favor the idea that Bad Guys can be punished or rewarded. Seems they’re figuring, if they take the time to figure out what the Bad Guy wants, they’re making themselves as bad as him and that’s just wrong. So they don’t believe in the concept.
But history does.
This is important stuff because it all matters when it’s time to go voting. If Placeholder Joe really did net his 81 million votes, or even if he didn’t but came close, we need to discuss this a whole lot more. Because that would mean, once it became apparent that Donald Trump is scary to bad people, more Americans voted against him over that than for him. They didn’t put America first, and now we have a mess. We’ve been here before. A few times.
The ninnies will never acknowledge this, of course. It would make them culpable. Well, apart from finger pointing, we have reasons for wanting to explore this. America’s leadership, in theory at least, is something under our control. Russia’s leadership is not.
Trump at one point called Putin’s move savvy and genius, which set off the ninnies into an apoplectic fit. I find this telling. Apparently they live in a world in which you’re not supposed to appreciate an enemy’s positive attributes, even if doing so is the only way you can avoid underestimating your antagonist at some critical moment in forming your strategy. You’re supposed to hate, hate, hate, all the time, and when it’s time to assess your enemy’s battle acumen or some other type of wisdom, you should be calling him a dummy or poo poo head or something.
Well wait, aren’t I being what I call others? Shouldn’t I be presuming a greater sense of realism and practicality on the part of those who disagree with me politically?
Perhaps. But, I’ve already tried that. And I found out the hard way that these are people who will just let Putin do — whatever. They’ll pull him out of a utility closet as a prop to be used against Republicans at campaign time, they’ll make up a bunch of fiction about Trump being in cahoots or whatever…whenever Putin’s not useful for them, they’ll gloss over him again, making snarky one-liners about 1980’s history. And then Putin will actually do something and it’s surprise, surprise, surprise.
So I’ve tried respecting them; I’m ready for some disrespect now. I see them as political creatures who will anticipate things for the sake of political victory, and if there’s no prospect of political victory, anticipate nothing.
One can hardly blame them. If we acknowledge the simple truism that America’s enemies are acting in their own interests, and can therefore be motivated, and controlled on some level provided we think as pragmatically as they do…then, after evaluating what is under our control and what isn’t, we’d have no choice but to support doctrines of Peace through Strength. And then the ninnies who are professionals at the game of being a ninny, would be out of a job. Good for the country, bad for them.
Or maybe I’m wrong. But the only way to find out for sure would be to start discussing this: Can bad guys be intimidated into inaction? Or are they purely random events, like hurricanes? Would the ensuing discussion yield good points worth thinking about, on both sides? Only one way to find out that one. We should explore it. Shift the focus away from Tiger King and The COVID for just a little while.
I have seen lots of lists of “logical fallacies,” both formal and informal. But I have not seen an entry for what I would call, for lack of a better name, a fallacy of “the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.” There should be one. Someone should write one if no one has written one already.
The China Bioweapon must not be a bioweapon…must not have been a lab leak…must have escaped from a “wet market” or a Canadian postage stamp. Lots of people think that even though there’s no hard evidence to substantiate it. Because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.
All these people bossing us around telling us to wear masks and take vaccines and stay home etc….they must have our best interests and our collective health at heart. They must. Not because we have reason to think they do, but because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.
And they must have a plan. They must be competent. Because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate. I noticed this over the weekend while Mrs. Freeberg and I were out of town, with all these recaps of the Ukraine situation. Each and every expert interviewed, and there were plenty, talked up a storm about this might happen, that might happen, Putin may be doing this, or that, or thinking this or that…everything is up in the air. Except for one thing. Those who are managing the crisis, are doing whatever it is that should be done, and they’re not doing anything that shouldn’t be done. That one you could take to the bank…because the alternative was far too frightening to contemplate. Anybody with a brain in their heads they were interested in using, had to notice these absolutely-sure conclusions were entirely dependent on observations that loaded up chock full of questions and doubts, which should have been a problem. It’s not a problem for the ABC News audience though.
The people who are vaccine hesitant must be stupid, crazy, Cuckoo for cocoa puffs, believing in “conspiracy theories,” incapable of carrying coherent thoughts around in their heads…because if they have actually been paying attention and forming logical conclusions off things they know that others don’t know, well, that’s far too frightening to contemplate.
This isn’t just a persuasive logical fallacy. it is a deeply polarizing one. I think if you lined up everybody and sorted them according to how ready they are to dismiss credible possibilities, just because the ramifications are too frightening and for no other reason, you’d find the 0% and 100% ends of that spectrum densely populated, and the halfway point very sparse. In other words, people, generally, do it or they don’t do it. People do, or else they don’t, say “I’m ready to eliminate that as a possibility, not because the evidence compels me to eliminate it, but because my fears compel me.”
We should define this fallacy and learn to spot it.
It’s really everywhere.
Especially lately with this debacle with the China bioweapon.
Yeah, it’s probably a bioweapon…I know, I know…that’s too frightening to contemplate. So it must not be so.
I’ve lately been thinking about leadership. That President’s Day is approaching, may at first blush look like the cause, but if you have been reading about what’s going on in the world you understand that that’s not it, P-Day is just a coincidence. A trolley has come off the tacks somewhere, and it’s costing us big-time. Just a casual glance at our “leaders” today confirms this, and it’s not a United States thing. It’s a First World thing. Somewhere, somehow, a pricey sweet vintage of Riesling has turned to vinegar. Our history is swollen thick with legends of leaders, born with their gifts and then chosen by destiny, who pulled victory from the jaws of defeat. It happened both within and outside of the military. They showed by their various words and deeds that they weren’t replaceable. They rode their horses into musket fire and cannon fire without flinching. Their opinions were not all popular; sometimes they swam against the tide. They refused to segregate their troops by skin color or to disregard the advice of females, during times when it would have been accepted and popular to do such things. They had courage and they had principles. So we know what good leaders are, and we have had some.
Nowadays they’re all buffoons. It’s more than a pattern. It’s setting in as an ironclad rule. The most lightweight stuff is floating to the top. Listing examples would be futile, and far more time consuming than listing exceptions. Somewhere we’ve lost our way.
I’m talking about what, exactly? We could start with the resume, distinguishing past employment that involves actually building something that works, from “make work” jobs, “no show” jobs, “being in the right place at the right time.” Making decisions that change the course of cause-and-effect. Getting your hands dirty. This is enough to substantiate, although not necessarily prove, that I’m calling out something tangible here, that it isn’t all in my head. We’re looking for something and not finding it. We’re finding lots of things that try hard to look like it, but the goods aren’t making it to our doorstep, as if we’re bringing empty grocery bags home from the market.
I think it started when people began to associate leadership with certain mannerisms. Public school “education” got us started on this. In the 1970’s it became fashionable to “let the kids choose their own leaders,” and the kids would respond by anticipating which ones among them would be chosen by everybody else. And then this Captain of the Football Team, Class ASB President, would saunter up to the head of the class in his name-brand clothes and speak from behind the podium with great bumptiousness and confidence…desperately pretending to know what he was doing. Which would have been an act he had been performing from an early age. It was all about the swagger. Inspiring people to say “There’s just something about him I can’t explain it!”
But, nothing that came out of his mouth changed the course of anything. It was all a bunch of bromides.
Okay so that’s one thing; a real leader says things that are merely manifestations of the weighty thoughts he’s been having, a fake leader’s “weighty thoughts” consist mostly-to-entirely of how to word his speech to make himself look good. How does one distinguish? We must be looking for something apart from the default, something people are not born doing. This much we know, because we stopped finding it when we merely stopped looking for it. We didn’t engage in a drive to forcefully extirpate it. Except maybe for manhood, I suppose. Our current social climate frowns on carelessly intertwining rugged manly mannerisms with any notion of “leadership,” arguing this would potentially deny us the benefits of good leaders who are female. I think that’s correct. But, here there is a clue: If it’s something that’s been happening ever since my childhood, I remember certain things about my childhood. On television, good leaders were still manly. At school, where we selected our leaders from among ourselves, or where our teachers took it upon themselves to show what leadership should look like, they were all female or effeminate males. Looking back, it’s easy to see what was happening: Progressives were retooling our cultural framework, as they are wont to do, as they can’t stop doing.
The truth is, though, that the testosterone eruption possesses neither a superset nor subset relation to genuine leadership. But it isn’t mutually exclusive either. The progressives, once again, steered us wrong.
A real leader is engaged in cause-and-effect, and autonomously invokes if-then thinking. “If we don’t guarantee the right to vote to persons of all races, there won’t be much point to the prior guarantees we have made about banning slavery and equal representation under the law.” “If we don’t seize such-and-such a hill, or beachhead, the enemy can launch attacks and counterattacks on us without warning.” Fake leaders have thoughts about not having thoughts: “Who am I, to say marriage is between one man and one woman?” “How do we have any more right to be out here, exploring, than this Crystalline Entity that’s floating around killing people?”
Perhaps if we could thaw out someone who got frozen a century or two ago, this change in prevailing zeitgeist would become more apparent. “It’s a good thing he’s in charge, otherwise something worse would have happened…” has fallen off the table. We have a President of the United States who has done nothing good — and yet, he’s the right guy for the times. He speaks with great force, and creepy whispers, and if he knew where he was he’d be like a Terminator robot — can’t be reasoned with, won’t show pity, remorse or fear. That’s today’s “leader” for you, there’s no point discussing anything with him. There’s an impulse to just knuckle under and do what he says, like in times of old. But back then you did what the leader said because that was your best hope of coming through the battle in one piece. Nowadays, it’s more like a depressed sort of resignation. “Oh well, one year down, three to go.” And this is what we have accepted as leadership.
It isn’t just Placeholder Joe. You heard his partner in crime: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.” There it is again, the grand flourish before the nonsense, the swaggering confidence, the “pretend to have a thought in my head when I really don’t have one.” We have accepted this as a sort of new-normal in leadership. If we want to do what these people say, it’s no longer because that’s our best shot at coming out of something alive. It’s more like it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to argue with them. How did we get here?
I think we got here when we decided leadership had something to do with personality, and if someone was fit to lead us, they should be fun to watch. Maybe that was it. I’ve heard a lot of people say a lot of things about George Washington, but I’ve never heard of a contemporary say he was fun to watch. Super duper tall, commanding presence, persevered in the face of near-certain defeat, made good decisions, etc., yeah. But not fun to watch.
I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the cosmetics, though. Our obsession with appearances has refocused our attention onto characteristics that aren’t just irrelevant to the search for real leadership, but deleterious to our objective of finding some of it. This part is particularly hard to define. Real leaders move a certain way. It isn’t a swagger. It’s an ease with physical labor that reflects past activities and attempts. President Obama digging a ditch with His fanny sticking way out, was a good pictorial representation of it not being there. I recall participating in a lengthy online inspection into our male movie stars, wondering what had happened over there. How come thirty year old men today don’t speak, move and act like Sean Connery back when he was thirty? What’s different? Someone came up with the bit of trivia that young Connery, the man of a zillion jobs including pugilist and milkman, had actually been routinely punched in the face and maybe we’re seeing some of that. Yes; that could be it.
The change reeks of a bad trade, a “birthright for pottage” exchange, as if we’ve given up something irreplaceable, imbued with a value that escaped our understanding when we traded it away, for sake of something left on the table, that we didn’t even get. Placeholder Joe and Kneepads Kamala make dreadful decisions, and they’re not even fun to watch. I look at a picture of the G-7, and I feel like a huge reservoir of oxygen has been sucked directly out of my bloodstream, or I’ve lost a week or two out of my life just by laying my eyes on the spectacle.