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...
Via Seablogger, a Thomas Sowell column even more insightful than usual.
Are Facts Obsolete?
By Thomas Sowell
Friday, July 18, 2008In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Sen. Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.
As the hypnotic mantra of “change” is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.
Sowell goes on to ponder Sen. Obama’s ideas against the backdrop of history, and how his ideas have been tried by other countries. He covers punitive taxes and regulations on business, restrictions on international trade, increases on minimum wage rates, and Obama’s disturbing “refinement” of these and other positions as he shifts his priorities from winning the nomination away from Hillary Clinton, to prevailing over his Republican opponent in the general election.
It’s a little unfair, if you ask me. None of this stuff has started with Obama or with 2008. But Obama and ’08 are both important in defining a zenith, or rather a nadir, of what has been transpiring for many years now.
Yes, facts are becoming obsolete. It started with “political correctness” — the term itself tacitly admits that whatever was under discussion was correct on some mundane, technical level, otherwise why include the adverb in “politically incorrect”? Why not just call it incorrect? And so, with that phrase and the underlying concept, we came across a destructive epiphany, that there were multiple levels in which something could be “correct” or “incorrect.”
And then Bill Clinton lied — but oh, wait, no he didn’t, it wasn’t any of our business and we shouldn’t have asked the question.
Saddam Hussein “wasn’t dangerous” even though he was…his “country never attacked us.” No one said then, or says now, that Hussein was a harmless ol’ teddy bear. They just form opinions that make sense only if he was, and then bully others into adopting those beliefs as their own. The accusation that flies around so easily is that if you were for removing Saddam from power, you were losing track of what mattered because Iraq had “nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.” But the central question was whether Saddam was a dangerous, deadly cog in the machinery of international terrorism, and we don’t talk too much about how our fifth-column peaceniks have lost track of that. Even though the facts say they have.
Don’t even get me started on global warming. Consensus? Science is settled? Debate is over? Nobody says so anymore, except to echo what was fashionable a year or two ago. But echo it they do.
Got a kid? Has he put an electronics toolkit together lately? Does he know who James Abram Garfield was?
Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.
That’s their problem. A politician’s problem is how to look like he is for “the poor” and against those who are “exploiting” them. The facts are irrelevant to maintaining that political image.
Nowhere do facts matter less than in foreign policy issues. Nothing is more popular than the notion that you can deal with dangers from other nations by talking with their leaders.
I have been spending all of my life listening to our “leaders” talk about “talking” with some other nation’s “leaders.” In all those years and all that talking-about-talk, I’ve not heard anyone discuss the details of what these talks would be. I come from a strange planet called “Earth” in which this is more than a little strange; how can the details of talk, themselves, be trivial and unworthy of exploration, but it’s somehow worth rambling endlessly about whether the talks should take place? Especially when it’s an all but foregone conclusion that they should & will? But that’s the way it’s been done for quite some time now.
I don’t know where we go from here. My hope is that this stuff moves in cycles, and after we’re done being bored with facts someone will figure out that they do matter, after all, and we’ll have some kind of Renaissance. Tom Swift books, a generation of flesh-and-blood nerds ready to emulate him, and the rest of us admiring the nerds from the sidelines, dazzled by the things they build in their garages — not that a few more of them are nerdettes and isn’t it wonderful because it shows our commitment to something called “diversity.” In short, my hope is that we’ll admire each other for doing things, not for being things.
That’s where we are now; we earn adoration from our peers by being something, not by doing something. We do this because of the condition in which we have placed ourselves, through our sneering complacency about facts. Because of the one all-encompassing, grand-poobah great-grandpappy of all “facts” more important than all the rest, and this is what is being ignored: To live life ignorant of facts and what they mean, is actually boring. It is a meaningless, suffocating existence. Because when you are committed to avoiding the recognition of facts and what they might mean, life is just an endless menagerie of surprises. Nothing more than that.
We are exasperatingly bored, and we don’t even know it. We’ve done it to ourselves.
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