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...
Ian Tuttle writes in National Review:
The Left has a storied history of transforming legitimate disagreement into mental illness…
:
How is one to debate whether Rudy Giuliani says what he does merely because he is a white supremacist? “But I am not a white supremacist!” he might object — which is, of course, what all white supremacists say! And when [NY Times Columnist Charles] Blow claims that the president’s opponents are desperately clinging to power, how is such an opponent to respond? After all, doctor knows best.To psychologize the question at issue in a debate is to remove it from the realm of debate altogether. That is why liberals are eager to explain their opponents’ positions as the work of psychological “mechanisms,” operating subconsciously or unconsciously, of which the opponent is unaware. Were he fully apprised of these mechanisms, he could be a constructive interlocutor. But oblivious to so much subliminal influence, debating him is just not fair; it would be taking advantage. He is, one might say, not in his “right mind.” Where the Soviets encouraged sulfozin, the American Left encourages Howard Zinn — but the difference between the two is, at root, not so large.
It is to be expected. What else are you to do when the evidence says your opinion is wrong, logic and common sense say your opinion is wrong, history says your opinion is wrong, the “science” behind your opinion doesn’t produce predictable or repeatable results — but you have this emotional need to swagger off the field of conflict as the unquestioned victor? It’s all too easy. You announce that you have found yourself in a battle of wits with an unarmed man, then take the high road.
I have to disagree with the closing thoughts:
Obviously conservatives could employ this same practice. [Michael Eric] Dyson’s obsession with racial injustices they could blame on “querulous paranoia.” Blow’s concern about conservative “fear” they could explain as “persecutory delusions.”
But to do so would, besides being obviously false, serve no purpose. Ideas, proposals, platforms — the material of political progress — are refined in the clash. Reduced to expressions of hidden cognitive processes, ideas vanish.
And if you think American politics is unhealthy now…
But it is! We have elitists accusing non-elitists of elitism, sexists calling non-sexists sexists and racists calling non-racists racists. How do you fix that? Not with a bunch of “don’t lower yourself to their level.” That’s just a bunch of not-doing-anything. And it’s been tried already.
Since when are “persecutory delusions” among liberals false anyway? Beside being Thanksgiving, this is Ferguson High Drama Week #2. We’ve been listening to persecutory delusions among our friends the leftists, the entire time, all day every day.
Now if you want to set me straight that it’s a mistake to argue with them, you’ll find you haven’t got a lot of convincing to do. But it’s still an educational exercise, of sorts. I have noticed among the lefties who aren’t so eager to “diagnose” their opposition, the next popular tactics all have something to do with perceiving some lack of understanding. The fabric of conservative thinking is all wrong, it fails to note legitimate “shades of gray” in some spectrum, or the conservative fails to see how the plan is supposed to work. Something requires an explanation. It seems to be a sincere misunderstanding on the liberals’ part. But it also comes off looking like monologuing-away about how single-payer health care will fix all our problems, or a bigger stimulus will fix the economy, is what’s really needed. Like the monologuing is a tonic. Or an anesthetic.
Because when the conservative provides a rebuttal of the form “Yeah we already tried that, and these were the results” — the counter-rebuttal is…yup…more monologuing about the same stuff. “See when the government spends the stimulus, it creates jobs, which blah blah blah.” It gets embarrassing. The endless-loop shrinks down to the size of a Cheerio, and the “debate” dissolves into just one side belaboring discredited theory, and the other side annoyingly articulating the results of practice.
In fact, this is a rather simple, indeed tedious, misconception crying out for a correction long overdue. Liberals are allowed to think the disagreement results from conservatives’ ignorance about the future. When in actuality it comes from the liberals’ ignorance about the past. It turns out that when you form domestic policy around the premise that it’s wrong for people to get rich, and overseas policy around the premise that it is wrong to confront evil, what you get out of that is more poverty and more evil.
Like, you know, duh.
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