House of Eratosthenes

He reads the Washington Examiner first, then Politico, and “Then I look at the [Washington] Post, which is not what it used to be. Each year it’s less than what it used to be before….It’s so neocon I can hardly read it….I read the New York Times….You gotta read some other newspapers before you read the Times, you have to work your way up to it…. The [Wall Street] Journal, once in a while, not often.”

And…

I used to love the [Washington Post] Style section. … What a joke it is. … It’s about this ridiculous show business news that is totally boring.

Also in this interview, Chris Matthews said something truly amazing:

‘Hardball’ is absolutely nonpartisan.

Chris Matthews is one of the all-time idiots, but at least his stupidity can sometimes serve a purpose. Here, he perfectly illustrates a core assumption of the left: they can’t be partisans, because “partisan” connotes “bias” and, as they never tire of telling us, the truth has a liberal bias. What to us is blatant leftwingery is, to them, simply common sense.

One of my favorite ways to tweak my liberal acquaintances, in fact, is to ask them to name a politician, position, or media outlet that is unabashedly liberal. For instance, I ask them to name the liberal equivalent of Bill O’Reilly, or a politician who is as liberal as, say, Rick Santorum is conservative. Or I’ll ask them to describe — just hypothetically, you understand — what the liberal equivalent of Fox News would look like. You’d be amazed at the amount of hemming and hawing this occasions. I think I actually got a buddy to admit that Keith Olbermann is kinda sorta partial to the Democrats once, but it took a good half hour of concentrated effort…. I guess when you base your entire identity on being “Smart,” there’s really no way to admit that your opinions are actually opinions, and not the capital-T Truth.
- Severian | 12/09/2010 @ 19:04
I’d love to watch you get into it with Mr. Darrell, Sev. Sometimes I think you’ve got that guy pegged even better than I do.

Another thing I’d like to see out of you is “how I tweak libs.” I’m sure you could fill up a list of ten or twenty with no effort at all.
- mkfreeberg | 12/09/2010 @ 19:39
“Partisan” is a tricky word — and we should be somewhat careful with it. Though Chris Matthews is definitely partisan.

People forget that “partisan” denotes party loyalty. One can have a set of ideals and then hold candidates or even parties up to that ideal, and if the candidates and parties that tend to match up with them the best tend to be the same party all the time, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re partisan — as long as you have a logical argument that ties your consistent ideals with those candidates or to that party.

Anybody who’s ideals are reflexively identified with a particular party — that’s partisan. But as Ben Franklin said, when everyone thinks alike, then no one is thinking. There is no party that represents all of my ideals. Which is why I don’t belong to a political party. I do tend to vote mostly for Republicans, though, because their stated values are a much closer match to mine than those of the other party.

Partisans tend to follow a party. What needs to happen is this country is that we need to do what the Marxists did. They worked through the party which was already closer to them in philosophy (and yes, it was premeditated) and steered it in a direction more to their liking. And they’ve been working on this for at 60 some-odd years.

Right now I’d say the Democratic party is lost to us, at least for the forseeable future (though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to work on them some, too, as the left has worked on the Republican party as well).

And what I’m getting at is we need to lead the parties. Steer them. Change what they have to offer, what they are selling to the American public. Which means … primaries.

Government goes to those who take it, and the Left has been taking it while those with traditional American values have been sitting on their hands (myself included). It’s not that much different than neighborhood associations or clubs. Not very many people really want to be on the board, so getting on it, especially at low, grassroots levels, is relatively easy. Often all it takes is to find out what positions are open and volunteer.

Most of us on the right have jobs, though, so we have a smaller pool of people who can do this and still feed their families. So it’s harder.
- philmon | 12/10/2010 @ 08:58
Morgan,

thanks for the kind words, but my brief perusal of Mr. Darrell’s site and your interactions with him lead me to conclude that it’s hopeless. He seems like a nice enough guy all around, and amenable to reason within a certain sphere… unfortunately, that sphere doesn’t contain anything that really matters. Like my own liberal buddies — and liberals generally — he can’t seem to consistently separate fact from opinion. For instance, I have a friend that swears up and down that the New York Times isn’t a liberal paper, and is in fact a right-wing rag. Seriously. He simply can’t see that “liberal” is not synonymous with “to the left of him.” Of course, by that standard the only truly liberal paper would be Pravda, circa 1978 …

…which leads to my first and favoritest “lib-tweaking” strategy, which I call “Name that Partisan!” Basically it involves asking them why, specifically, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Fox News, etc. etc. (take your pick) is “partisan.” I let ’em ramble for a few minutes, and then say “ok, so that’s the standard of rabid partisanship. Now, could anyone, anyone at all, on the left be accused of such partisanship? If not, why not?” It’s loads of fun.

[Two good variants are “Name that Neocon!” and “Name that BI-partisan!” — same general strategy, except this time you ask which actual, current, living politician isn’t a “neocon,” or which actual current etc. Republican politician can be compromised with in a spirit of “bipartisanship.” The actual, current, living stuff is important, because otherwise they’ll try to get off the hook by naming whichever Republican was just voted out of office, or just died. “Oh, there’s nobody in this congress, but I sure wish William F. Buckley was still alive! That guy was bipartisan as all get out.”]

Pretty much all my lib-tweaking boils down to either that, or a simple request for specifics. One I stole off you, Morgan, is “deregulation bingo” — whenever some leftard goes off about the evils of deregulation, just ask them which specific regulations they’d like to see put back in place, and why. Variants include: “what, specifically, is a ‘shovel-ready’ project?” and “what specific ‘injunctions’ would you put on Iran?” Good times….
- Severian | 12/10/2010 @ 10:35
[H]e can’t seem to consistently separate fact from opinion.

Damn funny you should say that. The one time he came over here to comment I ended up calling him my Thing I Know #330 Guy. He didn’t seem to take it as a compliment. Well, Darrell is in some good company nowadays…and it isn’t an exclusively liberal trait (although certainly a predominantly liberal one). Too many arguers are running around out there indulging in outcome-based thinking. Come to a conclusion they like, and you must know what you’re doing, come to some other conclusion and you must not — and then there’s a green light to say anything about you they want, as long as it’s negative. Stupid. Bigoted. Stupid and bigoted, bigoted and stupid.

One thing really bugs me about him though: He’s a schoolteacher. Now, when I was in high school we had a lefty-loosie history teacher and a tighty-righty Social Studies teacher. They were actually best of friends. They both gave me horrible marks if I screwed around, or A+ if I worked my ass off — ideology didn’t enter into it. Although they both relished the opportunity to tell us American history as they saw it. But could you disagree with them and still pull an A? Emphatically yes, in both cases.

Darrell consistently assesses intelligence or lack thereof according to whether you agree with him. As far as I’m concerned he can disagree with me in whatever way he likes, but I wish for the sake of his students he’d knock that off. And if I were the one to change my mind about things, agreeing with him across the board, I wouldn’t feel any less sorry for them.
- mkfreeberg | 12/10/2010 @ 12:44
Darrell consistently assesses intelligence or lack thereof according to whether you agree with him.

This is the logical end-point of defining your own side as “Smart,” tout court. No, the facts don’t have a liberal bias. They don’t have a conservative bias, either. Facts are facts, and 2+2 is still 4, even if Hitler or Lenin (or Palin or Obama) says so.

Nor is “intelligence” a singular entity. It is perfectly possible to be brilliant in one field and a drooling idiot in another. Take Paul Krugman, for example. I’m willing to grant that he’s an excellent economist (for the sake of argument), but knowing the arcana of derivatives pricing (or whatever he won his Nobel for) has absolutely zero to do with large matters of public policy. A sports comparison is apt: Michael Jordan is widely considered the greatest basketball player of all time, but he stunk at baseball. That’s because “athlete” isn’t a unified category. Sure, Jordan is better at both basketball andbaseball than I’ll ever be at either — he’s a far superior “athlete” in that sense — but he’s superb at one and lousy at the other when compared to the appropriate standard. You can measure IQ, but brainpower isn’t fungible — someone with a 140 IQ will probably be better at generalized intellectual tasks across the board than someone with a 100 IQ, but a number on a Wechsler test is a piss-poor predictor of practical intelligence in any field that matters.

This is where liberals have painted themselves into a corner, and I’m starting to see a ray of hope with the ongoing implosion of Holy Man’s regime. If everything He does is “Smart” by definition, then he’d better be right 100% of the time. If he’s not… well, either His supporters aren’t “Smart” at all, or there’s something wrong with the “liberal = smart = agrees with me” equation. Maybe the distinction between fact and opinion might be making a comeback….
- Severian | 12/10/2010 @ 14:05

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

A Qualified Answer to Katie Couric’s Question About NewspapersThursday, December 9th, 2010

A Qualified Answer to Katie Couric’s Question About Newspapers
Thursday, December 9th, 2010