House of Eratosthenes

5. they’re horny, they know everything and their [sic] going to live forever…so that works out;
4. the inability to see themselves as flawed;
3. lazy and whining snot-nosed punks;
2. their inability to know the difference between having a free mind compared to sound policy — it’s all one and the same to them; and
1. completely void of all moral code.

To which commenter Carlos7 replies…

It all starts with #4.

And, based on my experiences “discussing” things with some of the more intransigent ones, I would have to agree. That isn’t true of your beloved politically-uninvolved politically-unaware “Aunt Mabel” who just wants to do right by the impoverished and disenfranchised, and just hasn’t thought things out. But it’s true of the younger airheads registering for their wedding gifts at Obama’s web site; they, unlike you, were not descended of Adam and Eve who ate of the fruit, therefore they’re not flawed. You’re flawed because you cling to your guns bitterly, and believe in angels and what-not — they’re part of an evolutionary process gliding toward perfection a micron at a time.

The irony is, that while they’re running around being so much more science-y than you are, they’re missing out on a basic key component to evolutionary theory, which is: The progress is achieved solely by means involving birth and death. Each organism, and that means people, has its associated evolutionary stage carved into its DNA, flaws and all, and it carries those flaws from womb to tomb. That necessarily means that, no, sorry, Barack Obama did not become more “evolved” when He made up His mind that gay marriage was alright, and liberals don’t grow bigger brains with extra lobes the day they decide to become liberals, so you can’t transform overnight into the Jetsons, or the X-Men, or those aliens from Star Trek with extra big mushroom-shaped brainy veiney heads.

I think, deep down, they realize this already. That’s the source of the bile, the nastiness; they can’t separate from the riff-raff by means of this overnight-evolution, even though they’d like to, because they’re not happy with themselves the way they are. So snarking at those around them who don’t “believe,” is the next best thing.

Your Aunt Mabel who bakes the yummy sugar cookies, she’s a different story altogether. She doesn’t want this separation, she wants the opposite. But she’s not on topic because the subject is destroying virtue, and bless her heart, she still has tons and tons of it. She just has no idea what she’s talking about, that’s all — no way of knowing what a higher minimum wage or a stricter gun control law really does, and no way of ever finding out.

I thought there was something else special about #4, it’s the most quotable part of Hawkins’ column:

Liberals begin with the proposition that conservatives are unwitting dupes at best and evil at worst while other liberals are on the side of the angels. This leads them to excuse just about any and every behavior from killing cops, to terrorist bombings, to treason as long as the perpetrator has the right beliefs and is useful to the movement. When you think that the only real crime is disagreeing with your ideology, you can make a hero out of a drunken, disreputable coward who left a woman to die in a tidal pool or even come up with justifications for why it’s fine for the Department of Justice to help Mexican cartels get weapons they used to kill more than 300 people as part of some misguided political stunt to encourage gun control.

Precisely.

When a liberal does something wrong, you can probably find lots of other liberals who will say “that was wrong,” but to a man, they’ll all insist on sticking that word “but” after the word “wrong,” followed by some obfuscating and distracting filibuster. That’s a consistent formula: Fellow liberal + “that was wrong” = filibuster. They can’t ever, ever say “that was wrong” and just end the sentence right there: end of sentence, dot, new paragraph, new topic. That’s completely out of the question. Against the rules.

Hawkins: “For the most part, success isn’t random. Most rich people deserve their wealth just as poor people deserve their poverty. There’s a reason a bank CEO is where he is and a dirty hippy with empty pockets is impotently protesting him in the street. Most people who fail deserve to be failing just as most people who succeed deserve to be succeeding.”

I notice he leaves himself an out with “for the most part,” which indicates that at some level, he’s aware that lots of honest and hardworking people have fallen flat on their asses, especially in the last five or six years with the tanking of our national economy. The people I feel sorry for are the ones who are doing all they can to improve their lot in life and simply can’t find work (or who are under-employed), or have had their businesses go downhill relatively quickly and go bankrupt, less due to lack of business acumen and more to the “foot traffic” simply drying up. (Think of a wedding catering business in Las Vegas, for example. Sin City has been hit hard by the recession since the tourists simply can’t afford to go there much these days.)

Moreover I suspect a lot of decent people who read Hawkins’ column will take personal offense at this. I know what he is getting at – people’s lot in life is largely a function of the choices they made while younger, including the ones that “seemed right” at the time – but I think he’s still going to needlessly piss off a few readers with that paragraph.

When a liberal does something wrong, you can probably find lots of other liberals who will say “that was wrong,” but to a man, they’ll all insist on sticking that word “but” after the word “wrong,” followed by some obfuscating and distracting filibuster.

Don’t we on the Right sometimes do the same thing? I got into an argument on the “Hello Kitty of Blogging” on my Wall a few days ago with a liberal family member. I posted an old YouTube video of Reagan cracking jokes with reporters, and this guy immediately laid-in to our 40th president with all sorts of human-rights allegations related to the Iran Contra affair.

I pointed out that Iran Contra at least had altruistic motives (getting the hostages freed and getting weapons to the anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua), while Fast and Furious was nothing more than a cynical attempt to justify more gun control (the alleged purpose of which has never been properly been explained to me, assuming it was ever intended as anything other than an excuse to revive the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004)….and our current president apparently isn’t bothered by the deaths of hundreds of innocent people regardless.
- cylarz | 07/14/2012 @ 20:58
Don’t we on the Right sometimes do the same thing?

Not really, no. Maybe I didn’t spec it right, but what I’ve got in mind is things like — Ted Kennedy leaving Mary Jo to drown “was wrong.” Now, maybe your lefty friend will acknowledge that and allow the whole subject to be concluded right there; but that would be outside of my personal experience. With the liberals I’ve met, TedK is supposed to be the “Lion of the Senate” or the “conscience of the Senate” or some such, so if there is any acknowledgement to be uttered at all about “wrong” then it has to be followed with some obligatory tripe. “But look at all the good he did in the years that came afterward for ordinary Americans” or something along those lines.

Compare that to your average conservative acknowledging a far lesser charge: When Trent Lott made a reference to the “problems we’ve had all these years” at Strom Thurmond’s hundredth birthday, it was an idiotic thing to say. The conservatives I’ve seen arguing this — and I’m in this camp — evaluate the charge of saying-something-stupid, and hand down a verdict of guilty. Their, and my, complaint is that the sentence was out of line. But you’re not likely to see some attempt made to throw a bunch of crap into the discussion about it, to try to make some fallible human audience forget the details. See, that’s the difference — liberals tend to say nonsensical things, because they’re constantly showing off for bystanders who aren’t part of the actual discussion.

Conservatives think being conservative is a product of life’s experiences, liberals think being liberal is a pathway to being a decent — acceptable — human being. Therein lies the difference.
- mkfreeberg | 07/15/2012 @ 06:14
mkfreeberg: When Trent Lott made a reference to the “problems we’ve had all these years” at Strom Thurmond’s hundredth birthday, it was an idiotic thing to say.

This is what Lott said: “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.” Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat, an openly segregationist splinter from the Democratic Party.

Hawkins: Liberals begin with the proposition that conservatives are unwitting dupes at best and evil at worst while other liberals are on the side of the angels.

This is a typical confusion, equating the most extreme view with the larger group. The belief that “the ends justify the means” is not restricted to liberals or to the political left, but can be found represented in many ideological groupings.
- Zachriel | 07/16/2012 @ 09:58
Shorter Zachriel: “Yes…. BUT -”

I am mindful of James Lileks’ theory on this: if your apology or explanation is nothing more than an elaborate plinth upon which to place a gilded “BUT” then you need to go back and think through things again.
- nightfly | 07/16/2012 @ 14:34
Exactly.

Severian nailed this stuff when he called it “verbal squid ink.”

Fektoid.

Ooh look, bright shiny object!

Squirrel!!
- mkfreeberg | 07/17/2012 @ 01:30
Another problem.
Liberals will always side with tyranny. Because the tyrant will offer them a compromise and those fighting tyranny will not. Thus they will take the compromise which at first doesn’t seem to bad because it is the peaceful thing to do. Then comes the next compromise and the next until they have become part and parcel of the tyrannical regime
- Fai.Mao | 07/18/2012 @ 02:23

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Five Ways Liberalism Destroys Virtue
Saturday, July 14th, 2012