Very thought-provoking piece in The Atlantic, which takes awhile to point out the obvious:

The people who are most knowledgeable about politics — and therefore, the ones who understand the most political jokes — also tend to be the most ideologically extreme. So it makes sense that political satire shows, like conservative talk radio and its Fox News spinoffs, are ideologically skewed: Their viewers are the kinds of people who know the latest news stories and what their fellow ideologues are saying about them.

Before writer Oliver Morrison gets to that though, there is an interesting story:

Political humor, in particular, might have an inherently liberal bias. Alison Dagnes spent years looking into this question for her 2012 book A Conservative Walks Into a Bar. She spoke to dozens of working comedians who self-identified as liberals, and as many who identified as conservatives as she could find. One of the reasons she posits for a lack of conservative satire is that the genre has always been aimed at taking down the powerful, from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam and 9/11. “Conservatism supports institutions and satire aims to knock these institutions down a peg,” she wrote.
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Peter McGraw, an associate professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, has argued for what he calls the “benign-violation theory” of humor. McGraw believes that humor results from violating social norms or by violating a particular person or group. But it only becomes funny when it’s placed in a second context that clearly signals the violation is harmless or benign. In other words, if someone falls down the stairs, it will only be really funny if that person doesn’t get hurt.

Earlier this year the journalist Joel Warner published The Humor Code, describing his efforts to test McGraw’s theory. Accompanied by McGraw himself, he visited improv artists in New York and stand-up comics in L.A. The two men talked to the world’s foremost researchers on humor and explored the vast joke collections of humor anthropologists. They even traveled to Japan to see if the benign-violation theory held up in a culture renowned for its (by Western standards) weird sense of humor. In each case, Warner and McGraw were able to use their theory to explain the various kinds of humor they encountered. But when they tried to put the theory into practice, by having McGraw perform standup — first at a bar in Denver and then at the Just for Laughs Festival in Toronto — it didn’t work very well. McGraw did manage to get some laughs eventually, but only after months of immersion and practice.

This attempt to provide an overarching theory of humor suggests that academic explanations aren’t much help to the professionals who are trying to be funny. Humor is a creative art that responds to a specific culture at a particular moment in its history. This response can take many forms: TV sit-coms, internet parody, late-night variety shows, cartoons, stand-up, sketch, improv. But in each case, the jokes only work if they’re perfectly timed and aimed at the right audience. [bold emphasis mine]

That makes perfect sense to me. It’s like the tumblers behind the knob on a safe. If the delivery and the timing are right, if the forum is compatible with the message that is being delivered, and if the audience is ready to here it, you get a click. If you only have two out of those three then nothing happens…which I imagine to a stand-up comedian must be painfully embarrassing. That would be what in the industry they call “dyin’ up there.”

This struggle to thrive in a particular genre isn’t exclusive to conservatives and satire. At the end of the 1990s, when Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show, conservatives dominated one form of entertainment media: talk radio. Liberals have never managed to equal conservatives’ success in that arena. The Air America network — whose talent included Rachel Maddow, as well as Saturday Night Live alumnus and future Senator Al Franken — filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of 2010. Even MSNBC has never been able to attract as large an audience as Fox News, the televised version of conservative talk radio.

Could it be that American political satire is biased toward liberals in the same way that American political talk radio is biased toward conservatives? Dannagal Young, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Delaware, was looking into the lack of conservative comedians when she noticed studies that found liberals and conservatives seemed to have different aesthetic tastes. Conservatives seemed to prefer stories with clear-cut endings. Liberals, on the other hand, had more tolerance for a story like public radio’s Serial, which ends with some uncertainty and ambiguity.

Young began to wonder whether this might explain why liberals were attracted in greater numbers to TV shows that employ irony. Stephen Colbert, for example, may say that he’s looking forward to the sunny weather that global warming will bring, and the audience members know this isn’t what he really means. But they have to wonder: Is he making fun of the kind of conservative who would say something so egregious? Or is he making fun of arrogant liberals who think that conservatives hold such extreme views?

As Young noticed, this is a kind of ambiguity that liberals tend to find more satisfying and culturally familiar than conservatives do. In fact, a study out of Ohio State University found that a surprising number of conservatives who were shown Colbert clips were oblivious to the fact that he was joking.

In contrast, conservative talk radio humor tends to rely less on irony than straightforward indignation and hyperbole. When Rush Limbaugh took down Georgetown student and birth-control activist Sandra Fluke in 2012, he called her a “slut” in order to drive home his point about state-mandated birth control. After the liberal blogosphere erupted with derision, Limbaugh responded with more jokes, asking that Fluke post videos of her sex online so taxpayers could see what they were paying for.

These are excellent examples, made all the more relevant by a common theme reverberating in recent years from Planet Liberal, that there is something innately inferior about the conservative mind for this failure to pick up on irony. That’s an understatement, by the way. Try arguing with a liberal sometime, preferably in one of the faceless forums known for unleashing incendiary rage by loosening inhibitions, like a comment thread in a blog. “Don’t you understand irony?” will come the retort, a few exchanges after the conversation gets a bit heated. It’s one of their Go-To’s. And yeah, turns out, it is possible to snarl at someone on a web page, if you really want to do it.

Left unexplained is, exactly what crime is committed when one fails to get irony. Liberals, today, have a lot more rage for this than they have for robbing a liquor store in Ferguson, MO. And nobody anywhere can coherently explain why that is. There is a bit of hypocrisy in the snarling, too, as the Limbaugh/Fluke example reveals: Limbaugh was doing a lot of joking over that, and in the midst of their hyperventilating the outraged proggies failed to pick up on it.

These examples formed the kernel of Young’s theory that liberals and conservatives look for and see different kinds of humor. Connover, the producer of The Flipside, has already voiced skepticism about Young’s hypothesis. “That’s another way of saying that liberals are smarter,” Connover said. “And clearly that’s not the case. Liberals are some of the dumbest people to walk the earth.” Young insists that hypothesis is not about intelligence; it’s about a preferred structure of jokes. She maintains that there’s nothing inherently better about liking ironic jokes over exaggerated ones.

I would say they’re not quite so much dumb, but let us say, blithely unconcerned with clarity. The passage excerpted ends with a graphic of Stephen Colbert, underneath which an editor has seen fit to append a caption that reads in part, “Stephen Colbert’s humor can leave his audiences wondering whether he’s making fun of conservatives, [or] the way liberals see conservatives…” It goes without saying that this comedian in particular is popular among the left, so this provides additional support for the notion that conservatives and liberals see ambiguity differently. It goes back to my previous observation that

Our “civilization” at the moment…is embroiled in a cold civil war…between people who refuse to define things, and people who MUST see to it that things are strongly defined before they can do what they do.

It is the “do what they do” thing that is the deal-breaker. There are liberals, here & there, who actually do work for a living, in fact there are entire industries that have been fairly saturated with liberals, taken over by them. Just as there are industries that have been taken-over by conservatives. Could anyone with some decent knowledge of contemporary politics, credibly envision a near-future event in which one or more of these industries switches sides? Conservatives give up tobacco farming, truck engine manufacturing, roof inspection, bridge design, in exchange for the industries they’ll take from the liberals — Hollywood, psychiatry, tort law, social work.

It’s pretty safe to say that isn’t going to happen. There are characteristics involved in these professions. The biggest attribute I notice is change-of-states. The crop is not yet farmed, the job is done, and then the crop is farmed. Psychiatry doesn’t work that way, of course. You stretch out on the couch, you pay your money, after awhile the therapist says “Mmmm, okay that’s very interesting, but at this point I’m afraid we’re all out of time. See you next week. We’re making fantastic progress!” But there’s no way to assess any sort of progress without anything changing states. Just like with the social work and the tort law and the making A-list blockbuster movies. Twelve months on, money will have shifted hands here & there, but all the situations will be unchanged. So that’s the big difference I’ve noticed, and in my opinion it’s a difference that essentially locks all the industries into whichever half in which we find them ensconced today.

And I connect that back to the ambiguity-thing. Conservatives don’t look at ambiguity the same way. It’s not a punchline, it can potentially be a killer. If you’re going to go walking out on a bridge your company just designed and built, you’re going to look at the measurements that went into building that bridge, a whole lot differently. So this Colbert-confusion is not going to be that titillating to the conservative mind, because that’s an evening show, and the conservative is going to look at the brain-teaser as not quite so much a punchline, as a piece of unfinished work. And hey, he just clocked out of work. If there’s more work to do, then fine, we call that “overtime” and who’s writing the check for that?

Liberals may see that as greedy or selfish. But the truth is that it’s just one of many transformations involved in reaching adulthood.

From Town Hall, by way of Right Wing News:

Earlier this week the United States and other western powers evacuated Yemen, citing concerns about security in the rapidly deteriorating country. On the way out of the country, U.S. Marines were instructed to destroy their weapons and U.S. vehicles were taken over by Houthi rebels.

Now, without a presence there, the State Department is arguing rebel Houthis can be trusted to keep their word and to respect the U.S. embassy until it can be reoccupied. Houthis have been seen on video calling for “death to America,” just brought down the U.S. backed Yemeni government and have ties to terrorism.

At Pat Dollard, a fascinating video clip of the press conference:

Asking for it back again, pretty-please. What a fascinating diplomatic maneuver.

But fear not, our head guy is on the job or something.

Someone somewhere…is going to isolate some part of this [new video] as perfectly encapsulating How Obama is Diminishing the Presidency…

But which is the Most Diminishing Moment? We have done our best to rank them, from least to most diminishing, below.

I’m in favor of #7 myself:

This is a controversial decision, but we can defend it: How many pundits know how deeply embarrassing selfie sticks are? We propose: Not many. This would however be the most damaging clip for an attack ad — if Obama could run again.

But my all-time favorite comment about this from the thread beneath:

This is an excellent example of how republicans and democrats see the presidency differently. Republicans expect the president to defend the country. Democrats expect the president to entertain them.

Yeah. Bulls-eye. Not your daddy’s democrat party, by a far stretch. No longer is it the “party of the working man,” more like the party of…party. Little boys wearing their fathers’ business suits. Babies who’ve been handed blowtorches. They don’t know what they’re doing, and are not sufficiently mature to develop the curiosity to go figuring it out. They mutter away in solemn tones about “everyone” being able to get “access” to “the health care they need,” but it isn’t sincere. Everything is just one big joke to them.

From Cracked:

Here’s something we’ve been wondering: How do superheroes have babies? Thanks to hours upon hours of analyzing fan-made diagrams on the Internet, we fully understand the ins and outs of superheroes making babies, but the birthing part is a little unclear to us. Mainly because most superheroines have so comically narrow torsos, you could barely fit a foot of intestines in there, to say nothing of forming an entire tiny human.

We realize that times and beauty standards have changed significantly and that we probably won’t see a plus-size female hero in a mainstream comic anytime soon. But, we would be equally happy with regular-size female heroes — or pretty much anyone who isn’t capable of taking cover behind a stop sign.

Of course, it’s nothing new to point out the unrealistic proportions of comic book characters — most male superheroes are already so muscular you’d swear they were smuggling steroid-infused watermelons under their skin, so who cares if comics exaggerate a few feminine traits here and there? Well, see, the thing is that giant muscles are primarily a male fantasy, while waists barely wider than your ankle are primarily … a male fantasy.

Yeah…ya know? I actually don’t think so. I’ve met just a couple of guys, ever, who wanted girlfriends who could “see her own toes without bending over,” which to me means, if I’m interpreting it right, no tits. Most guys don’t want that and don’t like that. Guys like curves and tits. I realize it’s February and that’s “argue about the depiction/selection of the female body, everywhere and all-the-time” month, but do we really have to argue about that? Guys liking curves and tits?

I really don’t think straight-guys started this trend, or if they did, it wasn’t out of a lustful fantasy. I think superheroines who are “capable of taking cover behind a stop sign” are just easier to draw. It is the lazy cartoonist’s version of the lazy scriptwriter’s “I’m getting way too old for this” or “I’m coming with you!” or “You’ve got to stop blaming yourself for what happened.”

It’s a vicious cycle. Cartoonists draw all females the same way, feminists (who would never dream of buying the comic book anyway) get extra ticked off about it, especially in February, so they shriek. The shrieking leads to pressure, and the pressure leads, just like pressure on a lump of coal making it into a diamond, to a tighter viewing frustum in which the female form can be safely depicted. Which leads to all the females being drawn the same way. Some more.

It’s a transformation that takes place slowly over time, like water wearing away at a rock. You doubt me? A quick look through history:

That’s from the seventies, when feminism was flexing its muscle and it was still okay to call it “Women’s Lib.” At least I think. Sometime around there. Note, there is room in her torso for some intestines, liver, kidneys, and maybe a womb. Healthy looking, if simplistic.

By the eighties, cartoonists had started to veer away from drawing women and men as formless blobs and developed a healthy curiosity about actual appearances of human bodies: Where are those muscles, which direction do they go, which ones stick out, how, and when? And Wonder Woman looked like this:

Again, room for a stomach, liver, lungs, all that good stuff.

With a few more years of feminist caterwauling, and the arrival of a new generation of cartoonists who evidently haven’t seen too many women naked, look what we have. She can now take cover behind that stop sign like all the rest of them. She’s got it all, except the guts or the room for them:

So yeah, all the female superheroes are drawn pretty much the same way now. Big round boobs that don’t resemble the real-life ones, born or bought, and a mop handle for all the rest of it.

But it isn’t because of male fantasies. Males have had fantasies for a good long time, for as long as humans have been reproducing. Also, fantasies lead to more creativity, not less of it, and what we’re seeing now is the death of creative energies. Not because of fantasies, but because of fear.

But, there are other items on the list that bolster this point. Like #1: “Every Female Character Sharing One Face.”

Yeeeeaaaaahhhh…I’ve been noticing this as well. And the example they provided is excellent, even eerie.

Who is this bitch anyway? There must be someone, somewhere, inspiring this, like CMSgt William Candy. The cartoonist’s mom? An ex-wife maybe? Or a soon-to-be-ex-wife?

Again, the question is what’s happening to creativity. If there’s a narrower range of products being developed, that’s an obvious decline, and not any kind of rise. Lustful fantasies, or any sort of fantasies, do not diminish creativity; they inspire it. Healthy or not, they stoke the flame. That is not what we’re seeing here at all.

From Chicks on the Right.

It really is true. Liberalism is a mental disorder.

Brian Williams is taking a temporary leave because of the “misremembering” thing. His Wikipedia page has probably the fairest and most complete recap of what happened here, but there’s a note above it that says the page includes too much. So it might do to pull that in here before the revision hits…

In February 2015 Williams recanted a story he had told about being aboard a helicopter hit by RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) fire and forced to land on March 24, 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His initial and subsequent reportings of the incident indicated that a helicopter in front of his was hit by the RPG. However, in a 2013 interview and during the NBC Nightly News broadcast on January 30, 2015 Williams inaccurately recounted the incident, stating that it was the helicopter he was on that was “hit and crippled by enemy fire”. His story was soon criticized by Lance Reynolds, a flight engineer who was on board one of the three helicopters that had been attacked. Reynolds and other crew members said they were forced to make an emergency landing, and that it was a half hour to an hour later that Williams’ Chinook helicopter arrived on the scene. Williams investigated the damage and interviewed crew members about the attack.

On the February 4 broadcast of Nightly News, Williams apologized, stating that he “made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” and extended his respect and apology to the “brave men and women in the air crews who were also in the desert.”

NBC News President Deborah Turness announced on February 6 that there would be an internal investigation into Williams’ Iraq reporting. On February 7 Williams announced that he would step away from the Nightly News broadcast for “the next several days.”

On the same day, a 2007 videotaped interview surfaced in which Williams described the helicopter incident in another way that contradicts the recollections of its crewmen. Williams said in the interview, “…I looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us, and it hit the chopper in front of us.” Williams had already agreed in his February 4 apology that no RPG rounds had been fired at his aircraft, but the statement also collides with the recollection of military personnel that the helicopter that did sustain RPG damage was at least a half hour in front of Williams’ craft, making it impossible for Williams to “look down the tube” of the RPG that damaged the other helicopter.

I’m struggling to reconcile this with what I know about the lefty-leaning types, the left-wing cloth from which Williams is cut. I’m taking it as a given that this misremembering event is an effect, of which the leftiness is a cause. My reasoning should become clear after what follows. I haven’t got much new information about this because by now, most of the ones I know have unfriended me on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, either that or we’ve reached some accord in which we “agree to disagree” and all that rot. Most of the lefties I can see are on the news, like for example, President Platitude babbling His gibberish about “high horse” and the Crusades/Inquisition thing…

In [President Obama’s] speech on Thursday, he said:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

Pharaoh Three-Putt then went on to explain exactly what “terrible deeds” He had in mind. Oh no wait — no He didn’t! We’re left to figure this out for ourselves.

Once again, it could be fair to accuse me of making the problem with such ambiguity, since a lot of people won’t see it. And that would at first appear reasonable, too. Obama is speaking in the context of a man being burned to death while a crowd watches, well, the Inquisition sometimes involved burning at the stake, so the point is made. Right?

And the answer is no. Ambiguity involves a plurality of interpretations; a disagreement about whether ambiguity is present, cannot be settled by people who believe it’s not there just because they lack the ability to see what causes the confusion. Obama mentioned the Crusades. The evidence, and common sense, compel us to regard all those as one big defensive war. They were a response to the Muslim hordes’ centuries-long attempt to take over the entire civilized world, and of course anytime you’re trying to control people, the very first thing you must do is to stigmatize as a “terrible deed” any act of resistance. We’ve seen Obama’s people do that repeatedly. ObamaCare alone is an adequate example, although there are others. So, sorry, I’m really not sure if He’s comparing immolation to immolation or not. He could very well be talking about something else. Why didn’t He take the time to clarify? He says “let Me be clear” an awful lot, why doesn’t He take the few extra words to, you know, actually do it?

But back to the main subject. How does the idiotic “high horse” remark connect to the Brian Williams debacle? What they have in common is this: Narratives coming undone. People of all ideological stripes love to talk about how they “wait for the evidence to come in before reaching any conclusions,” but in human existence, that is mostly mythical. We like to compose narratives first, then watch truth unfold to validate them. We all do this. It’s impossible not to. Against any example offered to thwart that generalization, the ultimate test would be to monitor human behavior in the presence of some event that is known to repeat, like a drumbeat, a sunrise, or a shrewish soon-to-be-ex-wife yelling about something. People start to form expectations around what has not happened yet, but that they expect to see happen.

People in positions of authority are especially likely to do this, because when unfolding reality fits into a stated expectation like a cog’s tooth into the gap of another cog, it looks like the right people are in charge of things. It’s a cheap and easy trick. Of course, it works the other way too; you have new questions emerging about whether the right people are in charge when reality doesn’t unfold that way. But that’s why we have spin. That’s why speechwriters make money.

Here we come to a key difference in the way lefties do their “thinking,” that distinguishes them from normal people, ultimately separating them from normal people: They are extraordinarily outspoken in their narratives, and yet when the unfolding reality confounds those narratives, the experience doesn’t even faze them. They are Medicators, and as such, they exercise a “process of adjusting one’s emotional response to reality as a first priority, with recognizing that reality as a distinctly second-place priority.”

Are you starting to see the picture now? Brian Williams didn’t lie. He honestly vocalized what was in his head, the problem is that what was in his head was whatever made Brian Williams happy, because Brian Williams leans left and that’s what people do when they lean left. President Obama thinks His patently juvenile rebuttal of “Christianity was doing it too” is somehow relevant, for the same reason Brian Williams thinks his chopper was hit by a rocket, for the same reason Obama’s fans think He is a gifted speaker or that the high-horse comment was some sort of brilliant point to be made. And this is why they unfriend you on social media, or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. This is why they do not revise anticipations of things after previous anticipations were thwarted.

It makes them happy to think this stuff. As Medicators, it is all about that; it is all about regulating the emotional state.

For the same reason I spread fertilizer around on my lawn, that is why they spread it around in their minds: There is a “lawn” of sorts in there, and they want it lush and green. You can prove that your rebuttals are meritorious and correct, all day long and until you’re blue in the face, it doesn’t matter.

Being Medicators, leftists don’t give two hoots about whether a perceived fact is correct, or if a stated opinion is worthy, or whether a recollection is accurate. They care about whether these things are pleasing to them — therefore, whether such things “belong” in their heads — nothing else. That is the real cause of the conflict. It’s whether reality is something you assess, measure, perceive and recall, or whether reality is something you choose.

Fact is, if they kept right on “thinking” that way but didn’t seek to control other people, there wouldn’t be any conflict at all.

Update: Thought it would be good to bookmark this as an example of those who think President Obama was somehow right in what He said. Yeah that’s right: The President said “lest we get on our high horse,” and in the subsequent words immediately climbed up onto a rhetorical high horse — and, there are some hardcore adherents who think that’s just fine, in fact that the message was overdue.

If the article itself underwhelms as an example, get a load of the comments.

There are few things in our modern world sadder than the spectacle of those among us who are secularly inclined, indulging in their legendary bromides about the evils of one thinking oneself better than others simply because of the thoughts in his head — and then, from there, proceeding to provide their own illustrious examples of exactly that. Seemingly without realizing they’re doing this.

From Top Right News, which you’ll note adds on Steven Crowder’s somewhat incredulous reaction to President Obama’s attempt to equivocate.

Let’s hear it for high horses.

As far as the cosmetics of it, the “Greatest Speech Evar”-ness of it…if I agreed with the sentiments of it I’d have to say Obama did not present the position very well. I grew up here and I’ve heard this from the snotty kollege kids already, “What about the Crusades?? What about the Inquisition??” It isn’t an intriguing argument to me, it’s more like 35 years out of date. I’m certainly not going to show the desired reaction and go something like “ZOMG What is President Obama talking about?? To the encyclopedia I go!! What are these ‘crusades’??”

Instead, it’s more like (0:52)

Obama: “Remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition…”

Me: Yawn…

Obama: “..People committed…”

Me: Is this the part where someone finally gets specific? Please expound. Can’t wait.

Obama: “…terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

Terrible deeds? So much for specifics.

I guess He’s talking about burning at the stake. That might compare to what we saw on the video that was released Tuesday. But, that’s still only a guess. What does He really have in mind? This is why it’s important to be specific.

Referring back to the first video, I have to wonder if “terrible deeds” refers to merely resisting a hostile takeover of the entire civilized world. Hey, stop resisting! That’s a terrible deed.

It’s like Ferguson all over again. President Obama consistently shows, along with a lot of other people, a disturbing fondness of portraying aggressors as victims. As anyone who’s been bullied in school knows fully well, this is what bullies do. They come up with false narratives, pass them off to people, and play-act like they’re the ones being bullied.

Related: William Teach writing at Pirate’s Cove: “I missed the part where Obama specifically said ‘horrible things in Mohammed’s name’.”

From Jihad Watch.

William Kilpatrick writes in the National Catholic Register (hat tip to blogger friend Rick).

A widely read Catholic news outlet recently carried a piece about the causes of Islamic terrorism. The conclusion? We don’t know what causes it, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with Islam.

That has become a familiar refrain. When bad things are done in the name of Islam, we are told it has nothing to do with Islam. To be fair to the author, Susan Wills, she relies heavily on two books by academics who have studied terrorism.

One would think they should know the score, but they are hesitant to come to any conclusions, except to rule out the one that would jump to most people’s minds when an Allahu akbar-shouting individual starts shooting in their direction.
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One of the academics Wills cites answers the question, “Why would anyone commit such acts?” with “We don’t know why. Even the terrorists don’t really know what their motivations are.”

The terrorists don’t know why? Then what’s the point of terrorizing?

Almost by definition, acts of terrorism are committed out of ideological motivations. The idea of terrorism is to spread an ideology by intimidating others either to accept it or else to cease resisting it. Drive-by shootings may have the effect of terrorizing a neighborhood, but since they are not motivated by an ideology, we don’t refer to gangs as terrorist outfits.

On the other hand, a suicide bomber who blows himself up in a crowded market is a terrorist. He does what he does out of an ideological or religious motive — not, as some terrorism experts would have us believe, for no particular reason at all.
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More to the point, many Islamic terrorists do have a thorough knowledge of Islam.

Take Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood Texas, shooter. He once presented a well-informed PowerPoint lecture on Islam to his medical colleagues.

Or consider the case of Umar Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” who was president of the Islamic Society of University College, London. In high school, he was known as “the scholar” for his extensive knowledge of Islam.

Then there is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State group. He holds a Ph.D. in Islamic studies.

Or take Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden, two of the most influential exponents of global terrorism. Both were steeped in Islamic doctrine.

It’s beginning to look as though those with the wafer-thin knowledge of Islam are academics with an agenda and press secretaries without a clue. Catholics would do well to think twice before lending credence to their highly politicized points of view.

It’s not just the established narrative on terrorism that’s at issue. Influential Catholics continue to push a variety of ideas about Islam that, although widely accepted by politicians and pundits, don’t hold up to examination.

Thus, we have otherwise reliable Catholic thinkers who maintain, contrary to mounting evidence, that Islam is a religion of peace, that Muslims are our natural allies and that Islamophobia poses a greater threat than Islamists. Catholics need to undertake an agonizing reappraisal of their thinking on Islam.

The nothing-to-do-with-Islam narrative is fast becoming untenable — and that’s because it has nothing to do with reality.

Blogger friend Phil came up with this during a discussion we were having at the Hello Kitty of Blogging.

Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that scientists are not immune to the non-rational dynamics of the herd. Many false ideas enjoyed consensus opinion at one time. Indeed, the “power of the paradigm” often shapes the thinking of scientists so strongly that they become unable to accurately summarize, let alone evaluate, radical alternatives. Question the paradigm, and some respond with dogmatic fanaticism.

We shouldn’t, of course, forget the other side of the coin. There are always cranks and conspiracy theorists. No matter how well founded a scientific consensus, there’s someone somewhere—easily accessible online—that thinks it’s all hokum. Sometimes these folks turn out to be right. But often, they’re just cranks whose counsel is best disregarded.

So what’s a non-scientist citizen, without the time to study the scientific details, to do?
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Your best bet is to look at the process that produced, maintains, and communicates the ostensible consensus. I don’t know of any exhaustive list of signs of suspicion, but, using climate change as a test study, I propose this checklist as a rough-and-ready list of signs for when to consider doubting a scientific “consensus,” whatever the subject. One of these signs may be enough to give pause. If they start to pile up, then it’s wise to be suspicious.

(1) When different claims get bundled together.
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(2) When ad hominem attacks against dissenters predominate.
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(3) When scientists are pressured to toe the party line.
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(4) When publishing and peer review in the discipline is cliquish.
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(5) When dissenting opinions are excluded from the relevant peer-reviewed literature not because of weak evidence or bad arguments but as part of a strategy to marginalize dissent.

There are twelve items on the checklist. I think #9 might be my favorite.

Another National Review piece, by Kevin D. Williamson, by way of Gerard.

Progressivism, especially in its well-heeled coastal expressions, is not a philosophy — it’s a lifestyle. Specifically, it is a brand of conspicuous consumption, which in a land of plenty such as ours as often as not takes the form of conspicuous non-consumption: no gluten, no bleached flour, no Budweiser, no Walmart, no SUVs, no Toby Keith, etc. The people who set the cultural tone in places such as Berkeley, Seattle, or Austin would no more be caught vaping than they would slurping down a Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s — and they conclude without thinking that, therefore, neither should anybody else. The wise man understands that there’s a reason that Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors; the lifestyle progressive in Park Slope shudders in horror at the refined sugar in all of them, and seeks to have them restricted.
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They cannot say no to their own children, but they can say no to grown adults they’ve never met.
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There are many conservatives who prefer organic food, who do yoga, who like trains, and who would prefer living in Brooklyn to living in Plano. De gustibus and all that. The difference is that progressives, blazing with self-righteousness, believe themselves entitled to make their preferences a matter of law.

And that’s the Left in short: A lifestyle so good, it’s mandatory.

Victor Davis Hanson, writing in the National Review:

Although we don’t hear much any more about “No blood for oil,” the lie about “Bush lied, thousands died” has never been put to rest.

What was odd about the untruth was not just that Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and the anti-war street crowd become popular icons through spreading such lies, but that the Democratic party — whose kingpins had all given fiery speeches in favor of invading Iraq — refined the slur into an effective 2006 talking point. That Democrats from Nancy Pelosi to Harry Reid had looked at the same intelligence from CIA Director George “slam-dunk” Tenet, and had agreed with Tenet’s assessments, at least until the insurgency destroyed public support for the war, was conveniently forgotten.
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No one, of course, noted that the initial success in Iraq also helped shut down Moammar Qaddafi’s WMD program in Libya and pressured the Pakistanis to arrest (for a while) the father of their bomb, Dr. A. Q. Khan. The latter nations apparently feared that the U.S. was considering removing dictators who that they knew had stockpiled WMD.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A part of the anger directed toward George W. Bush over the Iraq thing, came from the beltway mentality — unspoken, but practiced — that when you make your move to confront some sort of pressing problem, you shouldn’t go so far as to actually solve it. Solving a problem is forbidden, in fact, merely changing the state in some permanent and beneficial way is frowned-upon. You’re supposed to make a lot of speeches and generate a lot of movement, like a hamster in a little wheel. Passively wait for something good to happen, hog all of the credit for it, and if anything bad happens then blame your predecessor. Solve the problem? No. Just give a wonderful speech, use the phrase “come a long way, but we’re not quite there yet,” and go back to playing golf. For decades.

That almost looks like an Obama rant, doesn’t it? I don’t mean for it to be. It isn’t just Him. It’s the Washington way.

Along comes George W. Bush, to identify a serpent in the grass, give his reasons for removing it, and then actually getting it done. It’s quite the paradigm shift, and some people can’t handle it. Even out here, away from the capitol where all the real people live. Voters have a way of getting used to ineffectual leaders who give the same speeches generation after generation about the same problems, without doing anything to solve the problems.

Those voters are like me, though. Something breaks, we fix it or replace it. The difference is, they are unnerved by the idea of our leaders doing the same thing. Budgets, way “up” there, are not supposed to be balanced like we try to do with our household budgets; problems “up” there are not supposed to actually be fixed, pests are not supposed to be removed. When the matter is too big, or perhaps too distant, they just want to see speeches and nothing else.

Friend and former colleague started pontificating about the climate change hooey over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging. I took issue with some things because he seemed to be relying on the falsehood that the point of disagreement is about the actual “climate change,” as in, dissenters must be dissenting about the notion that change can happen. In fact, the point of disagreement is about the change being some sort of dire sign of end times, or even for that matter, abnormal. The rebuttal is not “No the climate is not changing, no it’s not no it’s not”; it would be more accurate to say the rebuttal is one of “yeah, it changed, like duh.”

So if anything, the people pushing the political proposals connected to climate change, are the ones denying climate change. But I’ve waxed lyrically about that before. In fact, recently.

This brings up another point, perhaps controversial, but not nearly as much as it should be: Climate change is not science, it is pure politics. My former colleague vehemently disagreed with that, but vehemence was all he brought. Last night, as it happened, my imbibing was limited to two glasses of red wine with an excellent spaghetti dinner. Feeling like I had an unfair advantage here. If time permits, I’ll blog more about the dinner later.

But, chose to sign off with this. By this time it was morning, and I’d determined brevity, or lack thereof, had no connection, none whatsoever, with the likelihood that my comments were being read or inspiring thought. It’s an “If I’m gonna be accused I wanna be guilty” thing; ten words would have been too long. So why not go for broke. Because there has to be some more discussion of this. We could even use, to coin a phrase, a national dialogue about it.

…you don’t think the climate change thing is connected to politicians?

It IS politics. It is a political *movement*. Here’s what’s going on, I’ll explain it to you here and then I’ll copy it to my wall.

The democrats figured out, that if you rely on public assistance for anything, you are going to vote democrat until the day you drop dead. (If you live in Chicago, you’ll vote democrat even longer than that.) It’s just a fact. Ever ask a so-called “centrist” who has no obvious reason to vote democrat, why they do it? It’s predictable what you get back: “Back when I lost my job in [year], if it wasn’t for [social program], I/we would have been SCREWED.” And some will tack on this thing about “Our grandparents went years without finding a job before FDR came along with his programs.” But, FDR didn’t want their parents to be able to work, he wanted them dependent.

It’s been eighty years since FDR. The democrats would have to be imbeciles to have not figured out, in all that time, that their continuing survival relies on creating and embiggening classes of poor and/or dependent people. How poor? At this point, it’s a pretty wide range of standard-of-living. It works if you’re living pretty damn high on the hog, but…are relying on programs to go to college, or send your kids to college. Yeah, the “free college” thing, that explains that. It’s an invasion into the layers of social comfort, the higher ones, that in times past would have realized their strength comes from the individual and not from government. They want those people, the “upper middle class,” to feel beholden to democrat policies so they’ll vote for democrat policies even when democrat policies suck. Which is often. So they need this. They don’t want you “educated.” They want you dependent.

And how poor can you be, and still serve their purposes? ALL the way down, baby, ALL the way down! Just a notch short of dead in the street (except in Chicago). If you’re homeless, you’ll vote democrat if they just give you a ride to the polling place in a van. They’ll give you presents. But, that costs time and gas and cigarettes and booze, so they’d prefer you not be homeless. But only a little bit. Ideally, to the democrats, you are not homeless, but so poor that you’re worried sick about becoming homeless any day, sharing a studio apartment with 30 relatives, pooping in buckets, a quick shuttle ride down to the nearest polling place. They don’t want you to make it, or realize your dream of buying a home, they want you dependent.

Those among us who are not yet independently wealthy, have to pay bills and satisfy some unsecured-credit obligations before we can realize the dream of becoming independently wealthy. And so we have expenses. That is the wall. Remember “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall”? Lefty governments always have walls around them; their ideas are “so good, they have to be forced,” as the saying goes. In America, the wall is a wall of expense, debt, and financial dependence. Just like communists, which is what they are — they don’t want anyone scrambling over that wall. So they make things more expensive. Don’t believe me, go and look at their positions on domestic issues. Each and every single one. Ask yourself: Does this make products and services cheaper, or more expensive? I’m sure you’ll find a lot where they make things “affordable,” but that just means they’re forcing taxpayers to buy it for people who don’t want to pay for it. When they have an effect on the cost of something, the effect, consistently, is to raise the cost. They’ve been doing it for a hundred years solid with no let-up. They don’t want you to make it, they want you dependent.

At this point, if you’re a democrat you’re thinking: If ONLY we could find a way to do ONE thing, and make *everything* more expensive. They have a way of doing that: Raising the cost of energy. See, they don’t want you to use the new light bulbs or any other kind of light bulb. They don’t want you lighting your house, or your apartment, they want you dependent.

If “climate change” was science, coupled up with some honest dread about what humans are doing to the planet, there’d be some re-thinking. Raise the cost of energy? There’s at least a good possibility that desperate people are going to leave a bigger “footprint” on the planet, than non-desperate people, so we should think about that. Well of course, they’re not thinking about that and they don’t want anybody else thinking about that. They don’t want you or anybody else thinking about anything, they want you dependent.

We have ways of figuring out if something is “science,” you know. A thing that calls itself “science” should involve experiments. It should offer results that are not only documented, but quantifiable. Repeatable. Predictable.

Climate change is not science. It is politics. The democrats don’t give a fig who does actual “science.” They don’t want you doing “science.” They want you dependent.

After all, it’s pretty darn hard to get democrats elected. When people pay attention to the results of domestic policies, over the longer term, then it becomes even harder to get democrats elected.

They don’t want you paying attention.

They want you dependent.

Thing I Know #330 says, “A man who doesn’t know the difference between a fact and an opinion, is not to be trusted in delivering either one of those.” It’s worth recalling that when we see these things that call themselves “science” that do not do science, as described above. Seems by now we’re at the point where hardly two to three days go by, without someone entirely lacking knowledge of the conceptual concepts, to any depth anyway, angrily lashing out at a skeptic, defending the “science.”

Everybody, it seems, likes to chant away with some homily about how we need more people thinking for themselves. It’s amazing how much anger is aroused if anyone actually does it. Seems to me that the confusion takes place among people who haven’t taken the time to figure out, or to educate themselves, about the difference between a fact and an opinion.

Recalling from President Obama’s State of the Union speech:

I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

That is a great enunciation of the wrong way to understand science. Ignoring for now the problem that Obama’s definition here for “best scientists,” which according to the structure of His sentence determines absolutely everything, is something like “scientists who tell Me what I want to hear about climate change” — scientific fact is heap-big different from scientific opinion. It might have gone over your head here, and if so you’re not alone because it’s a subtle thing, but the claim President Obama really made here is “I have managed to find some scientists who say human activity can have an effect on rising oceans, etc.”

What a brilliant orator. The honest restatement packs a lot less of a punch, doesn’t it? I can find some scientists who insist we never landed on the moon, if I really try.

This label of “science” has an appeal to the energized ideologue, similar to the appeal catnip has on a feline. If it’s “science,” questioning it is futile, and that’s exactly what ideologues want — don’t question what we say, it is futility to do so. And indeed, that is exactly the claim they’ve been making. The problem is, that only holds for scientific fact, not scientific opinion. What seems to have escaped their notice is that the scientific pursuits that have aided mankind most greatly, involved scientific opinions that were way-the-fuck-out-there.

In fact, it’s been pretty often that scientific innovation has provided us with this great benefit, as a direct result of testing theories that never even came close to surviving any level of critical inspection. Even software engineers apply that, on a daily basis. Let’s say some fool who doesn’t know what he’s doing, hands me some code. His track record is that his stuff doesn’t work, because he sucks at his job and doesn’t unit-test his stuff, and my intuition is that it isn’t going to work. But my “theory” is that it will. It’s not any sort of professional courtesy, it’s a desire to waste as little time on it as I possibly can, having resigned myself to the fate that I will have to waste some. So I devastate the theory by taking it seriously. The code works, is my default premise; I presume, scientifically, against what I think to be the likely truth. So let’s call it this way, and do an “experiment.” Whoopsie! Well, give me a ring when you fix your shit. Then I go back to what I was doing.

That’s exactly the way science is done. You make a theory. You build an experiment around the theory. The cool thing about software engineering is, you usually can achieve some certainty about the theory being proven, or failing that, you can achieve some certainty about the theory being refuted. Oh look, the database table had integrity, we ran your transaction and nothing else, now it’s lost integrity. That’s a rarity in the rest of science.

“Scientists say [insert fact here]” speaks volumes. It is the final word. Yes, challenging it is futile. “Scientists say [insert opinion here],” on the other hand…that says nothing. That’s what people don’t seem to get lately, one says everything and the other says absolutely nothing. You have to think outside Thing I Know #330 if you want to do the “science says” thing.

There’s really no mystery to it, we know why, and we know how: They whip out their patented “I laugh at it and it becomes untrue” magic-beam of thought destruction.

From the comments:

sorry aaron, but isn’t your reasoning contradictory? if more nuclear families = more production = more GDP, the left should like nuclear families, because they produce more money that will be spent by the governments, which translates in more job positions and salaries for them.

Holy smokes, what a load of bull. When has the left ever been worried about a supply stepping up to meet a demand, except where it concerns the supply of more law, agencies, regulations? They certainly haven’t been overly concerned about the government having enough money to spend. They use the rhetoric to justify higher taxes, but anybody who’s paid attention for any length of time knows what’s really on their minds is the higher tax. After all the taxing and all the spending, is the government running a budget deficit? Did it run one last year? Will it run one next year? All they know about it is “The home office told me the deficit went down under Obama/Clinton.” That’s the extent of their knowledge about budget deficits.

Putting it another way: Say all the IRS trucks get caught in traffic and burn up in a massive fire, with all the cash (and the hard drives, but that’s another story), and government doesn’t receive a single nickel before it has to do all this spending. All the year’s spending is from debt. Or, the car fire doesn’t happen, everything comes out fine that year, all the spending is from cash. The point is, what does the leftist care either way? They don’t give a rip. They don’t even know how much spending there is. Their position is that it isn’t enough, whatever it is. They just want it to go up.

Another interesting aspect of leftism, with regard to this issue, is about men getting married in the first place. Lefties have no problem with that at all. Once the marriage is underway, they have a big problem with it continuing; every divorce that might possibly happen, they want to happen. But you’ll notice when centrists and right-wingers say “Don’t get married in the first place if you’re not sure it will work in the long run,” they say that alone, there are no leftists joining them. That’s because married men are not free. Bachelorhood, for whatever else you might say against it, is freedom. Liberals hate freedom. Bachelorhood is driving your motorcycle down an empty highway, with a bunch of horsepower between your knees and fifty dollars in your pocket. Being a husband and a father is more like flying in a passenger jet; full of being told where to go, what to do, how to sit. Or, piloting it, since there are real responsibilities involved, and a shift that is endless. Or more like, a mechanic maintaining the jet. Or a luggage handler loading and unloading it.

Or, being given a pink slip and sent to the unemployment line. Oh yeah, leftists especially love that part. That’s the fuel that makes their other-society go, men being told they’re no longer needed or wanted, and get out, take your infernal opinions with you, leave your wallet behind. Telling a man to go away is how business runs in their world, how households run in their world, how the law works in their world, how kids get “educated” in their world. They can’t get enough of that. Workplaces, homes, entertainment, media, they want it saturating all those walks of life, men being told their positions have been eliminated, and hit the road, Jack, and don’cha come back no more.

This illuminates the irrationality of their obsessive-compulsive disorder: If you’re so keen on men being ejected, wouldn’t it make sense to back up the “don’t get married if it isn’t forever” folks? But the lefties won’t join in. If that advice is followed, there are fewer victims. The left requires victims. They want more kids from broken homes. Hey, getting democrats elected is actually pretty tough. And, they’re punch-drunk on the fire-the-man ritual. You can’t forcibly eject what wasn’t affixed in the first place.

Mother Jones, via Weasel Zippers: Mitt Romney, Republican nominee for U.S. President in 2012, is on board again…

During his 2012 presidential bid, Romney was dismissive about Democratic efforts to combat the effects of climate change, and he pushed for an expanded commitment to fossil fuels. But in a speech in California on Monday, Romney, who is considering a third run for president in 2016, signaled a shift on the issue. According to the Palm Springs Desert Sun, the former Massachusetts governor “said that while he hopes the skeptics about global climate change are right, he believes it’s real and a major problem,” and he lamented that Washington had done “almost nothing” to stop it.

Oh, so Washington is supposed to do something about that now…

Sadly, Michelle Malkin’s headline about this was probably the fairest one:

Mitt Romney to make minor tweaks to climate change stance until he’s elected president

So why can’t a “conservative” listen in an open-minded way to all sides of the climate change debate, impartially reach his own conclusion on it, and, should that conclusion merit a greater intrusion into our lives by the powers in Washington, start to speak out in support of that? And remain a conservative?

The answer has to do with the mistake made when the “global warming” movement renamed itself — and the rest of us allowed it to — into “climate change.” Consider what happens when things rename themselves. Companies rename themselves rather easily, because it becomes pointless for the rest of us to refer to the company by its old name. For humans it’s a little bit tougher, you have to take some time out of the other things you have to do in order to fill out some paperwork, then shunt it through a system that is clogged up silly with broken cross-references due to previous mentions of your old name. For political movements, it’s equally tough for the same reason, a lot of effort has already been plowed into making the movement known by its old name, and now all that branding has to be re-done. It still happens occasionally: “Progressives” into “liberals” and then back into “progressives” again; “Womens’ lib” into “Feminism.” This happens when the political movement has lost a lot of credibility and wants to get it back again, much like a criminal might steal the identity of an infant who died the year he was born.

For science to rename itself? Science speaks with the authority of science — a pity that is, sometimes, since we have a lot of ideas calling themselves “science” that are not reached scientifically. And so it does rename itself, and easily, when the renaming is justified. When the science actually changes, with sufficient significance that the renaming became an absolute necessity. That was not the case with changing “global warming” into “climate change.” The only thing that reconciles that is if you perceive the “movement” to be what it truly is, a political movement and not science. It was not renamed to accommodate or acknowledge the arrival of game-changing new evidence. It was renamed because it lost credibility as a political movement.

As a reference to the ignition point of controversy, to the epicenter of factional disagreement, the name “climate change” is outright fraudulent. We do not disagree about whether the climate is changing. That’s just dumb. In fact, no one has ever embraced any default presumption that the climate should remain static, like a ball bearing remaining round or a machine part remaining flat, except for the proponents of climate change legislation.

An honest name for this political movement would be something like: The “Put government in charge of the weather” movement. Or, the “Give us your money and we’ll save the world” movement. That is where people disagree, on this notion that a few should be given control over the resources and labor of the many, and this will somehow have a positive bearing on the planet’s continuing ability to sustain life. That is the epicenter. And it would reveal that the proponents of the movement are, well…perhaps they should not be united with their money in the first place. But back to the political movement. It is a splendid example of the true difference between conservatism and liberalism, in this day and age. The way I defined it:

What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.

Conservatives have no business supporting the “Give us your money or the planet is doomed” movement. None at all. Conservatives conserve civilization, and climate change is an attempt to wreck civilization, so civilization can be rebuilt into something else. Something like ancient Egypt, making Pharoahs and royalty out of only a few, enslaving everyone else.

So Mitt Romney wants to support that now; Washington should do something. We need a bigger government. Okay, my question for Romney is the same one I’ve had for lefties on this thing. Would an even-bigger government contribute to this climate change? It’s human activity after all. If not, why not?

Thomas Sowell:

What may be a spontaneous confusion among the public at large about the very different meanings of the word “equality” can be a carefully cultivated confusion by politicians, lawyers and others skilled in rhetoric, who can exploit that confusion for their own benefit.

Regardless of the actual causes of different capabilities and rewards in different individuals and groups, political crusades require a villain to attack — a villain far removed from the voter or the voter’s family or community. Lawyers must likewise have a villain to sue. The media and the intelligentsia are also attracted to crusades against the forces of evil.

But whether as a crusade or a racket, a confused conception of equality is a formula for never-ending strife that can tear a whole society apart — and has already done so in many countries.

More good stuff from Gerard, directing us this time to Chateau Hertiste: “A New Rallying Cry For Men”…

“Who bitch this is?” is an exhilarating assertion of patriarchal privilege packed into a pithy four word thunderbolt. It manages in just those mere four words to pack so many deep layers of privilege and masculinity it seems almost impossible.
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I believe that “Who bitch this is?” should become a rallying cry for a male generation in the West that has allowed itself to be pushed around by feminist nonsense for far, far too long. Reasonable debate has failed and the feminist establishment refuses to listen to rational concerns about where they are leading our civilization. Direct words need to be spoken, and this man Shinblade has gifted us with these four powerful direct words to show us the way forward.

So the next time some silly cow gets in your face, or puts her hands on you, or accuses you of being sexist: just stay calm and don’t allow yourself to become upset. Maintain your frame, look around, and then in a clear loud voice ask the room one simple and devastating question: “Who Bitch This Is?”

Update 1/25/15: What’s this shit I hear about grown men talking?

Because just about everyone has heard these silly things, like “Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam”, and reacted by either an eyeball roll, a shrug, or with uncritical acceptance. But John Hawkins points out that there are other ways to play that game, and although we don’t hear too much about these, they do a much better job of reflecting reality:

The more fully people become engulfed by liberalism, the more they embrace political correctness, groupthink, and close-mindedness until their thought process becomes little more than simplistic tribalism.
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Seldom do liberals realize that they advocate positions that are just as morally repulsive as the grotesque positions they habitually (and usually incorrectly) attribute to people who disagree with them.

Want some examples?
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2) It’s just as bad to support race-based groups like La Raza, MEChA, the New Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network as it is to back the KKK, the Aryan Nation and the American Nazi Party. They may have different levels of societal acceptance, but they’re all race-based groups that are hostile to certain groups of people based on the color of their skin.
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6) It’s just as bad to support kangaroo courts in colleges that make it easy for men to be falsely accused of rape as it is to be someone who accuses rape victims of having “brought it on themselves” by wearing short skirts. Either way, you’re blaming the victim and making it easier for innocent people to be victimized by the scum of the earth.

From the comments:

Each point in the article is an example of how liberals use identity politics to divide and conquer. The evil here is in not seeing people as individuals but as collections of demographic characteristics they can use to pit one group against another while always claiming to protect the downtrodden from oppressors. In reality they have no interest whatsoever in solving the ills of the downtrodden, they benefit directly from perpetuating the conflict.

Eric Erickson writes at Town Hall:

Destruction Because of Offense

It is a growing phenomenon, and it was on visible display last week. A group of terrorists was so offended by a publisher that the publisher had to be destroyed publicly as both an act of vengeance and an act of instruction.

The act of vengeance was directed against the publisher directly. He came under attack for his personal actions. He published something that offended the group. He published something that enraged them and, consequently, he needed to be punished.

The punishment could not be minor. It could not be something like heaping scorn on him. It could not be a public disagreement, a challenge or a debate. The subject, after all, is not debatable. The publisher had to be crushed, his livelihood taken, and he had to be ruined.

Ruining him, though, is not enough. There had to be instruction for others. The dictionary defines terrorism as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” One of those political aims is to let others know that if they speak out, they will be ruined, too. The terrorist must teach the public that if any of them causes offense, they too will be taken out. It is more than that, though. It is also instruction to self-regulate against offense.

Once a person has been visibly ruined with no grace and no mercy because, in this example, he dared publish something that offended the terrorists, the lesson is clear. Polite society does not want that violence and cannot abide the violence. So the public will step in, as agents of the terrorist under duress, to shut up any others who might stand in the town square and risk offending.
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In November of 2013, Kelvin Cochran, a former Obama administration official turned chief of the fire department in Atlanta, Georgia, published a book titled “Who Told You That You Were Naked?” The book expounded on the fire chief’s faith and encouraged people to turn their lives over to Christ.

In the book, Cochran said his chief end was “to glorify God.” He said that was his first duty even in his job at the fire department…
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…He said gay sex, like heterosexual sex outside of marriage, is a sin. For saying his job was to glorify God and gay sex is a sin, gay rights activists screamed loudly that he could not do his job. They accused Cochran, with no evidence, of proselytizing on the job.

The offended group of activists had to destroy Kelvin Cochran’s livelihood because his published work offended them. Mayor Reed of Atlanta complied.

These people, as Erickson points out, feed off the need of the rest of us to preserve civilized society. We see this over and over again, because it works. One day you say something, next day someone is clamoring for your head — and purely in passive-voice, as in, it isn’t worth remembering or commenting on who exactly is doing this clamoring, how many kindred spirits they represent in their passions, whether they’re even putting their names under something or remaining cowardly anonymous.

The day after that they have your head, and the day after that, someone else’s speech is being compared…again, in passive voice, it doesn’t matter who’s doing it because it seems like everyone is…to the contraband you spoke before your own head fell. It’s “over the line” or “beyond the pale.”

The power to destroy is symbolized in the power to unify without doing any actual unifying. What if the people who wanted to kill that editor in France, got together with the gay activists who managed to take down Kelvin Cochran? They wouldn’t play dosey-doe or give each other high-fives, would they.

J.R. Dunn writes in American Thinker:

American leftism has gotten an awful lot of mileage by monopolizing the moral high ground. It is the sole force in American that favors the poor. The sole enemy of racism. The sole comforter of rape victims. The sole protector of defenseless Muslims. The sole guardian of the environment, and so on ad nauseum.

It all falls apart eventually — with friends like the left, nobody needs enemies. But often overlooked is that fact that it’s bogus from the start. Any prolonged glance at the left reveals it to be an ideology of power, its major tool violence, its goal revenge.

Leftism has always been about revenge. The works of Marx are filled with fantasies of retribution and judgment. Their tone reeks of resentment and paranoia, with blame cast for even the most trivial. “The bourgeoisie,” Marx once declared in a letter to Engels, “will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.” That’s leftism in a nutshell.

When you and I want to send a message, we send it. We act as a force of light, starting with the intention that our audience should know something they previously did not know. This messaging works the opposite way, with a perpetual theme of “Don’t Say That.” The right thing to do is to marginalize it, trivialize it, perhaps study it. That thing in France illustrates vividly that our lives may depend on that someday.

But the more common way to handle it, unfortunately, is to integrate it, and to most emphatically integrate it where we earn our living. Do you work in a place where men have to fear for their jobs if they put a picture of a woman in a swimsuit on their desk or office wall, even if it’s pictures of their wives or girlfriends on vacation? You probably do. Just about everybody does, everyone who works in an office anyway. That’s actually wrong. It’s part of the problem. “I find that offensive…or, I’ve managed to cook up a scenario in which some person, who may or may not exist, could be offended…so you have to go.” That ought to be the way it works in some faraway land, of which we heard from some friend of a friend of a friend, some place we have no intention of visiting even if we want to travel the entire world someday. Should be a work of fiction for all practical intents and purposes, as realistic as Rapunzel offering access to her cloister by way of letting down her long hair.

Once again we see: liberals aren’t. In a truly liberal society, “offense” would be no big deal. We wouldn’t relish it, but it would be a paltry unpleasantness, an unavoidable thing, the price to be paid for living in a place that has freedom. Liberals are quick to make the claim that this is exactly how they feel, ironically, about taxes. But offense? Off with your head. We have all the one-liners memorized. “That might not be cool, know what I’m saying?” “I dunno, do we really need that?” “Someone might complain.”

That’s the real tragedy. Decent people, who genuinely appreciate freedom, live out their entire lives in the light and not in the darkness, become willing dupes of the darkness. We end up having ninety-nine more non-public spectacles, for every public one. That’s why there is the destruction. As Erickson points out, the destruction is not the point, it is merely a tactic. The point to it is the public spectacle, the message to be sent to everyone else. The publisher who is shot, or the prisoner who is beheaded, or the guy who said something wrong or displayed something wrong and has to be forced into administrative leave or early retirement; these are just ways to get that done. Gay activists, Islamic extremists, frumpy women who don’t want any pictures of girls in bikinis around, they all just want to open a can of whoopass…but to do that, you have to open and wreck at least one can.

Did I post this one already? Can’t believe I would’ve passed on it…

From Geeks are Sexy.

What’s really great about this sketch is it shows what’s motivating the other four people in the room. The narrative for success has already been written, the consultation with the expert is the formality added on to the end, as an afterthought. Dealing with details is a task relegated to the expert, nobody else is bothering with them.

By the end, Walter has learned his place: Reality is fine, but don’t screw around with the narrative.

Now what would have been even better, is if they tossed in a XINO who, out of incompetence, political expediency or just plain malice, gives the group the answer they want to hear about whether it’s possible to draw a straight line in the form of a kitten, parallel to six other straight lines that are red and not-red at the same time. Then of course they’d turn on Walter with something like “You call yourself an expert and yet you say it can’t be done, well Charlie over here found a way to get it done!” Or, at least he said he can, which is good enough. Certainly that’s all they wanted to hear. You haven’t long to wait to see this scenario play out, too.

From Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.

I wonder if someone went through and made sure each one of these assembly-people is a good cultural fit? I dunno…in my own experience, I’ve seen a formula played out again & again, something like

…where A is the fretting & concern over what people are, and D is the care to be taken about the things they do.

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, is proud to have a “spinoff” of sorts called Rotten Chestnuts. It’s a side-project within a side-project. It was supposed to be a group-blogging thing, and I don’t want to disparage the efforts of some others involved, depending on your point of view it still is one. Another legitimate point of view is that it is dwindled, or yet another legitimate point of view would say it has exploded and blossomed, into a fountainhead of the thoughts coming from severian.

If there was some kind of “publish or perish” quota in place, the other four or five of us would be in big trouble. Fortunately there isn’t, we offer up something that might be worthy here & there, now & then, about whatever. This is in accordance with the original design intent when we started the thing, so that’s a success in my book. But, one might say it has kinda-sorta morphed into becoming severian‘s blog, or at least, he has become the primary contributor.

Anyway. The Christmas season just past, started up a big ol’ debate both on the Hello Kitty of Blogging (somewhere), and on RC (here), about atheism. Because severian went after atheism. Note that a debate about atheism is not the same thing as a debate about the existence of God, although these two things are related and certainly do arouse the same passions. As G. K. Chesterton famously said,

Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion. [emphasis mine]

It’s a good thing to bear in mind when one reads and evaluates this comment…oh my…I’m just dazzled. Bedazzled. Not only impressed, but bowled-over, mind blown, at what a splendid — what other word could I use — chestnut it is. How fitting that it fell where it did.

You know that Atheism isn’t the BELIEF that no god exists, but the LOGICAL CONCLUSION that no god exists, right? Atheism is as much of a religion as off is a TV program.

I do believe the cuttlefish have been out-cuttled! Not that this is all anything new. The second half of it certainly is not. I grew up in a college town, and if I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times: “Atheism is a religion the way bald is a hair color.” There are even bumper stickers.

The first part is the part that fascinates, that is the “business end,” like the lit end of a match. The move is mundane: Let us tease out this minuscule difference, this distinction so fine it requires an enlightened mind to see that it’s there. Not a belief, but a logical conclusion. Oh yes, the scales are falling from my eyes, the atheists don’t believe differently, they simply have noodled out the proper and logical answer to the question while the rest of us continue to stumble around & bump into each other…

This brings to mind when a young father and his two very small children sat next to me at Starbucks. I was engrossed in some project on my laptop and wasn’t paying much attention to them, then I realized he was playing the same game with them that I played with my own lad back when he was about six or seven. The daughter, who was the older of the two but still on the light side of five, it seemed, was fixated on the meaning of the word “opinion” so the father was teaching them the difference between opinion and fact. Then he started teasing her: “It is a fact that Star Wars is great!” She looked at him a little bit sideways, started to figure out this was so much balderdash, but wasn’t quite sure. Being a fan of Star Wars myself, I thought it not out-of-bounds to interject: “Hey, that’s not a fact, that’s an opinion! Although it happens to be quite correct.”

And the capital-dee Dad completely got it, rolled with it, and the kids got it. Lucky kids. There is a difference between an opinion being correct, versus an opinion going through some transformation like a caterpillar into a butterfly and becoming a “fact.” Kids who are taught this at a very young age, have an advantage. It is an advantage not shared by the “atheism is just a logical conclusion” people.

They are the ones who lack the ability to tease out subtle but meaningful distinctions. This is proven easily. If we start out with the premise that they “get” something, and everybody else is stumbling around in this cloud of ignorance failing to grasp it, we remain in the smug-atheist’s comfort zone but that’s about all we manage to accomplish, and in so doing we encounter one contradiction after another. It’s a mess. Start with: How many other “beliefs” should we find, by applying this magical elixir of transformation-of-belief-into-fact, are not beliefs at all but actually logical conclusions? Well, just about all of them. In fact, I have a tough time thinking of any exceptions to it. Even the cargo cult people, who “believe” that building a replica of an airplane out of wood and straw will summon food and supplies from the sky. We would have to elevate that, along with all other beliefs benefiting from supporting evidence, to the next threshold of “fact,” or “logical conclusion.”

On the other hand. If we proceed from the assumption that it is the snotty-atheist who has missed out on something, and his deniers are the ones who get it — a funny thing happens. Everything falls into place. The first satisfying “click” we hear is this: The secular dude, along with everybody who agrees with him for the most part, is swimming eyeballs-deep in a brine of self-satisfaction which he’s all too eager to display to his opposition. There’s no uncertainty at all, not even trace amounts of it, no inquisitiveness. It is a zenith to which I have only rarely ascended, myself, and there’s something that impresses me about this, too: I do not think back on these occasions of ascension with the self-satisfaction, now, that I had back then. Learning did not follow; ignorance did. How can learning follow from an intellectual state in which one denies the necessity of learning anything? We should expect the arrival of new knowledge to be a happy occasion, enjoyed exclusively only by those who are ready for it. The first step is to say “I don’t know.”

Atheists, at least atheists like this guy, are just people who aren’t ready to say that. Somewhere they’ve picked up on this credo, that the first step to answering any question is to eliminate the option of saying “I don’t know.” That’s my impression anyhow. They seem to be saying “Okay when we’re done puzzling out this thing, we’re going to know the answer, whatever it is, with complete, absolute certainty, with not even a trace residue of question.” Now then with that out of the way, what’s the answer?

It’s silly. I don’t know how they get started on that. It must be from taking written exams, maybe? It’s like the storm being endured by the hardened brittle dead tree versus the mighty oak that bends. Those who have preliminarily excluded any reckoning with the basic human-knowledge concept of uncertainty, time after time, reach some laughable conclusions. Not only that God does not exist, but other things. Like the planet is in danger and we can save it only by unplugging our cell phones and coffee pots, those are two of my favorites. But those are not the only ones, there are others. We can end racism in this country by electing a black President, and treating Him more like a movie star than an elected official. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Conclusions so risible, they can arouse feelings of fidelity only from those who have preliminarily disclaimed any reckoning with this basic human-knowledge concept of uncertainty. They are bad ports, docked only by boats whose captains have sworn off any other port.

But I was particularly fond of this rejoinder:

No wait, hold on. This is bull****.

Let’s take your metaphor and run with it. So in this metaphor, religion would be like a fandom (or Star Trek or Supernatural or Firefly etc) and fandom does all sorts of things like hold conventions and hang out at websites and clubs and read material related to the show (so all that would be faith conventions, websites, church, holy text etc).

So atheism is like the “Off” tv ‘program’? But there’s conventions going on that are all dedicated to “Off”. One can find entire campus groups all devoted to “Off”, they even have buildings and incorporations. There’s countless websites devoted to “Off” and large amounts of fanfiction on it. That’s not even getting into the spokespeople that bill themselves as the biggest fans of “Off”.

In other words, if people can’t really have any devotion to the “Off” show, THEN WHAT THE HELL IS THAT HUGE GROUP OF PEOPLE DOING EXACTLY THAT???

To play with a Chris Rock quote: “Atheism may not be a religion, but it’s wearing the uniform of one.”

Seems to me it’s not the religious that need to be convinced atheism isn’t a religion, but the atheists themselves.

He devastated the claim simply by taking it seriously.

Dr. Jonathan Wai condenses the advice from the “Father of Advertising” David Ogilvy:

In 1963, Ogilvy wrote: “Nowadays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on ‘team-work’ is bunkum — a conspiracy of the mediocre majority. No advertisement, no commercial, and no image can be created by a committee. Most top managements are secretly aware of this, and keep their eyes open for those rare individuals who lay golden eggs.”

Joshua Wolf Shenk recently argued in the New York Times that “the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness,” and instead advocated for the idea of a creative network or collaborative approach. Apparently 50 years later, the emphasis on collaboration and teamwork continues to be popular. But Ogilvy argued that creativity comes from the mind of the individual.

Seems to me we’re talking about two different things here. Shenk cites an example of Shakespeare co-opting Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke. Which might mean something if anecdotes were data. They’re not, but let’s look at it another way. Have you got a fighting chance at coming up with such a renowned tale, shutting yourself up in an attic with a quill pen and ink fountain all by your little lonesome? For such a product, the team environment displays obvious advantages, most prominent of which is the benefit of feedback. Without that, you can scribble acts and scenes to your heart’s content, but how do you know they’re any good?

Everything creative, however, is not necessarily a play. Some of these works have to appeal not to the desires of large numbers of people from different backgrounds, but rather to nature. They work or they don’t work, as complex systems enjoining simpler things that either work or don’t work. In such cases, the committee is pretty much useless except perhaps for providing money. To make it work, figure out if it can work, how it can work, what needs to happen for it to work, someone needs to sit his happy ass down and get busy. A guy or a gal.

But that isn’t the real story of what’s happening here. The real story is the desperation. We have these people running around who are desperate to engage this “conspiracy of the mediocre majority,” to proliferate the mythology. The best evidence that it is indeed a mythology is the conspiracy itself. If committees were the fountainhead of true creativity, they could simply get to work and the proof would be in the pudding. There would be no need for articles of the sort Mr. Shenk has written.

So the protesters block a busy highway during rush-hour as part of the “police brutality” franchise-protest-fad…local news network follows some of them home to find out who they are, what’s their story, and do they have anything further to say. As in, something coherent.

This Noah character with the white-guy dreadlocks avoids discussing anything biographical about himself, insisting it’s not about him. Which is interesting, since according to the justification being pieced together here and there about the protest, the inconvenience deliberately placed on the rush hour commuters is insignificant compared to what is being endured by those subjected to the police brutality and stuff (As a consequence of doing things like robbing liquor stores and resisting arrest). And yet, young Noah feels uncomfortable with this conversation being caught on film.

Eh, I think in my book that does make it all about you, Mr. McKenna. Inconvenience, discomfort…such little bumps in the pathway of life are for others. You’re too good. That puts you above all the rest, and somewhere in here is a story because there has to be a how, what, and why to this difference between you and everybody else. That means it’s news.

I can certainly promise such questions would be foremost in my mind, if I was ever blocked by a living menagerie of snots from nice neighborhoods with nothing to do, while I was trying to get somewhere.

Hat tip to Kate at Small Dead Animals.

Or…we could research into the ongoing Internet feud about whether Martin Luther King was a Republican or a democrat. Seems there isn’t any definitive evidence on that question going in one direction or the other, so it drags on a bit. Although it has not escaped my notice, that those who insist King was, would be today, or should have been a democrat, seem to be simply reaching the conclusion they want. They start with a premise of “democrats good, Republicans bad,” and quoting from Martin Luther King III, who is just doing more of the same.

On discrimination, which ties into this, let’s first define what it is.

1. an act or instance of discriminating, or of making a distinction.
2. treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit:
“racial and religious intolerance and discrimination.”
3. the power of making fine distinctions; discriminating judgment:
She chose the colors with great discrimination.

The definition of note, here, would be the second one: Making a distinction on the basis of class rather than on individual merit.

Would Martin Luther King be a democrat today? I have a tough time buying that, because I think even democrats would admit this would require King to morph and mutate his own understanding of discrimination, according to what the party apparatus told him to do. From the famous Dream Speech:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream…I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

The observation we can make today, that I’ve made before, is that when democrats and left-wingers accuse Republicans and right-wingers of discrimination, when you look into it awhile you find they are not accusing the opposition of straying from King’s dream, that we join hands as sisters and brothers, the ugliness of the past put forever behind us. On the contrary: When you look into it, you’ll invariably find people on the left today are accusing people on the right of failing to discriminate the way the left-wingers want the discrimination to be done. They don’t put it that way, of course, but that is the structure of the complaint. Has someone got an exception to offer against that? I haven’t seen any.

The problem Martin Luther King emerged to confront, existed in the first place because of an ancient denial-against-definitions very much like this one, and King made reference to it in the excerpt above: “Live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘…all men are created equal’.” Out of political expediency, in order to get the American Revolution underway, the founders of the republic had to say one thing and do another. They had to act like liberals, applying “liberal” definitions of things, in this case, “equal.” This directly led to all the ugliness that followed. And here we notice that some things haven’t changed, in all that time. We manage to agree, across the political spectrum, on verbiage alone, and then the disagreement comes about when our friends the liberals start to play games with definitions. Equal doesn’t really mean equal, so equal treatment doesn’t really mean equal treatment. Discrimination actually is non-discrimination. All sorts of things start to become opposites of themselves.

And then they keep on keeping on. Because Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when color wouldn’t matter, and we would all join hands as a common people, the social strife behind us forever, sitting down at the table of brotherhood.

Problem is, if that’s going on, it gets really, really, really hard to get any democrats elected.

So would Martin Luther King be a democrat today? It’s possible. But if that were the case somehow, one thing we know for sure is that he’d have to be embroiled in conflict with party platform-makers, as they not only resisted the sentiment of his dream, but nurtured personal and career ambitions to ultimately defeat it.

Ara Maxima, via Gerard:

Liberals and leftists love to proclaim this to rightists of any kind, or even insufficiently leftist left-wingers. A veiled threat — you don’t want to piss off history, do you? Huh? Huh? Punk. Sign this petition for gay rights, bigot. Yeah, that’s right.

Unfortunately for liberals, this little sentence proves nothing beyond the liberal leftists’ own total illiteracy. They’ve clearly never read a history book if they think history’s side involves gay marriage, voting women, and mass immigration.
:
History has been extremely unkind to all kinds of leftisms, except that one that still dominates Washington DC, Brussels, and Boston. This is an uncomfortable truth for the Left. History produced all the Left’s bogeymen. Leftists imagine they can take control of the planet, abolish their enemies, and thenceforth history will be on their side.

Reading history, I am doubtful.

Just arrived in my e-mail, again, this time from the Brother-In-Law. In trying to find a source, which is an effort that has yet to bear fruit, I came to find out Allen West had also been engaged in the same search.

The word conundrum is defined as a complex problem that is often puzzling or confusing. Here are six conundrums of our contemporary United States of America:

1. America is capitalist and greedy – yet almost half of the population is subsidized.

2. Half of the population is subsidized – yet they think they are victims.

3. They think they are victims – yet their representatives run the government.

4. Their representatives run the government – yet the poor keep getting poorer.

5. The poor keep getting poorer – yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about – yet politicians (mostly progressive socialists) claim they want America to become more like those other countries.

And consider these following three observations about the direction of our current government and cultural environment:

1. We are advised not to judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are admonished to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics. Funny how that works, as we see the liberal progressives already jumping on the tragedy from Santa Barbara California. So what about the three victims who were stabbed to death, should we ban knives?

2. We constantly hear about how Social Security is running out of money. How come we never hear about welfare or food stamps on the verge of running out of money? Maybe the first group “worked for” their money, but the second didn’t. It is a simple case of printing money for political bribery and extortion.

3. Why are we cutting benefits for our veterans, giving no pay raises for our military and cutting our forces to a level lower than before WWII, but are expanding and increasing the benefits to illegal aliens? It is all about pandering for votes – and who cares about national security or veterans dying at the hands of their own Veterans Administration?

This morning I was reviewing some old e-mails, and discovered a comment thread I’d abandoned last month over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging continued to smolder after my departure. I had exited the conversation and re-directed my attention to more promising tasks, after one of those “moderate not a liberal” types had questioned my dismissal, as a model of the way we want things to be in this country, of the city of Detroit. Her rebuttal had something to do with Detroit being quite nice. She and her friends leaped to the conclusion that I must be entirely unacquainted with Detroit. On my way out, I decided to just let that one go, although it is in fact untrue; I’ve seen the place up close. It’s a warning to the rest of us, more than anything else.

I can resolve some of these conundrums: #5 explains #4 and #6. People gain a sense of direction out of a perceived need for having a sense of direction; you want to know where the waterfall is, when you gather the impression that your boat is becoming perilously close. By the same token, nothing anesthetizes against a sense of direction like a decent standard of living. What statement manifests an anesthetized sense of direction, like “We wanna be like Detroit”?

The problem with this nowadays is people don’t think they’re in that situation. They look at their hourly wages or their annual gross, and count themselves as “middle class” or “poor.” But in relation to the rest of the world, they’re not poor. When it comes to getting hold of the things they want & need from day to day, or hour to hour, they’re not poor. In fact, they’re “rich” enough that they feel like they can screw around with reality a little bit.

I’ve spoken with them.

Them: “Elizabeth Warren wins elections because she hears the voice of the little people, like us.”

Me: “If she wins elections because little people vote for her, then all politicians like her are always going to want more of these ‘little people’.”

Them: “Hmm hey what? Me no understand.”

When you can’t tell the difference between people fixing something and people breaking something, you are very far gone.

From Miss Cellania, who opines: “…it will be remembered, which is all that matters in advertising.”

But what about the globular wormening?

“…into the soul of progressivism.” Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, expounds on his research into the leadership and background of President Woodrow Wilson:

Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since “progressivism” is suddenly in vogue — today’s leading Democrats proudly wear the label — it’s worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president.

You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for.

The record should give sober pause to anyone who’s mesmerized by the progressive promise.
:
The old conception of absolute truths and immutable laws had been replaced by a “Darwinian” vision of organic change.

Hence Wilson argued that the old “Newtonian” vision – fixed rules enshrined in the Constitution and laws – had to give way to the “Darwinian” view of “living constitutions” and the like.

This is a period of America’s history that, for all of its influence on subsequent events, doesn’t get a lot of attention. That span of time between the two Roosevelts; to a casual and passive observer of history, it’s a dark foggy period.

There is a reason for this. If more Americans had a better understanding of this time period, they’d also have a better understanding of the true conflict between the right and the left. And the left, for the most part, represents those who have the incentive and the resources to get the final word in about what “history” has to say. They have the time to make sure they get to win all the arguments. Their opposition is busy living in that history, providing products and services to other people, which frees up the lefties to write up their essays and get them published as documents of record. Whatever might make lefties look good, is not only true, but “history.” Whatever might make lefties look bad, not-never-happened. Down the memory hole it goes.

On the teens and twenties, they haven’t got anything to say. So you have to take the initiative and study it yourself. Schools won’t teach it. They’ll insert a blurb about Teapot Dome Scandal, call it good, and move on to FDR saving the economy and defeating Hitler.

From Liberal Logic 101.

Thing I Know #52. Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.