Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
People who think like adults argue like adults; therefore, people who want to think like adults, are obliged to argue that way. It can be tough to do sometimes. First thing to keep in mind is that you have to engage the ideas and not the people pushing them. What tends to get you bogged down here is pattern recognition: It is an entirely valid argument to say, for example, “I notice women who push the crappiest and silliest radical-feminist ideas have hyphenated names.” Certainly it is not politically correct, but if you think you’re noticing the trend because the statistics would support it, and not just because instances of the trend make a deep emotional impression on you, then it’s a valid pursuit to call it out & ponder what it might mean. But it’s teetering on a brink because the line between pointing that out, and saying some very silly things, can be fuzzy. “All women with hyphenated names have very silly and crappy radical-feminist ideas” would be an invalid generalization, clearly unfair to hyphenated-name women who happen to have sensible ideas. As well as a disservice to the person thinking it.
The salvation is to simply keep a decent and rugged tethering to the facts. Statements with “all,” “none,” “always” and “never” are to be viewed with deep suspicion, and upon receiving the inspection they deserve, will tend to wither and implode much more quickly than most others. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi said, only a Sith deals in absolutes. Of course, that in itself is an absolute statement, so…hmmmm…let’s move on.
For this reason, I don’t like observations like “liberals are stupid” or “liberals are mean.” It sounds like something a frustrated third-grader might say…and, there is the other matter that it isn’t true. Have I not met some liberals who are pretty darn smart? Of course I have. How about nice liberals? That one is a bit tougher, I’ll admit. Certainly I can round up for you a lot of liberals who like to think & say how nice they are, in short order and without putting much effort into it. But you would be well within your rights to say, Try Again Freeberg, it doesn’t count because the liberal is not as nice as he or she thinks he or she is. This would happen quite a few times, in fact you and I would eventually achieve some proficiency in recognizing this muted-down streak of effeminate-male anger, like Captain Hawkeye Pierce getting ready to explode into some self-righteous monologue about whatever. The “aggressively non-threatening NPR male” rage Harry Stein was writing about.
But, at least among the women, there are some liberals who are genuinely nice. One Aunt by marriage, on my Mother’s side of the family tree, comes to mind. These types do genuinely mean what they say when they indulge these fantasies about a “fair shake” for the latest fashionable minority/victim group. They just don’t understand the wretched ultimate effects of the policies they favor as they indulge these fantasies.
Here’s the thing about generalizations, though: Because generalizations fail so often due to their well-understood intellectual fragility, they are, in fact, extremely valuable. That would not be the case if they could be easily debunked all of the time. But contrary to popular belief, they fail often because they can be easily debunked — pay attention to this part, now, it is critical — almost all of the time. Almost. They are like the canary in the coal mine. Fragile, therefore first to expire, therefore there is meaning to be inferred from any situation in which they’re not expiring.
All too often, you take a large group and apply a generalization to it, which upon encountering reality & the facts, implodes almost instantly. But then you carve the large group into smaller groups, reapply, and after a few rounds of division you find the generalization works. Or, at least, you’re lacking in any facts that will vanquish the same generalization again, and you’ll have to allow it to survive, tentatively. This is possibly the beginning of understanding a cause-and-effect relationship. In our example of the genuinely nice liberal, who never seems to be a male, theory: It is more important to males to achieve cosmetic superiority to other specimens, than it is to females, because of the “peacock” attribute of the male psyche. And, the effort to achieve cosmetic superiority to other specimens is exactly where liberals lose their genuine nice-ness, as well as where their credo ceases to make any sense. I’ve criticized them for this many a time, and I’m not done yet: Making a perfect new world in which we’re all equal-equal-equal, to show how much more worthy you are compared to other people? The contradiction is completely devastating, completely unworkable — and not very nice at all.
All of this is a lead-in to my observation that the easiest generalizations about liberals, which crash and burn instantly when we review our factual encounters with real-life, real-smart, real-nice liberals…suddenly find new life when we divide the arithmetic set of “liberals” just a tiny bit. And my “didja notice” moment here is, the number of times we need to divide this arithmetic set in order to give the generalizations a new leasehold on life is: once, into two sets. A simple, clean bisection. I actually noticed this quite some time ago, and have since reviewed the generalization to see if it’s be knocked into the dirt by reality yet again. With that one bisection, the re-pulverizing has yet to occur. Perhaps it will later, but for now the newer set of generalizations seems to be like a good one, and it’s certainly durable.
From this exercise, I perceive two halves. I value this perception rather highly, for if it continues to hold up, it may lead in to a road-map to liberalism’s eventual defeat, at least within this chapter of American history.
You have the ones like the kindly old Aunt, along with the not-so-nice peacock males and all others who aspire to be like her. Somewhere in their hearts there are these good intentions. This is why I’m throwing truly nice people into the same pot as not-truly-nice people, melting ’em all together and calling it a day: They all have it in common that they sincerely want other people, strangers who they’ll never meet, to have an easier time in life. Some of them have mixed motives — “I’m going to look like a better person than that other guy, over there, because I said something positive about gay people” — and others don’t. They favor policies that ultimately hurt the people they want to help. But they know not what they do. One of my favorite examples: Raising the minimum wage. I’ve explained it over and over to them, you’d think the idea would manage to get across: This does nothing to actually “raise” a wage, what it does is outlaw jobs that pay anything below a certain amount, which is being increased. Can we agree on that? I’ve been genuinely surprised to find out the answer is, YES, we can agree on that, until such time as we have to form an opinion about an issue, then the typical response is to just keep clutching to the same opinion they had before. Like a baby to a blanket.
Other examples: Affirmative action in contracting and hiring, to soothe and cool whatever residual racial tensions there may be. The predictable effect is toward the opposite. Raising taxes to cover a city’s, state’s or nation’s tax revenue and budget woes. Showing those dirty, rotten companies how ticked off we are that they are “gouging consumers,” but smacking them with a whole new layer of burdensome fees and regulation. All these policies have a predictable effect more-or-less completely opposite from what was intended, and yet these types will line up to support the same policies over and over again, thereby bringing a lot of harm to the people they claim to be helping.
People in this group claim to care, and on some level they do care. They’re just not thinking things out all the way.
Now, the other group exploits the first group. These are vicious cold-hearted bastards who know perfectly well that Barney Frank caused the housing crisis, Fast and Furious would get innocent people killed, that gun control does nothing to make a city any safer, that when it costs companies more money to bring a product to market they just pass it on to the customer. These people know all about all of this. They just don’t care.
These people are usually employed in some capacity, such that they achieve a higher level of compensation, job security, or both when the wretched policies go into effect and innocent people are hurt by them. Hillary Clinton doesn’t really think it makes no “difference” who caused the attack in Benghazi. Joe Biden doesn’t really think you’re a lot safer if you fire your shotgun twice. President Barack Obama doesn’t really think more lives would be saved by His “extra background checks.” These people are just plain liars. They know the truth is very different from what they’re saying, but they don’t give a hang.
Those are your two groups of libs: The ignorant, and the apathetic. Evidence-impervious, and scruples-devoid. No, they’re not trying to be uninformed, or to hurt people; these are not their central motivations. That’s the whole problem. Both groups have bigger fish to fry.
From all I have observed, liberalism over the last few years has been making some great progress in moving, as they say, “forward.” Battle after battle after battle, in the congressional districts as well as in the nation’s capitol, is resolved in their favor, often with the “progress” locked in somehow so that their opponents can never reverse it, even if there’s a sea-change at some future date. The gun control thing was the first notable exception, at least in the last year or two. By & large, since 2007 or so they’re winning every single argument. And if there is one single reason for this progress of theirs, I would say it is this: The division between the ignorant and the apathetic is hard to pick up. We’re living in a time in which it’s become toned-down, and subtle. It’s so hard to see, that even people who watch politics all day every day won’t notice it’s there; instead they’ll insist on calling the whole movement “liberals.” That matters. Advancing liberalism is really all about sales pitches, from the apathetic to the ignorant. And it succeeds when the ignorant agree to the purchase. The feeling right now is that these two groups are one and the same, so the ignorant have no reason to decline.
I further perceive that the winning streak will come to a stop, and reverse, if and when this division is re-emphasized, highlighted so that it is easier to see. We’re all guilty of being ignorant now and then. But who wants to buy something from some shyster who is obviously hoping you remain ignorant? Isn’t that when you hang up on the telemarketer, car salesman, real estate crook or MLM crony? That’s when liberalism stops; when the ignorant-commoners realize they are not peers with the apathetic-elites, and that the two groups do not share common goals. From that, will come the realization that the policies that are being sold to them, are not conducive to the objectives they want to achieve. But it comes only from that epiphany, which may be sudden or slow. A smooth-talking smiley-faced Republican can’t explain it to them. They have to learn, from their own experiences, that they’ve been sold a bill of goods in the years gone by, and the attempted-fleecing is still taking place.
In other words, they have to learn on their own to start taking a sensibly jaundiced view of things. It’s part of growing up.
The problem is: Too many of them think they’re already doing that, by reciting ridiculous and useless homilies about “Oh well, all politicians are crooks,” as if they are magical incantations that can somehow make bad ideas into good ones.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Rotten Chestnuts.
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Yup. I came to this conclusion quite some time ago. But you actually put it into words surrounded by a cohesive explanation.
- philmon | 05/04/2013 @ 08:53I think of it in terms of professional sports vs. sports video games.
The biggest per-capita consumers of sports video games are pro athletes. You can’t see a “lifestyle” segment about a pro athlete without an Xbox in the background. This is because of the wish-fulfillment nature of it — in your schema, they’re the old aunts who really, really want things to be better, but know in their heart of hearts that it can’t. Pro athletes play themselves in video games because they, more than anyone else, know that they can’t do what their cyber doppelgangers do in real life.
The kids (and me) who buy the games are the ignorant. We don’t know what the athletes in question can really do, but it hardly matters — I can lead the major leagues in homers with some minor league scrub, because I’ve got the cheat code and I know exactly when to press the “swing for the fences” button. I have the illusion of both control and competence (which pretty much describes your typical Democrat voter, no?).
But there’s a group I’d wager LeBron James’s salary never plays sports video games: Professional sports agents. They’re “the apathetic” in this example. Their livelihood depends, in equal measure, on knowing exactly what their clients can and can’t do, and maintaining your ignorance of same. In the video game world, I can take Random Scrub X and lead the league in strikeouts, because a) I know Random Scrub X’s strengths and weaknesses better than he does (there’s a number and everything), and b) I can hit the corners better than he can, because my biggest handicap is my beer consumption, while he’s trying to do it in real life in front of a million screaming fans while his mom is going through chemo and his kid’s sick. In this scenario, ignorance is the lifeblood of the industry — the agent who can convince fans that Scrub X is in real life the kind of pitcher he is in video games, and thus convince pro managers of the same, makes millions. The agent who believes his own players’ hype, though, isn’t an agent for too long. That’s where the Barack Obamas and the Hillary Clintons make their money.
Heck, there’s your GOP slogan for next cycle — Vote Republican, because life is not a video game.
- Severian | 05/04/2013 @ 13:04“My dear Toohey, don’t confuse me with my readers!”
- mkfreeberg | 05/04/2013 @ 13:07At the risk of sounding like a dumbass, I don’t get it…. even after reading the link. I assume it means something like “thanks for just repeating what I said in different words, jackass.” Guilty as charged.
- Severian | 05/04/2013 @ 16:05Oh, you probably have to read the book. Gail Wynand is not a simple character. The movie doesn’t really work consistently at properly servicing the book, although the line is a good one. I was just belatedly wondering if Ms. Rand managed to say the same thing I was saying, in far fewer words.
Which is a rather humbling thought to have. I make Ayn Rand’s work look concise?
- mkfreeberg | 05/04/2013 @ 16:26So we shouldn’t say liberals are stupid, even though they fanatically believe stupid things? Tell me, at what point are we permitted to call someone who believes stupid, evil things stupid or evil?
I’ve noticed THIS tendency: the conservative tendency to attribute liberal’s appalling thinking and behavior to “ignorance.” As if that made the toxic beliefs they cling to any less lethal! Liberals are at least ballsy enough to call their opposition evil, as per their beliefs. Conservatives instead wallow in the wishful thinking that if they’re nice to liberals, if they use mealy words and refrain from calling anything liberals do by name, if they give the liberals just a little more slack, someday they’ll win the liberals over. This is why the instant we get a republican white house, congress and supreme court, their spines all fall out. They want the liberals to LIKE them.
Any way, there’s a statute of limitations on pleading ignorance about right and wrong. It starts countdown about the time you learn to tie your shoes, and should be completely expired by the time you’re old enough to vote. If a liberal past 21 continues thinking like a liberal, if they continue to be ignorant, then it’s because they WANT to be and CHOOSE to be. And that right there makes them malevolent.
- rhjunior | 05/04/2013 @ 19:38There’s a saying about this, that one should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence. I’ve often thought that got said in the first place, because someone figured out it needed to be said; it can be a very hard thing to keep in mind, at times.
We know there must be such a thing as passive ignorance. If I were to propose that the government should go into debt and therefore sign IOU’s that our great grandchildren will have to pay back, so that today we can have, for example…free banana cream pies delivered to our doors. We know we have all these dingbats who will say yes-yes-yes, and it isn’t because they want government to be cash-strapped and it isn’t because they want to burden future generations with junk. They just don’t look at it the way you and I look at it, as a cost-benefit equation. They just like pie.
Perhaps, the way they see it there’s no other way they’ll ever get pie. $3.95 a slice might as well be a million dollars. They’re essentially giving up on the market system that’s based on people’s choices, because they’re tired of dealing with other people’s choices. They just want free pie for everyone. Does that make them “malevolent”? Probably. But, they were around when Reagan was around, and HE won. Twice. Overwhelmingly. How come that is? I think the ugly truth is, if you have so little fight in you that your only vision for getting pie is to have free pie handed to you, then you’re more likely to just go with the flow and do whatever the crowd is doing.
- mkfreeberg | 05/05/2013 @ 04:24So we shouldn’t say liberals are stupid, even though they fanatically believe stupid things? Tell me, at what point are we permitted to call someone who believes stupid, evil things stupid or evil?
We all believe some stupid things, though. As somebody (Chesterton?) said, the rational man will not marry and the rational soldier will not fight. Traditions are tradition because they’re shorthand for all this stuff — you might be able to talk a soldier into charging a hill with utilitarian reasoning and probability…. but probably not, because fear is stronger than bloodless logic. We need some level of “fanatic belief” to keep the social gears turning.
The infuriating thing about Our Betters is that they’ve arrogated to themselves the power to decide which beliefs will animate our society, based on nothing more than their own superior virtue. And then they wrap themselves up in what Morgan just called “passive ignorance” (nice phrase) to avoid making the obvious connections between the policies they say they favor and those policies’ obvious consequences. Throw in a little workaday hypocrisy, and they can keep voting for free pie forever while decrying the socially unjust pie shortage.
[I live near a college, so I see this behavior all the time. All my neighbors, for instance, are keen on school integration, because diversity is our strength. Except that my neighborhood was recently re-zoned into the district for that other school… you know, the diverse one. Suddenly I had far less neighbors].
The evil ones are the ones who know this tendency all too well, and exploit it. They know that liberals are all power worshippers at bottom, who really do believe that might makes right (why else do they rush to assign everybody to a class category? Labelling “The Poor” gives you vast power over them, rhetorically, intellectually, and economically via the vote). Do you really think Obama would lose a single voter if he straight up proclaimed “I deserve to be president, because I’m more enlightened and virtuous than you?”
- Severian | 05/05/2013 @ 09:13