House of Eratosthenes

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Obama To Revive the Sixties

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Hawkins really found a humdinger this time. On Huffington Post, one Stephen Mo Hanan has made the point that capitalism is simply beyond saving. An important message, since his viewpoint no doubt represents the same of many others:

The oft-prophesied collapse of capitalism is looming over our world’s daily supply of goods. The global economic system is on the ropes and must not be allowed to fail. So proclaims government, financial marketeers, tottering czars of industry, media mandarins, and just about everybody else who can pay to be heard. But since their efforts to avert failure have so far inspired little confidence, some attention might be given to Plan B. After all, despite its arcane procedures, capitalism is really just an accounting system, a way of ensuring that the world’s work gets done and that those who do it are properly compensated.

Now I’m not stupid enough to forget that capitalism is also a system that has allowed a substantial though relatively small group of human beings to amass titanic wealth and, so to speak, to capitalize on that wealth by exercising transformative power over the whole planet and everyone on it. If they were all wise and benevolent, that might be a satisfactory arrangement; they aren’t, and it isn’t. So any discussion of how human history (let alone human well-being) might continue after the demise of capitalism must get a good fix on the roots of greed and why it has persisted despite the abundant evidence of its perversity.

Ah yes…greed. The House of Eratosthenes Glossary says —

Greedy (adj.):
An undefined word. If it does have a meaning at all, the closest one we’ve been able to extrapolate from the pattern of the word’s actual usage, is: Someone who manifests a desire to keep his property when someone else comes along wanting to take it away. A wealthy person who wants to stay that way (but you’d better click on the word “wealthy” to find out what it really means).

Mo Hanan takes a few paragraphs to say what he really means, but eventually gets around to it…

What if we began to ask whether corporate consumerism was really the ultimate flowering of America’s promise? For one thing, capitalism as we know it would fade away. But since it may be doing that anyway, we might be wise to drop our resistance and bid it a fond farewell. We could thank it for its efficient promotion of the Industrial Revolution, while observing that by creating an interconnected world it has rendered its own creed of frenetic competition obsolete. A satellite can’t go into orbit till its booster rocket falls away. If the accounting system is in flames, let it drop and disintegrate, mission accomplished.

This is the first part of his long column in which that voice in my head, screaming “What in the hell have YOU been watching, Mo Hanan?” finally subsides. I agree with him a hundred and ten percent here. Socialism…anti-capitalism…modern liberalism…call it what you will. It is dedicated to an axiom that whatever has helped us up until this point, is a hindrance from here on out and has to be jettisoned.

I live in a world in which fathers teach their sons how to use guns, even though in these times, you don’t need to know that in order to feed yourself. How to tie knots, even though you don’t need to know that in order to travel. How to change a flat tire, even though a service that will handle that for you, is a phone call away. How to make a car last three hundred thousand miles, even though you’re expected to trade the bucket o’ bolts in after fifty or sixty, seventy tops.

Mo Hanan, and those like him, live in a metrosexual world. A Twilight Zone in which yesterday’s assist is today’s burden and tomorrow’s toxin. He lives in a world in which we’re expected to provide payback to whatever has ferried us, rescued us, lifted us up from disaster, by casually discarding it. To reward life with death.

And his preaching is in favor of brotherly love, and against materialism.

Oh, the irony.

No, we share effectively only when we do so from love, as children spontaneously teach. They teach it not only in those moments when they suddenly share a prized possession, but especially when they share some unexpected aspect of themselves, the harvest of self-discovery. We could travel steadily through life making such offerings of ourselves, giving and receiving delight, except for being conditioned by fear to suspect the worst of each other.

Of course, living can inflict a thousand wounds on our ability (or willingness) to “love one another.” But with the advances since Bible times in our understanding of how the psyche functions, self-realization techniques are widely available to repair the damage done to our inherent nature. Why not make use of them? The world’s work would get organized and performed in a collective spirit of mutual assistance and shared benefit.

Mr. Mo Hanan, you possess a remarkable ability to abandon in a great big hurry whatever dollops of reality contradict this vision of yours, so I’ll pose this question as if you’ve not yet thoroughly noodled on it and it’s not a mere formality: What in the world were the last forty-five years about? What was going on since this vision first gained widespread recognition and acceptance, and the election last month? Was America just s-l-o-w-l-y allowing the lesson to sink in?

What was 1968 about? What was 1980 about? What was 1994 about? Could we have been experiencing the same kind of fatigue with the party-in-charge, leading up to those years, that we displayed in 2008 with their ideological opponents? Or were the people just going off willy-nilly, showing a mindless Pavlovian response to — aggressive marketing?

No, what you’ve managed to ignore here, and I get the impression you have an impressive talent for so ignoring, is the well-established fact that while the capacity to share and give and love is an ingrained part of this mystery-shrouded human psyche, so too is the ego.

Seriously, there is some thought with some horsepower behind it going into Mo Hanan’s column. I’m not entirely sure it’s all his…it has the flavoring of something ripped off from somewhere else, and it is a rather tired message I’ve been hearing over and over again, here and there, since my childhood. But there is some good thinking somehow getting injected in there. It’s just not very well informed. Someone has achieved way too much talent for expurgating ideas he doesn’t like, before he adequately checks ’em out.

Hey, here’s a fun exercise for you during your down time. Every time Mo Hanan talks about loving each other and getting along with each other in this new post-modern era of mutually cooperative human history, in your mind’s mind, insert afterward “with conservatives and Republicans.”

For a chuckle.

But don’t get too humorous with that chuckle. Don’t forget — there are millions upon millions of people who see the world exactly the same way as Mr. Mo Hanan. And they want “everyone” to get along and love each other, to be included. But their definition of everyone excludes quite a few folks, folks just as real as any other, that they don’t want to talk about. Their Utopia is a sort of modern version of Noah’s Ark, built from stem to stern for the express purpose of providing a shelter to an elite crowd…leaving the balance behind. In their world, “everyone” never really means everyone. And they don’t want to admit it.

And always, always, always…their plans for creating this new world, fall apart when the time comes to decide who’s going to be in charge. Because every face on the totem pole thinks it’s going to be the one on top. Everyone in their new Starfleet wants to be a Captain, and nobody wants to clean the Starship latrine. They confront the mystery and the power of the human ego, later rather than sooner — always insisting on the dubious privilege of allowing it to take them by surprise.

That’s why, as you survey all the gear that has given good things to you and those you know, from coffee makers to green (!) automobiles to the weaponry Mo Hanan hates so much, to nuclear reactors…capitalism continues to retain a complete monopoly on providing it. Every nut, every bolt.

So with all due respect, Mr. Mo Hanan, maybe we still have some waiting to do before we talk about jettisoning things.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Thanks For Cearing That Up

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

My intuition tells me there’s a little bit too much attention to vague notions of “diversity” involved in your education system there, Ms. Rhee…maybe the time’s come to focus on something else.

Posted in Everyday Dimwits, Poisoning English Language, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

The Male Voice

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Blogger friend Gerard noticed it nearly three years ago:

You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

It is a conscious assault upon male things…or an unconscious one. Most likely a sloppy hodge-podge of those two. Being a resident of Folsom, I decided a month ago I’d left my own observations unmentioned plenty long enough:

The patchwork-quilt of [F]olsom is polka-dotted with parks of varying size, and being a parent myself I get to watch lots of parents interact with their children.
:
Fathers…and mothers…modulate their voices way, way upward. Several octaves in the case of the gentlemen. It does not sound like me telling my kid to keep his feet on the pedals. It does not lack a declarative tone at the end, like the Castrati described by Van der Leun. They declare things. They just declare them in this weird, other-worldly, somniferous voice. Kind of like Marvin the Martian. Except Marvin the Martian sounds like an opera baritone compared to this.

Victor Davis Hanson, last week, got in on the act (he must’ve been reading Gerard’s blog because nobody reads this one!):

Something has happened to the generic American male accent. Maybe it is urbanization; perhaps it is now an affectation to sound precise and caring with a patina of intellectual authority; perhaps it is the fashion culture of the metrosexual; maybe it is the influence of the gay community in arts and popular culture. Maybe the ubiquitous new intonation comes from the scarcity of salty old jobs in construction, farming, or fishing. But increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet. I confess over the last year, I have been interviewed a half-dozen times on the phone, and had no idea at first whether a male or female was asking the questions. All this sounds absurd, but I think upon reflection readers my age (55) will attest they have had the same experience.

And now the eggheads have done their studies on exactly this thing. To whatever extent you allow eggheads to tell you what the girls want, it would seem the girls are starting to place a premium value upon that which is, according to the observations of the three of us, in a state of wane:

While Justin Timberlake’s high-pitched voice may be music to many female ears — it seems women actually prefer men with raspier, deeper voices like that of Sean Connery.

A study, done by researchers from Harvard University and Ontario’s McMaster University, found women are attracted to deeper voiced partners, which experts claim indicate dominance and good genes, the Daily Mail reported.

For the study, anthropologists and psychologists from the two universities studied 88 members of the Hadza tribe in Tanzania.

They found that when women are at their most fertile, they are attracted to deeper voiced partners because they are considered to be better hunters who offer more protection, the newspaper reported.

In fact, women are only attracted to higher pitched male voices when they are at their least fertile, such as when they are breast feeding, researchers said.

The findings, published in the British medical journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, go on to say: “Voice pitch may be an indicator of underlying mate quality in humans. Vocal attractiveness is correlated with body and facial attractiveness.”

Now, I’m no egghead; I don’t have sheepskin on the wall or a white lab coat or a pocket protector to put in the lab coat or a propeller beanie I can wear on my head. I may have picked up a thing or two about how to work with statistics, but I don’t apply it to my “research,” which amounts to nothing more than looking around at people, watching the idjit box, not being afraid to use the word “whenever” or to remember things like Hanson does.

Nevertheless — my “research” has noted there is a strong correlation between these cultural enclaves in which higher pitches are used for what passes through the masculine voice box, and lower standards in defining what is, or might be, a threat. No, not so much lower standards. Confusion. You know what I mean. Wherever people who mean to harm others, are perceived not to, and people who only mean to harm those who do harm, are perceived to be out of control and dangerous.

Social circles in which Denny Crane would be the “bad” guy…

These are bubbles of thought in which I notice the masculine voice starts to rise……..? And I would extend that into the playgrounds in which I see the daddies talking like Mariah Carey. I’m just going to assume, and I’m not going out on a limb here, that these daddies-and-kids come from households in which masculinity is regarded as a useless burden, an intrusive threat, or both. So daddy talks high, like mommy. Who wants to threaten his own kid? I don’t think this is conscious. I think this is an evolutionary trait — when the village imposes a new criteria for belonging, people who live within it start working like the dickens, to belong. Gals are better at this than guys are, but guys are improving their chameleon skills as they become more feminine. Spending more of their time within the walls of the village, as opposed to outside, where they used to be, running around in their loincloths hunting for rapidly-moving, sneaky, tasty things.

I find it interesting the eggheads have started to pick up on this conflict. The conflict will no doubt unfold, in the years ahead, becoming more and more effervescent…I find that interesting too.

What I find most interesting of all, is that the two juxtaposed and contradictory forces in this conflict — men talk high, men talk low — are both provided by the preferences of the females. Females, as we’ve said many a time before here at The Blog That Nobody Reads, are individuals just like anybody else. They are not of one mind. And the female individuals part company on whether or not it’s a good thing that men are different from them, and can do things they cannot…write something in the snow, open a pickel jar, grow all kinds and types of hair on the face.

There are women who get agitated just thinking about it. And still prefer the company of “men.” Quasi-men. And they manage to find some. The poor bastards.

There are other women who practice viva la difference. They may be conservative, they may be liberal, they may go hunting for moose, they may have spent their entire lives indoors.

What should men do? My advice is the same for all men, whether they’re looking for a nice lady, or are already happy with the one they got. Just talk the way you naturally talk. If your voice is, indeed, two octaves above Middle C, then by all means talk that way — but I don’t think it is.

Save the question-mark-on-the-end for occasions on which it belongs there. Learn to declare things. I’m convinced, at this point, and with the passage of time I’m only becoming moreso…this has a direct bearing on how a man thinks. Some things are open to question, others are not, and the guys I’ve met who talk like women, seem to have a profound weakness for intellectually regarding matters closed that, in fact, are. They seem to live in this mind-falsetto world in which everything’s open to question, constantly. That isn’t good. And no, I’m no longer willing to entertain any further thought or pondering about that. Dammit.

In short, just follow the advice of this guy…

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Masculinity | 3 Comments »

Beer and Individuality Linked

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Now this is a thing that makes you go hmmm. And when I go hmmm, like anyone else, I’m thinking back on personal experience…and I must say, the findings make a lot of sense to me.

In Hollywood lore, the lone cowboy tamed the Wild West with two six-guns by day and drank warm beer with both fists in dusty saloons at night.

That stereotype of the rugged individualist who enjoys tipping back a few might not be so off the mark, according to a newly published study by marketing professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They found that places where individualism is valued over the collective good also tend to be places where a lot of beer is consumed.

I like reading about these studies that dabble in individualism versus collectivism, because they’re written up by eggheads and journalists — both of which tend to lean heavily toward the “collectivist” end of the spectrum. It’s interesting to me when they try to take a centrist approach, and their colors just shine through.

In this case, there is a theme permeating the column from top to bottom, that this correlation is taking place on a layer of thinking that was the subject of Pavlov’s experiment with the pups. Ring bell…dog starts slobbering. Mention individualism…people get thirsty for beer.

Problem: People don’t mention individualism that much.

I’m probably in a position to comment because I’m the guy they’re trying to study. Anyone who’s been reading the pages of this blog for awhile (which, of course, nobody actually reads) knows we tend to see very few linkages between collectivism and anything good. We see individuality as the source of everything we have that’s worth having — because it is.

And we like beer. Here.

So what’s it look like to me? It’s a stigma. When you’re a true individualist you have to be left behind by quite a few things. First, of course, there are the true-blue collectivists, and you don’t fit in with them because you don’t see life the same way. Then there are the goths. And other rebels who try to be individualists, but they’re more concerned with what others think than they want to admit — so you end up having very little in common with them, either. And then there are the socially inept, the mentally incapacitated, the narcissists, the…well, I’m pretty much recounting middle- and high-school here, aren’t I. Nerds, jocks and smoke-holers. That’s life.

The point is, by the time the individual has been rejected by every collective there is, there’s no one left around except those who are distracted from these social issues. We don’t try to be individualists. We grew up being distracted from all this stuff, while we were fiddling with things. Tinker toys, erector sets, computer programs…that cool slider thing I made out of Dad’s rope and Mom’s clothesline poles, on which I could very well have busted my back, and I’ve often wondered how that didn’t come to pass.

We’re the builders.

And when we’re done building stuff, we just want a nice cold bottle of beer, dammit.

Contrasted with that, collectivists have an identity to worry about, and the identity is externalized from them in that it’s decided by a prevailing consensus within their group. They can get thrown out. Therefore, there’s a stigma — beer happens to be the first and easiest thing to stigmatize. That’s my explanation. And the column seems to veer close to this realization, almost tumbling into it, but then beating a hasty retreat:

“The definition of an individualist is that we act on our attitudes, we be ourselves,” [L.J.] Shrum [, marketing department chairman at UTSA] said. “Whereas in collectivist societies that’s more frowned upon, and you want to make sure you reflect on the good of the group.”

I’ll bet if you could live in one collectivist society after another, for millions of years, watching ’em rise and fall, you’d see the sequence is consistent. Stigmatize skin color, then right after that stigmatize the things people stick in their cakeholes — alcoholic beverages, hard drugs and tobacco. We start off with the visible things, you see. And then bloodlines…starting with the issue of disposable income in your family tree, and how it affects the way you dress. Again, what’s visible. Thoughts and ideas come soon afterward, at which time skin color is un-stigmatized, but all the other visible stigmas remain.

The researchers also found they could take a group of college students and manipulate those individualist-versus-collectivist impulses a bit, which in turn influenced how thirsty those students were for beer.
:
The researchers first compared per-capita beer consumption with a well-known set of national scores for individualism and collectivism developed by Dutch marketing researcher Geert Hofstede.
:
“Our standard cowboy image is the prototypical individualist. However, Hispanic cultures, Latin American cultures, many Eastern European cultures, are very collectivistic,” he said, adding that those who make the move to the U.S. may be the more individualistic members of their cultures.

But the real picture is even more complex, Shrum said. All people have some degree of both individualism and collectivism, with one side more dominant. And by getting people to focus on themselves or their families and friends, psychologists can bring either trait to the surface.

And that’s what Zhang and Shrum did with 128 undergraduate business students (all of legal drinking age). When they temporarily induced the students to become individualists, they became thirstier for beer. Collectivists became less so.

There’s a glaring hole in this research, and I think the researchers missed it because they were more sympathetic to the collective mindset than they should’ve been.

You see, the collectivist becomes agitated toward the individualist when the collectivist gets the idea that somewhere, beyond the immediate line-of-sight, someone might be behaving individually. Then they crack down with their “convert or die!” sermonizing upon that renegade individual. They accuse him of being a rebel, of actively figuring out what everybody else is doing and then laboring toward the opposite — even though the evidence says the individualist just doesn’t care, because that’s what an individualist is.

Does the individualist get all cranky and lay the smack down upon the collectivist, when he finds out someone’s behaving collectively?

No.

He just wants to be left alone.

To drink his damn beer.

He gets all cranky when someone breaks down the door and barges into his living room, to take that beer away.

Another thing I notice, is they left out ancient Egypt which is commonly thought to have come up with the first thing that could’ve been called “beer.” Yeah, ancient Egypt which came up with so much cool stuff that there are all these theories rattling around they were visited by aliens from other worlds. Oh yeah, collectivist hoards built those pyramids by shoving enormous slabs up the inclines, lots of collectivist labor involved in that. But someone had to design it first. We’re not too captivated by the idea of 400 guys lifting or moving something one guy could not; it’s simple math, really. What fascinates us about that civilization is how the designing got done.

Well whoever did it, after he came up with something he knew would work, probably the first thing he did was sit back and have a beer.

Posted in Phony Egghead Studies, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 2 Comments »

People Who Have Met Sarah Palin or George W. Bush Are Exempt From This Rule

Monday, November 24th, 2008

If you think the two people mentioned in the headline are a couple of big ol’ stupid dumbasses, and you think this because someone else told you so — and you believe it right down to the marrow of your bones — don’t get started on any of what follows. Not with me.

Just…don’t.

1. I don’t want to hear what an independent thinker you are.
2. I don’t want to hear about your education. You’re not using it.
3. I don’t want to hear that you’re a “nuanced” thinker, capable of perceiving the world outside of overly-simplistic black-and-white terms.
4. Don’t bore me to tears telling me how much Europe has hated us up until now, or is going to be inspired to not hate us quite so much from here on. Who cares what you think.
5. And I really don’t want to hear you asking about if “America is ready to elect a person of color.” I said she was, when it wasn’t cool to say so. You’re the people who called me ignorant. I won’t even ask if you’re going to recant what you said or apologize, I know that’s not happening.
6. Save your blathering about how intolerant conservative Republicans are. You and I both know you can’t name examples, and you’re not the kind of person who thinks too deeply about that anyway.
7. Clothes that cost $150,000. Don’t even start to go there.
8. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. His Holiness The iPresident-Elect could pass his own modern-day Alien and Sedition Act and you’d be just peachy with it. You know it and I know it.
9. Globular wormening. I ride my bike to work. You probably don’t. Stuff a sock in it.
10. Liberty. You adopt opinions about the intelligence or lack thereof of total strangers, because other total strangers, told you what to think. You don’t know what liberty is. You don’t have the first clue.

Had to get that off my chest.

Among people who have not met Sarah Palin or George W. Bush, any statement that either one of those high-profile Republican contenders is some kind of a big dummy, is tantamount to driving a mile and a half down the freeway with your left blinker on — not a sign of gargantuan intellect.

It is an exceptionally odd prestige symbol a lot of people have. Their numbers are more than significant, and their misunderstanding about how they’re presenting themselves, is quite tragic really.

I have a dream, that my children and my children’s children, will be judged on their intellectual acumen or lack thereof, by people who’ve actually met them. And will grow up in a world in which people wait to personally meet each other, before passing judgment on how smart or stupid everybody is.

Seems like so little to ask.

And yeah, I have the same words for any Republican voter who wants to call Obama a big ol’ stupid-head or whatever. Meet people…then decide. And even then, know a little bit more about things than what you say out loud. A generation or two ago, this was just common sense.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 7 Comments »

Food is Death

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Okay, okay, fine. I’ll write something about this “Sarah Palin gave interview with turkey butchering going on behind her” stuff. And I’ll completely avoid the obvious — that if it was Joe Biden or His Holiness The iPresident-Elect Man-God…the same people who are calling Gov. Palin a stupid dumbshit for choosing the wrong background, would be squealing with delight about what a wonderful interview it was and how dare you blame the august luminary for a background that is the cameraman’s responsibility. Or the news producer’s. Whatever.

I’ll avoid any mention of that whatsoever.

I think this is much more worthy of comment. Food is death. If you eat, you kill. Period.

How sick a culture do we live in if real, live, grownup adults writing for real, live, grownup newspapers are only finding out now for the first time that meat comes from animals? Aren’t we supposed to shun the shrink-wrapped vision of the food chain? Aren’t we all supposed to be more nuanced than that?

But now it’s only okay to eat meat (anything else is a sick slutty “celebration of death”) if we never-ever-ever-ever acknowledge that what we’re eating came from an animal? And what exactly are people who work in the farming business supposed to make of all this? What will happen to them when people finally find out what it is they actually do?

Update:

I never thought about this. Looks like Vegans are gonna have to starve to death…

I can get crops to grow by simply putting seed in the ground. The rest of my job is to kill, kill, kill. Kill weeds. Kill insect pests. Kill vertebrate pests. Whether by herbicide, pesticides, shooting, trapping, stomping, you name it — I spend far more time killing than I do making something grow. Mother nature takes care of the growing. I have to remove the competition. There have been days when I’ve trapped 50+ pocket gophers and shot 100 ground squirrels – before lunch. They needed killing, and the next day, more of them were killed because they needed killing. At other times, I’ve shot dozens of jackrabbits at night and flung them out into the sagebrush for coyotes to eat.

Hat tip: Gerard.

And here’s that video of the clueless dolt Sarah Palin using the wrong background for her interview. Really. Seriously. Is this supposed to be evidence of her dimbulbishness? On what planet? What about the news crew? Does Sarah Palin say “Hey, why don’t you shoot me over here?” and the camera crew that is so much smarter than her, says to itself “aw…gee…darn…the Governor has chosen a poor background…can’t say anything about it, with her being the Governor and all…”

An Emperor Has No Clothes situation?

You people call yourselves the “reality based community.” Heh.

Personally, I think it’s pretty funny.

And…that’s about all I have to say about that. Happy Thanksgiving. Go out and get a real turkey. Sucker’s been killed anyway, don’t want it to go to waste.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization, VPILF | 1 Comment »

Newt Says No

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says Sarah Palin will be one of 20 or 30 significant players in the Republican party going forward, but she won’t be a leading contender and she won’t be the de facto leader.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is batting down the hype that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin heads into 2012 as the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination.

Palin energized the Republican base after GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) tapped her as his running mate and she has tried to preserve her high public profile since Election Day.

But Gingrich, an architect of the Republican revolution of 1994, took Palin down a notch, asserting that she would not become the party’s leader, as some have predicted.

“I think that she is going to be a significant player,” said Gingrich during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. “But she’s going to be one of 20 or 30 significant players. She’s not going to be the de facto leader.”
:
Palin dominated media coverage at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami last week. She grabbed the spotlight at a Thursday press conference, answering reporters’ questions while a dozen other GOP governors stood awkwardly behind her on stage.

Crowds of reporters and cameras chased Palin in Miami while ignoring more experienced colleagues from other states.

But Gingrich on Sunday sought to divert some media attention away from Palin and to other governors such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and Utah Gov. John Huntsman (R).

“She’s going to be a much bigger story in the short run,” said Gingrich, explaining Palin’s higher media profile compared to other GOP governors. “But, I think, as she goes back to being governor and as she works in Alaska, you’re going to see a group of governors emerge, not just Sarah Palin.”

Gingrich said Huntsman and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) may emerge as political leaders on the economy while Jindal could claim the mantel on healthcare reform.

“I would say, for example, to Republicans who are about to face this question of how do you get the economy growing again, bring in Gov. Daniels and bring in Gov. Huntsman….”

“If you want to understand healthcare, you can do a lot worse than to bring in Bobby Jindal who may well know more about health policy than any other elected official in America and is doing an extraordinary job in Louisiana.”

I…I…I’m so confused. Did you just say you represented the Republican party?

Because, y’know, I think if I needed some direction from my luminous leaders on who’s supposed to catch my fancy and who is not, I would’ve joined the party run by those other guys. They thrive on that stuff, you know. “You like Shiraz better than White Zin, today’s favorite color is purple.” Since when do you get to decide what we are going to be telling you? I guess in some hidden lab somewhere deep in Mount G.O.P, some scientist is looking at a “Ignore The Base” meter and has put out a report over the weekend saying the November quota has not yet been met.

Here’s what it’s about, Newt. Not so much about growing the economy…but how. Not so much about healthcare…but quit going through life yelling for your mommy. Have Huntsman or Daniels or Jindal become known for something like “Drill Baby Drill”? Would they?

Here’s what it’s about — it’s about refusing to apologize for your existence…discouraging others from apologizing for existing…and then…refusing to apologize for those previous two.

Sarah Palin has earned our trust here.

You used to do the same, friend. Then what happened?

Maybe you’re the guy people were talking about when they clamored for this “change.” You’ve been in the beltway for awhile, and something in there seems to have gotten to you.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, VPILF | 5 Comments »

We Love Her As She Is

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

The Dagney with the misspelled name speaks for me on this one…and God only knows how many others.

I actually heard Cal Thomas, a reliable conservative voice, say on Fox News tonight say he thought Sarah Palin needed to reinvent herself? CAL, WE LOVE SARAH AS SHE IS!!!!!!!!!! WHAT IN HEAVEN’S NAME WOULD MAKE YOU THINK SHE NEEDS TO BE ANYONE ELSE?

Imagine the following in your very best slow, loud, Samuel L. Jackson, Pulp Fiction voice…

Nobody needs to reinvent a Goddamned thing.

It’s the people voting. One ticket had lawyers on it, the other ticket had none. The electorate was in the mood to vote for lawyers. Focus-group tested buzzwords, a bunch of nonsense that “Everybody” knows…that’s what the ballots were made of this year.

We’ve gotten sick and tired of lawyers and canned catchphrases before. We will be tired of ’em again. And when we are, “Smug ‘n Plugs” won’t have a single other thing to sell anybody. The hunger for real solutions, with substance, that actually work, will set in.

It’s a hunger that always arrives quickly. Quickly and painfully. The desire to see good guys treated like bad guys, and bad guys treated like good, dissipates the minute the bad guys start running around doing their damage. In other words, we’re all a bunch of Paul Kerseys…we believe in fluff and hope and change and things that sound good, “root cause of crime is poverty,” second chances, rehabilitation, right up until our wives and daughters are violated and murdered. Then we’re ready for some reality and some justice.

Let the electorate try their childish experiment. They won’t be enamored of it for long, I promise you. May the lesson arrive quickly, may the tuition be affordable, may the damage be slight.

Drill baby drill.

Update: You know, at first it strikes me as a fair argument that I ought to be doing some research into whether Mr. Thomas said what’s attributed to him, before I work up my passions. Ordinarily, I’d agree.

But not here. I’ve heard this tired trope many times before, that Ms. Palin “needs to change,” and at this point I don’t give a rat’s rear end whether Cal Thomas said it or not, nevermind in what context. I don’t care. The talking point is out there, and it’s a load of hogwash.

The electorate will be learning soon enough what a dreadful mistake they made. Sarah Palin doesn’t need to change a thing. Not in what she does, not in what she is, not in what she says. She’s smart, and she’s right.

And so this inspires some more (semi-stolen from DC Comics) artwork. As if we haven’t indulged in that enough already. I’ve always liked George Perez’ work…and the Supergirl/Wonder Woman ratio has been tilted a bit too strongly toward the Amazon Princess lately so the time’s come to even it out.

Go Sarah Go.

Posted in Elections, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 5 Comments »

Twenty Bullshit Narratives

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Man, I am so jazzed about what happened with the previous post. I broke a cardinal rule there, you know.

I am a blogger with an software engineering background. I’ve found blogging is the opposite of engineering. Lemme explain how…

Let us say you have invented a software networking tool. It is a peer-to-peer networking tool that works kind of like those old programs that connected to bulletin boards. It is a Layer 5 tool you’ve invented, which means it is a session-layer tool. You remember that — Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away, 5th word begins with S, S stands for Session. Now let us say you have a customer that is running into problems with your tool, and whether you know it or not, the customer is having these problems because of the networking software on his desktop computer.

He has a serious bug in his datagram layer software, which is Layer 2.

You address this by changing your software. You are addressing a layer-2 problem with layer-5 fixes. What happens.

We-ell…

You burn a lot of midnight oil. You have very little to show for it. Your software modules take on thousands of lines of nonsense code that doesn’t really do anything. Your test cases turn to manure. You revert a lot of changes, and of those, you revert a lot of them right back again.

See where I’m going with this? In engineering, you address bugs at the layer in which they occur. Because addressing them somewhere else is always possible. But it’s a one-step-forward, three-steps-back proposition.

I’ve come to view blogging as the opposite.

People vote for Barack Obama, which is a problem. The problem is due to something else far more deeply-rooted…our continuing apathy toward truth, toward cause-and-effect thinking, toward reckoning with consequences as our parents and grandparents told us we should learn to do. But if you speak to that, you might very well lose your audience. So instead, maybe it’s better for bloggers to think like bloggers, and not as software engineers. Maybe bloggers should address symptoms instead of causes.

That’s been my rule. But I broke it.

This dipstick of a news anchor said, without a piece of evidence to back it up (so far as I know), that pro-Proposition-8 people were just as hateful and visceral as anti-Proposition-8 people. I could have acted as a good blogger and just addressed that.

But I went deeper. I broke form, and acted as a software engineer, analyzing the root cause.

I explored bullshit narratives; how popular they’ve become; what role they played in electing our Messiah of a President-Elect.

I was certain this would lose my audience. But this is The Blog That Nobody Reads. The nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads when they don’t have the time, reacted favorably to it and it sparked a fascinating discussion, both online and off. And then more than a few of my friends around the web picked it up. Apparently, this has really hit a nerve.

Good. I hope the folks who’ve taken the time to comment on what this means to them, represent millions. And I think that they do.

So I made a new word, again. It’s a little bit more than one word…

Overly-Convenient Narrative (OCN), or Bullshit Narrative, Socially Expedient Narrative, Howdy Narrative:
A construct of words, sentences, expressions and focus-group-tested phrases to describe a sequence of events with only a casual relation to the truth. Recall that Bullshit has an interesting non-correlational relationship with truth: “One cannot bullshit unless one absolves onesself of any concern at all about personal costs involved in disregarding truth — costs absorbed by other parties, are quite alright.” Liars are not bullshitters because liars have to concern themselves with what’s true, and assert something that differs from it.

A bullshit narrative tends to be more believable than regular bullshit, because whereas regular bullshit meanders randomly toward and away-from what’s true, the OCN narrative is formed around a kernel of truth. It is overly-convenient because it is assembled according to what is likely to be proliferated the most rapidly among diverse audiences, and to survive the longest. People use it to introduce themselves to each other, and ingratiate themselves with others who have bought into the same bullshit narrative, thus striking up a chord of instant (if not somewhat phony) friendship.

I went on to compile a list. A list that I could, if I dare say so, add to all day long if I so chose:

Some notable overly-convenient, bullshit narratives:

1. Sarah Palin is a dumbass.
2. So is George W. Bush.
3. So is J. Danforth Quayle.
4. We’ve poisoned the environment, causing global warming, and now we’re all gonna die.
5. The rich don’t pay taxes because they can hire accountants who know all the tricks of the trade.
6. Joe McCarthy ruined the lives of hundreds of people over made up, trumped-up charges.
7. Religious people are bigoted and intolerant.
8. (DEBUNKED) America is such a racist country it will never elect a black President.
9. No one is truly free unless… (fill in the blank)
10. Saddam Hussein was not dangerous because he had no weapons.
11. Clinton kept us safe. The 9/11 attacks occurred on George Bush’s watch.
12. Whenever a Republican is President, the public debt explodes.
13. You can’t raise a family on minimum wage the way it is now.
14. Nobody has any business owning assault weapons.
15. Barack Obama… (fill in the blank)
16. Republicans are opposed to civil rights.
17. We shouldn’t care what the Founding Fathers thought of things, because those guys owned slaves.
18. America is all about separation of church and state.
19. Our strength lies in our diversity.
20. Republicans and democrats have the same goals in mind, just different ideas about how to get them done.

Thinking takes work.

A lot of people don’t want to do it.

They want to do a lot of talking anyway. So they recycle tropes. Tropes they “know” are true, because they’ve heard ’em so many times before.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 5 Comments »

Narratives

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

I’ve been thinking a lot about narratives lately. By that I mean, descriptions of events that are pieced together toward the objective of surviving, and traveling far and wide, rather than for the purpose of promoting good decisions.

There is a reason I’ve been thinking about them, and on this reason I’d rather remain somewhat slithery and vague for the time being. My old “friend” from work, the one who likes to talk about politics a lot but has shown a consistent tendency to descend into conflict with people — and it’s always someone else’s fault. Yeah, he’s an Obamaton.

I’d rather talk less about him, and more about who, and what, he represents. This should be do-able because this type of person is commonplace. They don’t want to be negative people, I don’t think. Conflict follows them around because they lack the tools to deal with the conversations they want to have. They want to talk about their truisms, their narratives…global warming will kill us all, Obama is a smarty-pants and will fix everything, George W. Bush is a war criminal and a dummy. Conflict will follow them around because if they persist in having these conversations with people who see things the same way, they’re going to get bored. It isn’t that they want to argue. It’s that they want ideas to be exchanged. If you think George W. Bush is stupid, and I think Bush is stupid, ideas won’t be exchanged because there’s no reason to explore anything.

So they gravitate outward.

And they bump into people like me…who don’t want to do a lot of arguing either. But we live in a different world, one in which each conclusion possesses an attribute of likelihood. In our world, if we are to conclude something is so, then the requirements change for the underlying justification based on whether we’re concluding the thing is probably so, versus whether we’re concluding the thing might be so. And if you’re arguing that the thing must be so, then the rules change yet again. You say this guy, whom I’ve never met and am never going to meet, who is President of the United States when I’m not, and has fooled me along with everyone else with his phony election…is a big dummy? Are you saying that’s probably true or are you saying that’s possibly true? And what of Obama rescuing us? Solving all our problems? To the satisfaction of whom?

People who argue by narrative don’t think this way. “Obama is the Real Deal,” to them, is an idea that has come to maturity just as much as any other…because it is ready to travel. To endure, to propagate. It need not prove anything, and it need not rest on evidence of anything.

Someday, I must find a way to deal with these people. Ignoring them doesn’t work. Agreeing with everything they say, doesn’t work. Changing the subject doesn’t work.

I’ve told the story before, of this popular narrative that emerged a year and a half ago that this was a racist country that would never elect a black man as President…I ended up in trouble when it was discovered I was leaving this narrative in my “holding area,” waiting for solid evidence of it, refusing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I was inexperienced in matters dealing with our racial-relations problems, was the new narrative — and there is some truth in that. But whatever. In the end, it turned out I was correct not giving the benefit-of-doubt to that other narrative. It wasn’t true, and it probably hasn’t been true for a very long time.

But it has been a very popular thing to say.

That’s the trouble with thinking by narrative. You can certainly say, they are already being subjected to a meritocracy in the theater of ideas, for they would not proliferate if there was not some truth to them. That’s the weakness: Some truth.

This battle for survival is not sufficiently taxing, for the emerging victors to show a pattern of verity. To survive and spread, the narrative doesn’t have to be provably true, demonstrably true, probably true…not even conceivably true. The appearance of truth will be quite sufficient. It’s all based on the other fellow, that stranger over there — how ready is he going to be to hear it. That’s the lodestar.

Quite a lead-in for this film clip Rick found at the “Jack Lewis” site. And this film clip is quite a morsel of ugliness, some three minutes’ worth, to get to the end, in which the dimwit anchor says something that twisted Rick off pretty good, and rightly so in my opinion:

Those last three words: “On both sides.”

You tool. You stupid tool. Yes, I mean that as the insult. I find it fitting in your case.

Maybe there was something earlier in this newscast substantiating that there was an equal measure of hate and nastiness on the “Yes On Prop 8” side. Maybe. I don’t give a rip. This is arguing by narrative. This is what I’m talking about. It’s “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes” stuff.

It has become such a convenient narrative that religious folks are bigoted and intolerant. Too many people don’t care if it’s true or not. They’re meeting people by spewing this tired trope, making friends, and that’s all that matters to them.

But I end up in conflict with them, the same way I ended up in conflict when I voiced my doubts that racism was still capable of swaying a presidential election. I doubt it. I doubt religious people are inherently nasty, I doubt they are statistically nasty, I doubt they’re even motivated in that direction more than the average bear.

Spare me your anecdotes. I’m sure you have one or two. But it speaks volumes that when the time comes to support the argument, the most popular anecdote is something called “The Crusades,” and the second most popular is something called “The Inquisition.”

I’m not supposed to think anything of Obama’s America-hating asshole friends, because some of the stuff that went down occurred “When He Was Eight” — well here’s a news flash. During the crusades, Barack Obama wasn’t eight yet — so why in the hell does anyone bother to talk about ’em?

And so this chestnut that religious people are intolerant, is being stored, by me, in that holding area. I’m still waiting to be convinced of it. That, right there, is enough to get some people spittin’ mad. It gets them mad because they’ve got this little sound bite they can trot out, and use to make new friends, nevermind if there’s truth to it or not…and when they meet someone who isn’t buying, to them it’s like they’ve met someone determined to be their enemy. I’m sure it might feel that way when you’ve become accustomed to something else.

But that just goes to show, they’re the ones generating the conflict. They make friends by twisting truth around, rather than regarding the truth as it exists. And the truth as it exists, in my experience at least, is that the religious people I’ve met have been very nice. I haven’t personally seen too many of ’em shun anyone over their sexual preferences…I’ve heard quite a lot about that kind of thing, mostly with the kind of vague outlining used to relay urban legends, friend-of-a-friend stuff, like the lady with black widows making a nest in her beehive hairdo. The religious people I’ve met possess not a monopoly, but something very close to it, in helping strangers who are less well-off and expecting no payment of any kind in return.

So mister airhead anchorman, kindly take your “On Both Sides” narrative — for that is all that it is — and stick it up your rear end where it belongs, until you have something more substantial upon which to hang it.

I am tired, exceedlingly, to the point of digust, of watching people attacked and ridiculed for their creed, within the borders of a nation that was founded expressly to provide shelter from exactly that. And supposedly, more often than not, in the name of tolerance. Cut me a megaton crystal-cadillac break.

Posted in Poisoning Christianity, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization | 5 Comments »

Memo For File LXXVI

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

There are four things about people I’ve never been able to figure out. Maybe they’re all related to each other.

1. We Kill God Whenever We Get What We Want

When the very essentials of life require a struggle, and such struggles entail uncertainty, we believe in God. It’s quite unavoidable, you know. It’s said there are no atheists in foxholes; there is some truth in this, but it may be closer to the truth to say there are no atheists on a farm. When every foodstuff and every staple requires effort and every effort involves working waiting and wondering, there has to be prayer. When you pray, you have to send your prayers somewhere.

And then when things are better, and we go too long a time without working waiting and wondering, even for our luxury items…after awhile, God dies. Or disappears. Carrots and cabbages can be had for a ritual, which will be over in fifteen minutes with a quick drive to the corner market and a swipe of the debit card. Cigarettes, too. And candy-coffee. Purified water, tampons, chewing gum, electronic gadgets whose names begin with a lowercase “i” and tote around our personal music collections. Look how smart we are, we don’t have to wonder where we’ll be getting anything. We’re way too smart for God. We think we’ve killed Him, we think this is the result of cool reasoning and logic, but all that’s changed is that the necessity for prayer has momentarily disappeared. And so anybody who still believes in Him, must be a big dummy. Just because we can get sweet coffee drinks with long unpronouncable names whenever we want to.

Saving Your Ass 2. We Really Hate Having Our Asses Saved

There’s something going on here that has to do with our own ignorance. We have such a breathtaking and heartfelt gratitude for those who save us from a calamity we know is coming, that we’ve had time to dread. For the savior who spares us from some looming disaster of which we’ve been ignorant the entire time, right up until the danger has passed, we have nothing but spite and scorn. Someone kills a nest of black widows under the equipment your kids play on — if you’ve known about the black widows for a month or two, and haven’t been sure what to do about ’em, you’re all, thankyewthankyewthankyew. If you’re just finding out about ’em, it’s more like, What the hell are you doing in my yard, man? Get outta here. The guy who tells you your tire is flat, just as you’re getting in your car; the guy who calls you on the phone with your wallet in his hand, when you thought it was safely in your pocket. For a single instant there is a flash of inexplicable anger for such well-intentioned strangers — for no good reason. It’s as if, if we refuse to accept the danger, maybe that’ll re-write history so the danger was never there.

Even then…how do you explain the nastiness? Someone saves you from something. Maybe you want to believe in the something, maybe you don’t. If you don’t want to believe in it, and you think you’re right and this fellow who “saved” you is wrong, why do you hate him so? No, don’t give me your pablum about “illegal and unjust war,” etc. George W. Bush is hated by millions upon millions of the people who live in the country he leads; only a tiny fraction among them know anybody serving in the military, let alone anyone who was a casualty. And if they cared about the “Iraqi civilians” one bit they’d have been popping champagne corks over the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime, because when you really care about someone, that’s what you do when they no longer have to live under an oppressive dictator.

It’s the action itself. We have a whole lot of spite for action that takes place early on, in the middle of our debating. When the debating extends past the point where it’s obvious what’s the right thing to do and what’s the wrong thing to do, we get white-hot-pissed at the guy who does what is clearly the right thing while we’re still arguing.

3. We Value Association as an Adequate Substitute for a Workable Plan

It’s true, you know. Once we come together on something, or when we’re even simply invited to come together…no plan is needed. We don’t even need to agree on what the goal is, which is something I’ve always thought of as particularly absurd. How many times does this happen in your daily life. How many times are you told “together…we can do this,” and nobody takes the time or trouble to say a few words about what exactly the “this” is.

It’s quite a simple and durable piece of logic, that if there is a benefit to be realized from laboring on something together, we need some synchronicity here. But the people who are the most enthused about coming together seem to fight any effort to define that. It’s just “this.” We’re all going to work on “this” together.

4. We’re Always Causing the End of the World

This is the one thing on which we’ve been completely consistent, it seems, throughout all of our various civilizations right back to the dawn of recorded history and probably before even that. The end of the world is imminent, and it’s all our fault.

Time was when God was going to get mad at us and figure out His whole experiment was a wash…because of our screw-ups. That was part of the magic, you know — our own culpability, our own sin. Nobody ever trembled at the thought that God might’ve built the human race as a tool, back when He was unaware there was some other resource at His command which would do the same thing, and then one day say to Himself “oh silly Me, this whole thing was unnecessary.” No apprehension that Armageddon would be brought about by some factor completely outside our control. No, the fantasy was always that we caused it. And of course it wouldn’t do to say we’d mess up something that would cause the end of ourselves as individuals, or of our families, or our countries. Nope, never any local damage. That would’ve spoiled the fun. It was always lights-out for the entire human race, with our own fingers on the switch.

Nothing’s changed. Now that God is dead, we have Global Warming. It’ll make the entire planet uninhabitable, and once again…drum roll, please…it’s all our fault.

The millenia tick on by, we believe in God then we don’t, our asses get saved by people we hate…and this stays consistent. We just can’t get away from it.

Posted in Everyday Dimwits, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 6 Comments »

When an Obamaton Says Everyone’s Entitled To Their Opinion…

Friday, November 7th, 2008

…they never mean it, and don’t you forget it. That’s the truth, boys & girls. When they say they want a discussion, what they want is an echo chamber, nothing more and nothing less. I’ve not yet seen it fail.

The blogosphere is chock full of weary but optimistic comments from those who share my views, but have more class. The leitmotif is to roll up our sleeves, swallow hard, and find ways to work together.

Sorry. When the party in power has the idea to tax the businesses and people who are responsible for providing jobs to everybody else…and it’s already well established what happens when we do that…I don’t think being a good American has too much to do with bucking-up, sucking-up, and falling in line. I don’t think it has to do with protests or strikes or revolutions or riots, either.

Sure, respect High Holiness as the legitimately elected President of the United States and Commander in Chief. A deeply flawed Commander in Chief. Corrupt, mistaken…one or the other, perhaps both. Talk reasonably about the issue to whoever will listen.

But the policy doesn’t work, and that’s just a fact. It’s provable. It’s been tried. Many times. We know it’s counterproductive…what we don’t know, is the extent of the consequences of giving it one more go.

Obama himself is smart enough to know spreading the wealth does not work. If he isn’t that smart, certainly, more than a few of the people working for him are. Somehow they’ve got loopholes built in so this doesn’t hurt them.

We are not in this together.

And Obamatons do not want a free and open exchange of ideas.

We are not laboring toward the same goals with different methods in mind for getting it done.

No, this is a cold civil war. A war in which the enemy has won the latest battle, and that means if we play by the rules we give them the respect the deserve as the victors of the latest battle. Nothing more, nothing less.

And never ever forget — that is far greater civility than they ever showed when they were out of power. It is far greater respect than anything demonstrated at the Wellstone Memorial.

Some tax policies don’t work. It’s just a fact.

Some strategies of “diplomacy” are tantamount to surrender. It’s just a fact.

Some dialogues are nothing more than a monologue. It’s just a fact.

And calling out a small girl in your class because her daddy’s in Iraq and you want to ridicule what he’s trying to do, is being a classless turd. That’s just a fact too.

H/T: Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler who, true to form, has lots of well-chosen dirty words about the occasion. And a snail-mail address by which you can reach the superintendent’s office of this schoolteacher’s district, to let ’em know what a swell job you think she’s doing.

Posted in Obamamania, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 8 Comments »

Heartbeat of Stupid

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Quoting myself, as I engage in debate about this regular sixteen-year event in which the youngest guy wins the election on behalf of a new generation without offering any good ideas.

Why, I wonder, is this a post-World-War-II thing. Young people have always wanted to go out and make their mark; change the world. This notion is fairly young — that this world-changing should be done by voting, with a large mob of people who are of like mind and similar age, to elect the candidate closest to your young generation, without demanding he define what “change” he’s bringing. A hundred years ago, the whippersnapper with stars in his eyes would talk about what HE is going to do. “And then I’m going to marry that girl! Over there! I just know it!”

Okay, some of that I’m conjuring up from movies, which is always a mistake.

But the point stands. There’s been an insidious attack upon the individual sometime during the 20th century. For all the bluster raining down upon us throughout the generations, it seems, looking back, that is the single most significant political transformation within our shores during that hundred years; the individual doesn’t matter very much. Achievement is something you do after you “come together,” and what exactly it is you do, together with the ultimate effect of it, are just meaningless trivialities.

ABC News is reporting that Obama will inherit a bad economy. That’s some rich spin right there; The Messiah In Chief will milk that one for…well, forever. If we repealed term limits and he was in there for ninety years he’d still be playing that one up: I didn’t screw up anything, it’s the “failed policies of George W. Bush.”

You know what ABC is trying to tell you? Obama won the election, and then the Dow tanked the next day.

That’s highly unusual, you know. It’s sufficiently unusual that it really says something about The Chosen One, and it isn’t good. The market is an emotional construct — but not completely so.

For those who’d care to activate the left side of the brain as we proceed to inspect this…it doesn’t require much inspection at all. There’s not much to inspect, because we don’t know a great deal about what The One will do after His Holy Hand comes off the Bible.

We know things are supposed to be better for everyone because He is going to spread the wealth around. As I’ve pointed out before — we’re not that young of a nation. We’ve spread the wealth around before. Always, a generation or two have to pass on by before we think it’s a good idea worth trying again. If it worked out okay, we’d just start doin’ it and stick with it. That didn’t happen.

We also know he’s going to tax the snot out of any company involved with producing oil, so that we pay less for gasoline. Now, remember: We’re thinking with the left brain here. Cause and effect. Facts and conclusions. Reason. You make it more expensive for a company to do business, and the price of the product that company produces, comes down? Come again?

And we know universal healthcare is coming. A lot of other countries have universal healthcare. American patients who need medical care, are not going there to get it. The people who live there, come here.

He’ll end the war no matter what. Wars are ended through negotiation and coordination involving both sides. The point of decision is part of those negotiations. You don’t walk into them with your own commitment already in hand, written up, ready to be tossed on the table. When one side decides to end the war without any concessions from the other, they have a name for that: Surrender.

Other than those…well, if we’re tuning out passions and just sticking to logic and reason, the bottom of the barrel’s been scraped hasn’t it? We’re down to how young and handsome and charismatic he is, and “there’s just something about him!” and tingling feelings in the leg and (planted) schoolgirls fainting when he speaks at those rallies of his…and hope…and change.

And I guess, in 2024, we’ll be doin’ it again. By which time Obama will look like a silly old buffoon, like Bill Clinton, and all the “young” people who voted for him. Well there is some satisfaction in that.

But this isn’t a timeless trend, this heartbeat of stupid. It has an origin, and if you go back in time before that origin, it isn’t here yet. Therefore, it must have a terminus somewhere. How is that brought about, that’s the question. This is still a wonderful, mighty nation that can survive an onslaught of underqualified, lackluster leaders, even in the White House. But it doesn’t deserve to be condemned to an endless, pulsating supply of ’em.

Posted in Elections, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 11 Comments »

Sarah Palin Unqualified

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

Millions of dollars have been spent to make us think so, and it’s apparently working.

All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee. [emphasis mine]

Since the beginning of the month.

What events, pray tell, occurred since the beginning of the month to make people convinced of such a thing…people who were left unconvinced as of the thirtieth of September? The Katy Couric interview? Nope, sorry. Occurred before that. The “Bush Doctrine” thing, in which it turned out Palin was correct and it was the reporter who needed an education about it? Nope. That was even earlier.

It’s the time span declared, that creates the glaring logical problem with this. It’s a fair statement to make that throughout October, nothing substantial transpired to convince anyone of Palin’s unfitness or incompetence provided they weren’t so convinced before. Nothing substantial…and only one thing that was insubstantial. The spending of millions of dollars to get the word out.

That old meme about “all Republicans who pose a threat to democrats must be stupid if they were born after Pearl Harbor (and must be evil if they were born before).”

I guess that old warhorse still has a few years of life left in ‘er. That’ll always be the case, you know, as long as people are more malleable in their thinking than they believe themselves to be. And they are. Everyone wants to be placed on the pedestal reserved for independent thinkers…so few really merit that.

Meanwhile, here are a few words jotted down by Elaine Lafferty, who used to run Ms. Magazine. Yeah, that notorious right-wing libertarian rag Ms. Lafferty’s as loyal-democrat as they come, and she actually sat with and talked to that clueless dolt Sarah P. In close quarters. In October, and before.

It’s difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again this week, doubts about Sarah Palin’s “intelligence,” coming especially from women such as PBS’s Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism moniker. As Fred Barnes—God help me, I’m agreeing with Fred Barnes—suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart.

I’m a Democrat, but I’ve worked as a consultant with the McCain campaign since shortly after Palin’s nomination. Last week, there was the thought that as a former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine as well as a feminist activist in my pre-journalism days, I might be helpful in contributing to a speech that Palin had long wanted to give on women’s rights.

Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her “confidence” is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is.

That’s probably why the millions of dollars were spent to get the word out that she don’t know nuthin’. Nothing scares a politician, or for that matter anyone in any position of power, like an everyman with a brain in his head who actually uses it. As Ayn Rand said, thinking men can’t really be ruled.

And this is the real concern about the nine-point swing. Palin certainly has had her stumbles and hiccups, one could even call them gaffes…but since they all occurred before this huge jump in her incompetence rating, what we have here is a jump of nine solid points, every single one of ’em delivered by propaganda, since the evidence did nothing to support this in the timeframe specified. Every single point, and every single fraction of a point — that’s all people parroting what they were told to think, there.

Should this concern us? I’d ordinarily say no, because people have always wanted to put on a big show of thinking for themselves, and they’ve always been dissappointing in this. It’s one of those things that go all the way back to the snake giving Eve that apple…or the first man’s ape-tail shriveling up into nothingness, if that’s your point of view. Humans have always wanted to be regarded by other humans as deep, solitary, independent thinkers. They’ve never wanted to do much to earn that.

Here’s what concerns me. You can’t just spend millions of dollars repeating over and over again that a certain smart person is stupid, and then enjoy a nine percent increase in the number of people who believe it to be true. People have to have some reason to clamber on board the bandwagon. Sarah Palin hasn’t been giving people reason to believe that it’s true. As far as I know, free cigarettes and hooch haven’t been passed out to people willing to sign on to the idea that Palin’s a moron…and so it comes down, by process of elimination, to a technique the democrat power-brokers and party bosses are known for using, and using very well.

The “I’m not too sure about you” technique. The “maybe-you-can-count-on-me” technique.

The weapon wielded here, is your own uncertainty. Tell a man you think he’s scum and nothing he does will ever change your mind, and you can’t get him to do anything.

Tell a man you think he’s wonderful and nothing anybody else does will change your mind, and you get the same result.

But you tell him you used to like him, now you’ve heard some ugly stuff, or accuse him of some skulduggery here or there…put on a good act that you’re thoroughly convinced that he did what he did, even though you just pulled it out of your ass…but are undecided about whether the fellow deserves the consequences that would surely rain down upon his head if word got out…maybe demonstrate the capability to convince others of this imaginary transgression, nevermind whether there are any facts that would back it up.

He’ll move mountains for you.

And he’ll believe everything you tell him.

It always has the potential to work, and it does work nearly always. That’s because we’re all flawed. If you’ve made mistakes in the past and haven’t come to terms with them, a complete stranger can accuse you of something else entirely unrelated, something of which you couldn’t possibly be guilty. If the facts don’t back him up but he still strikes a chord…he’s got at least a shot at owning your very soul. We seem to have it wired into our brains to think “well, I didn’t steal any office supplies like he thinks I did, but I returned a library book a week late a few years ago and he doesn’t know about that, so I guess it all evens out.”

The only exception to that rule, is the true Howard Roarks of the world; recall what Ayn Rand said about thinking men being ruled. People who believe in what they do everyday, who are strong enough to sustain their own definition of what’s worthwhile, and know that they themselves are it. In other words, that stuff we used to call “self-respect.” That isn’t being a perfect being, devoid of sin. That simply means making up your own mind about things. This technique of “friend yesterday enemy today maybe-friend tomorrow” doesn’t work on them.

Apparently, it does work effectively in the here-and-now. Hence my concern. It would seem this isn’t Howard Roark’s finest year. Individual self-respect seems to have gone on a holiday.

I wonder if we’ll ever see it again. It would be nice if we did…but if that doesn’t happen before Tuesday, I don’t suppose it very much matters. Enjoy your two years of socialism, and for being forced to live under it, you can thank the people around you who are utterly lacking in self-respect. Whatever the personal reason they have for missing it, in every country in which socialism has prospered, they are always the ones who brought it on in. The kind of person who yanks her daughter out of school to go see the Replacement-God-Man in action. Yay, the unicorn-fart man will pay my mortgage for me…

H/T for the video to Cassy Fiano.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in GroupThink Nonsense, Obamamania, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, VPILF | 2 Comments »

Jennifer Rubin Discovers the Yin and Yang Theory

Friday, October 31st, 2008

In a fascinating contribution of hers called The Palin Rorshach Test, Jennifer Rubin notes that Sarah Palin, the Alaska Governor currently running for the White House with some old guy, is far less interesting than the discourse and debate she has inspired. Rubin’s column explores the real differences between Palin supporters and Palin skeptics…then it delves into the skeptic side of that schism, and takes a look at what truly motivates those who so recoil from Caribou Barbie.

Sure, there’s a strong suspicion that many in the anti-Palin camp are posturing to ingratiate themselves with the Washington cocktail set. (One defender of Palin recently said to me of Palin opponents: “They want to be above the respectability bar, not below it.”) But I will accept for sake of argument that most advocates on both sides are sincere. And I’ll ignore for a moment that a number of Palin skeptics may have another candidate already in mind for 2012. So what’s the real difference between the sides?

I think it breaks down into “Players” and “Kibitzers.”

The Players are those who engage in politics not simply as an intellectual exercise but as a sport — a combat sport. They appreciate the need to sell and engage voters. They like the rough and tumble of campaigns. They understand the point of it all is to “win, baby, win.” And because they see politics as a group activity they are attuned to the audience — the voters. They watch the crowd, not because the crowd is “right,” but because without the crowd (voters), this is all an academic exercise. It is not hard to see why talk show hosts fall into this category. They, after all, make their living engaging the public and understand precisely what it takes to hold their interest.

That is not to say that the Players don’t care about ideas or the message. To the contrary, because they see the message of conservatism as a valuable and potentially winning vision they are extremely attuned to finding the right messenger. If you trust the message to the wrong candidate you get 1996, or worse.

On the other side are the Kibitzers, those who don’t hold office or run campaigns or much bother with real voters. They write books, tell us what is wrong with conservatism, and scold the poor slobs who run campaigns. They lack any visceral sense of actual conservative voters. Their bent is decidedly academic and their approach to politics is sterile. If you can simply come up with the ideal blueprint, go on Charlie Rose’s show, and write a column for the New York Times or Washington Post, the light will go on, the conservative movement will be saved, and they will earn the applause of their peers.

Now, some of the Kibitzers, truth be told, don’t care much about ideas: it is sentiment and word pictures that catch their attention. They’d rather toss around elegant phrases unmoored to any reasoned argument — slip the surly bonds of analysis, as it were — than mix it up in the hurly-burly of real electoral politics. [bold emphasis mine]

Yup, that’s Yin and Yang. The Yin allow their social skills to atrophy until a very seasoned age, so they can concentrate on making things work. The Yang allow their functional skills to atrophy indefinitely, so they can concentrate on socializing. This thing we call “The Right” in our country is predominantly Yin while The Left is predominantly Yang, but each side of the left-right divide is a composite of unlike parts.

In other words, there is a sprinkling of Yin in the left. Liberals do get things built. Al Gore’s a great example of this.

And there’s a sprinkling of Yang on the right. This is the phenomenon Rubin is noticing. Most conservatives are concerned with substance, and just a few are concerned with style. These are the folks who’d prefer to “toss around elegant phrases unmoored to any reasoned argument.” And they do not like Sarah Palin, not even a little bit. They liked John McCain way back when, in the olden days, when the New York Times liked him. Palin offends them, and not just a little.

It’s the stuff she does. She’s a “get it done” gal. When she fires someone, there’s a reason why — she wants ’em gone. She doesn’t want to just go through the motions of firing them. And if you get in her way, she’ll fire your ass too.

The Yang are not so burdened by what causes what, and what’s a consequence of what. That isn’t their world. Being superior communicators, want to replicate themselves in others. These are the people who stop you from doing something “the wrong way,” but can’t tell you what awful consequences will be conjured up should you continue to do things that way. They are schooled in procedure, and not in cause-and-effect. Internal to any given culture, most of the social problems develop from Yin and Yang having contact with each other too quickly, too intimately, and without adequate…buffering. For better or for worse, this apparatus we call the “conservative wing” falls under “any given culture.” Hence the divide that has come to Ms. Rubin’s attention.

But the whole country is divided this way right now. It is reaching a tragic zenith.

Since no one but the Yin can make something work that previously did not, it’s up to them to build up a society. And no one but the Yang has any desire to replicate their own behavior in others, therefore, it’s natural that once things are comfortable and functional, the Yang take things over. With no challenges left to a mature and evolving society, eventually, they succeed at this…and then such a society becomes all about commisserating with one another, all about empathy. At such an event horizon of societal maturity, that society will forsake the values that were necessary to getting it built. Unfortunately, what’s needed to build something is identical to what’s needed to maintain it, so this high level of societal maturity will always turn out to be cancerous. The Yang, therefore, will always have it in their destiny to ride such a maturity back downward again, into the ground, as they seek to obliterate or convert anyone who isn’t like them.

The United States is at a very high level on this bell curve of societal maturity. Out here on the west coast, I can say that this spot of earth on which my fanny is sitting right now, when it was trod upon by (European) people for the very first time just a couple centuries ago, the paramount concern was starvation; after that, rattlesnakes. Here we are, just one or two clock-ticks later. Five generations, perhaps six or seven. And we’re worried that Starbucks might have put the wrong flavor of syrup in our lattes. It’s more common for schoolchildren to be held back a grade over concerns about their “social skills” than about their academic achievement.

Everywhere you look, someone’s calling someone else stupid.

But look what Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe had to say this late in the last presidential election…and if you think anything’s improved since then, I’ve got a bridge to sell you…

Gallup found in January 2000 that while 66 percent of the public could name the host of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” only 6 percent knew the name of the speaker of the House. Last year, a Polling Company survey found that 58 percent of Americans could not name a single federal Cabinet department.

The ignorant can be found in the highest reaches of academe. Of more than 3,100 Ivy League students polled for a University of Pennsylvania study in 1993, 11 percent couldn’t identify the author of the Declaration of Independence, half didn’t know the names of their US senators, and 75 percent were unaware that the classic description of democracy — “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” — is from the Gettysburg Address.

These tidbits are nothing new. Or old. They’ve been going on for awhile, and they’ve always been remarkable given this long-running crescendo of our political-argument din. It seems every single year we make just a little bit more noise about things compared to the year before. Can we really be that ignorant of the essentials of the subjects that so thoroughly capture and hold our passions?

Can you really have that much heat with so little light?

It would seem the answer is yes. But only in a society that has ripened to the point where the cells that make it up, are scrumptious…juicy…heaving and undulating…ripe to the point of rot. Ready for an unstoppable malignant spread. Near the apex, ready for a complete Yang-takover, and the subsequent ride downward into chaos, like in the closing chapters of Atlas Shrugged, like in the fall of Rome, like in the sinking of Atlantis.

Like a lawn dart, straight into the ground.

The natural consequence of forgetting, from sea to shining sea, what it takes to get a useful thing built and what it takes to keep it working.

Are we there. Are we approaching the apex, or past it.

That’s what this election is about.

Thing I Know #130. The noble savage gives us life. Then we outlaw his very existence. We call this process “civilization.” I don’t know why.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization, VPILF, Yin and Yang | 3 Comments »

Reprehensible

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

The Yin and Yang series is about how there are two ways to think out every problem, and thinking people are divided into two camps whether they realize it or not because each individual selects one of those two ways of thinking and sticks to it for life. The ninth installment explores how this takes place inside the cranium.

I’ve written much about this, but to explore it at a high level it comes down to this: You can think like a Yin by traversing the first three pillars of persuasion in sequence — fact; opinion; thing to do. Or, you can think like a Yang, by anticipating what a group consensus will find to be reprehensible, and doing the opposite. The first of those two techniques works well when you are in solitude and don’t have to reckon with the opinions of others. The second works only in a group environment, which explains why some of us get lonely faster than others — they’re deprived not only of happiness when others aren’t around, but also of the fuel for what they have adopted as the convention for rational thinking.

Where do Republicans and democrats enter into this? Republicans recruit primarily from the Yin; democrats draw their support primarily from the Yang.

And this is why their talking points are different. The two issues I think illustrate this best, are 1) waterboarding, and 2) hate crime legislation.

To the left, waterboarding is simply awful. Don’t do it. What we don’t discuss too much is that on the right, a lot of people think it’s awful too. Except the right wing is home to the truly nuanced thinkers here. They’re the ones asking all these pain-in-the-ass questions. The first three pillars in sequence; cause-and-effect. IF THEN. So, IF we waterboard, THEN someone somewhere will think we’re bad. Who is that, exactly? Who thinks that? IF we stop waterboarding, THEN someone will think we’re better people than we’d otherwise be? What happens then? And when they ask those questions and await answers, they’re left sucking air. There are no answers. It’s just empty rhetoric. So they don’t take the argument seriously, because the argument isn’t there to be taken seriously.

Hate crimes, likewise, are simply awful. But hate crime legislation is only attractive to you if you neglect cause and effect. IF we enhance penalties based on motive, THEN the government has a compelling reason to examine motive that it didn’t have before. IF it examines motive, THEN it must necessarily examine thought…a personal attribute previously thought to be private and sacrosanct. This is a problem. The Yang are not properly equipped to care about any of this. There is only the group consensus, which is sort of a replacement-deity, to be considered. The crime is awful, therefore, any punishment of the crime must be good. Four legs good two legs bad.

In announcing that things are deplorable, the right does not communicate the messages very well. The left excels at this. Every little criticism against Barack Obama, now, is raaaaaaaacist whether it is legitimate or not. Simply repeating his own words, without comment, can be racist now. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is hung in effigy in front of some guy’s house and you have to count on the fringe kook right wing blogs, like this one, to see it treated as anything more remarkable than a routine news oddity tidbit, like a giant spider snacking on a bird.

It isn’t that the right wing sucks at broadcasting the “That’s Deplorable!!!” sound bite. The problem is with models of thought. That just isn’t how the right wing thinks about things. It’s better equipped to deal with real life, in a world filled with spiders eating birds, killer whales biting seals in half, lionesses stripping planks of bloody flesh off of captured antelopes while they’re still alive, and islamic militant fundamentalist jackholes shooting schoolgirls while they run out of burning buildings.

You cope in a world such as this, by reacting, logically, to such instances of barbarism. To find something to be repugant to your personal value system and then just go around announcing it loudly, to hopefully win recruits…really doesn’t accomplish very much. Especially when you’re doing it to bolster an argument that you shouldn’t be doing anything about anything — that’s when it becomes glaringly unhelpful.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, VPILF, Yin and Yang | 1 Comment »

Filibuster Proof

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Having a democrat President, a democrat House and a democrat Senate is not enough. For Hillary Clinton, it’s worth forming an alliance with Al Franken, to stump around in an effort to make the new Senate filibuster-proof.

“Al Franken was taking on the vast right-wing conspiracy before other people even admitted it existed,” she told a crowd of 2,000 supporters on the University of Minnesota campus, urging them to give her rival, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate. “Al Franken, with your help, can be our 60th vote.” [emphasis mine]

While I remain a staunch anti-filibuster advocate (When I Start Running This Place, Item #30), it’s an interesting canary in a coal mine in this situation; with 41 Republicans in the Senate the filibuster would be the last hurdle for bad ideas, or at least, extreme ideas.

Think about it: With the results in from an election in which Obama became our President in a rout, and democrats solidified their holds on both houses of the legislature — what kind of acts would still need that pesky filibuster to be removed, or rendered ineffective, in order to pass?

Here’s something else to ponder. Since the question posed above is simply belaboring the obvious (my respected pro-filibuster opponents use that argument on me, fairly often), it’s well-established that we already have quite a few people who are concerned with it. Hillary’s no dummy with that fine political art & science of figuring out what’s bothering people. She could have come up with a laundry list of good ideas, that might perish in the legislative chamber of a nation gripped in left-wing fever if there are 41 Republican votes in the Senate to bottle things up. Somehow, it was worthwhile to leave this undone. And I notice that’s the case pretty consistently.

The democrat party loves to talk about victory over Republicans.

It loves to talk about tactics and measures put in place to make sure they’re unopposed. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were so enthused, with the prospect of defeating terrorists?

They so seldom talk about the fine details of what exactly it is they want to do. They hate Joe The Plumber so much. All Joe The Plumber did was initiate a dialog about this, at such a level that such a dialog became truly useful to people. If democrats thought they had a platform that would become more popular to us as we learned more about it, right about now Joe The Plumber would be getting a phone call about a Cabinet position, or an Ambassadorship.

That’s not what’s happening to Joe right now.

Their euphemisms disturb me. A lot.

So many of their most effective euphemisms involve placing discussion of generalities, where discussion of specifics would be in everybody’s better interests. Barack Obama has been babbling constantly for the last two years about “the failed policies of the Bush administration.” He could have been talking about an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. He could have been talking about making sure each year’s budget is in the black — no new spending. After all, we “know” that’s what he really means, right? But he doesn’t say those things very often; instead, he talks about “the failed policies” with that name always following afterward.

No politician worth his salt will choose a strategy that involves risk and cost, over another one that does not.

I’m hearing the word “common sense” bubbling to the surface of the political-speech stewpot as well. In a sane political cycle, a singular use of this term would inspire stigma, and repeated uses of it would result in career suicide. But it seems Sen. Obama’s margin over his opponent widens by a point every time he uses that phrase, so it’s working out very well for him.

Implications of “common sense”:

You and I are not only united, but our unification is a piece of distant history. We are united in our goals as well as in our methods for reaching them. What I’d do in a situation, is identical to what you’d do in the same situation…or, at least, our reactions would be substantially similar. We need not make early commitments about what exactly is to be done — we can leave the real decision making until later, because you and I have this fraternal notion of trust in each other.

Is that the situation with the political climate of our country today?

More to the point, what has Obama, or Hillary, or the democrat party in general — done to foster a climate like that?

Therein lies the patently absurd dishonesty to which we’ve unfortunately become accustomed, and begun to accept. The democrat party is making a good show of including “everyone” in what they’re going to be doing. But Hillary’s effort here is typical of her party’s efforts. They want a complete election cycle in which they are so powerful, that nobody else’s opinion matters. They’ve done such a splendid job of gathering campaign funds, now, that they have a golden opportunity to explain the details of why they need that, to the rest of us.

And they won’t do that. They won’t do it, because it would hurt them. They act — in many, many ways — like people ready to assume a substantially different behavior, after a point of commitment has passed. The point of commitment means everything to them. If they had a real fraternal camaraderie with the rest of the nation, something in which the phrase “common sense” would be meaningful, the point of commitment wouldn’t have such an impact.

They act — more than a little — like the blushing bride waiting for the rings to be exchanged so she can gain back the weight, stop wearing make-up, spend truckloads of money down at the mall, start shagging the best man, and never cook another meal again.

Caveat emptor.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 2 Comments »

Politically Correct Girliemen of the Week

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

Yasser Abdel Said murdered his own daughters for dating boys who weren’t Muslims. And that silly FBI put out a notice on him, that was so insensitive that it actually called out the facts. Gasp.

Since this murdering bastard butchered his daughters here in the USA, and we’d really, really, like to get him up close and personal with the Mexas execution chamber, Yasser hit the big time, when the FBI posted some ‘Wanted’ info on this steaming load. That’s when this sorry saga strayed into the Girlieman spotlight.

Initially, following the lead of the murdered teenage girls’ great aunt, the initial FBI ‘wanted’ blurb was thrillingly real:

“The 17- and 18-year-old girls were dating American boys, which was contrary to their father’s rules of not dating non-Muslim boys,” The FBI “wanted” poster read early last week. “Reportedly, the girls were murdered due to an ‘Honor Killing.’” (Fox News)

In record time, ‘some Muslims’ whined about the use of ‘honor killing’. These homegrown Jihadikazes are worried that rank and file American individuals will get the ‘wrong’ idea since ‘honor killing’ ‘attaches a religious motive’ to this crime. These murderer coddling traitors to everything we hold dear worry that “honor killing” might make a rational adult discriminate against Mecca Maniacs. If by ‘discriminate’ they mean someone, like me, wants to see this man, who killed his daughters to preserve the family honor, burn in the hell he deserves, then I am guilty as charged.

Going gutless and furtive, the FBI beat a hasty retreat, by rewriting the wanted blurb to make it okey dokey for traitorous, American hating, Sharia loving, scumbags like CAIR. That’s when a craven, Jihadikaze coddling, coward named Mark White, media coordinator in the bureau’s Dallas office, left a lasting stench in our nostrils.

‘…[He whined to Fox] that the FBI changed the wording “because the statement was not meant to indicate that the FBI was ‘labeling’ anything.

“The person who wrote it up did not see the misunderstanding that [the original wording] would create,” White said.

White added that the FBI should not be in the business of calling cases anything that is not described in law.

“It’s our job to find the fugitive. It’s not our job to label this case anything other than what it is, what it is from a criminal perspective,” he said, noting that there was no legal definition of an “honor killing” and that such a motive had not yet been proven in court. That will come out in the trial, and the jury can decide that.” (Fox News)

When challenged about the FBI’s double standard – they, routinely, use the equally ‘discriminatory’ term ‘hate crime’ – this stinking stain on humanity’s butt spewed more weasel words. Blah, blah, blah.

The irony here — a lot of Americans don’t understand very much about Islam, even after all these years. The debate that swirls under the surface, is whether the religion is inherently violent, or whether it’s been hijacked by violent fringe-group radicals.

Politically-correct backpedaling like this, has at least the potential to make the entire religion look more dangerous than it really is. It creates an appearance that in order to make the religion look harmless, you have to suppress facts. Make sure things stay un-discussed. This isn’t a matter of correcting a mistaken record — it’s a matter of whittling down the scope of what can be mentioned.

What people indulge in that for the purpose of making large numbers of other people to think good things about something…or to prevent them from thinking bad things…it lends, at the very least, an appearance that shenanigans are goin’ down. Someone’s selling a pig in a poke. It accomplishes the exact opposite of what’s intended.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Justice, Poisoning Masculinity | 2 Comments »

Election Year Sanity

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

…from Stossel.

H/T: Becky the Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Stuff.

What’s it gonna take for everyone to stop being so stupid? Maybe we can elect a President who’ll get us all smartened up.

Just kiddin’. Calm down.

Posted in Nanny State Crap, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

Mahoney…

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

The kollege kids at FARK are trying to come up with ways to make this more innocent than the hijinks and shenanigans of the Congressman’s predecessor, Mark Foley.

For the uninitiated, Mahoney is a democrat. Foley was a Republican. Mahoney won Foley’s seat after, and as a direct consequence of, Foley’s problems. In fact, Foley’s problems are consequential to the entire nation because they were central to the impetus for throwing the Republican bums out of Congress and entrusting our legislative branch to the democrat party.

Mahoney’s scandal is a heterosexual one. Foley’s scandal was homosexual. And yes, you’ll be surprised how many FARK kollege kids are bringing that up. Maybe.

Mahoney’s scandal seems to involve some hush money. Foley’s did not. It involved underage pages.

The FARK kollege kids needed to check the party affiliation of these two “gentlemen,” and then engage in a little bit of collaboration with each other, to figure out what their opinions would and should be. And they’ll *never* admit it. That’s where it gets fun to watch.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Incumbent Scandals, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | No Comments »

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXII

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Our challenge to come up with an exhaustive list of reasons not to support Sarah Palin, seems to have drawn the notice of a mixed-ideology crowd over here. A couple of the most vociferous among the angry-left over there would appear to think they’ve met and surpassed the challenge…something to do with Palin being a bumpkin.

And I got chided a few times for not backing up my assertions with facts. And, by the way, I’m stoooooopid…and Palin’s a bumpkin (and the Rothschilds own her).

Just thought I’d help ’em get the word out. This kind of clear-headed thinking needs all the publicity it can get, in these unenlightened times, ya know.

“Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.” — Larry Elder

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, VPILF | 1 Comment »

Smart democrats

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

Ever notice that whirlpool of weirdness that envelopes you whenever you hear everyday left-wing people describing the smartness of left-wing politicians? You’re not imagining it.

Picking up where she stopped last time we noticed her, Dr. Melissa Clouthier continues her thoughts about common sense, and what she calls “intellectualism,” which I delight in calling other things. Usually “arrogance,” but more like “foppishness,” “pretentious snobbery,” “boobishness,” “sparkle & glitter,” “all package no contents,” “showmanship,” “gift-o-gab,” and “prissiness.”

When I was in Chiropractic College, I stumbled across a wide spectrum of individuals:

There were the knobby heads who could memorize facts cold, did well on tests and had an amazing ability to integrate the knowledge into clinical experience.

Then there were the knobby heads who could memorize facts, did well on tests, had trouble with integrating the knowledge and were good intellectually but had a terrible time relating the knowledge to an actual hurting person.

Most people were above average intelligence, did pretty good on tests, could integrate their knowledge and were terrific clinicians.

Some people in this above average range could not relate to patients, either, but didn’t have the intellectual fortitude to do pure research. These people can make up for it with excellent business experience or they tend to suffer in practice.
:
The same goes for politics. There are people, Chief Justice Roberts comes to mind, who has a monster intellect and the incredible ability to translate the complex into language the common person can understand and grasp. That does not necessarily mean I will always agree with his opinions, by the way, just that I respect the mind and thought process that got him there.

Sarah Palin strikes me as bright, but not genius smart. What she also has is an ability to put the knowledge in context and grasp the effects of the policy. She has a gift for practical reasoning.

Some on the left seem to think we need an intellectual giant as president and that will guarantee smart policy. That is a non-sequit[u]r of dismaying proportions–as anyone who spent time around the smarty-pants set knows.

Within these paragraphs, Clouthier speaks for me, including the description of Gov. Palin. Palin’s not a genius and doesn’t need to be. She’s mastered, or at least progressed very highly within, the art & science of figuring out effects from causes — just like any experienced outdoorsman. If I do this, then that will happen…if I do not do this other thing, then that will happen. She is not a savant and doesn’t even rate highly among “smart” elites. I do think she’s smarter than most ordinary people, way smarter than average. Bill Clinton is probably smarter than she is…in his own way. He’s got talents for which you could search and search and search, and never find a specimen more remarkable in that regard than Bill; whereas Palin is merely above-average. They’re both to be respected — neither one’s a dummy — but Sarah is closer to the center of the bell curve.

In a responsible position, it’s no contest. You want Sarah Palin there. Most folks have met a Bill Clinton type, who can talk your ear off about how good things are goin’ while the real job goes undone. You want that guy putting out the fire consuming your home? Seriously? I don’t think so.

Leftists, lately, don’t distinguish among these different types and magnitudes of smarts. Quoting myself, in response to Melissa’s latest thoughts:

I see a lot of things happening when democrats tell us one among their own is “smart”:

First of all, the process by which they decree Bill Clinton or John Kerry or Al Gore or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to be “smart,” is a depressing exercise in anti-intellectualism itself. All the sins you can make against brain-smarts, are in that process. They think something because someone else told ‘em to think that; they’re bullying YOU around, trying to make you think this third-party (neither one of you have met) is smart, just because they’re bullying you; they’re confusing gift-o-gab with across-the-board smarts; the list goes on and on. These are all anti-intellectual things to do, and they’re doing them, toward the goal of defining who’s smart and who isn’t.

Second, of course, is that it’s confirmation bias writ large. The message unspoken is that democrats are just plain smart. Find a guy who thinks John Kerry is smart…wh[at] democrat does that guy think is average intellect or below? The answer, invariably, is nobody. It’s not about smarts. It’s about democrats. It’s just propaganda, a lot of folks know it, but nobody ever says it.

Third: The definition is sloppy. You quickly gather the impression, and you’re right, that the conversation/bullying-session isn’t really about *smarts*. These famous democrats aren’t presented as people functionally smart, above-average, IQ somewhere in the 125-135 range…if you’re working late and the deadline is tomorrow, would you want them working on it with you, or some big dummy. It’s not that kind of smarts. These are luminous beings. Barack Obama has wrinkles on his brain you don’t have. You should be squealing in delight to be breathing [the] same oxygen as them.

If you pay attention to politics for any length of time, you understand this to be a political gimmick, nothing more — that’s even if you agree with what’s being attempted here, even if you’re a leftist. It only works because most people don’t pay that much attention. Most people hear this discourse about smartness, they think the ideas are all about smartness and nothing else. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Crosss-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in Poisoning Individuality and Reason, VPILF | 1 Comment »

“Doesn’t Anybody Have a Conscience Anymore?”

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Newsbusters again…

Gov. Sarah Palin parachuted into a phone interview on the Laura Ingraham show in the last minutes of the program today at about ten minutes to Noon eastern. She urged citizens (and by extension, the media) to demand answers from Barack Obama and Joe Biden about Bill Ayers, ACORN, and Obama’s record of voting against protections for infants born alive after an unsuccessful abortion.

“I don’t see the other ticket being asked to be truthful and give details,” she said. She added that Obama’s positions are “so far left,” but they’re being “packaged up to look pretty and mainstream, and they are not.”
:
On Ayers, Palin said Obama hasn’t told the “total truth” about his long-time association with an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” On ACORN, she said they are pushing voter fraud. “Doesn’t anybody have a conscience any more?” She urged, America to “wake up and ask thse questions.”

Based on some experience watching some talking points blossom and others die on the vine, it seems to me our problem is with these “soft referendums” that pass unanimously without being put to a vote. Like for example: What’s mean? We’ve somehow decided what’s mean and what isn’t, to the complete advantage of liberal democrats, without any meaningful dissents, and without actually casting ballots.

Sen. McCain points at Sen. Obama during a townhall debate and uses the words “that one.” That’s mean. Obama’s official campaign makes fun of Sen. McCain because his wartime injuries leave him unable to use a computer keyboard…that isn’t mean.

What’s bipartisanship? That’s another one. John McCain has made a big show out of being able to work with Barack Obama and other liberal democrats. I haven’t heard of Sen. Obama making any similar and opposite declarations about his readiness, willingness, or ability to work with Republicans. All I’ve seen him do is blame Bush for any little fly in the ointment…often changing the subject, to the point of offense, to do so.

And yet among those who think the answer to our problems is to “rise above partisanship and do what’s best for the country” — the overwhelming consensus is to flock to The Chosen One, whom any honest analysis would declare has very, very little to do with rising above partisanship. How does this dovetail with their decree that partisanship caused our problems and bipartisanship will end them? What’s that got to do with an Obama administration? Again: It’s a soft referendum. It was put to “The People,” supposedly, but decided, unanimously, without voting.

People like to run around babbling a bunch of stuff and nonsense about what independent thinkers they are. It just ain’t so.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

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Equivocating

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

equivocate
equiv·o·cate
1 : to use equivocal language especially with intent to deceive
2 : to avoid committing oneself in what one says

Cassy’s pretty disgusted. I started listing reasons why I disagreed with her, and by the time I was done I realized I didn’t.

Hawkins declares Obama a huge winner. I’d like to disagree with that one. I’ll have to go over everything later. Hope he’s wrong.

Melissa says it’s an Obama win, but notes that Mr. Socialist was forced to admit he’s a socialist. I hope that’s more significant than she gave it credit for.

Althouse is neutral for now. She’s disgusted by many of the same things that disgust me, so I hope she’s in the majority on this.

Stephen Green says McCain won, but not by enough to matter.

Anchoress agrees with Cassy, saying: Worst. Townhall. Ever.

There is something about our nation’s upper legislative chamber. Everyone ensconced therein seems to be afflicted with “moderate” disease. The story’s always the same: “All this partisan bickering’s goin’ on, and I’m going to dive into the mosh pit as Mister Moderate and forge compromises!” Hey look. Republican senators are opposed to partisan bickering; democrat senators are opposed to partisan bickering. They’re all on record. If they meant what they said, we’d see an end to partisan bickering overnight. And yet, since Jefferson vs. Adams…we’ve had red-hot partisan bickering every goddamned day.

In fact, what does the White House have to do with gray areas and neutrality? Seems to me, the U.S. Constitution is making a practice of yanking every important decision that truly matters, out of the legislature and jamming it into the White House where someone with balls will deal with it. That means no, or very little, equivocating. That means when Brokaw asks if the Soviet Union is an “evil empire,” Barack Obama’s answer is “well, they’ve certainly done evil things”…that’s what we don’t want at 1600 Pennsylvania. But that’s not Barack Obama equivocating. That’s a typical senator spewing his bullshit.

My idea of a constitutional amendment: Senators cannot run for President. They have to resign, and then wait a long time to rinse that beltway neutral-gray crud out of their systems. Seven years, at least. Then they can run.

Because the President is an executive. And you can’t be an executive without calling things what they are. A legislator, sure. But not an executive.

Update: Screw this. It’s degenerated into nothing more than another demonstration of how & why people come to hate politics. I’m ready for a serious case of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Let’s browse some bikini ice fishing pictures (click the pic).

Posted in Elections, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 2 Comments »

The “Fact Checking” Fad

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

James Taranto savages the “fact-checking” fad. It’s your must-read column of the day. Maybe even for the week.

The “fact check” is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog ends each assessment with between one and four “Pinocchios,” just like movie reviewers giving out stars.

Like movie reviewing, the “fact check” is a highly subjective process. If a politician makes a statement that is flatly false, it does not need to be “fact checked.” The facts themselves are sufficient. “Fact checks” end up dealing in murkier areas of context and emphasis, making it very easy for the journalist to make up standards as he goes along, applying them more rigorously to the candidate he disfavors (which usually means the Republican).

Example: USA Today has a “reality check” of a McCain ad whose script runs as follows:

Narrator: “Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are . . .
Obama: “. . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.”
Narrator: “How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals: too risky for America.”

The USA Today headline reads “Quote From Obama Taken Out of Context.” In a way this is a tautology, since a quotation by definition is taken out of its original context (and placed in a new one). But of course the phrase out of context usually connotes “used in a misleading way.” Is that the case here? Here is a longer version of the Obama quote, per USA Today:

“We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

One the one hand, Obama was making a broader argument, which the McCain ad ignores: that America should send more troops to Afghanistan. On the other hand, Obama clearly did assert that America is “air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (the subsequent clause makes that undeniable), though one could argue about whether he was asserting or merely worrying that we are “just” doing so.

We’re slowly going insane, you know; confusing the subjective with the objective is the first milestone to complete insanity.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 2 Comments »

One More Thing On That Veep Debate

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

You know how the CNN news-babe had her teleprompter programmed to reminder her that Whoah, we have an overwhelming consensus that Biden won the debate!

Well, that was fishy from the get-go because anyone watching for themselves could see the special CNN panel was more-or-less deadlocked.

For those who care about consensus-politics…which is most people…Blogger Friend Phil has gone through and tallied up the votes. Hit the freeze-frame button just as many times as he needed to. And yes, indeed, it would appear that whether fourteen is a bigass overwhelming number or a teeny-weeny throwaway number depends…entirely, not just a little bit…on fourteen of what, exactly?

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the CNN Zone!

This is why we have blogs, folks. You really have to wonder what kind of crap we were being sold by Jennings, Rather, Brokaw, Cronkite, et al. You really do have to stop and seriously wonder. This bullshit has a long history of working; if it didn’t, they wouldn’t be trying it.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Elections, My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 2 Comments »

Fact Checkers

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

This post is going up at 8:35 PDT.

FOX News just put on what may very well be the most valuable “news bumper” segment I’ve seen in years. I hesitate to call it “informative” because it makes a point that is only obvious, and should’ve been under discussion all along. The point had to do with fact checkers who check facts after a debate closes up or a campaign advertisement spot comes out…rhetorical question raised was, who checks the fact checkers?

In sum, what really matters, is this: These “non-partisan” fact checkers look at the same facts, in different ways. They come to different conclusions. And the segment had examples to offer. Obama knew William Ayers: This fact checker says that’s true, that fact checker comes to the conclusion it is false, this other one takes no position. So it isn’t good enough to just rely on one fact checker, record the conclusion, take note that they are “non-partisan,” wash out all the details and call it good. Yer bein’ used. Maybe not even deliberately…but you’re becoming a useful tool if that’s all you’re doing.

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We Watch the Same Thing, We See Different Things

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

Here’s something interesting about human behavior. The following clip was added by 1stAmendmentVoter who is apparently an Obama supporter. This person seems pretty sure that when Palin and Biden went head-to-head, the Senator from Delaware was a clear victor. It’s only two minutes long. Why don’t you scan it for some actual reasons that a neutral observer should think Sarah Palin lost the debate.

Did you see what I saw? A poll. A poll of strangers decided, 51-36, that Biden did a better job. If you go to the page for this clip you see a bunch of quotes from luminaries. Also strangers. But what neutral, objective, balanced and dispassionate strangers they are, huh.

Bob Shrum: “She Barely Kept Up”… “McCain Lost the VP Debate Too”… Madeleine Albright: “Biden’s Night… We Need A VP Who Can Be Persuasive With Foreign Leaders”…Leah McElrath Renna: “Biden’s Tears Did More For The Equality Of The Sexes Than Palin’s Presence”… Newsweek’s Fineman: Palin Like “A Wolverine Attacking The Pant Leg Of A Passerby”

Now, back in ’95 we saw our country’s racial divide open up just a bit, as O.J. Simpson’s trial entered the home stretch and then finally reached a verdict. What arose to confront us was the Rashomon syndrome; two people with different interests, especially different interests seldom discussed in polite company, see something. It’s a singular thing. They disagree about what it is they saw. They shouldn’t, but they do.

That’s what’s happening right now with this Palin/Biden debate. What interest me here, however, is what is presented by the two different sides as they each make the case why they saw things the way they think they saw them. In 2008, this is what makes the sides truly different; these different perspectives, speak to their character. Go back and watch that clip again. Study it, one more time, for reasons you should think Biden won the debate. What do you find? You should think Biden won the debate…because…this other person, over here, thinks Biden won the debate.

Compare and contrast. John Hawkins has a YouTube clip too. His clip gives reasons to think Palin won the debate. Except Hawkins does something pretty strange here: He allows viewers to listen to the debate themselves! Wow, you’re putting a lot of faith in the hoi polloi, aren’t you John?

For me, this defines a crucial difference between the way liberals and conservatives think. How they see things. What goes on in their heads when they see things. Liberalism is the last gasp of a dying age — the twentieth century, in which it was a novelty that one man could speak, and in that very moment be heard by thousands or millions. By the nature of that kind of technology it is impossible to unworkable for those masses to have any efficient way of letting the speaker know what they thought of him. Mass communication is not necessarily bidirectional communication. And so, having reached maturity on this imbalanced diet, liberalism has nurtured down to the marrow of its bones a reflexive proclivity to tell people what to think.

A liberal is not necessarily inclined to make the clip John Hawkins made. Some liberals do, of course. If you show a great level of competence and creativity in selecting the clips to include, and sequence them just so, so that your compilation eventually compels an uninformed viewer to reach conclusions directly opposed from what reality would suggest — what you have there, then, is a Michael Moore product. And isn’t Mr. Moore’s career just a damning indictment of liberalism itself. He became famous because he discovered ways to c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y show some footage in such a way that liberalism looked good. Question: If that’s Moore’s contribution, but liberalism is already supposed to be a good idea, then why was his chosen craft such an incredible novelty? Answer: Because there is some difficulty involved in getting that done.

Now, look at Hawkins’ clip one more time. There is no Michael-Moore trickery involved here; this is exactly the way the debate went down, just with a little bit less waiting. What he’s showing are, for all intents and purposes, random samples. Liberals must tell people what to think, conservatives allow people to make up their own minds about things. And this is the way things went. Palin would highlight in some subtle way the difference between the way people decide things inside the beltway, and the way people decide things in the rest of the country. Biden, if he is truly a master of expressing the best part of an argument through his words and his tone and his facial expressions, must have been making a counter-argument of “look how white my teeth are” because that’s all he had to say about it. Just a big ol’ crocodile smile. Nothing else.

That would be an effective and fair summary of most of what took place.

Palin: Something is wrong in Washington. Those people do not think about important problems the way people with real responsibilities think about important problems.
Biden: Yeah, but look what a great smile I have!

Well, you know what my conclusion is about it? Biden and Palin both represented the grievances and passions of millions of their virtual constituents in this match-up. And that’s how debates are truly won. But Biden’s constituents are a bunch of peaceniks. Their battle cry, of an “illegal and unjust war,” is old and tired by now. We invaded Iraq; get over it. We can debate what to do going forward, but as far as going in in the first place, it’s a piece of history. Furthermore, Biden’s tent is way too big. Some of his constituents genuinely do hate the country. They do, they do, they do — some of ’em. Others have a more sincere desire to see peace. Some are pie-eyed absolutists living in utopian bubbles, and insist war should become a thing of the past. Others are more realistic and say war is sometimes unavoidable, but it should only be engaged when it is inevitable, and that was not the case here. Some are anarchists. Some are totalitarians. Some are isolationists. Others desire a one-world government with more authority invested in the United Nations.

Obama and Biden face an impossible task of uniting them…should they win this election. I don’t think it’s really do-able. These people have nothing in common with each other. Their egos are wrapped up in the Obama/Biden ticket because of Barack Obama’s personal charisma, and Obama’s charisma holds such an appeal for them because they’re uninformed on the issues. That’s their commonality. The only one.

Wonder Palin! Palin emerges as the true heroine here, fighting the good fight. She’s representing the rest of us. We’re out here in “flyover country,” living our lives…our normal lives…and Washington, DC is getting further and further away from us. Quite frankly, we don’t know what to make of it. We’re working and paying bills, and nobody’s bailing us out of things. This “Dick Cheney” guy Biden kept bashing all night long, calling him the most dangerous Vice President ever — what is the Cheney doctrine, anyway? It’s also called the One Percent Doctrine and it says if there’s a 1% chance that shenanigans are going on, sometimes you have to treat it as a certainty if you regard the potential shenanigans to be a sufficient cause for concern. This just goes to show how far apart the beltway is from the rest of the world, because out here, that makes perfect sense. It may very well be the most unpopular doctrine to ever have been voiced around the Patomac, since the day our nation’s capitol was located there. Out here, meanwhile, everyone who manages their own life’s business, believes in the One Percent Doctrine. It is how we do things. Everyone believes in it…except for those who are somehow sheltered from making decisions that matter.

One percent chance there are black widows under your kids’ play equipment, you treat it as a certainty.

One percent chance your wife’s car has a leak in the brake lines, you treat it as a certainty.

One percent chance you left the stove on when you left the house, you act as if you most certainly did.

It really all comes down to management styles. Palin won the debate, because the way she makes decisions about things that come under her executive management jurisdiction, flows seamlessly into the way she managed this debate; and that, in turn, flows seamlessly into her personality. She’s the mother bear protecting her cubs — but she doesn’t treat the rest of us as cubs to be protected. She treats us as other mother bears, who are also protecting our cubs. Because that is precisely what we are.

And we don’t understand voting for something before voting against it — as she pointed out (right before another impressive display of Biden crocodile teeth). We don’t see how it’s okay to lie about something under oath just because the question was “personal”; we don’t understand comments about “letting Wall Street run wild” when we know the regulators had much more of a hand making the problem in the first place. We don’t understand bailouts. We don’t understand saying all these nice things about John McCain, and then once you’re Barack Obama’s running mate, trying to get people to pretend you never said them. We don’t understand radical left-wing democrats when they protest a war, make up lies about the soldiers killing and raping civilians — and then claim to support the troops. We don’t understand all this brow-beating that global warming is a big concern, but the damage to our infrastructure from these carbon cap-and-trade initiatives are not…and these creeps all over the world putting fatwas on the United States and trying to develop nuclear weapons…are also not a concern. We don’t see how it’s any of Germany’s or France’s or Canada’s damn business who we’re going to elect as our next leader. We don’t understand that. We just don’t get that stuff, and we don’t want to get it. You have a job to do, you do it. If something comes along that might mess up that job, you treat it as a certainty that it will.

And you do not, do not, do not, ever lead people by giving them sanctimonious and poorly-informed instructions that they shouldn’t be worried about something, that in reality, should worry the dickens out of ’em. It’s a contrast between weak management and strong management. That’s what this election is really all about. So if someone is out there thinking Biden won the debate, and they’re voting, that’s just the latest piece of evidence that we have way too many people in this country voting.

Our candidates for high office shouldn’t be selling us weak management with slick sales pitches, emotional connections, mosh pits and crocodile teeth. They shouldn’t even be tempted to mobilize a campaign like that. Yet they are not only tempted, but acting on it.

Don’t blame the candidates, blame the people. But Palin won. Among thinking men and women who have real responsibilities, there can be no question.

Thing I Know #112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.

Posted in Elections, My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, VPILF | 2 Comments »

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XXI

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

Nobody reads this blog, the saying goes. Except, since we started distinguishing ourselves that way, people have been coming by to read it. And that trickle of traffic has been slowly but surely rising throughout the last four years…in that time, more than one other blogger has come by to say “Hey, I’ve got the real blog that nobody reads!” But then they respect a sort of virtual trademark that we don’t really have, and allow us to continue to claim the tagline as our own.

That’s a good thing. “The Blog That Nobody Reads” has a sort of slippery, surreal definition to it; it doesn’t mean “no traffic.” It’s rather like the literal interpretation of “utopia”: noplace. House of Eratosthenes refers to thinking in such a logical way, that you gift yourself with being able to perceive things that ought to be, according to convention, beyond your grasp. “The Blog That Nobody Reads” indicates that nowadays we don’t do this so much. Nowadays, we settle for being told what to think by others.

That, and an informal blogging policy that here, we don’t mold and shape what we say in order to get more traffic. That’s how you fall into the trap. That’s how you end up saying silly bullshit things. Like, for example, that fire has never melted steel before — and a lot of other stuff like that.

But of course we do have Sitemeter. And we pay attention to it. It does have meaning to us. We do like making friends, and we’ve made some good ones here. Also, the numbers are doing some interesting things. They tell a story of readers who pop on in, and make it a point to keep on keepin’-on. You nobodies, it seems, are real creatures of habit. The daily hit total climbs or else it does not climb…on the days when it does not climb, it stays where it was the day before almost precisely. I mean by that, within five or ten hits, out of a daily total of between four and five hundred.

We are, evidently, being incorporated into daily routines of strangers.

Now, this is a source of interest, and it also inspires hope. We do not write, in these parts, for the benefit of readers with diminished attention spans…we absolutely do not do that. We labor, we linger, we inspect, we analyze, and when we engage in process-of-elimination, we tediously enumerate all of the possibilities. This is a cardinal sin, of sorts. We break rules of writing in favor of rules of sound engineering. And it gets pretty damn dry, sometimes, we think.

Like right now.

Anyway, September of ’08, although no doubt somewhat modest according to the average among four-year-old blogs, was nevertheless a record for us, and caps a trend of record-breaking over the last year (click on the thumbnail to the right for more detail). We look forward to hearing from our new readers, for in the end, what we’re advocating is not quite so much political conservatism, but simply — thinking like a grown-up. That makes for better friendships than political ideology. And if this is just a slice of Americana, perhaps our weary nation is outgrowing what had become previously become a national pastime of thinking like a spoiled brat. Maybe we’ve just outgrown the bullshit. Maybe we’re just so fed up with being told stupid idiotic things…like we never should’ve gone into Iraq because Saddam Hussein had no weapons and therefore was just a harmless, lovable old teddy bear who’d never hurt anyone…or when your President is being questioned in a disposition under oath, he gets to decide what answers are nobody’s business and therefore when he gets to lie his cheating, perjuring ass off…or that the Government set up explosives around the World Trade Center to justify the passage of the PATRIOT Act and the War on Terror…or GOOD SIR YOU MUST CONTACT ME AT EARLIEST IMMEDIATELY I HAVE 25,000,000 TO BE WIRED TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT HAVE A GOOD KIND REGARDS LOOKING FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU…

…well, maybe we’re at that point you get after a lot of drinking, when you can feel your body start to be overwhelmed by the toxins. When the room starts spinning — it’s just not fun anymore. Maybe we’re sick and tired of the nonsense.

The possibility exists that it’s this whole subprime/loan/mess/bailout thing that really put us over the top in that department. That’s a pleasant idea to entertain, for us, because there’s a wonderful example of thinking like a child, and being rewarded with exactly the kind of disaster you get after the children have been put in charge of things. We already know for sure, that this particular event was the inspiration of our loquacious ramblings snagging a “quote-of-the-day” award for us this month.

Hooters & Horses It’s just a theory, at this point: We, as in the Big “We” that represents all of us, or a majority consensus therein — are tired of the bullshit, and we’re tired of the lies. If we can’t make ’em go away, we want them to at least improve in grade. Stop trying to fool us with tidbits of nonsense that can only fool complete imbeciles. We have grown to the point where we are ready to test what we are told, with meaningful tests, in the moment in which we are told it.

We’re demanding something better than bumper-sticker slogans that sound good, and reflect juvenile populist rage and nothing more.

Right now.

And Sen. Obama’s going to see if he can get elected as our President. Heh!

Ah well, this can still turn out any which way. But for now, The Chosen One is in a spot in which I wouldn’t want to be if I were him. I like my theory. Sure I like it because the outcome that would substantiate it, is one I find pleasing…not necessarily because I’d bet a lot of money on its likelihood. But I’ll take pleasing. There’s only one way to test it, anyhow, and that is to wait another five weeks. We’re ready to test it that way.

Welcome, all you nobodies not stopping by to not read the Blog That Nobody Reads. Take the time to look around, and write in. Introduce yourselves. We don’t bite.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Obamamania, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 3 Comments »

I’ve Got a Bracelet, Too

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Matthew Sheffield, Newsbusters.

In recent memory, every presidential debate eventually distills down into a few catchphrases. Al Gore became known for his sighs and love of lockboxes. John Kerry actually served in Vietnam. Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy.

Barack Obama has a bracelet, too.

That inartful comeback will likely filter out through the political ether in the days ahead. What might not filter through our partisan press is that shortly after pointing out that, like John McCain, he sports a bracelet given to him by a military family, Barack Obama had to stop and look down find out the name of the soldier he’s honoring.

That soldier is Ryan David Jopek. Barack Obama doesn’t appear to have known that fact.

Here’s his complete line:

“Jim, let me just make a point. I’ve got a bracelet too. From, Sergeant, uh, uh, from the mother of, uh, Sergeant, Ryan David Jopek.”

Had a Republican, say Sarah Palin, made this gaffe, who wants to bet that we wouldn’t hear this clip repeated endlessly during the post-debate spin shows and in the days ahead? How much would the sincerity of our hypothetical Republican politician be called into question.

I didn’t hear it discussed once in the post-debate coverage. Did you?

Let’s be fair, here. Can you imagine how the mother of Sergeant Jopek would have felt, had Obama simply let this go — right while the bracelet was dangling on his own wrist? He had to say something. I hope that’s what motivated him, and I think he does have some human decency, and that that is indeed the case.

Now having said that, this kind of thing strikes me as extraordinarily sad. Because the people who are most enthused about supporting Barack Obama, voting for him, defending him — they don’t understand there’s a problem here. They have their own special definition of caring about someone.

They live in a special world in which nobody actually labors toward getting something done, except in the realm of “CALWWNTY” (Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet). Outside of the CALWWNTY vicious cycle of civil-rights-movements “we’re still working on that,” anything that requires effort is a manifestation of someone not caring about someone else. It’s the way they were raised. If you’re working on something, someone else should jump in, do it all for you, and present you with the results, immediately, or else you’re a victim of someone else’s lack of caring. Wherever there’s caring, there has to be a quick fix. Real work, therefore, exists only where people don’t care about each other…unless everyone is working on it, which is why CALWWNTY gets a pass. As does building a post-modern Star Trek utopian universe.

In that utopia they’re trying to build, people simply — exist. Mill about. Order free chocolate treats from food replicators whenever they want. They don’t really labor toward anything…not unless all of them are similarly engaged.

And so, to some of us, Obama having to re-check the name on his bracelet was just natural. The Sergeant had a funny name, after all! To the rest of us, this completely invalidates the point he was trying to make…and it’s not because we had preconceived desires to see his point invalidated. It’s because he really, truly, does not “care” in the way we define caring. He wants to see people alive and healthy and whole, but wants to see them abandon the effort on which they’ve spent their blood, sweat and tears. Once that’s done, in his world, everything will be all okay, because people will be intact, feelin’ good, unscathed, and covered by some fabulous universal medical care. And not really doing much of anything.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in Elections, Fallen Heroes, Obamamania, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization, Star Trek, Vision for Victory | 2 Comments »

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