Debates, debates, debates…

Master Debaters

How’s this for obvious: Your reaction to the debate says a lot more about you and your priorities than it does about the debate…
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The best thing about debates, in my opinion, is how they’re by liberals, for liberals, so you can conduct some psychological research on the fly…
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Just as in generic extruded fantasy product novels, the humble dorky awkward farmboy is always the Savior of the Universe, so the Gamma / Liberal is the real hero of whatever situation he’s in, because he has some secret untapped power. The difference between GEFP and real life, of course, is that in real life the liberal believes he has found and activated his secret untapped power: Words!

Observe liberals for any length of time — particularly on the internet — and you can’t help but conclude that they really think they’re winning by being snarky and dismissive. They act as if coming up with a really great comeback 20 minutes after getting stuffed into a locker by the quarterback is the same thing as — no, better than! — beating him up in the parking lot.
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Part of this was W. specifically — they’d cling to their precious “he’s the dumbest idiot evar!” narrative even if he trounced Einstein in a calculus contest — but a lot of it is their own insecurities. Which leads them to vastly overrate the importance of specifics, details, and especially “debate” performances.

Figuring out these liberals is just like fighting the Hydra: Resolve a single unanswered question by lopping off a head, two more questions/heads grow back on the stump, and immediately. Hillary is supposedly the better choice, even though her policies are wretched and the results of her meddling, wherever she’s been allowed to meddle, are even worse — because of The Power Of Words. Good ol’ style-over-substance, from the nineties when her husband was boss. She’s the better leader because she’s got the spiffy comeback.

How come it is, then, that she needs help from the “fact checkers”?

“Fact checking” doesn’t pretend to be straight news exactly, but something more authoritative. The conceit of the “fact checker” is that he has some sort of heightened level of objectivity qualifying him to render verdicts in matters of public controversy.

Lately the “fact checkers” have been waging a campaign to portray Donald Trump as a contemporaneous supporter of the Iraq war, contrary to his assertions that he was an opponent. In Monday’s debate, Hillary Clinton pleaded for their help: “I hope the fact checkers are turning up the volume and really working hard. Donald supported the invasion of Iraq.” Moderator Lester Holt obliged, basing a question to Trump on the premise that the matter was settled: “You supported the war in Iraq before the invasion.”

So, it isn’t clear to me that Hillary is winning any sort of war-of-words here; certainly, not that she’s capable of doing so on her own. Nor is it clear to me that the “fact checkers” are actually checking facts. This looks to me more like opinion-checking. As in, I am to think of Donald Trump as a supporter of the invasion of Iraq. Hmmm. Guess I’m outside of the intended audience, once again, since I can recall with clarity what happened. Seems like last Tuesday or thereabouts. I wonder, is this what it’s like to grow old?

But, sometimes fact checkers act like real fact-checkers. It happens occasionally. The WSJ article linked above, brings the example of Donald Trump blatantly misrepresenting one of his prior statements, noted by FactCheck.org. “I didn’t say lie. I said he may have lied. I don’t know.” That was balderdash:

You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction; there were none. And they knew there were none.

Which reflects well, and much more uniquely than it should, on FactCheck. WSJ hits the nail on the head when it remarks: “It was a rare example of a ‘fact check’ that simply checked a fact.”

Regarding who won, Severian concludes in his write-up,

We’ll see. If poll numbers drift Hillary-ward in the next week, she won. But I bet they continue their Trumpward momentum with hardly a pause.

Well…that has yet to be seen. Starting to look like Hillary did win. Guess the “fact checkers” managed to help her!

Where Trump goes from here: He can continue to play it nice like in this first debate — the phrase “Crooked Hillary” didn’t make even a single appearance. Trump, instead, tended to make each squabble about him, which is most easily noted in Hillary’s ambush move involving that plus-sized Playboy model. Trump took the bait. This has a decidedly negative impact over the short term…results I would describe as “mixed” over the longer term.

He could go scorched-earth, like Larry Elder seems to me to be recommending, when you boil his advice down to its bare essentials. There is at least justice in that, since it is generally true that whenever Hillary points a finger, three more curl around and point back at her.

In his position, I think I’d shrug. There is justice in that too. “Miss Universe says you called her ‘Miss Piggy’ after she gained sixty pounds and it made her feel bad.” ++Raspy sigh++ Hillary, is that really the best you can do? Really? Can we get back to businesses, tax policy, jobs, and what are we doing to defeat ISIS?

The President of the United States doesn’t get to decide for the rest of us whether we should think fat porkers are sexy. Article II of the U.S. Constitution does not list that authority.

More violence. And it will translate into more reasons to vote for Tr– I mean, more reasons to vote against Hillary, at least.

Now her team is going to be unfairly saddled with the assignment of selling her. Selling the idea that it somehow makes sense, for a nation under attack, to elect as its leader a woman who can’t even stay on her feet and give speeches anymore, when giving speeches is her whole deal. Why put ourselves under the iron-fisted rule of the Wicked Witch of the West, after she’s been doused with the water and is melting into a loathsome puddle? And, in a sad way, I already understand how they’re going to go about doing this. They’re going to declare anybody who believes the nation is under attack, and anybody who believes Hillary has real health problems, to be outside the periphery of the audience they’re trying to reach. And proceed to ridicule them.

Awhile ago, struggling to understand, I noted that the movement of what we today call “liberalism” seems to be split into two halves, which I called the “scheming elites” and the “ignorant commons”. The thing that separates the two, described from a 38,000 foot level, is that the former is accumulating a useful skill by way of evolving strategies that continue to find measurable success, whereas the latter isn’t accumulating skills at all, useful or otherwise. The former sells things to the latter. It is debatable how useful this skill is, because the skill is in communicating with people who don’t learn anything with either success or failure, because they don’t try to do anything. So one half maintains a tethering to reality, by way of refining the art and technique of aggravating passions in the other half, which has altogether lost its tethering to reality quite aways back and isn’t on any road that leads to regaining it.

As a result, both are nuts in some way. I wouldn’t hire either one of them to do anything practical, even something mundane, like trimming the hedge I forgot to trim this weekend. I would expect all of them to lose my sheers, snip off a finger or two, sue me for everything I’m worth, own my house, and then blame George W. Bush for the mutilation. Maybe they’ll find some excuses for new taxes in the meantime. Manage the country’s response to all of the mass shootings and terrorist attacks this weekend & before? Forget it. But…the competence thing with the scheming elites. They did get Barack Obama reelected. I’m still concerned they could get Hillary in there. I have to be. They do know their own people; they know how to communicate with the insane ones. I guess it’s a question of whether that is the challenge that arises to confront them. And if the challenge is something more demanding than that, like learning how to communicate with sane people who actually do constructive things, can they recognize that and meet the challenge. I suppose that’s the question.

One sign that looks bad for them is their own proclivity to argue in superlatives. Last time anyone talked about polls, Trump had closed the gap and there had to begun to appear some local polls in battleground states, that had him squeaking past her. I am sure the scheming-elites are insane, nevermind what victories they may have in the past that they can chalk up to genuine cleverness, because they have continued to do what they did before; they have failed to adapt. “Hillary is the best qualified candidate EVAR!!” This is not the way the so-called “Trump supporters” have pushed their candidate. The #NeverTrump crowd continues to holler that he’s Barack Obama redux, the leader of a cult consumed by a messianic-complex fervor. I haven’t seen it. The argument in favor of Trump was, and continues to be, “alright yes there is something to be desired in both candidates, but here is why you should vote for this one over that one.”

With Trump running neck-and-neck with her, how much sense would it make for Hillary to be sold that way? Lots. Whoever is undecided in the last half of September, is still undecided for a reason. They’re the ones that have to be reached. We’re talking about the coveted “undecided voter,” which the liberal strategists, the “scheming elites,” are supposed to know how to reach. Well the evidence says they don’t know. They may never have. And they can’t learn how. They must have the capacity to embiggen the intellectual frustum, to achieve Aristotle’s “mark of the educated mind,” the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it. Without that, there would be nothing separating them from the ignorant-commons, and we do know they have that mark that separates them. We know this by their achievements selling liberalism. Maybe they’re capable of making the argument but are afraid of ticking off their base.

So it seems the movement, as a whole, is not capable of channeling that paradigm of “she’s bad, but not as bad as he is.” Because they just can’t process the viewpoint intellectually. And, I suppose, we should expect this. Maturity has a lot to do with the ability to choose from among a plurality of options that all suck; if these people had maturity, they wouldn’t be liberals. And when you step back a few paces and look at other matters besides elections, or look at elections in years gone by, you see this continues to be true. Conservatives think in comparatives, liberals think in superlatives. The issue is one of maturity. Grown-ups compare, because that’s what decision-making is.

The “She’s the best qualified candidate EVAR!!” thing has been subtle, but it has definitely been there. I started discussing this on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, and more than one friend chimed in with: Yeah I’ve noticed this…I thought it was just me.

I think they’re going to keep pushing that, and it’s going to continue to hurt them. Liberals, if you watch how they behave for awhile, seldom to never actually argue anything. Have you noticed this? They put together the narrative, as if re-stating it one more time, and/or in greater detail, will somehow convince those who have yet to be convinced. They may do it a couple times in a row, after which they’ll say something like “I can see there’s no point discussing this with you because you’ll never be convinced.” Seems to be lost on them that you have to actually bring something persuasive before you can play that card. When your storm-out-of-room, slam-door-behind-you sign-off statement is “If this doesn’t convince you then nothing ever will,” there’s supposed to be something of substance behind the “this.”

Also, superlatives just don’t fit this case. If Hillary Clinton is the BEST QUALIFIED CANDIDATE EVAR!!!, then what’s up with all that time that got wasted on Obama, Biden, Kerry…Edwards…Gore…Lieberman…? What happened there? Sexism?

Some words not suitable for a workplace or for a general audience:

Listen for the whole ten minutes, because it just gets better and better…

Via Steven Crowder.

This house has been good to us. It has become a sad staple of Americana, the story of two starry-eyed spouses falling in love with a “fixer upper” and making the leap, imagining themselves in a charming, quaint, occasionally madcap lifestyle of mending a toilet seat here, replacing a busted doorknob there…and then, in the ensuing frustrations, discovering themselves neck-deep in a nightmare that comes right up to or crosses the line of divorce. We went in on this with a bit of healthy paranoia, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst at each turn. Did some homework. As a happy consequence, we’ve held our head above water. We haven’t had any floors cave in under our feet or anything like that.

We have been very fortunate. I can’t attribute much of this to anything formulaic, that I could pass on to the next couple in terms of advice; except, we have prospered from buying maybe half as much house as we could’ve afforded. That might be some of it. The rest of it is luck. Well…knock on wood, as they say! At least I can knock wherever I want, with confidence. My fist won’t go flying through anything. But now comes the big deal: The fence.

We have a neighbor who seems to be a responsible and up-front fellow, and the layout determines that he & we are going to have to go in 50/50 on this. That is true of the “good neighbor” section that divides our lots from one another, as well as the exterior portion that is the far more serious matter. This is the full-height arrangement, over six feet, fully opaque, a piece of security equipment first. The street on the other side is a bit rough. This is not an aesthetic ornament by any means. What’s there now has been there since the neighborhood went in, twenty years ago, and it wasn’t built or treated properly. We went in half-n-half with the neighbor already, on a patch job to hold it together until “someday,” after the winter winds blew down a fifteen-foot section. Well, someday is coming up pretty quick, and the time’s come to do it right. It’s looking like, from the blanched expression on my neighbor’s face when we got back some quotes, “who pays for the fence” may become an item of pressing concern in the months ahead.

Or, “who fronts the cash.”

And this brings me to my point: I don’t give a flying fuck. As a responsible homeowner, my first & foremost concern is to get the damn thing built. If we have to front the costs, then that’s what it takes. If we have to handle more than our share when it’s all said & done — which I doubt, I think we’re talking about a man of good character — then, that is what we are going to have to do, and we’ll do it without a moment of additional hesitation and we’ll do it cheerfully. We will do it, knowing that the money we’re spending is equivalent to but a tiny portion of the worth of what the fence is protecting. We place importance on that.

Which brings me to Trump’s visit to Mexico…and the news, mostly on the teevee, about it.

For whose benefit are these stories being produced and aired? Not mine. Not any responsible homeowner, who looks on his duties as an American citizen the same way he looks on his duties as resident of the home. All I’m seeing is implications of Trump’s backpedaling, on the question of who pays for the wall. Nothing about the five positions from Trump’s speech, which is the real story, the real platform of fact from which one would need to make a decision, if one were still in the process of deciding. Or maybe that’s the problem, nobody is left still undecided about whether to support or oppose Trump? Is that it? Then why are we having polls, still?

My fence is going to be the most expensive home repair we’ve done, since we moved into the place. It will also be exquisitely aggravating, since we’ve been enjoying a year of seeing the debts associated with buying it two years ago, finally, and quickly, subsiding…dropping, lawn-dart like, not all the way to zero but headed in that direction. The fence we’ve got planned would reverse a lot of that progress. Or rather, will. The project is coming, the money is as good as spent already. I really couldn’t give two shits about whether our neighbor will pay fifty percent, or twenty-five, or zero. It isn’t on my radar.

With regard to America’s fence, people are getting hurt and killed. It has become de riguer for our governments, at all levels, to respond to the crisis by plying us with a bunch of misleading statistics about the illegal aliens’ propensity to commit crime versus equivalent statistics for the native population — as if that mattered even a tiny bit. Rather than fulfilling their obligation to defend the homeland from invasion, and solving the problem.

Opposition to illegal immigration is not opposition to all immigration. There’s nothing racist about it; what color is “don’t trespass”?

A fence is no more bigoted or xenophobic, than a front door on your house that locks.

And “who pays for the wall” is a peripheral concern at best. That question is nothing more than campaign rhetoric. Put out by those who are running the campaign of don’t-do-anything.

This question on Quora intrigued me, not quite so much because of the educated-above-their-hat-size, “solve all the world’s problems while we still know everything,” seldom-correct never-in-doubt sophistikateds that talk with smiles on their faces & their eyes closed; that’s a Quora staple right there. Rather, I was taken by the unusual experience. You have to read down quite a way to see it, but the answers under this one constitute a healthy mix. Eventually someone with good old-fashioned horse sense weighs in on the issue…yeah. Someone must’ve forgotten to close a door or something.

The answer most representative of the average floats toward the top, and reads like this; the number in agreement is so overwhelming, after awhile you wonder if it’s worth your while to read all the others…that, too, is a typical experience on Quora…

Conservatism, by definition, is about maintaining the status quo. For typical young people, using the US as a benchmark, the status quo isn’t that good. Their interests are thus best served by change, and change is a progressive or left wing thing. They came of age during the right wing G. W. Bush era, with its war mongering, governmental incompetence, crony capitalism, growing economic inequalities, and to cap it all off, a severe economic downturn that has left the employment and financial prospects of Millennials in dire straits compared to prior generations.

And they came of age during the internet era, so unlike prior generations who had to rely on the establishment’s media gatekeepers of TV and newspapers for information, younger people today grew up with ready access to information that directly contradicts shibboleths that prior generations took for granted. So they are far more inclined to question things and challenge the status quo.

The irony is, of course, that this all indicative of an under-challenged, and altogether unchallenged, status quo. “The status quo is not good and we need change,” George W. Bush is a warmonger, economic inequality, blah blah blah…same with the doddering oldsters relying on insufficiently diverse “media gatekeepers” for information, and the young, intellectually nimble New Hotness taking charge, armed with their dazzling array of learning resources.

We’ve seen it all before. And also, bushels and bushels of snooty condescension. Don’t forget that:

The entire world is moving progressively toward more comprehensive welfare states. The era in which it’s OK for a government to let its own people freeze or starve is coming to an end. This is right and proper.

It all seems just so correct and reasonable. Until you stop to think — just how current are these ideas, which are ushering in this bold new age? And the answer is, not very. Discarding phrasing styles and words that have only recently come into existence or fashion, like “[I]nternet,” this all could’ve been written in…well, just about any year from 1917 onward. The overall sentiments of progressivism have remained unchanged in all that time. We’re battling these “conservatives,” who want to keep things the way they are, but our victory is inevitable, because we’re for sharing and economic equality, and the old bastions of stodgy traditionalism favor inequality, but the world is changing. There isn’t a thought in there that’s less than a century old. And the basics of it are considerably older than that…again, still unchanged.

As I’ve noted before, the terms “conservatism” and “liberalism” work much better when you think about it in terms of creation, preservation and destruction. To say, “conservatism is all about what came before and liberalism is all about what’s coming” gels with a lot of definitions that are written and spoken, but those definitions are incorrect a good portion of the time; just as you’d be incorrect a good portion of the time if you said, “East is whichever way my boat is headed (so I don’t need a compass).” The modern era has seen a lot of retreats from liberalism, in other countries as well as in the USA. It happens whenever people figure out liberalism is incompatible with freedom, opportunity, prosperity and stability — which is often. That is somewhat akin to a boat righting its course after heading into the wrong direction, at which time it would be incorrect to say “East is wherever the bow points.” Sure you could say it. But you’d be wrong.

A lot of people are wrong about this. Many among them cling to this fantasy…this old (!) fantasy…that the younger generation, manifested by themselves, is on to some hot new idea and is in the midst of re-making the world around them into it. It does not seem to slow them down, even a smidgen, that they can’t name anything actually, provably new about the idea.

Still, the original question remains. Young people and old people do not look at property rights the same way. This old duffer nailed it, I thought:

Probably, because in order to be conservative you first need to acquire something worth conserving, and that takes time.

Probably, because in order to be conservative you first need to understand how society works, and in order to do that, you have to accumulate enough experience to figure out that your political science teachers were shameless lefty demagogues.

And another one made a good point:

Having trouble getting their first full time job when they get out of school makes people more likely to be a eoconomic liberal. That is they reject the conservative claim that to be unemployed means you’re lazy not unlucky. The generation that came of age since 2000 and especially since 2008 had a lot of trouble getting any job let alone a good one. However I question that they are really socialist any more than the peope who came of age during the1930s were.

This inspires some share of depression, I must say. Young people start working, or trying to anyway, and discover that it isn’t always immediately gratifying. Many among them, I suspect, through this initial effort are forced to cope with prolonged discouragement for the first time in their short lives. If the resulting frustration has a tendency to incline them toward left-wing politics, and I find that quite credible, that would mean it is to the left-wing politician’s advantage to make this experience more discouraging. What evidence is there to suggest this is not the case? And if it is the case, what evidence is there to suggest our left-wing politicians haven’t figured this out already, and are in fact acting on it, doing whatever they can to make it less likely that the average business will go so far as to actually hire someone?

I see precious little evidence to refudiate this…and much to support it…

Save me from symbolic gestures. I’m not yet at the point of begging for the sweet release of death to avoid the next one…but, I might very well miss an important surgery appointment to do so. I’m definitely at the point where the food tastes better and the air seems fresher, when there are none in my presence and none looming on the horizon.

I’m not sure what’s causing this glut. I’d say there are many factors, most of them cultural, some relatively recent and some others decades in the making. My county’s particularly obnoxious plastic-bag rule clearly shows the Overton Window has shifted, and there is something wrong.

There is legislation, and there is enforcement. If plastic bags have a deleterious effect on our environment, it is by way of littering, which is against the law already. As one of my Facebook sparring partners ably summed up the argument, “Since people (as a whole) seem unable to keep the environment clean without the benefit of rules, it’s time to make some.” Yeah alright, that creeped me out a little bit. Insanity does that to me.

People shopping for groceries are not doing anything harmful to the environment. People who litter are doing that. The rules are already in existence, the enforcement may be lacking. A legitimate argument can certainly be held about what to do next, but “let’s make some” more rules is not part of that, if it is to be any sort of reasonable discussion.

This is the old saw about the cop finding the drunk guy scrounging around in the parking lot looking for something, which turns out to be a watch he dropped. After helping with the search for a minute or two, the cop asks some more questions and it turns out the watch was lost six blocks away. So…why are we looking here? “The light’s better.” That’s what these people are doing. Confronting evil is hazardous, takes some balls, and most importantly — is unlikely to result in increased, fawning publicity. I would connect it to the frothy outrage in response to the invasion of Iraq, all those years ago. Right? Passing the resolution authorizing member nations to enforce: No problem! A member nation actually enforcing: PROBLEM.

If we discuss this cultural shift honestly, we have to see it for what it is. You simply aren’t supposed to do any enforcing; you aren’t supposed to confront evil. You’re only supposed to go through the motions. More rules, more rules, more rules…don’t ever enforce anything. It makes the people who’ve already decided not to do any enforcing, look bad.

The rules are always aimed at the same places. Soft, rule-abiding types. They may go along enthusiastically, racked by guilt, or they may go along the way I do, full of resentment. But an uprising is unlikely, so this is the soft, fatty tissue — the yummy part. No claws, no thorns, none of that messy back-fighting stuff. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s popular. Hey you homeowners, don’t water your lawns, because drought! And hey you law-abiding gun owners, it’s high time we passed some (more) rules against you! Someone who is not you just shot up a school.

We seem to be living in the age of “Go after the ones who didn’t do it.” I’m not sure how we got here, or how to get out of here. But, we’re here. If we really do want things to get better, that’s our first step. We have to break free of that diseased mindset. People are looking for ways they can vote in elections to make things better, and that’s the answer to that question. Skip that step, the rest of the effort isn’t going to matter much.

This past week, just gone by, is where maybe I can show some cautious optimism. Not that I’m bullish on Donald Trump being our next president, but like many millions of Americans, I accept it as a pressing priority that The Pantsuit has to be kept out of that office and sent home. To wherever home is.

Well, maybe now that can happen. Following the resignation of Manafort and the new hire of Bannon and Conway, I’m seeing a new smartness along with a slowly reassuring time-gap rolling by, without too many dumb things being said or done. The “language that caused pain” speech, from what I understand, was all-Conway and that was smart. The “law and order” speech was smart. Heading down to Louisiana was exactly the kind of smartness that had always been needed.

What is left to trouble me, then? I have lots of friends who will line up to ply me with all of Trump’s shortcomings, how he’s “just as bad as, if not worse than, Hillary” — but that’s bull. They’ve allowed their hyperbole to run away with them. I’ve availed them of every opportunity to prove otherwise, and no, there are no fortifying specifics behind such a silly statement. Hillary’s worse, and they’ve made the mistake of taking their eyes off the prize. I’m much more troubled by the idea that Trump could still lose, than that he could win.

And yet I’m still troubled, even discounting the possibility he might lose. I suppose we’re all making the mistake of looking for the very best-case scenario in this match-up, in which all sorts of Americans from different walks of life get to have some say, therefore, nobody’s getting everything they want. Everyone’s got their dream-outcome; everyone’s ratcheted down to their current dream, from many others that would have been better for them, so it feels like we’re all embracing reality when we’re all just really doing more wishing. Mine was, Trump would win and Hillary would lose after more of these — indelicacies. More of the stupid. Not that I like seeing Trump do stupid things.

But I do think the American electorate needs to grow a thicker skin. Without that, let’s face it, when it votes the right way it’s just like the busted clock. Years like this, it seems beyond their ability to even vote for anybody at all; anybody else get that impression? It’s like the voters, as a whole, can only manage to deny, by way of granting consent to the opponent of whoever. It can only reject, never accept. Therefore, who knows what the beast really does want? And why should anyone care?

I’m tiring quickly of this sense that “Everybody Knows” how Trump is unsuitable for this prestigious, high, powerful office. I personally find the whole attitude rather obnoxious. If the reasons are good, give them. As opposed to…

You’ve got somebody out there saying things that used to only be said in the shadows…I think what he’s saying represents something pretty dangerous for our country.

Silly people. You’ve been wasting my time all year long with these things-that-don’t-say-anything. I am left to conclude that what we’re talking about is:

• General decorum;

• The previously-mentioned special strain of Stockholm Syndrome;

• Profanity?

If the Trump campaign has started to act smart, of course it’s a good thing because it increases the chances that Hillary will be kept out of the White House. But for all we know, maybe that’s assured already. What’s potentially wrong with it is that the American voter was just starting to go through an awakening, by way of intense discomfort, which is how all such awakenings are achieved. To, when you get right down to it, the difference between substance and packaging.

Here’s how it works. Trump says something that is obviously stupid, and yet it is equally obvious it doesn’t really matter. These conservatives who saw their will thwarted when Rubio and Jeb! dropped out of the race, then when Cruz dropped out of the race, say to themselves, THIS time I will not be denied! And that is when they start to say risible things, like “Hillary is no worse.” This is not a summation of perceived reality. If that were the case, their passions would be on a downward slope as they continue to settle for less and less. That is not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a level of passion in them that was not displayed previously, when Trump was competing against Jeb!, Rubio, Cruz, et al. If they were honest about it, they would admit that this is a new tactic; a “boy, this will really show ’em, when they see me voting for her, they’ll finally know how mad I am.” But, who among us is honest about what really motivates us to do things?

As far as this recognition that a “higher standard,” or something, is good for society. I agree. It’s one of my 42 definitions of a strong society.

Coarse humor and other material are kept away from children, as well as adults who might not prefer it. The girly mags kept behind the clerk, rather than at knee height out front; the blogger who takes the effort to write “not safe work work language in this video”; the curtain in front of that special room in the back, at your video store; South Park scheduled on the cable teevee for 10pm or later. These are fundamental building blocks of any civilized society. The spicy stuff is freely available, but walled off.

That’s #5. But, speaking as the author, you know, #1 is #1 for a reason…

There is a vast, yawning gap between laws that are written down, and unenforced cultural taboos that are universally observed as a sign of respect the individual pays to the sensibilities of the community. There is an abundance of little things that are frowned-upon, and because they are frowned-upon they are very seldom done. They carry absolutely no penalty whatsoever. In fact, making any kind of “hard” law against some of these things, is one of the taboos.

Decency is a lot like a fart sometimes: If you have to force it too much, a lot of times it turns out to be shit. Oops! Think I just broke the taboo…

If you think this is going toward something about political correctness, you are right.

I am worried. I’m worried that it’s been so long since we’ve seen a problem actually solved, we don’t know what it looks like anymore and we don’t understand the process. The partisanship has just made things worse, when a U.S. President or some other executive inserts himself. Half the time, nothing identifiable actually gets done; if it does get done, then the party opposed to that executive will find all sorts of things wrong with it, while the executive’s own party just cherry-picks anything that might be interpreted as positive news, and hogs all the credit, casting blame upon whoever came before for whatever might not be so positive. People have resigned themselves to the reality that that’s the process. The idea that there are simple and reliable ways to forecast things from other things…genuine causes and effects, with genuine relationships tying them together…gets lost.

I’m also worried about the decisions being made by decent people. If this was some sort of enchantment being worked on indecent people, I would not be worried. But these are salt-of-the-earth types, who have grown weary of seeing “fuck” and “shit” and the like, casually dropped in common discourse. There was a union between them, and the South Park Republican types — they were unified by things that actually worked. Now we have Trump. There is a realignment, a wedge being driven between these two. The decent, salt-of-the-earth types are mulling over the idea of abandoning what works, going with the hot-air politicians who spew empty rhetoric.

Did Trump do it? I think not. He illuminated it. Salt-of-the-earth type used to have a meaning associated with it; you might be a farmer. Or, someone else who does things that actually work. Maybe that’s slipping out of our grip, maybe we’re moving past that.

There is no excuse for going with political correctness. You thought that had something to do with decency? That that was, perhaps, this long-awaited desirable fusion between the high wall that keeps spicy things out of the reach of kids, and the softer cultural taboo as opposed to hard laws? Thought that was it?

No. Political correctness is destruction, plain and simple. We’ve been wandering through the thick of it, like through a fog, since I was a kid. And I just turned fifty.

A little while ago, one of my decent, salt-of-the-earth type friends tried to get me to see the light after I took note of the high level of energy being spent by a couple of annoying cunts, to behave like annoying cunts. He tried to convince me to aspire toward a loftier standard of behavior, and I know that’s what his motivation was because when he failed to do so, he simply…failed. The next step would be to erect whatever sensible divisions became necessary, between his enclave of reverberating opinion, and my own, to keep out this R-rated talk where it is not appropriate. He didn’t, and he wouldn’t, make an attempt to destroy me for my transgression. Or, put me in my place…really show me who’s boss. A crusade for political correctness, as we all know too well today, does not look like that. Political correctness may exact a promise to never repeat the offense again, and it will bulldoze onward in this spirit of “No, you said it! We still GOT YOU!”

Political correctness is political. It is not decency. An attempt to enhance decency, resulting in destruction of the person who caused offense, but realizing no acknowledgement that the better behavior is better behavior — will have failed. Political correctness is about the destruction. If P.C. can bring about the acknowledgement of better behavior, and a sincere promise not to re-offend, but fails to destroy, then it, too, has likewise failed. It’s got nothing to do at all with bringing about a more enlightened or civilized society, and some among us are quite tired of this obligatory expectation that we should treat it that way.

It’s about getting people canned. Period, full-stop.

As such, it does not promote civilized-human behavior. It promotes shark behavior.

We just saw it, didn’t we, in Port Angeles? Quoting from the piece on profanity, linked above:

Whetham’s comments cited by Kidd occurred Aug. 2, when the council discontinued fluoridation temporarily on a 4-3 vote at least until a Nov. 7, 2017, advisory election.

That partially reversed a 4-3 Dec. 15 decision to continue fluoridation for 10 years after Mayor Patrick Downie switched sides.

Whetham was on the winning side Aug. 2 and the losing side Dec. 15.

The roles were reversed for Kidd, a fluoridation proponent.

Whetham did not return repeated calls for comment Wednesday.

“Will we have a list of profane words?” Whetham asked Kidd at Tuesday’s meeting.

Kidd responded that she did not want people to “use profanity, period.”

Got that? The article is worded just terribly…here’s the best I can make out of what happened.

The mayor switched sides…so this bitter old crone who won the fluoridation vote back in December, lost the vote just this month. So here comes that attitude, we’ve seen it before: “Well, darn it, I’m gonna win at SOMETHING here!” Probably aggravated by the anti-fluoridation guy being a little smartass, twisting the knife a little after his victory. So now Port Angeles is suddenly embroiled in this hoop-de-doo about language.

But, it’s not language. That would carry the implication that this is good for the city. It’s not about the city, it’s about this one crone and her hurt feelings. It’s about feelings and not about thought. “Kidd responded that she did not want people to ‘use profanity, period.'”

The request for a list might have been smartass too. But, not entirely unreasonable. The offensive word was “hell,” which is around the periphery of profanity in this day and age. Not Fuck, Cunt, Shit, Asshole or anything of the sort. I just used “smartass” twice, just above. Would I get dinged for that if I sat on the council?

It’s not a trivial question. A rule worth making is a rule worth defining. It’s really all about the definitions; and any of these salt-of-the-earth decent types, if they’re that way because they’ve been busying themselves with building things that actually work, that other people actually need, then they should be able to appreciate that.

The perfect tyrannical society has exactly one rule: “It is a crime for people to do things I don’t like.” That’s just a fancy way of saying, tyranny is not in the cruelty of the punishment, or the innocence of a seemingly innocuous act that could land you in real trouble. It isn’t even invested in the inequality of authority. We live under tyranny when we live under lack of definition. When the severity of a crime is decided in the aftermath. That’s tyranny. That’s what it is.

And we seem to be sharing our citizenship status with fellows who are hungry for it. It’s almost like, in their world, everything turns out okay if we just get rid of fratboy behavior, everywhere. Well, that’s not a rational thought process that leads to good results. That is a phobia, and it should be treated as such.

Forbes investigates. It comes away with a mix: People are generally not in much of a movie-going mood; summer started earlier this year; inadequate marketing.

I have a couple more ideas.

Star Trek’s appeal, as a vision for the future, is reassuring. We didn’t wipe ourselves out of existence, people of all sorts of different nationalities are getting along together. That’s fine, but “reassuring” is boring. Also, the franchise didn’t rely on that part of it as much as it does now. There used to be this thing about “boldly go where no man has ever gone before!” Then that was declared un-P.C., so it became “where no one has gone before.” Then it got reversed, in the worst Star Trek episode ever made, in which the courageous and intrepid Enterprise crew discovers that the warp drive is tearing apart the fabric of the universe or something. Although they didn’t put it like this word-for-word, this effectively flipped the motto around like a pancake being turned: “To timidly avoid going where just about everyone else has already been.”

They just wanted to be socially conscientious progressives, I’m sure. Well, they nuked the spiritual essence of a beloved and revered cultural tradition when they did that…which is what progressives do. So, we’ve got this huge tub full of good-hearted people wearing uniforms, being very careful not to go faster than Warp 5 so they don’t break anything? What’s the point?? How about…just not go? Starting with the premises provided, that is where common sense goes.

Star Wars, in contrast, is two stories. One takes place in the technological realm, involving pilots, ships, space stations, and lasers that go pew pew pew…the other takes place in a spiritual realm, unseen by all who are not “force sensitive.” Good and evil battle each other, in both realms. There you go. Spiritual…and…good & evil. Star Wars believes in the compass points. Evil is objectively evil, no need to debate it. There are good people doing evil things, but that’s consistent with real life — people are books, their good & evil deeds are pages within the books.

Star Trek has a way of crossing this line, into the Hipster Zone in which the deeds themselves can be subject to endless debate, with great points made on both sides, about whether this is good or evil. This complicates things needlessly, since it is not consistent with real life. Best Star Trek movie ever? There’s little or no disagreement: The Wrath of Khan, within which there is no necessity, none whatsoever, to tediously debate the good & bad parts of stealing the Genesis device and killing Admiral Kirk. That’s all-the-way bad, and this bad guy must be stopped. That’s good drama. But this has been receding. With every good act debatable as a potentially bad thing, and every bad act debatable as a potentially good thing, the whole story dissolves into an opera about characters in uniforms flying ships and feeling certain ways about things.

Well…if we don’t relate to the characters, that’s all it takes to send the whole thing over a brink.

But this brings me to my second idea. Following is a list of what the villain is trying to do in each movie, and why; see if you can figure out where I’m going with this.

I: Merge with The Creator, so I can learn my purpose.
II: Kill Admiral Kirk, because I blame him for killing my wife.
III: Steal the plans for the Genesis device, for fortune and the glory of the Klingon Empire.
IV: Talk to the whales, to make sure they’re still there.
V: Go to Sha Ka Ree, to find God, because……….??
VI: Sabotage the peace conference, so we can keep fightin’.
VII: Extinguish the star, killing everyone in the solar system, to go into The Nexus.
VIII: Go back in time and mess up First Contact, to assimilate Earth into the Borg Collective.
IX: Poison the entire planet, killing everybody, because I’m angry about my prior banishment.
X: Kill Captain Picard, and everyone on Earth, because I’m angry about being abandoned by the Romulan government.
XI: Kill everybody on Vulcan, and everybody on Earth, because I’m angry that Spock didn’t save my planet.
XII: Kill everybody I can, because I’m angry that Admiral Marcus woke me up from my nap.
XIII: Kill everybody on the Yorktown, because I’m angry that Starfleet didn’t come looking for me or something.

You see the issue now? There is a gradual but increasing over-reliance on “kill everybody indiscriminately because I’m angry”…which, with all these terrorist attacks, could be said to mirror real life somewhat. But, that isn’t why they’re doing it. This second problem ties in somewhat with the first problem. Star Trek, now immersed deeply into the Hipster Zone in which so few evil deeds can be recognized as decidedly evil, all of them have to be put up to some endless debate, is grasping at straws in a futile search for the few evil deeds that are irredeemable and thus not subject to this debate. And they’re left with only one.

There’s no strategic thinking involved in this. Last time any Star Trek villain did any of that, was twenty years ago. And that, it should be noted, has not aged very well now that it’s established that traveling back in time and changing history, merely launches a new universe. So what the heck? Why not let The Borg go ahead and gobble up Earth like a big fish swallowing a guppy? Earth Prime is still safe.

As the Wrath of Khan decisively proves, the bad guy has a lot of pull in deciding if the movie is going to be any good or not. A lot of pull. More than the hero. It also proves vengeful bad guys can be interesting; there is a way to do this correctly. The bad guy’s lust for vengeance has to make him into a Determinator, that seems to be important. But there are other rules too, because many of the above films had that going on, and they still didn’t work.

Bottom line is, Star Trek is having trouble because it’s in denial of the worthiness of the instinct of self-preservation. What it really needs is good old-fashioned submarine warfare — which Wrath of Khan did have, and which elevated at least one old episode to true greatness. The producers, in their current mindset, won’t green-light this. It would shrug off the hipster mentality that says all life forms are equally worthy, and sometimes the gazelle should stumble so the lion can have a decent meal. That’s not the way it used to work. It used to be, “They’re coming for us, it’s us or them” was sufficient to establish the roles of good guy and bad guy. Today you can’t do that. The lives that are at stake have to be truly innocent, at a distance, multiple in number, and most important of all…strangers. The bad guy’s not coming for you, he’s coming for Boston, or London, or Africa or India, or that solar system over there, or Earth, or the Yorktown, or…

Now that they’ve taken this step of debating all goodness and all evil, into incomprehensibility, for sake of embiggening horizons; they have achieved the exact opposite. Star Trek movies can only have one kind of bad guy anymore, and he can only be doing one thing, for one reason. That doesn’t excite people into attending repeat viewings. And after the movie comes out on video, this doesn’t get the disc back into the player. That’s not enough to make these into bad movies, but it doesn’t make them good movies either.

Nobody ever reads this blog, since it’s The Blog That Nobody Reads, and all…and one of our nobodies wrote in this morning with an inquiry.

Do either of you remember one of Morgan’s posts where he was talking about how conservatives have ceded so much of the public square to liberals because “we’ve got shit to do” and now conservatives are starting to realize that such was a mistake? (I found a few posts where he mentions the idea but I could swear there was one where he fleshed it out.)

These assignments are always pretty tough, for me most of all, because these thoughts are hovering in the background ready to find their way out into the open — and they do, multiple times. As the interested party notes, and this happens often…there’s one post where I really tear down the bunny trail, and it would be good to find that one, not one of the others that came before or afterward.

Well…Score! I think. Half a year ago, this time. Turns out I was talking about science, and what lately has been happening to it. Then I drifted just a bit…

Think back to decades ago when our liberals commanded us to question authority, as opposed to agreeing with authority all of the time to prove we’re not racists. I don’t mean in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, I mean more like Vietnam. In those days, politics became the dominion of liberals. Conservative parents wanted their liberal kids to get haircuts, and jobs. The liberal kids wanted to protest. From this split came a situation in which the liberal kids concentrated on getting, keeping, and using a voice, and the passion persisted until they were no longer kids. Conservatives, meanwhile, figured out the chickens weren’t going to gather their own eggs, the roofs weren’t going to repair themselves…they didn’t have time for this shit.

Throughout this time, you see the liberals still lost elections. But they lost them after having won the previous elections, after the public got a good clear view of the harm that comes from liberal policies. These decades represent repeated laps around the unnecessary-mistake track; laps taken by, unfortunately, the entire country.

Now we are at a critical juncture. The conservatives who clean the crap out of the sewer lines and lay the foundations upon which buildings will be erected, that will house all sorts of publicly funded liberal-egghead think tanks, have come to the unpleasant realization that previous generations never quite learned: They have to make the time for politics. They’ve got to attend to it, as if it’s yet another chicken with eggs not yet gathered, otherwise everything else they’ve done is for nothing. They’ve got to write the code that works, they’ve got to build the diesel engines that successfully contain the explosions, they’ve got to manufacture the action boxes for 9mm pistols that don’t rupture under the stress, and do all the other things that liberals can never do. Then, they have to participate in politics like the liberals do. And the conservatives have to grow all our food.

Can you imagine a liberal being a potato farmer? It would never work. He would decide “this soil is good for growing potatoes,” and then he would do what liberals do all the time: Promulgate the narrative. The very last thing to figure into his actions would be the lingering question of whether or not the soil is any good…and come harvest time, there’d be no potatoes. If you want a big bundle of excuses about how everything is Republicans’ fault, liberals are your guys. Or, gals, or zhers or whatever. But if you want something to actually work then that’s not where you go. It’s not their bag, baby.

If liberals ever toil away under any sort of standard, their first move is to re-negotiate the standard. They’re so busy re-defining things, they’ve made themselves into strangers to the concept of ever getting any actual work done.

So conservatives have to make things work…food that can really be eaten, code that can really be run, combustion chambers that really do contain explosions…then they have to make time to argue with liberals who don’t have to worry about any of that. Wrestle with the pigs in the mud.

So there are two problems here. One, liberals fancy themselves to be too good for any task that involves dirty hands…any task whose completion status is testable. We no longer live in the era in which such neglect bears consequences. If you think yourself too good to cook hamburgers, you can still get hamburgers whenever you want. So, liberals are running around on the Internet, on blogs and on other forms of social media, because Barack & Michelle have asked them to — and, they’re bored.

The other problem is that if the liberals ever did sweep the sidewalks or embalm the bodies or kill the weeds or design the car engines, they’d just do it until they found the entertainment factor to fall short of their expectations, which would be pretty damn soon. If they didn’t get the task done satisfactorily, who’s to say? So either way, they’ve got a lot more time for this than conservatives do, since the conservatives are doing things that are testable, which takes a great deal more time. Anytime you vote in an election, you have to be prepared to lose; anytime you gamble, you must be prepared to lose; and whenever you run tests in good faith, on anything, you must account for that proportion of times that the tests are going to fail.

Conservatives are building the bridges on top of which the cars are going to be driven — we wouldn’t have it any other way. Would you really want to drive a car upon a bridge built by a liberal? Not if you want to see your next birthday. So people are counting on the conservatives, the conservatives have to work away at the task until it’s really done, and the whatever really does work. While, the liberals are bored…so of course the liberals have taken over the arena of rhetoric. Add to that, the fact that conservatives are naturally harder to get engaged in any sort of coordinated political action, because they think too independently. Contrast the recent Trump vs. Cruz contest, versus the Hillary vs. Bernie contest; no need to comment further on that, I think.

Still, the conservatives win elections. The liberals only have the White House, nothing else. It isn’t because conservatives have gotten good at participating in this verbal cage match. Rush Limbaugh, and a few others in the same business with the same leanings but not nearly approaching his stature — versus academe, cable, liberal blogs that have become media phenomena, the residual power of the printed daily. On top of which, anything anywhere that is any sort of bureaucracy, naturally tugs left.

So why are the conservatives winning elections when the liberals are dominating what the conservatives still have yet to effectively challenge? Just the experience of the electorate, that’s all. Big government looks like the answer, only to people who haven’t actually dealt with it yet. People who haven’t gone through the experience of waiting in line for a building permit…because they haven’t built anything.

Greg Penglis, Canada Free Press:

You’ve all been watching way too many TV shows where all men, especially all white men, especially white men in commercials, are portrayed as morons. Like that commercial where Tarzan and Jane are looking for the waterfall. Tarzan is made to look like an idiot for not asking directions, yet it is Jane who is expecting the chimpanzee to speak English. But let’s be blunt ladies. Nagging or harping over stuff that you do not understand about men, is why you have no sex life, or no life in your sex, with your guy. The more years in denying and not appreciating who we are, or how we are not like you, or how we don’t think like you, the worse it will get. So if you really want to have the best sex of your life, say to your guy “let’s get lost honey, and then we’ll find our way out.” And then enjoy the process that follows: the fear of not knowing where you are, the challenge of many roads, the characters you meet along the way, the towns you discover, the hidden restaurant no one knew about — all these are possible. And once your guy gets to rescue you both, the rest, well, I leave to your imagination. But there’s one critical thing you have to do to make this work. You have to turn off the GPS. And this brings us to the point of this article…
:
One of the worst things to happen to cars was the automatic transmission. Women love it because it makes driving easier. Men, real men, despise automatic transmissions, because a manual stick shift gives you more control, more options, more capability, and most important, it is the driver not the car who decides when to change gears, and that is the essence of independent manhood…
:
My essential theory is that women feel free when they are secure, and men feel secure when they are free. That fundamental difference is at the root of all relationship problems, and in our case here, the root of how technology, or the lack of it sometimes, feminizes men.

He starts with the cars and the GPS…finishes with the guns.

Women, until they’ve shot them, hate guns. All they see are the dangers, the deaths, and the macho attitude they hate. Women who shoot predominantly do it for the self defense aspect. Men, do it more for the art. Now, there have been some absolutely horrible things happening with guns. And those are crimes, so I’m not speaking of the criminal use of guns. Rather, I’m talking about the legal use. I want to step away from the crimes for just a bit, and deal with the technology, and the attraction to guns, by men, who value freedom, and don’t want to be feminized by technology…

Guns go back hundreds of years. The technology is simple. There isn’t a lot to be added unless you get into computerized gunsights, highly advanced scopes, or other advanced technology out of the price range of your average guy at the shooting range. So the attraction is to put a bullet in the tiny center of a target sometimes hundreds of yards away. That is an art. Long time shooters will figure temperature, ammo type, distance, wind, humidity, and any other factor available. It is like telling the weather from clouds, or guessing shutter speeds, because all of these skills require developing talents, skills and instincts, in other words, man stuff. There is another thing men have lost to technology — fussing. Guns can require an amazing amount of fussing. You can take them apart, and put them together. You can clean, polish, work the action, practice, and do an infinite amount of fussing with the guns themselves. You can mount scopes, and all manner of other attachments. If you compete in pistol or rifle there are an infinite amount of modifications and parts that can be added and interchanged. If you load your own ammunition, a whole new category of fussing emerges…The fact that guns are also dangerous only adds to the fascination. Being able to control that force and power, and responsibility, is a huge thrill. Which in a way explains the complete opposition to guns by women and feminist men who don’t want that kind of responsibility. They just can’t understand the attraction because they just aren’t oriented that way, and because they can’t understand guns, or fast cars, or manual cameras, or sextants and ancient navigation, or maps and compasses, or airplanes without a radar baby sitter, or just the simple pleasure of getting lost, all of these have to be done away with, shamed, blocked, condemned, demonized, removed, made obsolete by technology, or confiscated by government regulation. And that ladies and gentlemen is one huge reason why we have a man crisis.

Men have been feminized by technology, and with it, society has become feminized as well. [emphasis mine]

It’s an old problem, actually. But as we continue to describe it, the definitions deteriorate. Men and women, for example. At this late date, a lot of women get it now; and, a lot of men do not. Women, in fact, have often developed quite a passion about this, and in many cases that can be directly traced to the frustration involved in selecting a suitable mate. So the gender divide is diminishing even as the passions that ensconce all the individuals further into one side or the other of that divide, increase.

What you’re left with is a somewhat gender-neutral culture conflict. That’s why I like this thing about “women feel free when they are secure, and men feel secure when they are free.” Because today’s men are assuming woman-like preferences for things, and today’s women are filling the void in masculinity themselves, you have to add “and some men” and “and some women” into that to keep it accurate. But there’s your cultural divide. And I would go further to, just like working the reduction operation in a division equation involving two fractions, simplify it a bit: Security and opportunity. Who among us is prepared to offer up a some of one of those, in exchange for a bit more of the other? I would opine, everyone with a brain. But which is to be sacrificed for which? There’s your divide.

There is a common narrative here that the two sides are chasing, in different ways. It goes something like this: Without me involved in this excursion, failure was certain, but with my contribution we have a fighting chance. Of course that is always exaggerated somewhat — no job is indispensable. The point is that no one wants to be completely replaceable, either. Some of us chafe at the idea, when we learn how to do a new job, of being handed some sequenced script: Push this button, move this lever, light should come on after awhile, turn that key, close the door. Especially when we’re told things like “And nobody knows what the heck is happening when the light comes on, that’s the way we always done it.” How do we know if the light bulb has gone bad? And what if it’s working, and it doesn’t come on so we can execute the next step, what’s the procedure then? Besides of which: That’s not really a skill. A trained chimp could do that.

But to a good half of the people we’re going to meet on any given day, that’s all plenty good enough.

I met someone in one of my old I.T. support jobs who joked about this. “Network goes down, network comes back up again, every other Friday we get a paycheck.”

The two sides seek control in different ways. The people who think the way real men used to think, aren’t happy with their scripted procedures because they want to know how the mechanism works. They’re thinking ahead, to parts failing and breaking, when there’s no one else around to call. But it’s also instinctive; they don’t want to call anyone else.

The other people, who think the way women used to think, and both sexes think now, just want to execute their steps. If this reduces them to automatons who could be replaced with the next generation of unthinking robot, they don’t give a rip; for some reason, this doesn’t bother them. Must be nice. What do they do when the lever won’t move into the desired slot, or the light doesn’t come on when it should? They get nasty, start to assume an air of royal superiority I’ve noticed, and I guess that’s where the transfer of control is. The masculine side lusts after control early, the feminine side grasps at it later, after things have broken.

Someone from work was reading the post previous, and audibly admired the phrase “non-producers tell producers how to do their producing,” which is a bundle of words I’ve strung together many times over the past twelve years in these pages. I’m positive I’m not the first to notice it. I guess that’s how it happens. Someone becomes an “expert” in their job by learning a script, not bothering to learn how anything works…acquires a little bit of authority before the first time being put on the spot when a fuse blows, and then you have the lethal combination. Napoleonic complex, pressure to get the job done, a gizmo not functioning the way it should; and, a gap in technological ignorance that isn’t supposed to be there. Next thing that happens is someone bellowing “Plug The Damn Hole!”, or some variation of that.

Which carries us back to the first observation, about asking for directions. Technology, of late, has veered away from making new things possible and put a renewed emphasis on making things easier that were already possible. This has a tendency to reduce the humans operating the technology to the automaton role, which is keenly annoying to roughly half of us, whereas the other half is gobbling it down and demanding seconds, not seeing a problem with it.

I guess I’m more annoyed — and on occasion, more annoying — than most because of my profession. Most gratifying part of my job is when I get to design how a new software module is going to work, and I’ve achieved some measure of success here by sticking to my old credo of: Keep the humans doing what humans should be doing, and the machines doing what the machines should be doing. That’s served me very well. But, by going through that cycle to earn my next loaf of bread, I’ve become aware of a type of human that — who? or maybe “that” is appropriate in this case — doesn’t mind doing machine work, not even a little tiny bit. Doesn’t mind being replaceable, doesn’t think about it.

No, it isn’t women. There are a lot of guys in this camp. They want to follow the script, push a button, wait for the light to come on and push another button. They don’t care what’s going on inside…and, much more often than not, they hate guns. They’ve often made a promise never to own one, but they have all sorts of ideas about what the next batch of rules about guns should be.

For a number of years now, I have been noticing there are two realities. There is the reality we think about and the reality we feel. A reliable way to distinguish between the two of them is to assess our own likely reactions to the spoken opinions of others. Which very often, as in you don’t have to wait long to see it happen, coagulates into a single chorus with a single melody, harmony and tempo. You also, regrettably, don’t have to wait long to see this consensus depart from the truth that is known. This presents opportunity; without such a conflict, things are not testable, and with the conflict in place, they’re testable. So when that happens, what do you think? How do you feel? And most importantly, how does it make you act?

This is the subject of The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. This is a childrens’ fairy tale about an enclave, within which the spoken/felt reality and the thinking reality take off in opposite directions. The townspeople, reckoning with anticipated consequences, form their opinions based on punishment and reward; in so doing, these fantasy opinions begin to gel with their feelings. It’s a common mistake. And what’s right in front of their eyes, and gathered directly by way of their other senses, after a time carries no influence for them whatsoever. And we see this, here in America, in our elections. Time is another useful indicator of deciding whether an interested opinionated type is driven by thought or by feeling, since feeling is snapshot-driven, unconcerned with whatever came before. Once an election is over, of course, we’re going to all become…and this is as predictable as any sunrise…disenchanted with our day-to-day productive lives being managed by political types who produce nothing.

And yet when the year number is divisible by 4, somehow this all changes. A non-politician as our President? Gasp! The horror! I’ve seen this in midterms, too; in 2010, I had noticed the word “unqualified” was taking on a strange new meaning. If you told things the way they really were, without trying to dodge the truth with diplomatic euphemisms, this set you apart from the political class that inspires our natural resentment during the odd-numbered years; and it made you unqualified for the office. We collectively seem to have a Stockholm Syndrome in place when it comes to the bullshit that keeps us hostage in our daily lives. It would appear we’re now at the point where we demand it. Anybody who can’t supply it to us on a regular basis is unqualified.

Another way to tell thinking apart from feeling. Feeling is loud. It has to be, because in the process of forming this coagulated consensus, it has to be communicated with these “Who’s with me???” text messages, posts, tweets — demonstrations. Thinking relies on perception. If you’re not doing some sort of experiment in chemistry, perception tends to be quiet. And so there is a “Loud Crowd” ready, willing, able and anxious to retort to the above with something like: “Oh no! Sarah Palin was unqualified in SO many other ways!! She’s SOOOOO stupid!!!eleventy!!” but that, again, is feeling and not thought. Thought relies on perception, and do these people personally know Sarah Palin? For the most part, no. Just like they personally don’t know Donald Trump.

Best argument I’ve ever heard for keeping Trump out of the White House: In 2018, under a Trump presidency, it is very easy to make the case that we need a democrat-dominated Congress to keep this narcissistic [fill-in-the-blank] in check. (Under a Hillary Clinton presidency, it is a persuasive argument that we need to elect Republicans.) That’s the best argument. The worst argument is the one I’ve heard most often lately: We cannot afford to have this kind of person with his finger on the nuclear button.

Again, this is feeling, not thought, because it is expression, not perception. Do these people personally know Donald Trump?

What happens when you really look into it? You might be surprised:

And…in the long history of our Stockholm Syndrome, this inter-generational feeling that we have to have unproductive people managing our nation’s production, tell me this: What sorts of men have had their fingers on this button? Forty-two men came before our current President. Those who base their arguments on the idea that occupants of this high office must fulfill some sort of lofty intellectual, temperamental and moral standard — which, it hasn’t been lost on me, goes largely undefined — demonstrate their ignorance of history of these 42 men. Simply put: No. We have not been honoring this high office by installing our best & brightest within. Not even close. Washington and Lincoln were probably okay dudes…Coolidge maybe, possibly Grant in some ways. As to the rest? Hey, they were what you should expect. We’re all human, all flawed. This office has been connected with disappointment, on average, much more often than with any sort of widespread elation over how something was handled. And for the most part, should’ve been. The “unfit for this lofty office” types imagine a halcyon White House history that seldom-to-never actually existed.

The political class, rushing to loudly communicate this feeling so it can be gelled into a consensus, ramping up on both the amplitude and the frequency of the message, expresses its displeasure and its shock that the electorate could even be seriously considering this dirty outsider. I’m guessing the displeasure and the shock are both genuine. And they should be. This political class is just starting to get a reading on just how disenchanted their constituents have become. Some of them might even have received it in full:

YES, there are all sorts of problems with Donald Trump, he’s even dangerous — but still way better than you.

I’m hearing an awful lot about how one candidate or the other is necessary for America’s continuing survival, that America cannot endure under whoever the opposition is. Let me add to that here: America is an organism, and lives under the same laws of nature as any other organism. Organisms endure problems, but only when they are capable of 1) addressing them or 2) adapting to them. When an organism perishes from a problem, it isn’t the problem itself that kills it, it’s the inability to address the problem over time. America has a problem and the problem is not hard to see at all: Our “leaders,” particularly on the democrat side, are not invested in the average citizen’s economic success. The current administration distinguishes itself by presiding over the most anemic economic recovery ever; and yet it, and its spokesmen, and social-networking fan base continue to crow about how awesome it’s all going. There’s your proof. And that’s your consequence of having non-producers tell producers how to do their producing. Is it any harder to start a small business, to keep it running, than it was thirty years ago? What matters is not the yes or no that follows that question; what matters is, why should Obama care.

But the problem goes back to well before Barack Obama. And it isn’t Obama’s fault. It’s the citizen’s fault. Maybe there aren’t enough among the citizenry who are actually producing? But there is this mindset that a politician’s job is to give good speeches. It’s like people have consciously realized, if the politician can speak effectively, he will just convincingly deflect blame for anything that goes wrong, and convincingly hoard credit for anything that goes well; so the “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” of Reagan’s era, will just kind of work itself out, if the figurehead can only speak effectively. So let’s elect charismatic types with perfect pant-leg creases, feel rather than think…all will be good. Take your Soma.

When & if the day comes we finally manage to liberate ourselves from that, we liberate ourselves from misery. President Trump’s temperament is not likely to help make that happen, but it’s unlikely to get in the way of it either. This country has been battle-tested, under the leadership of some very poor presidents with very poor temperament. Think, don’t feel, and you’ll see this is correct. Read your history.

Liberals are a strange beast. They hear Donald Trump saying “Make America Great Again” and take instant umbrage to the implication that America somehow isn’t already great. I guess in their world of must-think-this and must-not-think-that, they’ll not be permitting anyone to think America isn’t great.

Well, I suppose it’s good to see liberals and conservatives agreeing that America is great. Although I do have my doubts about that. Seems this famous speech is still drawing rave reviews…

I have noticed that there is an almost physical impossibility involved in declaring something “great,” until one takes the time and trouble to declare what something is. I alluded in the post previous to some of the life’s lessons I have learned from developing software; that is one of them. You don’t have to look far to find some sales exec extolling the virtues of his company’s software products, how powerful they are, how flawless they are…quality, bug-free, robust, scalable, etc. But you’ll notice they seldom get around to talking about what makes them so. Processes? It must be processes. Design? Implementation? Testing? And then sometimes you’ll have the opportunity to work there, and it turns out it’s like watching sausage being made.

Over time I have been forced to accept an inconvenient truth. There is no definition to be gleaned about what something is, for no such definition actually exists; not unless there is a prerequisite definition of what is to be excluded. In more concise terms: In order to define what something is, you first have to define what it is not.

We have across-the-board agreement that America is great? Very well; what makes it so? It isn’t the sunshine, the irrigation, the quality of the soil we have in mind. Some might be inclined to emit some glurgy syllables about the wonderful people; but, it seems everyone has some codification rattling around in their craniums, somewhere, about which groups of people suck, and many among those sucky people are Americans. So that’s not it.

Because of the exclusion rule, I have come to hold the truth to be self-evident that open-borders advocates do not, and cannot, believe in American greatness. They do not believe America is great now, they do not believe it’s ever been great, they don’t believe it is in America’s destiny, the probable or the optimal, to ever reach greatness. How could they? They believe in entropy.

God Himself is not above the exclusion rule, or I suppose chooses not to bother with getting around it. If we know anything at all about the Kingdom of Heaven, we know that it is exclusive. It goes without saying we’d have a lot fewer worries if that were not so. But it is, and it’s not hard to see why. If we take it upon ourselves to pronounce, breezily, the way liberals pronounce it with so many other things — “From this point forward, anyone can get into Heaven” — just the most cursory level of responsible thinking would compel us to spare our next thoughts for what is about to happen to Heaven. We already know there have been expulsions from it, and for defined reasons; there’s been no call for the Divine Wisdom to re-think those.

I think everyone gets this, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. This Trump fellow has caused a great hue and cry with his talk about building walls. As the critics against the wall-talk engage in their monologues about how bad walls are, how we ought to concentrate our energies on bridges and not walls, I have noticed the subject matter tends to spiral inward, Nautilus style, like a bit of astral detritus zooming along toward the event horizon of a black hole. Into a singularity: I am a good Christian, and Donald Trump is not. Or: His followers are not. It all seems to go toward me & my friends in, and those other assholes out. Every time. And just like the absorbed body can’t ever escape the black hole, the conversation never seems to veer out of that ever again. They speak out against the evil of building walls, while building one. What were Pope Francis’ exact words about this? “A person who thinks only about building walls — wherever they may be — and not building bridges, is not Christian.” That’s a perfect example. The Pope seeks to define what Christianity is, by declaring what can never be a part of it.

It works. But, by working, it reforms the Pope’s statement into an unworkable contradiction against itself.

I’ve noticed liberals have a tendency to attack things, very subtly, by nibbling around the periphery of a thing, attacking the definition of what makes the thing itself, by challenging any attempt to keep anything outside of it. The Republican party, for example: They need to be broader and more inclusive. The Boy Scouts should let homosexuals be scoutmasters. America should let in more immigrants, by which they mean but cannot bring themselves to say, illegal immigrants. Exclusion rule. So I’m theorizing that when liberals break down exclusions from a group, what they really seek to do is to destroy that group itself. How to test it? Simple; take something we know liberals do not want to destroy, see if they have the same desires.

They’re struggling for control of the House, Senate and White House. They have just one of those three things, and have a good chance of losing even that one in November. Where are the calls to make the democrat party the Big Tent party? Let in some stragglers? Hey I like hanging onto my money, I want lower taxes…can I be a democrat too?

Test fails. That proves, or at least fails to falsify, the theory. Everyone with a working brain believes in the exclusion rule, that you define what a thing is, thereby making it stronger, by defining what cannot be part of it. Everyone. But some among us seek to pretend otherwise, because they want to hide what they’re trying to do.

SNUL, and insert standard boilerplate “sorry super busy” excuse here; but, I should totally take the time to re-post this…someone else tried to do that, in a closed group, and failed because it was a Facebook friends-only post.

So he put out the call to the members to send me a friend-request. Good enough, but the thoughts really belong over here in the first place…

Beginning at the beginning…or, Why we argue about politics. More precisely, Why the people who say we should sweeten the discourse by simply not discussing anything, are wrong…

Routines of self-amusement aside, a human effort can involve an endeavor to create, preserve or destroy. Those three, nothing more — but — keep in mind a strategy is different from a tactic. A lot of preservation is invested in the destruction of something that, unattended, would destroy. And a lot of destruction is invested in the creation or preservation of something to do the destroying.

Destruction for destruction’s sake is appealing to the childlike mind because it involves instant gratification. When you’re talking about civilization, it also holds appeal for those who are invested in bringing about civilization’s end, perhaps with an eye toward building a new one atop the ruins.

And the Storming of the Bastille, 7/14/1789, was all about that. The truck-attack that took place on the anniversary of that event, also, was all about that. Liberals coming out of the woodwork to say “They shouldn’t do anything in response, because blah blah blah core values,” also, are about that because that’s acting in preservation of a destructive agent. Notice: These “core values” are undefined (although we know they don’t include protecting the innocent from harm). There’s a tip-off for you: One of the reasons creation and preservation are more boring than destruction, why they demand an ability to work and receive motivation from delayed gratification, is that these require strong definitions. Destruction is appealing to those nursing some phobia against defining anything. You don’t need to define anything at all, other than is the wrecking ball sufficiently massive to topple the structure. Everything else is up for grabs, so you can wink wink, nudge nudge, “everybody knows,” mumble, and chant slogans written for retards that rhyme.

I’m finding the wink wink nudge nudge “we all know” stuff is measurably wearing on me, like the sense of fatigue that descends upon one involved in a genuinely physically exerting task, such as riding a bike up a steep incline. Most especially: “We all know why Trump is just as bad as Hillary,” or “Barack Obama is a lightworker,” or other arguments that won’t hold up to inspection. We-all-know, all too often lately, is simply a euphemism for let’s-not-go-into-it.

We have to distinguish a lot between creative vs. destructive energies in software development. Not consciously, but I find it’s necessary when analyzing the aftermath of something, be it good or bad. Over thirty years, the most common thing I have seen, by far, is this: The implementer is compelled, by decree from the guy who signs his paychecks, to raze something to the ground and start over again. That comes as a consequence of the guy knowing how to write code, knowing how to eventually make it all work, but failing to document his progress. It is exasperating for both parties involved, but in the lead-up, I think more-so to the manager who’s writing the checks. He does not mean to be a destroyer; he does not mean to be into the instant-gratification. The simple fact of the matter is that timesheets are being signed and money is being spent, so there must be some gratification somewhere.

So for decades now, I’ve been trying to learn how to do this, to document the potholes and twists & turns in the road ahead…as well as the road just behind. Revolutionaries who march in the street and chant stupid things that begin with “Hey hey, ho ho” don’t need to worry about any of that. They, as individuals, as well as their movement as a whole, are all riding on pure adrenaline. It looks like admirable, gritty determination, and certainly they like to think of it that way. But they’re not really thinking about progress, forecasts, disappointments, renewal of strategy, persevering against long odds…how much is done, how much is left to be done…any more than a warehouse worker absentmindedly popping the bubble wrap is thinking about how many bubbles are left in the roll.

Destruction is fun. Destruction is quick. Destruction doesn’t require architecture or strategy. It is appealing to the childlike mind.

This past week ended with me making it to fifty. Perhaps that is why reality, and the recognition of it, has been on my mind a bit lately. One of the sobering things about fifty is, like forty and thirty, you know the enthusiasm that surrounded your childhood birthdays is gone and it isn’t coming back. Nobody says “I’m forty-nine and a HALF!” They don’t say, in this bracket, I can’t wait until my next birthday. When people ask if it’s your birthday you don’t say “Heck yeah, where’s my presents!?” And fifty brings an additional splash of cold water, because up to now I’ve had the luxury of thinking, I’m going to check out of this plane of existence before I reach a 100 but I’m still on the first half. When you reach fifty, that’s a mathematical impossibility. I’m not on the first half anymore, unless I’m destined to achieve triple-digits, an outcome we can discard rather safely, I think. So that’s it. Done deal. My center-of-gravity is over the brink. I could ignore that if I choose, but what’s the point? It’s reality. Nobody’s making it out of this alive.

But maybe that’s not it. Maybe what has inspired these thoughts is the news. It made a big impression on me earlier in the week, when I prowled through several pages of new e-mail, clicking open links for further reading as I went, and when I was done I had these browser tabs all the way across my screen…which is typical…what was out of the ordinary was that every single story had something to do with reality, and the avoidance of it. Every single one.

Starting with that annoying Pokemon thing.

While the old, familiar faces are front and center, “Pokemon Go” has taken location-based gaming to a whole new level. The free app-based game creates a sort of “digital world” around physical sites using local time and GPS location, so that digital creatures “interact” with players in real time.

La[u]nched on July 6, the game was installed on more U.S. Android phones than Tinder by the following day, according to app analytics specialist Similar Web. On July 8 “Pokemon Go” was installed on 5.16 percent of all Android phones in the U.S, it said.

As I understand it, you point the device in a direction and the app will use the camera to render the objects in your field of view like always, but then superimpose this creature that isn’t really there. I am impressed by this explosion of energy surrounding this unreality-game. Have to congratulate the designers, visionaries and implementers for having their finger on the community’s pulse, or for their happy accident. We’ve already had our nation’s First Lady launching her years-long promotional campaign to get fatties off the couch and move their asses; she and her costars never enjoyed this sort of success.

People, I continue to learn, really get excited over the little opportunities life presents to ignore, deny or contradict reality.

I wonder if President Obama is feeding off that sort of excitement-burst when He pretends that a speech about fallen Dallas police officers is an occasion to discuss Himself, or that that Black Lives Matter protests are peaceful…

“You’re not seeing riots, and you’re not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully,” Obama said Saturday, downplaying the escalating crisis gripping the nation. “You’ve seen almost uniformly peaceful protests.”

In the context of the growing wave of violence and animosity directed at police, the president’s remarks appear downright disconnected from reality.

…or, could He just be playing to a crowd that’s feeling this burst. Or maybe this has nothing to do with what people find exciting or titillating? Could it be just a maturity problem? A failure to develop the intellectual hardiness we use when we take in unwelcome information? An unnaturally high F.Q., or Fantasy Quotient?

That much does seem to be a problem plaguing at least some of the loud, outspoken types involved in these stories, many of whom have inserted themselves into these stories. How many among them would start a “This conversation’s not over until it’s over the way I like it to be over” back-and-forth marathon, upon reading something like this…

Failed liberal policies, not racism, are mostly responsible for the condition in which poor African-Americans find themselves. Welfare dependency and the narrative that because one is black one will always be discriminated against keep many discouraged and defeated.

There are more African-American politicians today than ever, even in the White House. Why isn’t their narrative inspiring the next generation? I think it’s because if the poor were to become self-sustaining they might not need liberal politicians. Poor African-Americans are a core Democratic voting bloc, despite receiving little in return from the politicians they help elect.
What is the biggest lie and worst narrative of all? It’s that politicians can deliver economic and social salvation. Hating the police will not affect this narrative nor will it improve anyone’s circumstances.

Or this…

[I]t is no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person. There’s an indisputable positive relationship between liberty and standards of living. There is also indisputable evidence that we in the West are unwilling to defend ourselves from barbarians. Just look at our response to the recent Orlando massacre, in which we’ve focused our energies on guns rather than on terrorists.

Saw an excellent article in The American Spectator by Jeffrey Lord pointing out exactly this problem.

Here we go again.

Yet another hotly reported media narrative stamps itself on the national dialogue only to find — oops! — maybe there are actually more facts to be discovered before we know, as they say, “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

This time around the media narrative surrounds the Minnesota shooting by St. Anthony Village Police Department officer Jeronimo Yanez, the shooting victim one Philando Castile. Says a police audio tape of Yanez:

“I’m going to check IDs. I have reason to pull it over. The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery. The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just ’cause of the wide-set nose.”

Then we learn that there are pictures out there of the robber — one of two — committing the robbery, gun in hand. And indeed there is a similarity between one of the robbers and Castile.

Now. How did we learn any of this? From a narrative quite different from the mainstream media’s all-too-predictable “racist white cop kills black man” story — a different narrative that went viral over at Conservative TreeHouse. The TreeHouse story drew instant wrath from liberal websites. Over at Mediaite John Ziegler put it this way:

Shocker! It Looks Like the Media May Have Bought a False Narrative in Philando Castile Shooting

:
The trouble here is that this presentation of a false narrative instead of the presentation of facts keeps happening over and over and over again. X occurs, the mainstream media jumps for the convenient liberal narrative of the moment — and the facts be damned.

We do have a problem with some “minority communities,” as they call them, becoming estranged from the police personnel who protect and serve them. I’m sure it goes both ways, people on both sides of the divide behaving differently than they’d behave if the divide was closed. But it impresses me that this continues to happen; the examples emerge, and the lately-arriving facts start to create problems for the examples.

Why does it keep happening? It is the advocates whose agendas are connected to the quality of these examples, who get to pick them. Why do they pick such lousy examples, that are damaged so badly, or undone entirely, by lately-arriving facts? Did they not know “Hands up, don’t shoot” was a fraud? Maybe they didn’t care?

I’m settling on that last one, that they just didn’t care. I have to keep in mind, Pokemon-Go has finally motivated people to get up off their asses and exercise. Michelle and Beyonce couldn’t do that. People have a fascination with pretending the unreal is real. There’s just no getting away from it, and I have to think this fascination extends to pretending the unverified is verified.

There’s also a tendency for people to stick their heads in the sand and avoid acknowledging what actually is verified, even people in high level positions:

We’re in a global war, facing an enemy alliance that runs from Pyongyang, North Korea, to Havana, Cuba, and Caracas, Venezuela. Along the way, the alliance picks up radical Muslim countries and organizations such as Iran, al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State.

That’s a formidable coalition, and nobody should be shocked to discover that we are losing the war.

If our leaders were interested in winning, they would have to design a strategy to destroy this global enemy. But they don’t see the global war. Instead, they timidly nibble around the edges of the battlefields from Africa to the Middle East, and act as if each fight, whether in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya or Afghanistan, can be peacefully resolved by diplomatic effort.

This approach is doomed. We have real enemies, dedicated to dominating and eventually destroying us, and they are not going to be talked out of their hatred. Iran, for example, declared war on the United States in 1979 — that’s 37 years ago — and has been killing Americans ever since. Every year, the State Department declares Iran to be the world’s primary supporter of terror. Do you think we’ll nicely and politely convince them to be good citizens and even (as President Obama desires) a responsible ally supporting peace? Do you think ISIS or the Taliban wants to embrace us?

No, we’re not going to talk our way out of this war, nor can we escape its horrors. Ask the people in San Bernardino or South Florida, or the relatives of the thousands killed on 9/11. We’re either going to win or lose. There is no other “solution.”

That, too, is something I’m noticing over and over again…people choosing their favorite narratives, as if they were choosing a favorite flavor of ice cream, without regard for what’s actually true…

On Monday Detroit Police Chief James Craig announced that the DPD has launched an investigation into Detective Nathan Weekley after his social media post went viral drawing over 40,000 views and a number of complaints.

The officer’s post was highlighted by the left-wing Michigan National Action Network revealing to liberal supporters of Black Lives Matter that the officer called the BLM movement “terrorists” and said that the only way the people would understand how important police are is to stop going to work.

“For the first time in my nearly 17 years as a law enforcement officer,” Detective Weekley wrote, “I contemplated calling into work in response to the outrageous act perpetrated against my brothers. It seems like the only response that will demonstrate our importance to society as a whole. The only racists here are the piece of (expletive) Black Lives Matter terrorists and their supporters.”

Over the line? Of course it’s easy to say so. But it’s not quite so easy to actually draw the line…across one issue and a great many others, keeping it straight as you go. Since when is calling someone a racist out-of-bounds? I’m seeing people do it quite often and not all of them are getting in trouble.

Phil had a good point to make about that…

I always find it fascinating that the people who scream the loudest about racism make absolutely everything about race. There’s nothing more racist than that.

Speaking of reality: John Hawkins came up with an intriguing thought exercise, of what would be going on in the world right now if white privilege really did exist the way some people seem to think it does. Interesting read, chock full of other things I don’t see happening…

1) We’d see frequent discussions on whether bumbling white dads or negative portrayals of southerners on TV and in movies were unfair to white people.

2) The government would be turning down talented black and Hispanic students to allow less qualified white students to get in via Affirmative Action.

3) Minorities would be LEAVING the United States, not making dangerous treks through the desert in the middle of the night to get in.

4) Falsely calling someone a “racist” would be considered to be just as repulsive as being a racist.

5) There wouldn’t be an option to press 2 for Spanish.

Say what you like about these, but at least they’re tests. And I guess the problem really does come right down to that, some of the ideas that are getting the best, most and brightest attention, and repeated most frequently at the highest decibel levels, are untested. Perhaps it is more accurate to say, the tests are wrong. The ideas are tested in terms of how much passion they can arouse, how much attention they can get. Not on the basis of whether they’re correct.

And here I must confront a paradox. It has been a permeating theme, around here, for the last twelve years that people have a tendency to estrange themselves from reality when they feel like they can afford to do so. Rounding up examples of me saying this, or something like it, would be time consuming and a bit pointless. First few times I made mention of this, it was in the context of Saddam Hussein’s old regime being declared, with blustering and theatrical confidence, to be clean and free of any WMD’s by our fellow anti-war citizens and their advocates; seldom correct, never in doubt. What has happened since then has gotten a bit twisty. People are still estranging themselves from reality. But, it doesn’t seem to be because of a feeling of stultifying abundance, or any sort of perception that they’re living high on the hog and reality has become optional.

Quite to the contrary. They’re voting to elect democrats, over and over again, even when they don’t agree with the democrats who are getting their votes. For the same reason the Depression-era voters kept re-electing FDR to further damage the economy. Their feeling is one of desperation.

But not completely. There are several different things happening at once here. It’s a mixed bag. People who say “Black Lives Matter is having a peaceful protest” are, quite obviously, of the opinion that if this statement is not correct, the lack of correctness will be costless to them. They are not in the line of fire. Maybe there is a loss of reputation that would come into play? But that doesn’t seem to count today the way it would have counted, let’s say, two hundred years ago. That bothers me more than anything. It’s like we’ve lost honor. Maybe that’s it. People can’t trust each other. This can be observed in the e-mail, often. People spread rumors, they get embarrassed when the rumors turn out to be false, and then they go back and do it again.

Sometimes they deny things that are actually true, and get told in front of everybody “Here’s a link.” Same embarrassment. Oops, my bad! And again, they go right back to it as if nothing happened.

So we’re going through an extended chapter here, in which reality is not to be taken that seriously, and reputations don’t matter much. Affluence and abundance have something to do with it, or at least they did. Maybe they still do. Desperation, and a feeling of dependence, also have something to do with it. “Must help spread the fable to make sure I can keep getting my vittles.” I guess the bottom layer of the Maslow Pyramid is something we’re enjoying in abundance, and there’s something higher up that is scarce, worth trading away the level of trust others could reasonably place in us. Which in generations past, would have been an irreplaceable thing.

I guess this observation comes down to only just that. It used to be, “If I say this thing that might not be true, my reputation could be wrecked and I won’t be able to get it back again.” That’s given way to, “If I say this thing that might not be true, some political agenda will be advanced, some group will benefit from that, and my stature within that group will increase. And who cares if it’s true or not, anyway?”

Perfect description (via Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm).

You want a pithy, one-sentence summary of what happened in Britain’s recent referendum on leaving the EU? Try this, from a woman in a call center in my district: “It’s the working classes against the smirking classes.”

Now the British class system is so tortuous and complicated that we struggle to understand it ourselves, let alone explain it to friends from overseas. But my hunch is that most Americans will recognize her sentiment.

She feels taken-for-granted, over-taxed, over-regulated, ignored, patronized, lied-to, laughed-at, disdained. She doesn’t expect her politicians to do everything she wants. She’d just like them to listen from time to time.

I have noticed people tend to feel a false sense of confidence regarding overly simplistic solutions to problems…over there. The acceleration of mass communication that has taken place over the last century and a half, or so, has made this easy to see.

It is the assurance of lack of expense that is the trigger; or at least, lack of frequent expense. De-personalization. I recall when people said not so jokingly, “just give it a good kick” when the teevee set wouldn’t pull in the signal. Nobody would think to say such a thing today. Is it because we think of these devices as less disposable than back then? Certainly not. We’re more educated about how electronics work? Hard for me to see; back in the 1970’s, kids didn’t just play with electronics, they actually built them, and the grownups shared this interest in how things function. Whereas today people just think about whatever is on the user interface. So it isn’t ignorance that triggers the “kick the teevee” mentality. It is distance from the source of the problem, coupled with an accumulated sense of frustration.

That’s your “smirking class” for you. They are people just like you and me, who have made the mistake of saying “What Those People need to do, is…” And they inspire the same sense of frustration in others when they do that.

In these modern times, this is a common problem; in previous times, it was a rarity, or didn’t happen at all. People from one class, affect the struggles of people in other classes. This has created the same effect that would arise from a spirited and widespread rejection of conservatism, without any such active rejection taking place. It is a deterioration brought on by way of insufficient faith, of insufficient defense, insufficient vigilance.

We have a conflict between working classes and smirking classes, because it has become an exceptional case that anyone fixates on their own class-workload. The fix is in the First Conquest Rule, that everyone is conservative about whatever he knows best.

So it’s clear to me, now, that when it comes down to a physical contest, we are not obliged, nor allowed, nor expected to defend ourselves. And this is not about gathering factual information, or statistics, to determine the best way to make our communities safer. If it were about that, the gun free zone would be living on borrowed time.

This is about culture conflict, straight-up. Guns bad, drugs good, cops bad, criminals good — who ya calling a criminal, anyway? Women good, men bad, up with ethnic, down with white, up with gay, down with straight, up with grass, down with tobacco, up with lady Ghostbusters, down with James Bond…it’s all about dividing us and tipping the scales in the ensuing culture-conflict, has nothing to do with actually fixing anything.

Except, it seems someone somewhere is choosing the culture. Christianity hasn’t got anything to do with guns…not much, anyway. Just one single thing fastens the issues together, the notion that human life is sacred. And yet when you look at the advocacy groups and the individuals that make them go, the alignment is nearly perfect. If someone opposes gun ownership, odds are they’re not too friendly with Christianity. Some Christians don’t like guns, but it’s hard to find one who will actually begrudge someone else’s decision to own one. They don’t look down on it with sneering contempt like the godless liberals do.

The day after Independence Day, I look around and notice it seems to have to do with independence…versus, dependence. It’s a disagreement of opinion about how government is supposed to function. What are our leaders, anyway? Is it a huge win for us when they escape accountability? Some people seem to think so, and these seem to be the people who think tax cuts are some sort of awful terrible idea. And, guns are bad. And that masculinity is bad too. Okay so when I put all this together, we’re not getting a very appealing picture…having a tough time seeing how anyone can be drawn to it. We react churlishly to anyone showing some individual capability to handle his own concerns, like health care and self defense…except for the strong girl thing, we’re supposed to like that just fine. But “strong” is not the same as being able to defend oneself against a threat. (In fact, that’s the whole idea of owning a gun, right?) So we vote in these leaders and pay high taxes, the higher the better. Make The Rich Pay Their Fair Share, and all that. And these leaders figure out where the money is supposed to go, in order to accomplish…well, we don’t know what. And if they get busted for something, they skate, because they’re just super wonderful mega awesome people or something.

So, after they get all our tax money, they use it to provide the defense against bad guys that we’re not allowed to provide for ourselves? It seems that is not part of the mindset. And that concerns me more than anything else. Providing for some defense for the weak and helpless, against those who would do them harm, is the one thing government is supposed to do. That comes before roads, park benches, sidewalks, mail. That is one of the biggest reasons our leaders are supposed to be accountable to us. Seems to me we’re slowly but surely losing the whole ball of wax.

Thomas Sowell is wondering what we’re celebrating in early July these days. I hate to say it, but I’m starting to wonder that too.

I have a question about this. I think it all comes down to this: Why do we bother with civilization? Some would say it’s got something to do with buying packaged and inspected food off a grocery store aisle as opposed to growing it ourselves, and maybe wiping our asses with quality toilet paper instead of dead leaves. I don’t think that’s it. I’m very sure we’re doing a lot of things with the grocery-bought food, things that even in this advanced era take up a lot of our time, that a hundred years from now will seem pretty wasteful and crazy. I don’t even want to ponder what’s going to happen to the toilet paper thing. But would it be reasonable, in that future utopia, to say “Back in 2016 they didn’t have civilization yet”? I’m gonna go ahead and call that a no, so that means it’s not reasonable for me to say civilization had not yet started in the early 1800’s, which was missing the toilet paper and the deodorant and the air conditioning. They still had civilization, didn’t they?

Civilization, I say, is — I can’t take your stuff away from you just because I’m bigger and stronger. That’s it. Period. Well, that and this too: We have a system of laws, and those laws do not privilege you with a reduced penalty for the same crime just because you are politically powerful, or worth a lot of money. That’s part of civilization too. But first comes the non-brutality. Criminal and civil law. Redress of grievances, protection of the innocent. The strong come after the weak, there are protections put in place. There are preventions before the fact, and penalties after the fact, to protect the weak and undeserving from the strong and malevolent.

If we’re missing one of those things, it’s hard to call a society civilized. And it looks like, without a change in course, we’re losing both of them. Once the course changes, life will get better, but not until then.

…and don’t go putting the cheeks of your ass on counters where they serve food. Don’t be a butt-dummy.

My wife and I lately have been engaged in an effort to embiggen the horizons of someone who’s been raised into poverty. Who this person is, is entirely unimportant, what’s important is that I did not say “raised in poverty.” I said raised into, which is such a broadly experienced and frequently-reoccurring problem nowadays that I’m afraid it’s stained us all. It is rewarding in that it is morally clarifying. Every bad habit that leads to an impoverished lifestyle, you don’t have to think on it too hard to see the cause-and-effect connection. At the same time, it’s frustrating. “Think globally, act locally” — so much easier said than done, especially when you stop to consider how many other people are making the same mistakes.

And, of course we have the mindset. Compassion means, somehow, that you have to disconnect an impoverished living situation from any actions that led to it. Which, out here in the land of reality, is the surest way to sustain poverty. Just keep saying to yourself nothing I did caused this, it just happened to me. Keep treating poverty as something outside your control, an event of bad luck. Envision your control as a nothing, and that is what it will be.

Over and over we have to keep asking ourselves: What is it about the human condition, that compels us to destroy ourselves? There is poverty, and so much more. We work hard at being, and staying…poor. Me, in the e-mails:

What makes people impoverished? These days, we here in the U.S. labor under intense social pressure to affix our agreement to the unwritten dictum: Poverty is to be thought ­of as unavoidable for those who are encumbered by it, a consequence of birth status. This is a disgraceful bit of poppycock, and an insult against the persons come & gone who lived in prior eras, within & outside of the United States. In this nation, in this time, we enjoy a birth status that has opened up more opportunities than any other, so far as we know within all of human history…Poverty, in the US of A Anno Domini Twenty Sixteen, is, mostly, decisional. Intergenerational poverty in the United States, today, with some statistically negligible exceptions, is always decisional. The best foundation by far for arguing some exception to this, is going to have something to do with geography. Transportation is cheap today. The world is small. Never been smaller. Some people say that’s heartless. I think it’s heartless to allow generations of dignified human beings, through the failure to insert an unpopular opinion in the discourse at the opportune moment, to wallow in poverty when it is absolutely unnecessary for them to do so.

Poverty, I have noticed, probably shouldn’t even be a noun at all. It’s more of a verb. “I’m povertying my kids.” “We’re povertying ourselves.”

One of the worst habits I have seen is to skimp. It holds appeal for those who have taken that first step, that step of “I’m tired of never having any money and I’m going to do something about it.” Seems quite logical, right? And, people do work their way out of the misery this way; they do win. It must be an effective habit, because in this modern era in the United States, we have a lot of slop. There are always ways to spend money more wisely. The problem starts when people neglect the income side of things, forget to ask themselves “How much money am I bringing into the household, and how much money could I be bringing into it?” I think just about everyone is guilty. Certainly, I’m not entirely innocent. The sin is one of lack of moderation.

I was raised in a household in which we were obliged to drape the gently used paper towels over the roll of newer paper towels, thus forcing the next paper-towel-user to tap into the reservoir of the “refurbished” before depleting the inventory of the newer. Also, contaminating said inventory. That’s penny wise and pound foolish. It was Depression-era living, kept around 35, 45 years after the Great Depression was over. Not rational. So you might say I’ve spent a lifetime wondering about the proper balance. Thrift is thrift, after all. Look how the rich people live. They’re thrifty — but, not like that. Nor should we expect them to be “thrifty” like that. You have to live sanely to live richly. I’m speaking generally.

The balance is not hard. It has to do with opportunity. You spend less when spending less does not mean you’re buying less — unless buying less is your intention. You spend less when spending less does not cost you something in terms of opportunity.

There are other ways to avoid poverty. One of the other ways I earn for myself a reputation as a heartless bastard, on the subject of poverty, is to ask that most uncomfortable of questions: What have you done to actually help someone lately? It is not my intention to chide. I’m not sitting on a suitably lofty, superior moral platform from which I could do such chiding. The people who object to this would be surprised at the coldly logical rationale, if they could only understand it: Our economy is based on people helping each other…still…for the time being. Here is a person who hasn’t made the economy work for them, the economy is driven by people helping people — so, what have they done? It is surprising how often “never” surfaces as the answer, if we’re going to think on it honestly. You invariably find a long, sloppy trail of get-rich-quick schemes in their wake. Schemes that were never supposed to actually help anyone else. This does not mean the poor-person is being punished for selfishness. You might think of it as an engineering thing: “I think your problem is over in here, somewhere.”

After you dedicate some real time and some real passion to helping other people, and negotiate in such a way that you don’t give away the store, there are other things. Get a skill. You’re born with talent, but a talent is not a skill. Don’t call the boss a skull-fucking moron. Don’t get (someone) pregnant without intent, or at least, planning and dedicated resources. Ah yes…and don’t confuse a formal education with intelligence. Or skill!

Are your friends idiots? That’s a good way to stay poor, hang out with a bunch of slackers with no ambition. How often does “no money for a beer run” emerge as the most pressing problem of the moment? That’s a warning sign.

I’m particularly keen on this one: Say you do help someone else. Or, someone else helps you. Where does the learning happen? Which way does it go? If the person who needs the help does the teaching, and the person extending the help does the learning, that is not a formula for success. Again, it goes back to cold, calculating, values-neutral engineering. And it’s rudimentary engineering. Doesn’t require any brain-horsepower at all, just requires focus. For people to receive help, and say to themselves “Hey, I should have been in a position to help myself, I wonder what that guy did differently from what I did” is not natural. It requires effort to embark on that thought process. But improvement of the situation requires nothing less.

I said there is poverty and then there is so much more. We also work hard at being, and staying…dependent. There is that Brexit vote. One of my Facebook friends, native of Scotland, is a bit upset with me for finding the event so fascinating now that it’s a done deal, and there’s really no news. I sympathize, absolutely. My defense is two-fold: One, there was not much of a story before the vote — a lot of the hubbub in the aftermath of the actual vote, has been generated by those whose job it was to report on it before the vote. And they were lazily phoning it in, because they generally figured it was a safe bet that the Remain side was going to win. Now the vote is done, and they’re surprised, bruised, anguished, butt-hurt. Which brings me to the second part of my sniveling excuse…the story has changed. I guess Britons cannot relate to this, but as a damn Yankee I’m really not inclined to care much about votes on memberships and policies in Europe. I do care, though, about this weird mental disorder, this addiction to dependence. The Stockholm Syndrome.

The more years I see come and go, the simpler this situation becomes for me. This is a phobia. People have a fear against independence. I suppose they/we always have. Some of us are inclined to defeat such a phobia, others are inclined to learn to live with it, co-exist with it. Like Gollum in The Hobbit, their eyes become accustomed to the dark. Except their obsession is not with power, more like with its opposite, the continuance of a powerless state of being.

Part of the reason I see it as a contrast between light and dark, is the behavior. The addiction to dependence, the phobia against independence, these have a demonstrated tendency to lead to dishonorable behavior. The “Remain” folks would like a do-over. This is exactly the behavior we see in our independence-phobic friends, the liberals, over here in the United States: “Let’s vote, and vote, and vote again, until the vote comes out the way we want and then never vote on it again.” We also see the resolve to live in narratives, to become one’s own self-fulfilling prophecy seemingly without consciously realizing it. The Brexit vote, say the Remainders, will lead to financial chaos and ruin…and they’re working hard to make it happen.

We work hard at being, and staying…ignorant. I see President Obama went on quite a tear on this issue of calling radical Islamic terrorism what it is…

He hammered [Donald] Trump over his “dangerous” mindset and “loose talk and sloppiness” about who exactly America was fighting, implying that Trump’s remarks were actually driving Muslims who might be prone to radicalization into the arms of ISIS.

And he doubled down to repudiate Republican campaigns that he was abetting terrorism by refusing to use the words “radical Islamic terrorism.”

“What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?” Obama asked during remarks at the Treasury Department. “Would it make ISIL less committed to try and kill Americans?” he continued, using a different acronym for ISIS.

“Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above,” he said. “Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.”
:
Mike Rogers, former head of the House Intelligence Committee, faulted Obama for treading the same kind of political terrain as Trump with his angry remarks.

“This was the chance for the President to try to bring us together. I think he is so focused on this presidential campaign he let himself go,” Rogers, now a CNN commentator, said on “The Lead” with Jake Tapper. “I just don’t think it looked presidential.”

I suppose some among Obama’s fan-base will take issue with that last comment, and they’ve every right to their opinion. But that just makes it all the more bizarre. President Obama’s point, here, is that He is justified in going through the motions of trying to solve a problem, without ever once verbally acknowledging what exactly that problem is…because there isn’t any reason. Yes there’s a nod toward “driving Muslims into the arms of ISIS,” but the pronounced emphasis in this particular diatribe was on “why should I?”

His message is essentially a shoulder-shrug. And yet He put such passion into it that He lost his composure, in so doing denigrating His own office. I mean, even more than usual.

Compare and contrast with a similar session of feckless-excuse-making, last year:

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he refuses to describe the Islamic State and al Qaeda as groups fueled by “radical Islam” because the term grants them a religious legitimacy they don’t deserve.

“They are not religious leaders; they are terrorists,” Obama said during remarks at a White House event on countering violent extremism. “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

Obama said the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is “desperate” to portray itself as a group of holy warriors defending Islam. It counts on that legitimacy, he said, to propagate the idea that Western countries are at war with Islam, which is how it recruits and radicalizes young people.

“We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie,” he said.

That is, at least, coherent.

Somehow, with this most recent outburst, Obama managed to launch something of a back-n-forth discussion about let’s-not-call-it-what-it-is. And that is the part that concerns me, as well as fascinates me. I even heard one radio guy, certainly no lefty-leaning Obama suporter by any means, denounce the common sense objection of “How you going to solve a problem without calling it what it is?” as “mere rhetorical flourish.”

I guess what’s happening here is that people are really weighing whether or not there’s an up-side, because they are taking the down-side seriously. And maybe that’s to their credit. My problem with that, though, is that I’ve seen so much of this, in families as well as in politics. “Don’t say X, because if you say X you’re going to tick off Y…and Y flies off the handle at anything and everything, so when Y starts wrecking Z it’s going to be all your fault.” I have to ask, at this point, does this ever work? Who’s ever seen this work? I really want to know.

“Crazy Auntie Mabel” is an alcoholic who’s prone to temper tantrums, cannot take responsibility for her own impulse control, so everybody else has to do it for her…walk on eggshells, don’t say the wrong thing. And above all, make sure and call each other out for saying something to tick off Mabel! “Whaddya think you’re doing??” Sorry…can’t relate. There’s a split here, I’m on one side, perhaps on the minority side. And that’s probably because I make a point of not being around people like this. Well, I’m not seeing much inspiration to reconsider that.

This is as self-destructive as the other two, up above. When there is truth, and we make a point of not acknowledging it, we also make a point of not considering it. We begin to behave as if the true thing is not a true thing. This matters, when the thing-that-is-true has something to do with solving the problem that immediately concerns us. Pretending it’s untrue, means compromising our effectiveness at getting the problem solved. Pardon my density, but what part of that is unclear to someone?

We have become so proficient at preserving our own ignorance, that it seems to me our elected and appointed officials are enjoying increased latitude they didn’t have before. To brazenly lie to us, brazenly cover up the lies, brazenly conceal things from us, brazenly admit they’re in the middle of pretending truth is falsehood and falsehood is truth, even right in the middle of insisting how worthy they are of our unreserved faith. At times it seems to me they’re even bragging about it (video behind link auto-plays). I’m not sure what this means. I guess we, as a society, are getting away from the idea that you have to understand a problem in order to do something to productively address it. If that’s the case, I have to wonder where that leads. Can’t be good.

We work hard at being, and staying…aggravated. This is another thing we do to destroy ourselves. It is yet another declining standard. Seems to me we’re stumbling around, especially in the heavily populated areas, being aggravated and occasionally wondering why we’re so aggravated. Unfortunately, it is even more occasional than that that anyone ever consciously or vocally notices: It isn’t supposed to be like this. We shouldn’t be this aggravated this often.

And it isn’t because we’re pre-disposed to being aggravated. There’s a lot of justified aggravation. Far more than there should be. We have built a system that exists to gather aggravation, like a lint trap in a swimming pool filter gathers detritus to keep it out of the pumps — and fling it in our faces like a monkey flinging poo.

I was making a bee line toward the checkout stands in a grocery store the other day, with a bottle of wine in hand. Just that. 1.5L of white wine, nothing else. And I found myself thinking about this scam we have going…supposedly we live under a system of just laws, because the laws are written and ratified by elected officials who are beholden to us. The reason I was thinking it was a scam, was because the self-checkout lanes were all empty and the human-monitored checkout lanes were all full. The lines were snaking backward, into the aisles.

You can’t buy alcohol in a self-checkout lane.

The problem is not that the law happened to be inconvenient to me, in the moment. There is a defense against that, that pretty much all laws are inconvenient now & then, that’s why they have to be laws. That much is reasonable. The problem is a question: Who the fuck wanted this? Whoever said “Without government, who’s going to stop me from buying alcohol in a self-checkout lane”? And while we’re pondering that one, we can think about another question that rises to confront us: With all the self-checkout lanes empty, and all the human-checkout lanes full, who does this law help?

And so I was not in the proper frame of mind to lay my eyes on the sign, affixed to the front of the human-operated checkout lane, several minutes later as I made my approach: Starting July 1, county law will require the store — not to give us bags. We have to bring our own. Now, this is California and we’ve got our share of Gaea-worshipping idjits, to be sure. My irritation here is that they, I’m assuming, have little or nothing to do with this. Oh sure, you’ll find some quotes here and there from those who can’t duck the responsibility and are flailing about for an excuse…

The Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 Tuesday in favor of the ban, joining Sacramento and about 150 other communities in the state that have banned plastic bags that are not reusable. Supervisors said they wanted to end the use of such bags to protect the environment because they essentially last forever.

“This, to me, really is a no-brainer,” said Supervisor Patrick Kennedy. “It has the most benefit for the least inconvenience.”

Supervisor Phil Serna, who introduced the ordinance, said the bags have become ubiquitous and people will adapt to their demise by reusing bags.

Can we drop the phony pretense? This is about fucking with people. Period, full stop. Somehow everything seems to keep coming back to that. And we wonder why we go around aggravated all the time. The answer is, we keep voting for people who want it that way.

No, really, they really do want it that way.

It’s rare when a politician is as honest about his strategy as the New York City councilman largely responsible for the plastic-bag fee about to hit New York City. For his candor, Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn) ought to be considered a new American hero.

Here is progressive politics in 2016: “It works by irritating us into changing our behavior,” Lander said of the bag tax.

It works by irritating us. There can be some debate about the accuracy of one of those verbs, but not the other. Government, when it’s being honest, acknowledges it isn’t your buddy, your helper, your protector, your go-to source for inspiration and dreams.

Nope, the government is now proudly proclaiming itself your irritant.

We work hard at being, and staying…helpless. The Trump phenomenon has revealed this unfortunate tendency on the part of many so-called conservatives who, oddly enough, we see constantly braying about something they call “principles.”

“Never Trump” agitators continue to work themselves up into a sanctimonious lather, indulging in a puritanical alarmism about Trump they normally pooh-pooh when it threatens one of their favored heterodox candidates. Gone are the “half a loaf is better than none” lectures they delivered to hector conservatives into supporting Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many other imperfect and idiosyncratic candidates warmly welcomed into their “Big Tent.”

In Trump, they see untold horrors. But Hillary, as the Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens put it, is a “survivable event.” George Will, who has made a career out of tailoring his stuffy but substanceless conservatism to the sensibilities of pretentious, PBS-style liberals, now punctuates with it one more act of preening about supposed GOP indecency.

He is the shocked puritan, who can’t understand how Paul Ryan could end up endorsing such an imperfect man, as if Ryan were presiding over a canonization proceeding rather than a party convention.

I suppose these people, and I, are talking past each other when we speak of “conservatism.” To me, it’s a very important thing because a lot of it is invested in stopping liberalism, which I see as toxic. So it strikes me as odd when people add their voices to such a stoppage, and then when a champion emerges who doesn’t tickle their fancy, suddenly their “principles” compel them to pronounce him inadequate and suddenly liberalism is a “survivable event.” That looks to me more like a cessation of upholding principles, than a continuance of upholding principles. How else should I be reading it?

But I suppose there is an appeal in being helpless, waiting it out while the wrong people are in charge. It spares you from the burden of having to develop a workable plan. Perhaps, for this reason, there is a relationship between this, and the above-mentioned ambition to remain ignorant. It all has to do with the avoidance of actual problem solving. The latest example, at this point, is Pope Francis’ weird comments about gun manufacturers:

“There is an element of hypocrisy [for a Christian] to speak of peace and then manufacture weapons,” Francis said Sunday, according to three separate Italian-to-English translations obtained by the Washington Examiner‘s media desk.

The press was quick to react.
:
Francis did not outright use the word “hypocritical,” and he did not say that it’s impossible for a Christian to deal also in weapons. Both points, however, were heavily implied.

Engaging in an imaginary conversation with a Christian who is involved in the weapons business, the pope said, “‘No, no Father, I do not manufacture weapons. No, no. I have only invested my savings in the weapons’ manufacturers.’ Ah! And why? ‘Because personal interests are highest.'”

Francis continued, saying in a colloquial manner that the behavior of these men calls into question their ability to be good Christians and to follow Christ’s example…

Well, you know what else you have to manufacture when you manufacture guns? Bullets. Bullets aren’t cheap, and some among us who have made the decision to own firearms also burn our way through bullets; some of us more than others. It isn’t just because we love the great outdoors and are drawn to the smell of gunpowder, although there is that. We are directing our household resources toward this so that if we ever need to have such a weapon, God forbid, we’ll be properly equipped and ready to handle the situation.

Pope Francis ignored this aspect entirely. And I have noticed many among his defenders continue to ignore it. Many among those who do not defend him, but don’t criticize him either, see nothing wrong with these remarks. It is quickly becoming normal for people to entirely fail to factor it into their thinking, that a gun can ever be used for self defense. Even though, to many a gun owner, that is the entire point of having one.

What’s really being normalized, I’m afraid, is victimhood. It’s a “shit happens” mentality. If you get mugged you get mugged, just hand over the wallet, and turn over the information to the police so they can fill out the proper forms and report the statistics to the FBI at year-end…if you survive, that is.

Why don’t we have enough money? Why don’t we know what we need to know? Why are we aggravated so much of the time? So desperate, so helpless, so disillusioned, so insecure? It is by choice. Just because we don’t consciously realize it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. We’re choosing this.

I’m inspired by recent events…none of them having to do with politics. Well, most of them not, anyway.

Pretty sure I’ve written of this before.

Persistent conflicts among thinking humans, inevitably can be traced to a disagreement, recognized or not, about whether to proceed with the definition of details, and they are between one side with an interest in concealing these definitions and the other side which relies on recognizing them.

The side that is invested in concealing detail, will start conflict to derail the discussions, because that is their mode of thinking and this leaves them with no other choice.

Then, they will blame the other side for starting this conflict.

First that cool viral song my wife found:

…then, the cause for some real worry. Washington Post, via Maggie’s Farm, via Western Rifle Shooters Association:

After Josh Zeolla graduated from high school, he moved in with his girlfriend. He studied audio engineering at a community college and woke each morning at 2 a.m. to make donuts at a bakery. She ran her own photography business and paid their bills.

“I dated someone who ran circles around me,” he said. “I didn’t have the ability to help her. I panicked. I put down certain things she was doing because I was supposed to be the man.”

Zeolla, now 26, said the insecurity sparked a break-up, then a downward slide. He wanted to be the provider, but he wasn’t. He didn’t look like the muscular, confident men on television. He was afraid to express the feelings that tore him up.

When his car broke down one day at the grocery store, Zeolla couldn’t afford to fix it or retrieve it from the impound lot. He wouldn’t ask anyone for money. So, he dropped out of school, lost his job and landed on a friend’s couch.

“I was paralyzed by this definition of what I had to be in my head,” he said. “I just couldn’t see how I’d ever get there.”

I found Zeolla, who lives in Rhode Island, after posting a journalistic call-out on Facebook: “Millennial guys! Would love to hear how you define masculinity.”

The whole article is sloppy. The premises are sloppy, the contemplation upon them is sloppy, so they never get re-thought, by the writer or by the interview subjects. “I was paralyzed by this definition of what I had to be.” Also, “He was afraid to express the feelings that tore him up.”

Not only does that end with a dangling preposition, it’s entirely irrelevant. I know this personally. I’ve been in this situation; is there anyone who hasn’t? If the name of the game is to keep those feelings expressed, I’m sure I did a shitty job of it. Probably did a shitty job hiding them too.

But eventually, I solved the problem and expression of feelings didn’t have anything to do with it whatsoever. Hey…we’re looking for the “stark difference between millennials and their dads”? Think we found it!

But whoosh…the point goes sailing right over everyone’s heads. Revisiting the story of this main subject, whose surname-spelling has mysteriously changed…

Zoella…recalls running out of money and food after he lost his income. He subsisted mostly on peanut butter and water, he said, because meals at homeless shelters were for, in his mind, “disadvantaged women and children, people with real problems.”

One day, he applied for a job at a customer-support call center, one near a bus route. He interviewed, got the gig and, after two years of making $10 an hour, was promoted to a director role. His anguish started to fade, he said, after he realized he was in control of his life.

“Realizing I was responsible for my opportunities,” Zoella said, “that was the point everything started turning around.”

He began to think often about social pressure, how it crushes both men and women. He realized others had harshly judged themselves, too. He calls this “his enlightenment.”

Zoella will soon join his uncle’s plumbing business. He wants to expand it with his recently acquired management skills. He’s also dating someone new.

And then…the tragic ending…for now…

“I think masculinity, for me, is about balance,” he said. “The ability to show your heart to someone and at the same time be a protector, which is what I always wanted to be to someone.”

When you think about it, this is alarming. This person’s been to the bottom rung, and back up again, deserves probably more credit than he’s managed to give himself. And learned nothing. What, according to him, did he do to solve the problem? Answering the ad, being a good employee for two years, must have had something to do with it; somehow these items managed to go without being mentioned, except as asides. And that’s a serious oversight. This is where he — as a representative of an entire generation — exerted some control.

Perhaps, with a little bit more diligent attention paid to the events and the related issues…and the spelling…all involved in the article’s publication might come to realize a jarring truth: Masculinity is not a balance. It’s a direction, as extreme as any other direction, in time or in space: Get it done, and if you don’t know how to get it done, find out how.

Do it as effectively and as efficiently as you can, because life, no doubt, has other challenges in store for you after you manage to clear this current problem. From observations like this one, come all the gifts we enjoy in life — discounting the purely natural ones, like air to breathe, and sunrises. This is where humans manage to do good stuff. And the expression of feelings is not within scope.

A friend and I were talking at work about the tragedy of the kids-these-days…the stuff they can’t do that previous generations would’ve been able to do, what’s changed in their upbringing, and consequentially in their behavior. She’s in her mid-thirties, I’m closing in on fifty this summer. So it was worth contemplating, that people in our age bracket have been harboring these concerns for a good long time, centuries even. In each generation, these concerns could be crystallized into something specific, that remains consistent with what was expressed a generation previous and a generation afterward: Here is something the kids aren’t being taught how to do, and after I was taught how to do it, darn it, turned out I really, really needed to know it. So how are they to cope? The world’s still here, so perhaps these worries are overblown.

But on the other hand. It would be futile, and maybe even a bit foolish, to doubt that there is a quickening of sorts taking place. The rate at which things are changing, the way they are changing, this is in itself changing. The kids don’t see it. And while the old farts like us do see it, it looks to us like some sort of a curve. Well, a curve could mean anything. y=x^2? Or, y=1/(k-x)? One can be plotted indefinitely and the the other cannot be. And this is the summation of the fears of all the old farts, grousing about the shortcomings of the younger generation, throughout history. Trying to detect from the slope of the curve, whether or not we’re heading over a brink. It’s the Stein Rule, whatever cannot last forever, won’t. So is this, that? Are we approaching something that can be approached only so much? That’s the question. Parabola or hyperbola.

I am reassured when I see that Medicators have been with us throughout the ages. These are the hopeless addicts to immediate gratification, the ones who don’t define much of anything at all, in fact will resist the useful definition of pretty much anything save for their own feelings. Their opposites are the Architects, the ones who take the time to figure out the widget will start working when, and only when, this pinion is affixed to this shaft and meshed with that other pinion…to which the Medicator protests, “I don’t care how the watch works, I just want to know what time it is.” Technology has illuminated, and intensified, this split in how people think. But the overall point is, it has also saddled us with a tragic paradigm: It has made it easy, in a way it never was easy before, for the Medicators to come out on top. Seems every big firm, right before tumbling over a precipice and starting a downward slide, puts their creative talent under the authoritative whim of the uncreative and untalented. This is a product of technology. Without technology, there is an implied contract of “you may have what you can build yourself,” just as without law and order there is an implied contract of “you may keep what you personally can defend with physical force.”

All-around, that’s an improvement. But there is one thing I know is wrong, for sure. I don’t need to wait to see how the curve plots as the X-axis extends rightward. And history provides me no assurances about this. And I don’t need a windy paragraph to make the point, I can summarize it in a single sentence:

People who “don’t care about” things, expect to win.

That’s new, and it isn’t being constrained in any way that I can see. Indeed, this expectation that the outcome should be unilaterally determined by people who claim not to care what the outcome is, does not come from within. If it does, it is at least being reinforced from without. These races for President of the United States just provide further evidence for what I’m observing. History is going to record President Obama got elected to fix our health care system, and…did something about it. The sources biased in His favor will say He fixed it, those biased against Him will say He wrecked it, but they’ll all be obliged to agree He was the Health Care President. But, Obama doesn’t care about this subject. He is not a policy wonk. If He was, He wouldn’t be fun to watch, there’d be no entertainment value in His speeches, and He would not be the figure He is today. Ever watch someone who cares about whether something works, build the whatever-it-is? Boring. Caring about where things go, how it all works, sucks up a lot of time. It can be made watchable only by way of careful editing, reducing hours and days to just a few minutes. But how about designing it? Want to watch someone do the actual design? Even more boring.

Watching someone wreck something, or dismiss a rebuttal with the ultimate smackdown of “I don’t care about,” that’s entertaining. Technology has enabled us to wallow in the delusion that this is how things are built. But it isn’t. Things that actually work, are built by people who care. Things that don’t work, are built by people who don’t. It’s no more complicated than that.

Which brings me to bathrooms. Among those crusading for an end to the ladies’ restroom as a defining edifice of civilized society, a talking point has set in that they’re somehow the sane ones; their exclusive lock on sanity is illuminated by the fact that they don’t care. They don’t care about the gender of the person using the facilities, and they don’t care about the issue overall either.

They think they can sell that as sanity, because they think it looks like sanity. Maybe it does to someone else, not to me though. Sanity, where one side cares about how an issue is resolved and the other side does not care, looks like: Let’s ask the ones who care. While those who have better things to do, more weighty things on their mind, go off to attend to whatever those things are.

I know, that’s just crazy talk, right? It would end these “bathroom wars” in a heartbeat.

But, that will never work. It takes seriously something that never was intended to be taken seriously, this outburst of “we don’t care about.” That’s fake. The crusaders for the rights of gender-confused bathroom visitors not only care, they refuse to take no for an answer.

This is an old problem with the homosexual agenda. It passes itself off convincingly as something reasonable, by basing itself on the premise that “kids are born that way,” therefore the object of all this crusading has to do with a personal birth-attribute, over which the person in question has no control, much like the color of a person’s skin. It is on that intellectual foundation that the movement is treated, from within and without, as an anti-discrimination movement. All fine and good. But it does not follow, from that, that the movement should be granted the various things it demands. This is the true meaning of the Latin “non sequitur“: It does not follow.

How you “sexually identify” shouldn’t have any ramification whatsoever on what bathroom you visit. We visit bathrooms to resolve biological issues; to take a #1 or a #2, to put it delicately. This has nothing to do with sex, it has to do with attachments and fittings. But with the “I don’t care” crowd running things, I suppose right-wing blogs are the only place we can mention what should be immediately & ultimately obvious?

As saneperson commented last month,

Another little game that liberals like to play is, “Why are you wasting time arguing about X when there are all these far more important issues?”

But if their real concern was that public debate time is being wasted on trivial side issues, the solution would be simple: Give the conservatives what they want on this issue, and then get the conversation back on the important things. If you think the issue of who can use which bathroom is silly and not worth arguing about for 30 seconds, then great, stop arguing about it! If you think this debate is a waste of time, you can end it instantly by just conceding the point.

Of course they never, ever do this. 9 times out of 10 they’re the ones who brought the issue up in the first place, by passing some law or getting a court ruling forcing everyone in the country to do something that liberals want. As in this case. So they’re argument is, “This is stupid and unimportant. So you should just concede the argument and give us 100% of what we want.” No, if you really believed it was stupid and unimportant, you would never have brought a lawsuit over it or lobbied Congress or whatever to begin with. You’re the ones who declared this a vitally important issue. And now you’re mad at us because we agree that it’s important.

The real objection, of course, is not that we are wasting time by debating this trivial side issue. The real objection is that we are not getting the liberal agenda enacted fast enough.

And that really nails it. My beef with them is not with their apathy; I’m apathetic about a lot of things. Nor can I fault them for their passion. It’s the insincerity, by which they so casually cloak the latter under a disguise of the former. They’re supposedly not targeting homosexuals, or straights, they just want a non-discriminatory world in which everyone can be what nature has decided they should be. And, they’re not coming after our kids, supposedly. But they are. Elsa is supposed to have a girlfriend, the newest hashtag campaign says so. What does “coming after our kids” look like, if that isn’t it?

And this brings me to the latest hot new trend of “We distinguish ourselves by not caring about it, so let us unilaterally dictate how it’s going to be and we will NEVER take no for an answer”: #NeverTrump.

Once again, a tempest in a teapot arises, and it’s supposed to be all my fault, for noticing a glaring contradiction. These are supposed to be champions of conservatism. Their narrative is that Trump is just as much a liberal as Hillary, and since the election is now a contest between the one and the other, it’s a lost cause for conservatism. They’re just pointing it out, folks, and don’t you dare insinuate they’re campaigning for Hillary!

Here is one example:

I will not vote for a liberal. I don’t give a hairy rat’s ass how many made-for-TV slogans he repeats, how many empty promises he offers, how many insults he or his followers hurl…I don’t trust him. I won’t vote for him. and I do not respond to fascist tactics, period.

if you only dive-bomb my posts in an effort to change my mind? save it. you’ll never do so.

if you delight in hurling insults at those who still take the time to engage you? don’t be at all shocked when they respond in the only manner in which you seem to understand.

don’t bother with your asinine argument about voting for BIG GOV CANDIDATE 1 (Thing 1) in order to prevent BIG GOV CANDIDATE 2 (Thing 2) from ascending to the WH. we told you months ago that — should this shit sandwich on soggy syphilitic toast become the fare du jour — we would not partake.

you’re comfortable with compromising your integrity, your “principles”, to the point that you’ll support a lying, classless bully who exhibits NOT ONE characteristic indicative of statesmanship, nor any fundamental understanding of the Constitution he might become charged with protecting — on the basis of this year’s “Hope and Change”? good on you; I’m happy for you. I’ll never be there.

I will not shut up. I will not stop posting about my objection to this ASS as an appropriate choice for president. I will NOT vote for him come November. and I AM NOT ALONE.

continue haranguing the last conservatives of good conscience remaining in this country; you’ll find that you only cement our resolve.

Where to begin.

“Hurling insults” is something I have seen time and time again from the Trump-phobes, not so much the Trump-philes.

I’ve checked out this thing about Trump being some kind of liberal. Even in the smear jobs, he comes off looking like a mercenary who has become tired of the rules he has successfully followed. This is the very picture of the newcomer-conservative that the movement should be making efforts to welcome.

And, as I’ve pointed out many times before, this mistaken mindset of “I must be correct for look how incredibly difficult it is to change my mind” is a rhetorical tool of the left. Of liberals. We should expect this to be the case. If they had what it took to take in new information, to consider other perspectives and other views, they wouldn’t be liberals.

But my biggest problem is with the “I will not shut up.” Why not, I wonder? If you are in this crusade to uphold your “principles,” which have to do with conservatism, which has been entirely betrayed now that the 2016 election is distilled into a contest between one liberal and another…then, I would expect, your head is in 2018 or 2020. And your crusading would go there. Why are you crusading in the here and now? What is it you want — this year? We know what you don’t want; what DO you want, then? Given all that is possible as of now.

If your thoughts are on this year, and you will not shut up…which I’m reading as, you will not take no for an answer…I’m guessing you want to divert votes away from Trump. You know your third-party candidate won’t actually win, so — what part of this is not supposed to look like crusading for Hillary? Why is it, exactly, that people aren’t supposed to think this is what you’re doing?

I’ve pointed this out to Trump-phobes before. They don’t take too kindly to it. One of the most common rejoinders is, if they’re expected to shut up, then anybody who disagrees with them should also shut up, just as quickly and just as much.

This misses the point. They’re the ones with the narrative that says all is lost now. They’re the ones who, given that the contest is now between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, don’t care. Which brings us back to the original subject, the title of this post. Just like the people who don’t care how nature made a child who was born gay; and, like the bathroom warriors. There is a certain way people behave when they really don’t care about something. True apathy has a certain standard, and #NeverTrump crusaders, by continuing to crusade, are failing to live down to it.

The time has come to start spelling it out with one word.

Lately every movie that has some action in it, has to involve a butt-kicking female. What’s sad is that it’s like watching an alcoholic try to cure his alcoholism by drinking more alcohol, because there is a desire here to get a message out that women can be just as heroic as men. What’s missing is the heroism. They stand up to sexists, they win arguments, they kick butt. Actually saving the day though, as in protecting the lives of untold numbers of total strangers, that’s still a dude thing.

There’s supposed to be some creativity involved, too, but there isn’t any. The constant costume is this NeckToToeBlackCatsuit. Modesty Blaise made this look good. It makes sense for Batgirl and Catwoman to be wearing it.

But that’s not enough. Selene. Emma Peel. Black Widow. Aeon Flux. Trinity. Wilma Deering. Charlie’s Angels. Scarlett. The Invisible Woman. The Bride. Seven of Nine. Katniss. Yori. And, some women who don’t belong in catsuits…Lara Croft, Wonder Woman, others.

It’s the bare legs, stomachs, backs…skin pisses off feminists. Interestingly, a pleasing female shape doesn’t seem to arouse this kind of rage out of them. Odd, since their battle cry is supposed to have something to do about reforming unrealistic societal expectations placed upon the female physique. A hundred-pound strumpet doing high kicks in a NeckToToeBlackCatsuit does nothing to bring about such reform, and yet we are surrounded by exactly that because the studios don’t want to piss off the feminists.

Well if the story is supposed to involve some kind of realism, I can certainly go without the bare skin. What I can’t abide is the NeckToToeBlackCatsuit. It is a warning siren of studio cowardliness, coupled with extreme lack of creativity. Black Widow, that’s okay because she’s been illustrated this way in the comic books for years. It’s the cookie-cutter motion that piques my fatigue, and ultimately closes my billfold. Oh, we’re supposed to have action. Write in a butt-kicking female, and have the costume department order up a NeckToToeBlackCatsuit.

Well here is an idea. How about…get to the root of the problem? How about writing it so that the woman, rather than just kicking high, winning arguments, beating people up — does what the male action heroes do that make them heroes? Find the control box that activates the deadly satellite that will vaporize Hong Kong in X many minutes, risk life and limb to get to it, and prevent a disaster? Which, if allowed to happen, wouldn’t harm her personally in any way, but would end the lives of innocent people she has never met, and never will meet?

Yes, some women in action movies do something like that. But not as often as the males. The high-kicking in the NeckToToeBlackCatsuit, generally, is invested in self-preservation. And before she gets to that, she’s winning arguments, asserting her position of superiority and dominance over retrograde sexists who don’t have the correct opinions.

It’s the wrong approach. James Bond did engage in & win some arguments here & there, sometimes against bad guys obsessed with world domination, sometimes with scatterbrained females. But the primary emphasis was on saving-the-day. The studios are missing this key point, so in their zeal to elevate reform of cultural attitudes above entertaining the audience, they’re typically not even going about it the right way.

Reason (v.):

1a obsolete : to take part in conversation, discussion, or argument
b : to talk with another so as to influence actions or opinions (can’t reason with them)

2 : to use the faculty of reason so as to arrive at conclusions

Reasoning:

the use of reason; especially : the drawing of inferences or conclusions through the use of reason

Something has happened. In years past, these people who today call themselves “liberals” used to do some of this. Now they don’t, or at least, they do it much less often than normal people. Which really says something, because normal people are not involved in social-media “debates” as often as these people who today call themselves “liberals.”

Maybe I come close. But my observation is about normal people. So, those who go by this label, are involved in arguments a lot more, and they use reasoning a lot less. Taking all of the above definitions into account and applying it to everyday situations, we might think of “reasoning” as traversing a sort of route on a map, with facts at one end, conclusions at the other.

It’s pretty hard to live an adult life, even for a day or so, without doing some of this. So how do they get around doing it? Part of it is, conclusions are really just opinions, and to an emotionally-invested liberal there’s no distinction to be made between facts vs. opinions. In their world, this stuff is all in the same salad bowl, it’s all just something you say to make people agree with you.

Their enduring position, and their attitude, is “accept it uncritically or else I shall call you a troglodyte.” Or something worse: Bigot, sexist, racist, homophobe. Mere insults carry a threat of social shunning, but the “ist” words carry a threat of vocational ostracism. Using plain simple words, that means career-death. That actually means something to a conservative.

The unreasoners are encumbered by a paradox. They want to think their ideas are so emphatically, so self-evidently true, so elevated above the need for any inspection, deliberation or contemplation — reasoning — that anyone capable of even the most cursory level of responsible thinking would not only sign on, but assist the liberal in eschewing any dissent. Truth is, though, if an idea ever did rise to that level of “everyone gets it, no need to discuss,” it would lose all appeal for them. They don’t want to promote any ideas that are self-evidently true, that everyone with a working brain automatically gets. That’s boring.

That would be something like: If you think the police are prejudiced against you and you’re afraid of them…start this urgent business of protecting yourself, by not breaking the law. Or: If we want the economy to do better, make it less expensive to start, and operate, a business. Things like these make far too much sense, so this is all something to be left to conservatives. They’re much more fond of things like: What is our country doing to make the terrorists want to attack us? Or: We have to sign these international accords so we can bring the planet’s climate (back) under some kind of “control.” Or things that contradict not just common sense, but themselves: The economy is doing wonderfully because of Obama’s wise stewardship — it is urgent that we elect Hillary so she can clean up this terrible mess. Cops are racist, let’s have strict gun control so only cops have the guns.

It is only when they take such risible positions, that the unreasoners start flocking to their go-to, like bugs to a zapper: It’s just so obvious, there’s no point discussing it with someone who doesn’t get it. Ever notice? They don’t do that with things that really are just obvious.

Me, from the e-mails:

I look at it like this. Whenever someone is replaced in some occupation due to incompetence, you can count on two things: Things will get better over the longer term, and there will be lots of discomfort over the shorter term. There are variables involved but the variables don’t affect either one of those two things. They remain true even if the incompetent is replaced by someone else even more incompetent (since, at least, there is a forced acknowledgement that there was & is a problem of incompetence, whereas before there was no such forced acknowledgement). And they remain true even if the prior person’s incompetence was a closely guarded secret.

Now the political class that Trump opposes, or pretends to oppose, it really doesn’t matter which — it had one freakin’ job, no more and no less. Trump is obviously not a politician and doesn’t try to be one, but he beat ’em at their own game, and he did it time after time after time, all year long. Anyway you cut it, that’s incompetence. They had one job.

You know, people blast Trump for this and that, some of what they say is true but it doesn’t matter because they’re missing the point. Trump did earn those delegates. There was something hugely broken before he came along, and he effectively exploited the problem. Yes it does remain a large assumption to be made that “exploit” has something to do with “fix,” and there are a lot of problems involved in such an assumption. But that’s the assumption that makes American politics go, that is how it works. With any candidate.

Their moment-to-moment war-planning, and their life-long training, is to be liked & get votes. Donald Trump…just go and randomly pick from any one of all the things he says, on any given day, for proof of this…is not quite as fixated on the being-liked part. He’s been beating them like harp seals all year. And beating them at what they’re supposed to know how to do. And he isn’t supposed to know how to do that, at least, not as well. But, the results…they speak for themselves.

No, that is not because there is just unlimited awesomeness on Trump’s end. There must be some incompetence on the other end. Pretty hard to deny there is something significant taking place right now, and that it is the result of pressures building up over time while being denied an outlet. An outlet’s been found.

Over the long term, that’s a good thing.

1. The very first rule is to keep in mind at all times that, by default, the reaction to you being angry is either a) indifference or 2) laughter. That’s because “temper tantrum” is a term we use to describe the behavior of very small children. If you’re using one to get something you want, you have to change this dynamic somehow. Which brings us to…

2. Your temper tantrum M-U-S-T involve a cost, to someone, besides you. Someone in a position to fulfill your demand, or at least get things moving in that direction, has to be deprived of something they want. If this is not happening then you’re just embarrassing yourself.

3. The best way to throw a temper tantrum is always to go charging out of the room. Keep in mind though that you can only do this once. If you have to keep popping back into the room to remind people you’re still angrily charging out of it…that’s not providing incentive for change, that’s providing humor.

4. Remember that a temper-tantrum is a negotiation tactic. As such, you M-U-S-T give your opponent an out. What are the terms of their surrender that you’re offering? How are they supposed to bring your temper tantrum to an end? Your demand must be a) possible, b) practical, c) concise and d) clear.

‪#‎NeverTrump‬ folk have a lot of good points to make, so it’s a shame that they’re punchlines right now. They’re breaking all four of these rules. Making a logical decision from a plurality of undesirable options is one of the defining characteristics of maturity. Fantasizing about some other option being available, that isn’t, is a defining characteristic of immaturity. No, it doesn’t look “principled.” It looks like a little kid upset about the dinner menu, throwing a fit because he can’t have something else.

There are no party bosses, wringing their claw-like hands together in perplexed states of agitation, whining to each other about “Oh no! Bob out in Northern California doesn’t like his choices! We must find another! Donald Trump, stand down!!” Fun thought for you to have in your head if you’re Bob in California…but that is not happening.

Had a terrible thought as I was listening to the morning news earlier this week, about these so-called Climate Change accords. It’s a thought I’ve had many times before. It’s about the future, but it’s becoming less and less a prophecy about what is to come, and more and more an observation of what already is.

My thought is that the alwarmists are going to lose the battle of public opinion, but win the war of public policy nevertheless. I find this much more frightening than the prospect that they could win at both, because there are quite a few things that would have to change in order for that to happen. But for them to be unmasked as the plunderers they really are, and get what they want anyway — well, we’re pretty much there already, right? All that has to happen is actual ratification of these international regulations, taxes, penalties, various wealth-redistribution schemes…which “everybody knows” are just a big crock. Just like, some fifteen years ago “everybody knew” they were on the up-and-up, and we only had ten years before the oceans would boil away or whatever.

My dread is that “everybody will know” this is just a big scam, and we’ll have to line up and pay anyway just like cows falling in line before the slaughterhouse. It won’t be worth anybody’s time or energy to question it anymore. Just like the income tax, and ObamaCare, and…

The attitude was adroitly summed up a few years ago by Mark Steyn, describing what has become in the United Kingdom a sort of catchphrase: “It’s ‘ealth ‘n safety gone mad, mate! ‘ealth ‘n safety gone mad!!”

‘It’s ’Elf ’n’ Safety, mate, innit?” You only have to spend, oh, 20 minutes in almost any corner of the British Isles to have that distinctive local formulation proffered as the explanation for almost any feature of life. The signs at the White Cliffs of Dover warning you not to lean over the cliff? It’s Health & Safety, mate. Primary schools that forbid their children to make daisy chains because they might pick up germs from the flowers? Health & Safety, mate. The decorative garden gnomes Sandwell Borough Council ordered the homeowner to remove from outside her front door on the grounds that she could trip over them when fleeing the house in event of its catching fire? Health & Safety. The fire extinguishers removed from a block of flats by Dorset risk assessors because they’re a fire risk? Health & Safety. Apparently the presence of a fire extinguisher could encourage you to attempt to extinguish the fire instead of fleeing for your life.

And this is my feeling of dread. That the struggle of swaying public opinion has not been lost — quite to the contrary, it has been won, rather decisively. People do not support the idea of unproductive people playing the “turnstyle game,” skimming off the top of the business of better people who actually do produce things. But, it doesn’t matter. In the generations to come, that’s how it’s going to be done — even though everyone with viable tissue upward from the brain stem, can see what’s wrong with it. Doesn’t matter.

Reminds me of that old joke about how many New Jersey teamsters does it take to change a light bulb. “Twenty-three, you got a problem with that??”

I’m not sure how we got here. We could not have gotten here without some people acquiring influence over lots of things, people who are very much different from me. People who want to see their own granddaughters watch them as they wreck things. I can’t relate to that at all. In the e-mails, I was inspired to drop a bit of personal history…

I had a good thing going with the network security thing, but I had to go back into software development again. Earning potential wasn’t the reason. Certification issues are much closer to the truth, but there are certification issues required with software development as well, especially in the military, and I have noticed my brain does not work in the same way as the brains of people who build exams. That comes a bit closer to the truth. But the bulls-eye is, I’m unhappy being the guy who meets with the application developers and telling them, “book, chapter, verse, here are the new policies we are implementing, and what you have built, entirely permissible up until this day, is an intolerable infraction against what we shall be enforcing from this day forward. Tear it out and do it again.” That was my whole line of work, a destroyer. My background had been as one of the guys who built stuff, and here I was with my whole working life dedicated to wrecking things. So I went back into the business of figuring out how to make things work and making them work…maybe, from time to time, being faced down by an “Information Assurance” guy just like myself years ago and told No You Can’t Have Firefox. But that’s okay.

You can certainly admit “climate change is real,” and yet many more hurdles will remain standing in front of you before you get to the part about “we have to get these accords signed so the planet can be saved.” Nevertheless, even if I cleared all those and was into getting those new rules in place, because I earnestly believed Charlton Heston would be banging his fists on a beach centuries hence, damning me to hell if we didn’t get it done…I can’t relate to a guy who wants his granddaughter to sit on his lap, watching him do the dirty work. The work of a destroyer. Who wants their grandchildren to remember them as agents of destruction? Even if you can rationalize the destruction is necessary. That’s your living epitaph, seriously? You want that? You found a good reason to stop things, and then you stopped them?

Sorry, I just can’t relate.

And yet, somewhere along the line, this has become the New Normal. Unproductive people, make the rules — are expected to make up the rules — about how more productive people are, and are not, supposed to do their producing.

Part of what has gone away, I think, is the paralyzing fear of a bare cupboard. There are some of us who do like to be productive; when you get right down to it, who doesn’t? But there is also a feeling in place, absent in generations past, that if we fail in this objective then it’s not like anybody in our household is really going to starve. That seems like a good thing. On the whole, maybe it is.

But it has the effect of devaluing productivity, to a matter of taste.

Oh sure, yes I’d like to produce something, if I can have that…the way I’d like to put chocolate milk on my Cheerios if I can have that. And that’s it, that’s the change in mindset. We know this is a scam and we don’t want our so-called “leaders” to be pulling this scam on us…but, if they get away with it, and they probably will, it isn’t anybody’s fault. It’s just things the way they are. Line up, get ready to get fleeced, or don’t produce anything, and we’ll just adapt to that. ‘ealth ‘n safety gone mad, mate. We know it’s wrong. We’re going to accept it anyway.

We did not get here in the blink of an eye. It’s been a series of tiny, unnoticeable changes, one after another, taking place across decades. We’re about to let the unproducers run everything, in part, because throughout these decades it has become something of a pain in the ass to produce anything. To produce something, you have to define things, and throughout this period of gradual degradation it has become harder and harder to define anything. The undefiners have become more popular than the definers, because the undefiners are more fun to watch. It’s fun to watch a wrecking ball. And that right there is the true source of the problem. We’re seeing a conflict between instant and delayed gratification.

Because the unproducers and the undefiners are running everything, and we’ve allowed them to take over like this, many among us have experienced a new misery at work — and, I suppose, we all deserve it. We have begun to labor under the tutelage of a new breed of undirectors.

Me, from the e-mails, again:

Among all the people who are trying to get something done, there are two kinds: Those who obsess on process, and those who obsess on outcome. “Bureaucracy” is a dirty word, you know, nobody ever says “I want to build the perfect bureaucracy.” Why is bureaucracy a dirty word? Because wherever there is one, there is a sink-or-float formulation in place with regard to these process vs. outcome people. The ones who are obsessed entirely with process, to the point they neglect outcome, end up on top.

…Processes have advantages. They provide immunity in case of a bad outcome, at least, to those who follow them. Process is a contingency plan, much like a parachute in an airplane. Plane takes the trajectory of a lawn dart, goes crashy crashy, and to everybody who’s bothered to follow the process — strap on the parachute — it’s all good. “I did what I was supposed to do.” You see politicians say this all the time. People don’t take the time and trouble to explore this aspect of it…but this is why they don’t like bureaucracies. Would you get on an airplane under the command of a pilot, who was overly obsessed with his parachute?

That, too, has become a New Normal: The power-figure who has all the authority, but won’t accept the responsibility that comes with it because the bad results came about after he followed, unquestioningly, all of the rules. Put in simpler terms, we have come to see it as a qualification for leadership, that our leaders won’t demonstrate any kind of critical thinking. We have begun to say — Yes! I would fly on that airplane. Even if the pilot has exactly one more parachute available for his use, than I have available for mine.

For that to happen, we must have lost the vision, somewhere, of arriving at our intended destination in one piece.

But the undefiners have done more damage than simply to saddle us with a new management layer of undirectors. They’ve also rotted the layers further down, closer to the bottom where the work actually gets done. How could it have gone any differently? People are shunned if they try to produce anything at all, shunned if they try to be anything different from what is absolutely mediocre, placed under the directorship of undirectors who are promoted to be undirectors because of their own demonstrated mediocrity…occasionally, you find yourself relegated in the status of persona non grata if you produce anything at all.

And so now we find ourselves living in the age of the unworker. It’s one of those transitions that has been sneaking up on us; we wouldn’t notice it if we had the chance to live the last 80 years over and over again, a hundred times in a row. But if you could have been put on ice that many years ago, and revived in an instant in the here and now, the change would have all the subtlety of a whack in the balls. You see, our grandparents did not live in an era wherein one counted actual “calories,” but they lived their lives around the expenditure nevertheless. Grandpa clocked in to his shift, and then he spent miserable hours that were measured in minutes. But it wasn’t about misery, it was about honesty. He got paid for that time, as a matter of honor from his employer. And he worked for all that time, as a matter of honor from him.

Now, we’re supposed to go without so our kids can go to college. Learning what, exactly? Ah…here, the undefiners have flexed their muscle. We don’t know the answer, all too often. Some kind of degree, that will make them more employable? Employable in what? Doing what? Producing things? Or adding to the already-thickening ranks of unproducers?

Remember, our Secretary of State — representing all of us, in some capacity — wants to be remembered by his granddaughter as a guy who stopped more productive people from producing things. That’s not just him. That reflects in some way on us all. And it reflects on us all, because of this change that has taken place; back when your grandfather measured the worth of his paycheck in the minutes of his misery, Secretary Kerry would have had to do this preening as a private citizen, and would be effectively told by his country “all fine and good, you go down that road alone. And as an aside, you are one weird, screwed-up grandfather.” Today, his unproducer vision is dominant. There is some vision of his granddaughter, hopefully as a long-lived, radiant, wise woman, getting the message out to her own grandchildren what “we” did in the here & now. What we stopped. And those great-great-grandchildren are supposed to be grateful we didn’t trash the planet.

Just like we’re grateful that a few decades back, the Hollywood hippies scared industry away from building more nuclear power plants…oh yes, during the rolling blackouts we all feel so grateful. No, reason and common sense say the tykes from many generations from now, will still be struggling with anemic economic “recoveries” and therefore aren’t likely to show such gratitude. But that’s reason and common sense. The province of definers…not undefiners.

Because we’re living in the age of the unproducer and the undefiner, the ununifier has become dominant as well. President Obama is merely the most resplendent out of many examples that could be offered. Each one surrounded by a cloudy narrative that he is in fact inspiring us all to live together in peace and harmony…but then, uh oh, reality beckons.

He condemns these “routine” events and calls for more gun control each time another one happens. After the recent Planned Parenthood shooting, he said, “we can’t let this become the new normal…enough is enough.”

But when did it become the new normal? While the 2nd Amendment continues to be attacked each and every time another mass shooting occurs, just realize something: these events were never this “routine” until Obama became president.

It isn’t just Obama, though. He’s not on the ballot this year, and yet there is something remarkably different: The two candidates with the highest disapproval ratings, happen to be the two most likely to face off against each other in the general election. It has not always been this way. What changed?

Well if you actually listen to an Obama speech, or a Hillary speech, or a Donald Trump speech, the answer is crystal-clear. This is the age of the ununifier. The so-called “leader” who purports to be an exemplar of excellence, but takes the shelter appealing only to the mediocre, the shelter of process over outcome, the parachute on the doomed plane. The guy who’s going to defend himself, after it’s all turned to crap, with craven cries of “yes but I followed all of the rules.” Yes, Trump would object to this, insist that he thinks for himself…John McCain supposedly did likewise. But see that’s the problem. These “mavericks” make up their own minds — how? They walk into a room and lock the door behind them, kind of mull things over really, really good? It seems they don’t take advice from anybody. Where do they get their information? To whom do they listen? What do they read? None of them are ready to say. Three possibilities emerge:

1. They don’t want us to know who has influence on them;
2. They’re making it all up as they go along;
3. They acknowledge someone else might have influenced them, but are afraid to inspect this open question themselves.

Either way, their decisions are beyond question, certainly beyond appeal. What really concerns me more than anything else is, all three of them seem to be open to the idea that in a free and honest exchange of ideas, they may find out the decisions they made cannot withstand an assault of scrutiny, as well as an opposite decision could; and, this terrifies them. At least, that’s how it looks to me. I’m sure there is a narrative that’s supposed to be peddled that isn’t being helped by that thought, but that’s how it looks.

The ununifier is a Prima donna. And we are living in his age. More’s the pity; we really do need, like never before, some open and honest discussion of the ramifications of important decisions. And we’re not getting it.

Worse still, our political so-called “leaders” are getting a rise out of this increased polarization. It has infected them with a perverse incentive, to get the rest of us fighting about anything…about nothing, if the situation calls for it. And so now we have the disgraceful bathroom debate. Should men be allowed to occupy womens’ restrooms because of the way they “identify”? Back when your grandfather punched the clock and began his dreary minutes of productive labor, it wouldn’t even have been a question.

One liberal Facebook-friend responded to this graphic…

…with this…speaking on behalf of many, no doubt…

Is he going to take some little boy who identifies as a girl and drag him behind his pickup truck?

Is he scared of his own sexuality and wants to prove what a man he is?

++blink++ What the fuckety fuckety fuck…

Look, I know this is nothing new. I’m up on this dark fantasy Hollywood has had, that any males who stand for manhood, thereby thwarting their agenda, must be latent homosexuals. I guess it all comes from that sick, sick movie. But this crosses a line: The same brush is to be used to tar any man, anywhere, who sees fit to extend any kind of extra effort to protect a woman?

Oh yes, I do get it, it’s all about narratives with these people. And that narrative they want is the one of an ultra-limber, ultra-strong, sinewy bitch-in-a-catsuit, who weighs 115 pounds soaking wet, kicking three hundred pound men backward so hard that their unconscious bodies shatter brick walls as they sail through the air.

Well the problem with that is…and it makes me feel a bit awkward having to type this, truth be told, it seems like I shouldn’t have to say it. There are an awful lot of females in this world, they’re more than half the human population. And they’re not all sinewy bitches in catsuits who can kick heavy guys through brick walls. Some of them are little old ladies who need oxygen tanks and inhalators. And yeah, maybe a big strong protector. What’s wrong with that, exactly?

I thought liberals were supposed to be in favor of defending the weakest among us?

I guess not. I guess we have entered the era of the unprotector. What happened here? This thing we call “liberalism,” far from being friendly in any way to the vision of expanded liberty, has become drunk on the power of the expanding state. And an expanding state cannot find the energy for further expansion, in any environment, save for one saturated in feelings of misery and despair. People feel miserable and desperate when they feel like they aren’t protected.

So it’s: DON’T protect that woman, or me and my friends will insinuate you’re some kind of latent homosexual. Leave her unprotected, so she’ll feel miserable and desperate, and she will grasp for the “protection” provided by my friends who are running for office, as democrats, as a thirsty man would lunge for a canteen of water. That’s how it’s supposed to work. So don’t get in the way.

Rather like two bums getting into an argument over who gets to work the street corner. Except the other guy wasn’t a bum wanting to work a street corner, he was a concerned man spending a few extra minutes to defend a helpless woman against danger.

Ah…but there are still more connecting tendrils. We have entered the age of the unman. And, the unwoman.

Now, what’s written above is quite a lot of words, even before you consider there are hyperlinks to go with it all, leading to more pages with more words. How to bottom-line it all?

I would compare it to drinking water after eating Jalapeño peppers. We’re doing things that seem at first blush like they should fix the problem, and in an instant…but the “solution” we’re trying just makes the problem worse. Nothing gets better until we do a better job of defining things, and the solutions we’ve been trying all have to do with removing definitions, rather than re-invigorating old ones or imposing new ones. So the problem languishes, or even gets worse. So we try a bit more of what we have already just seen doesn’t work.

At this point, we’re like a man who has ingested so much water that his health is starting to see a new danger that wasn’t yet present when he was just eating the peppers, and is still asking for yet more glasses. The distinction between men and women, we’re ready to rend asunder — that can only mean, all other definitions are on the table as well. Producers vs. non-producers, workers vs. non-workers, people who abide by the law vs. those who flout it, men, women, excellent, mediocre…people who need help and protection, people who do not…weakening and erasing these differentiations, has not done anything to help us. And yet, the critical thinking has yet to make a comeback.

We’re on auto-pilot, and have no business at all flying that way. It doesn’t fit our situation. The aircraft nose is pointed downward, the “pilot” has a parachute and we don’t. Oh yeah, and he’s not in the cockpit either, he’s in the back of the craft, by the emergency exit…

Now might be a good time to wake up from the nap.

Oh, my.

Jack Jenkins is ThinkProgress’ Senior Religion Reporter and has a Master’s of Divinity from Harvard University. Zack Ford is ThinkProgress’ LGBT Editor and an out and proud atheist who has spoken at various secular conferences nationwide. This week, they went to see the new film God’s Not Dead 2 together.

You can read the whole thing at your leisure. The two things that really resonated with me were…

1. The nerd-slap-fight at the beginning, over the pen. They were both supposed to take the “reviewing” assignment seriously enough to take notes, but prepared for this by arriving, somehow, with only one pen between the two of them…the result of which is one liberal blaming the other for hogging the pen. Well that is worth a giggle and a snort. I know it goes over the head of a dedicated liberal, and non-liberals were likely never supposed to see this…but, isn’t that just like ’em? Because of this, the first two paragraphs read like parody of liberal entertainment sites, written by a conservative. Except, I think, they’re serious about it.

2. Continuing on to the very end, what you get out of it is the same as what you get when you take it upon yourself to argue with a liberal, on any given day. Here, I’ll summarize it: “You lost us when you acknowledged the victimhood of, or identified with, someone we don’t think should ever benefit from victimhood.” The difference between that, and the whole review, is just some volume of idle mockery. But that gets right to the heart of it. Trans-genders, gays, atheists, women, blacks, and illegal immigrants can be victims. Along with felons who are actually guilty. Boy Scouts, home-schoolers, business owners, conservatives, Republicans, stay-at-home Moms, whites, straights, men…and Christians, cannot be.

A tempest-in-a-teapot has emerged over whether the film accurately portrays the legal challenges some Christians have encountered as they freely exercise their faith. The producer of the film maintains that the plot is taken from real-life examples, and to bolster this point as listed 25 such cases at the end of the credits. The so-called review links to an effort to debunk some of these, but it amounts to nothing more than any given left-wing “debunking,” it’s far less of a debunking than an exercise in “we can’t [afford to] let anyone else have the last word on anything, ever.”

What I got out of the actual movie they don’t want anyone to take the time to go see, is a point that seems to have gone sailing straight over their heads. And it isn’t complicated: There’s a big difference between a state that is dedicated to non-establishment of an official religion, and a state that is dedicated to establishing non-religion as its religion. In the United States, we have arguably managed to achieve the second of those two things, albeit outside the purview of written legislation, through a chilling effect. Yes, that’s a real legal term, because it’s a real legal concept.

And here begins a fascinating discussion. Someone should make a movie about it. Actually, someone did, but the liberals, thinking they’re responding to & prevailing in this ensuing discussion, could much more fairly & accurately be characterized as refusing to participate in it. Because it acknowledges people could be shorted, slighted, wronged…the foundational premise of any civil-remedy system…while maintaining membership in classes liberals don’t like. And liberals refuse to participate in any contemplation, in a group environment or in solitude, that allows for such a possibility.

Finally — finally! — someone bulls-eyed it. Can you play the clip? if so, keep watching until the very end.

The other issue is, of course, that there are reasons why we have been herding males into boy-restrooms and females into girl-restrooms. It’s a “Chesterton’s Fence,” you shouldn’t be allowed to dismantle it until such time as you understand why it got put there in the first place. One liberal was admonishing me that there is a possibility that a girl can be molested in a girls-only bathroom, and a boy can be molested in a boys-only bathroom; my rebuttal to which, of course, was that the likelihood of such shenanigans going down was much higher with men being allowed in a girls’ facility. Which I’m sure the liberal, when he responds, will make untrue by chortling at it and invoking his magical “I Laugh At It And So It Becomes Untrue” powers. That’s the ethereal liberal realm; people don’t change their behavior in an altered environment, ever, unless such behavioral change would be helpful to whatever liberals are pushing. Buying doesn’t slow down when there are artificial prices built into things, active-shooters don’t gravitate to places that restrict the ability of bystanders to shoot back…human behavior remains absolutely static.

But the primary, most-important issue is that we’re deciding what truth is. Is it merely an after-product of a person’s feelings.

As Heather Wilhelm points out at Red State (H/T William Teach):

So why can’t we just live and let live? Bathroom law opponents “are crusading against a tiny minority that poses no real threat,” Jillian T. Weiss, a transgender rights lawyer and activist, wrote in Wednesday’s USA Today. In a way, she’s correct: Demonizing transgender people is unfair in any light. But Weiss also misses the bigger picture behind the bathroom brouhaha. It’s not a fight against people. It’s a fight about reality, and whether the government can dictate a certain version of it. Ultimately, it’s a fight about freedom of thought.

America’s burgeoning bathroom wars, so silly and banal on the surface, are actually quite deep: They fling together two conflicting, wildly incompatible streams of thought. On the transgender side, identity is everything. If gender is truly fluid, and yet truly knowable, then the denial of one’s gender identity is a hurtful denial of one’s very being or self.

This is also why the bathroom issue provides such a massive spark point: If the government agrees that trans men and women can access the bathrooms of their choice, they are officially validating the view that gender is no more than what you feel or believe it to be. They are ruling this view, in their own way, a fact—and if it’s a fact, can anyone really rightfully disagree?

In a way, this is all quite obvious, this business of government ruling on a belief held by only a few among us, as a fact, and ruling against the contrary belief held by the remainder. People actually “know” this already. You can see it in the faces and hear it in the voices of the sugar-pumpkins in the video. “I identify as a 6’5″ Chinese woman.” How say they? Well the honest answer would be — I’m not as “sure” about height as I am about gender identity, because this month’s bandwagon is all about gender identity and not about height. We’ll see about height sometime later, maybe.

That would be the honest answer. But once people climb onto the bandwagon, they can’t say that.

From the comments:

My problem with this bathroom thing is no[t] even related to abstraction or morality, but to plain and physical conditions of the people affected. Male has penis, female has vagina. There are not “Peginas” in nature, not in humans, no in animals, not even in plants.

Public bathroom separation is based on that very simple, binary, but undeniable scientific and natural truth. Everything else is opinion and PC. And that is all there is to it.

I think the liberals have really met their Waterloo with this one. One of their most popular tactics in recent years is to get hold of some cherry-picked statistic, friendly to their agenda, that makes the reciter-of-the-statistic sound like he’s somehow pulled in a Ph.D.-level of expertise on the subject overall. It doesn’t matter if the statistic is questionable, or even if it’s been entirely discredited. President Obama, for example, is still getting mileage out of the business with ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists agreeing with global warming. The shelf life on this stuff is quite long. And let’s be honest, your Republican Uncle is usually going to be unprepared for the recited-statistic. This stuff works, that’s why they keep using it. So the liberals get to crow about “get the facts!” Case closed.

They use that here too. But here, on this subject, they are promoting a view of truth that contradicts their “facts.” They’re promoting a new fabric, a new shape to the space-time continuum, that says facts must give way to feeling. They are reduced to their usual, routine protest that the facts are on their side, while simultaneously insisting on the premise that facts don’t matter.

Furthermore, if facts don’t matter and feelings count for everything, then there is only one solution available to us to keep our society functional. We’re going to have to have more separation, not less. Give up on that celebrated liberal one-world utopia. Build more and more walls, so that people can live in segregated-bathroom societies, or unified-bathroom societies, whichever way their feelings make them feelz. And then we’ll have to build more walls still. Guns-or-not; high-taxes-or-not; meat-or-not; birth-control-or-not; money-or-not.

If we must insist that all feelings are valid, and that they trump truth, but that we are unified in our desire for peace — there is no other solution.

Update 4/18/16: Thanks for the feedback from those who weren’t able to play the video. I’ve replaced it with the tried-and-true YouTube.

Isn’t it exciting to think about, if you had super powers, you could avert some sort of disaster that would otherwise bring bodily harm to one innocent, or many? Or, that you could do something amazing that might simply have a positive effect on their lives? Make their day? Give them a thrill? Advance the cause of science, technology, peace, love, understanding…?

And all that stuff?

I guess the answer to that nowadays is “Not only no, but hell no.” This permeating theme that used to be de rigueur in comic books, from Action Comics #1 on through decade after decade after decade, has given way to a different one: What if the super-powered being turns against us? And ya know what…that started out as an intriguing thought. You have to welcome any & all intriguing thoughts into the superhero genre, provided they truly are intriguing. And new. But by now I have to put together some sort of a PSA, for the benefit of writers of superhero movies and comic books.

This is not new.

Also, it’s bad story-telling. It might not start out that way, but it’s bound to end up that way. It has zero potential. You can’t take it anywhere.

“[blank]-Man, with his powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, constitutes a threat.” Alright…what do you do with that? You can do two things, you can neutralize this threat or not neutralize him. Those are your two options.

How do you make this reasoning even appear mentally balanced? You can’t. Batman gave it a good try in Dawn of Justice, but he did not succeed. And I suppose the writing staff intended for him to fail at this…although they don’t seem to be too sure about that. How do we even summarize the theme so it seems somewhat appealing to someone who isn’t either working in a security-related industry, or completely off his nut? Let me give it a good-faith try: “If any one among us has powers not shared by everybody else, then not one among us is truly safe.” Ooh. That’s quite good, if I dare say so myself.

Let’s slip it one notch further toward the brink of insanity: If we can make a world where not one person can do anything everybody else can’t do, we’ll all be completely safe. Whoops! That one toppled over the edge. Looks like we never had too far to go…

Which is kind of the point I’m making here. Not only can you not take this idea anywhere in fiction, you can’t take it too far in real life either.

It does form the basis of sensible enterprise security. I remember one time management wanted to know if someone on the team could conceivably be a threat…not sure how that question came about, but the answer we provided was far more sensible. YES he’s a threat, the same way everybody on the whole damn team is a threat, we have administrative privileges that are required for us to do our jobs.

It boggles my mind, knowing that there are people out there who never get tired of this boring theme. It boggles me even more knowing, after they’re all done watching the latest movie that uselessly cogitates upon the idea-that-can’t-go-anywhere “Golly, what if Iron Man decided to take out downtown?” — will lose no time in solemnly intoning, goodness gracious here’s ANOTHER problem, so we’d better give President Barack Obama more power to do something about it.

I had high hopes for Suicide Squad. The Harley Quinn actress looks like she’s turning in one of those memorable performances, of the “great acting, because it’s not that much of a stretch for her” variety. But, the first line of the first scene, crapped all over my hopes for it…

What if Superman decided to do that? Dunno…file it under “If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t have to bump his ass on the ground all the time.”

Stop it already. I liked it in The Incredibles, because it wasn’t a serious thought, except when the storyline was showing how flawed the reasoning was. Since then, it’s been done to death…and it started out tired. Now it’s an irritant. Stop. Now. Please. Thank you. ThatIsAll.

Last month (as well as previously) I noted…

1. There is an intelligence within the liberal movement, manifesting itself through its competence, taking on the responsibility of adjusting the agenda between election cycles. Let us call this the “scheming elites”…

2. There is a demonstrated ignorance within the movement as well, a bloated, voluminous, sprawling ignorance…We could call this the “ignorant commons.”

3. The liberal movement consists, in large part, of a sustained monologue taking place FROM the scheming elites TO the ignorant commons, with zero feedback…

This creates something of a question. New information has a tendency to do that; one mystery solved, two more created. How are liberals motivated, what’s their angle? It’s easy to see how the “scheming elites” gain ground when it’s harder for me to protect my household because I can’t get a gun, or when I spend more time on the employment sidelines because it’s harder to get a job. It creates an atmosphere of hopelessness and desperation, and democrats win more elections when people feel hopeless and desperate.

What of the ignorant-commons? They flock to social media to recycle the talking points the scheming-elites gave them. They think it makes them look smart. How it makes them look, is like Lenin’s “useful idiots,” except on the wane curve of their declining usefulness…

I have noticed a certain drive to make sure all discussions end a certain way. So I guess there’s a childish addiction to winning-the-argument. But that’s not all of it. I recall a certain tireless gadfly engaged in an endless push to smear a questionable George Washington quote, give it a good shove one layer down from the category the facts support — “disputed,” “unsubstantiated,” “frowned-upon by the experts at Mount Vernon,” — to the category the facts would not support. “Debunked” or the equivalent. The tempest in a teapot ground onward, through the sands of time. The weeks turned into months and the months turned into years. Embarrassing to watch. There is an example where “winning the argument” rapidly dwindled into a lost cause. They wanted the quote discredited altogether, couldn’t bring the foundation of fact to support that, got caught coming up short with it, everyone saw. And it’s notable because as an example, it doesn’t stand alone.

I can’t help wondering what they’d have to say about Lenin and the useful-idiots quote.

The motivation is to make sure the discussions end a certain way, not quite so much to win arguments. One of my exes was a lot like that. I used to call the conversations “‘This conversation isn’t over until it’s over the way I like it to be over’ conversations.” I suppose this reflects on me; wouldn’t such exchanges be finished in an instant, if I would simply give them what they want?

But what they want is lying. Worse than lying. Voluntary assistance in lying.

I might add that making sure all conversations end a certain way, in a monogamous relationship, is slightly less silly than making sure all conversations end a certain way on Facebook. How many of those are there? Whose job is it to notify you these conversations are underway?

But, back to the questions that might perhaps actually be answered. What motivates the ignorant commons to persist in their ignorance, and to spread it to others? This answers itself, somewhat, because of the enabling factor. Wallowing in ignorance feels so much better if others share in it. And so we are burdened in the tragedy of ignoramuses working so much harder at recruiting, at pulling others into mire of the ignorance, than those who have successfully extracted themselves work at keeping others out of it. Said mire of ignorance thus becomes — unnecessarily — a sort of rite-of-passage. Only some emerge, but everyone has to enter. Like a turn-style on a subway, everyone has to go through it. Is this a fixable problem?

I was given cause to think about this while reading Susan Stamper Brown’s recent column in Townhall. She, perhaps unintentionally, hit on an illuminating point.

While it’s true that liberalism is destroying America, it is also true that most liberals are not doing it intentionally.

Instead, they do what they do out of fear. Liberals are the casualties of social conditioning which inspires them to fear just about everything. That’s why they fear free speech, warm winters, competition, healthy debate, individualism, the Bible, guns, big sodas, freedom, capitalism, the U.S. Constitution, salt, manly men, a strong military, and so on. These irrational fears drive liberals to attempt to control their environment by creating safe spaces and collective utopias which always fail.

At the heart of liberalism is a quest for control over people’s lives and the insistence that a monstrous, micro-managing government offering minimal personal freedom is the only way to achieve fairness. If Americans understood how enslaved they are, they’d run the other way, but, “ignorance is bliss,” as the saying goes.

Yes, there is something to this. I recall a liberal who was oh so anxious to win-win-win the argument, and/or make sure the conversation ends a certain way…had to ‘fess up, in spite of all his passion for gun control, he didn’t have any guns. In fact, he was grasping for some GoodPerson strokes, having boasted of a personal oath to never own a gun, ever. He hadn’t anticipated the optics. A lot of people haven’t got an opinion about guns one way or another, but they can see what’s wrong with non-gun-owners laying down the rules about how guns are to be owned.

That’s a good issue. Gun control illustrates the distinction between “good fear” and “bad fear”; one enables you to prevent a bad thing from happening, the other enables you to prevent the living of life. Bad fear, like good fear, is rational on some level and that’s what makes it dangerous. There really is a possibility, however remote, that you will be run over by a car & killed if you leave the house. Just like there is a possibility that a gun you own might be used for nefarious purposes, or have some role in a tragic accident. But how far are we to take this? Do you really want to swear an oath never to leave the house, to go along with your oath never to own a gun?

Well, if you’ve never made the decision to “go ahead, damn the risks and let’s see what happens” — about anything, ever — that can look reasonable.

A second enabling factor is the elevation of theory over practice. Every now and then I’ll see a liberal turn this on its head, try to set up this false narrative that it is the conservatives who short themselves, shutting out reality, reciting the same litanies over and over again. Some will accuse me of never having been open to the idea that something I said might be wrong. Now, that’s funny. A typical morning for me will begin at around 3, when I put on some coffee and start inspecting why an application or library I’ve been developing at home doesn’t behave the way I want it to behave. Then I shower, dress, drive to work and spend another eight hours doing exactly the same thing. So my favorite rebuttal of “I realize I’m wrong about six to ten things, every day, before you kids think about getting out of bed” has a paralyzing effect on them that I have not missed out on noticing. They don’t know how to deal with it. It’s as if they’ve never been in a conversation with someone willing to admit he was ever wrong about anything; and that’s probably exactly what’s happening.

We know liberals are great at coming up with theories, but are terrible at refining those theories based on the lessons that come with practice. My favorite example of this is the Affordable Care Act. They want to tell us it’s an overall success, on balance, but there are two things you’d have to take into account to determine that: 1) things that were working fine before the Act became effective, and 2) things that are all cocked up in the aftermath. Liberals resolutely refuse to acknowledge either one of those things, let alone evaluate either one.

But that’s just one example. There are many others. The above-mentioned gun control, climate change, minimum wage…”My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.” Theory, practice; practice, theory. Liberals don’t look at this the way normal people do. That requires maturity. Admitting that practice contradicts cherished theory, or even just that it has required some minor adjustment, can require a lot of maturity that they simply don’t have.

There is a third factor. We have to mature to a certain level to admit nature doesn’t care what we think. That means there is a metaphysical truth writhing away, like a great sea serpent in a moat, seen or unseen. It doesn’t care who wins what argument, it is what it is. Liberals, having failed to develop the maturity to recognize this, seem to think “truth” is shaped by these conversations ending in one way or another. I’m guessing they’ve been commanded by the scheming-elites to log on, and do what they can do drum up support for this thing, or to dissipate the support for that other thing. But I get the impression it isn’t only just that. They seem like true believers, like they can go back and re-write history, make it so George Washington really didn’t say what they “know” he didn’t say, if that is how the dialogue concludes. This is rather ironic, since it’s a tacit admission that with one potent rebuttal inserted where it otherwise would not be, or removed where it otherwise would have existed, reality is likewise altered and suddenly George Washington really did say it.

It seems strange and surreal that there are people who don’t understand this, and therefore it is necessary to point it out in writing somewhere: Reality doesn’t work that way. But it takes maturity to realize that. For that reason, I maintain that some of the most productive and beneficial opinions, over mankind’s history, were formed by those who implicitly understood the limits to how much their own opinions mattered. It’s easy to prove the reverse, that the opinions that have done the greatest damage, or the least amount of good, were formed by those who thought their own opinions were all-important.