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...
A third of a century into arguing with them on the Internet, I’m still struggling to figure out what the true difference is between liberals vs. normal people who think competently.
A lot of it has to do with feelings. When we grown-ups make a decision feeling a certain way, we are troubled by the possibility that deciding it at another time, with the facts remaining the same, in a different mood we might make a different call. This inspires reflection: Would we be wrong then, or are we wrong now? To a liberal, that proclivity toward emotional reasoning is a feature and not a bug. It seems like they live in a world in which all feelings have to be expressed, and making decisions about things is just another way of expressing them.
Sympathy has a lot to do with it. If you listen to a liberal’s rationalizations, you’ll quickly discover there’s some villain in the storyboard — there’s always a villain — for whom they have no sympathy, for whom they don’t want anybody else developing any sympathy. This confuses people because the liberal’s goal is to try to build a “new world” or “new society” that is “fair to everybody” and the temptation is to take them seriously when they say this. But, no. Talk to a young Marxist sometime about being fair to businesses. Talk to a young feminist sometime about being fair to men. There are certain loathed-classes, and what the liberal tries to do is emerge as an autocrat who directs the sympathies of everybody else, rather like a lawn sprinkler…and there is to be no irrigation, ever, in that particular corner. It’s the exact opposite of building a new and just society that is fair to everyone.
Change is a factor. Liberals are never going to see the potential downside of change until such time as the change has been fully defined…like, for example, if it’s change being brought by President Trump. Or, if it’s a funding cut against one of their cherished programs. In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with change at all, it’s like a six-year-old deciding on more sugar on his cereal. Change change change!
There is a lack of consideration for consequences. It seems liberals simply don’t think in those terms. They run their liberal megalopolises for decades and decades and decades…not a Republican to be found anywhere in Baltimore, Chicago, Seattle. That doesn’t stop them from blaming Republicans when things turn to crap. The rest of us are left to wonder, at what level of consciousness do they fail to establish the linkage between what was done, and what ultimately happened? To a liberal, their noble intentions are what matter. How the souffle ultimately came out of the oven, is irrelevant.
There has to be one epicenter of chaos, some originating point where liberals start making dreadful decisions. A point where the trolley is yanked off the tracks — contributing to all these other hazards, which are really just effect flowing from this common cause. But which one? They overlap somewhat.
Doubt has much to do with it. The liberals with whom I have argued are untroubled by doubt. I suspect my experiences are far from unique. I saw it back when their guy was in charge for eight years, and I’m seeing it now. Those of us who find ourselves in conflict with the liberals, about even simple things, have doubts about things because we’re adults. We don’t like making decisions with our feelings; we try to really maintain fairness to all involved parties rather than just make a lot of noise about it; we recognize that all change is not necessarily good; and we grapple with consequences. We have doubts.
Example: Masks on the face will slow the spread of the Chinese Virus — true or false? I have come to understand that where disagreement exists about this, it isn’t argument about the “true” or the “false,” it’s about the doubt. Well, when in doubt let us win, the liberals say, and wear your mask! Grown-ups, for the most part, comply. We’re not complying because they made the demand. Let’s face it, liberals have been bumptiously demanding benefit of all residual doubts for…well, it’s difficult to say when exactly that all started. The Earl Warren Supreme Court had a lot to do with it. You didn’t tell him his rights. The evidence is fruit of the poisoned tree. It’s conceivably possible someone else might have a knife that looks just like that. Maybe he ran because a police dog was chasing him. Maybe maybe maybe, possible possible possible, you have to pretend you don’t know even though you do…my guilty-as-hell client gets to walk. Our side wins!
Once liberals figured out “We get the benefit of all residual doubt” can be used to spring bad guys everybody knows are guilty, so they can go out and hurt more people and the public will just have to accept this…seems they had a realization that anything was possible. The tactic never backfires on them because liberals don’t have doubts. But grown-ups, thinking about consequences, will wear masks when social distancing is not possible, because sooner or later we’ll come in contact with someone whose immune system is compromised and we don’t want to take chances.
When did we start having doubts about the masks, that they were being used as a political emblem, rather than as simple and reliable devices to slow the spread of the virus? From the very beginning. But in the beginning that was a fringe-kookburger idea to have, even in an election year. But now? As possibilities go, it’s unavoidable! Liberals have made it abundantly clear they want the visual of masks masks masks…it’s the only chance Biden has. And oh by the way, these “Biden buttons” worn on the face may also retard the spread of the virus…possibly. We wear our masks when they make sense, because the masks can be both. We recognize non-mutual-exclusivity; it doesn’t have to be all of one thing and none of another. We want our grandmothers to live and we comprehend functional overlap.
We have doubts about the masks themselves. We see something is wrong when “a mask” is what’s being ordered upon us — no exceptions! Don’t even think about going out bare-faced or we’ll report you! And yet…a cloth mask is the same as N95 is the same as a surgical mask. Not how it works at all. But…we have our doubts. The rebuttal is going to be that something is better than nothing, and this makes sense.
There is the difference between how things work out here in the real world, rather than how things work in the idea-land where rules are made and unicorns cavort away in the rainbow-sunshine. Yesterday I did my laundry and I forgot to put in my cloth Chinese Virus mask. I’ll try to do another load today because the thing is filthy and it’s skipped a weekend washing already…but I want to get the spare too, and I’m having trouble finding it. It’s clear to me the proper solution is more cloth masks, nevermind that I’m having trouble maintaining the inventory I have already. So how are you doing? Have you got some apparatus in the jockey box or glove compartment of your car? Mine’s a disposable mask left over from when I had to wear it on Tuesday. You’re really not supposed to do that, you know. But — my village elders have handed down the rule, facial coverings required no exceptions, when I go into a store to buy food. Sometimes I find out we have to have something and I have to go. Have to be prepared. We’ve got to eat.
Am I the only one with that terrible, disgusting habit? Everyone is subject to the new rules and we all have to eat.
So I have doubts!
I think Trump is going to win the election. But I have doubts. Liberals are sure Biden is going to win, it’s just a matter of time…even as they seemingly concede that if Biden does win, no one knows who then becomes President. It’s an interesting question, but if they noodled it over for a time they’d have to entertain some doubts. So they don’t. If you back them into a corner about it, they just pick somebody. Then hurriedly change the subject, seemingly failing to grasp that they just named the person who’s going to be President a year from now…and this would be something worth inspecting, to every diligent thinker, no matter what their feelings of it would be.
I had doubts about Trump at the very beginning. Since 1992 I have shied away from this thing about “so-and-so would be perfect because he has his own money and can’t be bought.” So I had doubts about them with Donald Trump. But, he did make it work. Then the establishment DC types came down on him like a ton of bricks, including the establishment Republicans, and so the time came to admit there was such a thing as a Deep State. Couldn’t doubt it anymore.
Liberals say the Trump rally in Tulsa spread the virus, and now people are going to die. They don’t have doubts.
Conservatives respond wondering about the George Floyd protests, wouldn’t they be responsible for spreading the virus too? The rebuttal is that there is “little evidence” of this according to “experts”, but that isn’t an honest expression because that would entail doubt. Liberals, once again, have none. They know for sure that a Trump rally in a single day spread the virus, but sustained authority-sanctioned rioting and looting across hundreds of densely packed cities over a period of several weeks, did not. That must be one smart virus!
Being repeatedly wrong doesn’t faze them. Now that he’s President, Trump is finally done, oh yes he is, those walls are finally closing in on him. Haven’t we been here before a few times? We saw it even before the election back in 2016: This will be the end of Trump’s campaign. No doubts!
So after all these years, the appearance to me is that liberals are 100% sure of absolutely everything, not quite so much because they like certainty, although there is some of that. They share in common a phobia against doubt. It terrifies them. I mean let’s face it, doubt is received negatively by all of us. None of us like to admit we were wrong about things. But it’s part of mature thinking, of becoming a grown-up. Sooner or later, we all reach that fork in the road, choose the wrong path, and then a little while later have to admit it to ourselves and start backtracking. It sucks, but usually that’s the only way to get back on track. And for those doing it the first time, they emerge from the experience better and stronger thinkers than they were beforehand. Doubt is the parent of beneficial humility, and you have to have some of that if anyone’s going to trust you to make decisions about anything that matters.
Liberals want uncontested authority to decide these things. But they don’t have the requisite humility to earn it, because they can’t, or won’t, entertain serious doubts.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
They have no doubts, I think, because they think “smart” people have no doubts. They pick an identity, then do what they think that identity does. But since they refuse to observe the world around them and adjust their behavior accordingly, it ends up being a caricature of a character.
Examples? Sure. The kind of gay men liberals swoon over are caricatures of women — moody, catty, hyper-emotional, obsessed with shopping, beyond superficial. (Again please note: I’m not saying women are this way; they’re acting they way they think women act). Radical feminists, by contrast, are caricatures of frat bros — foul-mouthed, crotch-obsessed randos who think talking tough is the solution to all life’s problems.
But mostly what they are, what all of them have in common, is that they are very, very “smart.” Not actually intelligent — though some of them may have high IQs — but they behave in a way they think smart people behave. Their idea of “smart” is House MD, or maybe Mulder from the X-Files. Some mysterious something happens, there are a zillion possible explanations. The local authorities, those fools, start investigating the mysterious something like it’s a garden-variety problem. House or Mulder walks up and makes his pronouncements: No, it’s actually the chupacabra. He’s unshakable in his conviction, even though Scully points out a million perfectly reasonable objections to his theory, suggests a dozen much more plausible alternatives. No, dammit Scully, it’s the chupacabra!!
And, of course, it always is.
Normal people find those shows infuriating, because Mulder and House are always 100% right, even when the stuff they’re 100% right about today directly contradicts the stuff they were 100% right about on last week’s episode. Eventually the cleverness of the writers in shoehorning in new monsters / diseases of the week for the hero to be right about gets grating, and then it becomes a running joke…
…except for liberals. They never lose the faith, because the important thing is: Mulder is smart, and Mulder is always right, because smart people are always right and never have any doubts about being right, no matter what, because see above: They’re always right.
- Severian | 07/05/2020 @ 06:40[…] excellent question over at Morgan’s. I took a stab at an answer over there, but I think it needs fleshing out. […]
- Why Are Liberals So Certain? | Rotten Chestnuts | 07/05/2020 @ 07:19Don’t “we” have to mutually agree on what the definition of the term liberal means, at LEAST in relationship to political science?
- CaptDMO | 07/08/2020 @ 06:27This comes up a lot. It’s a good topic to ponder, in fact essential really…can’t have communication if sender & receiver can’t agree on what words mean, and this is a critical word.
Here is the problem. What I have come to call “the dead-tree definition” is as constant as the Northern Star, and it says
This doesn’t work. It isn’t my opinion. It’s provable that it doesn’t work. “Conservatives” and “liberals” are fighting tooth and nail because “conservative” Trump — the reformer — is occupying the White House. The “liberals” are screaming about this because they want to keep things the way they were before he arrived. Trump is changing things, supporting “progressive political reform” especially “the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties.”
At this point, the people most keen on objecting to my use of the word “liberal,” consistently lose interest.
The neophytes who have raised the question “What’s up with this ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ stuff?”, meanwhile, continue onward with their entirely reasonable question remaining unanswered, their desire for the necessary knowledge unsatisfied.
The problem is this: A “dead tree definition” adapts to changing events like, well, a dead tree. It doesn’t. American politics, meanwhile…well, they writhe around like an earthworm flopping around in agony on a hot sidewalk. Sometimes the dead tree definitions work, and conservatives are the ones who want to keep things the way they are, while liberals push onward with an agenda to change them.
This is not one of those times. Right now, it’s going the other way.
Liberals, in the United States, are people who have managed to acquire the ability to vote, usually legally, without learning to think like a grown-up. They advocate liberalism, and there’s only one definition of liberalism that really works. It’s mine.
- mkfreeberg | 07/09/2020 @ 05:20Back in the days, Liberals used to mock Conservatives by saying that Conservatives believe “whatever is, is right.” They were targeting conservatives’ (well-known) tendency to favor the mundane over the abstract. Liberals (old definition) were / are forever making sweeping pronouncements of the form “All X are Y.” Conservatives (old definition) were forever responding with “I don’t recall ever seeing any X that is actually Y.”
Filter this through the 2nd Law of SJW (“SJWs Always Project”) and you get my definition of Liberalism: “Whatever is, is wrong.”
Liberals (new definition) are forever assigning people to tiny little identity-boxes… but the boxes, upon closer inspection, turn out to be empty. There’s always something “problematic” about everything and everyone, because in the social media age, the catechism changes every five minutes while the internet is forever.
So, a few years ago, you were a racist if you thought Hamilton was anything short of a brilliant challenge to the blah blah blah. Even indifference was revealed to be the Mark of the Beast — you were an incorrigible racist for making so mundane a statement as “hey, you want to pretend Alexander Hamilton was Black, or just cast a Black guy to play him, whatever, no skin off my nose. I sat through lots of Black Hamlets, Julius Caesars, MacBeths, and whatnot back during the ‘rap Shakespeare’ fad of the early 1990s. This too shall pass.”
Nowadays, of course, Hamilton is “problematic” for… well, they can’t make up their minds. Is it because the Black guy they cast isn’t Black enough? Or is it that Black guys “acting White” for the exclusive benefit of White people (as they are the only ones who watch the stupid show to begin with) is a form of reverse minstrelsy? Or is it that the historical Alexander Hamilton, being a New England merchant in the Colonial period, was necessarily tangentially involved in the slave trade in some way (not to mention being West Indian by birth, so, you know…)? All they know is, the same show that was the greatest thing since the invention of fire yesterday is deeply “problematic” today. Whatever is, is wrong.
And so it goes with any real-world situation. Force them to confront an actual instance of “social justice” out in the real world and they fall apart. Let’s say you’ve got two guys, Tom and Steve, vying for the last remaining cubicle wall in the office. Tom is Black, Steve is gay. Which one gets it?
The “conservative” (however we’ll choose to define that, we’re not there yet) will conclude that, since someone has to get the wall, and there’s no way to take identity politics out of any criterion he comes up with, will eventually just flip a coin (or, to be safe, the smart supervisor will have Tom flip the coin and Steve call it in the air, or vice versa). Boom, problem solved. Neither is particularly happy, but since not even Proggies can argue against gravity with a straight face (yet), it’s a workable solution.
Now, force the “liberal” (new definition) to confront the same scenario. Xzhey will break down crying sooner or later, since there’s no possible real-world way to make a “socially just” decision. It’ll be fun watching xzhym try to come up with some elaborate wall-sharing schedule or something, but soon enough it’ll be clear that the thing just can’t be done. There is no real-world solution that is also “socially just.” It’s a null set. Whatever is, will be wrong somehow, because it is.
- Severian | 07/09/2020 @ 05:52[…] I Saw “Fighting Misinformation” Doubts That Lawyer Couple The Toppling of the Statues Peaceful Protests, for the Most Part City Breakers […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/12/2020 @ 06:06I think the difference often boils down to a couple of things.
Karl Popper asserted that any world view that explains everything actually explains nothing. This is a problem for crypto and overt Marxist because their ideology claims to explain everything. For example, if an employer treats his workers poorly he is a typical capitalist. If the employer treats his workers well then he is trying to forestall the coming proletariat revolution and maintain most of his Bourgeoisie standing. The employer can’t win. So, according to Popper, Marxist theory really explains nothing. (Popper is right about this)
Marxist and by extrapolation socialist also often fail to understand what money is, and consistently act as though we still use ONLY gold, silver, and copper coins. They confuse a modern, market economy with an 18th or 19th century mercantilistic one. If we did, then yes it matters how many Pieces-of-Eight Jeff Bezo has because it might mean that it was possible for me to not have enough. That’s not really how money works anymore. The fact that Mr. X is super-wealthy no longer means I can’t have enough. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.
The political left are also sophist. They believe their ideology trumps facts on the ground. Because they can’t adequately explain or defend the objections to their ideology and they don’t understand how the economy works so they are left with ideology and when that fails they have only violence.
- Fai Mao | 07/13/2020 @ 13:15“…So after all these years, the appearance to me is that liberals are 100% sure of absolutely everything, not quite so much because they like certainty, although there is some of that. They share in common a phobia against doubt. It terrifies them….”
I’m not disagreeing with your point, just adding to the background of it.
Descartes, he of the “I think, therefore I am”, and the vaunted ‘Method of Doubt’ which advised all to doubt all and believe nothing until proven true, rested his ideas upon this:
“I concluded that I might take, as a general rule, the principle, that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true, ”
IOW, doubt everything but what you yourself believe to be true. What that leads to is ‘Maybe Trump is Putin’s lackey, prove to me he isn’t!’, and “Just in case Covid might kill millions, we should quarantine the entire state, prove to me I’m wrong!”, and an infestation of skepticism and cynicism and a constant state of terror over anything that could possibly cause them to doubt what they “…very clearly and distinctly conceive are true…”.
More on that below.
- Van | 08/03/2020 @ 04:40Warning: This is where TLDR goes to die a painful death:
Unknown Conspiracies – You don’t think, therefore, they are