House of Eratosthenes

We’re spending the day celebrating the arrival of cooler weather, via a trip to the seashore. If we stay inland, such a celebration is still a couple months off. That’s Sacramento living for ya. School starts in early August, the temperature descends to match that situation…oh…somewhere around Christmas. Yeah. You see why I have trouble adapting to this.

If I don’t make it back, this will be the last post. If I get arrested and can’t make bail, this will be the last post for a few days. If all goes well this will be the last one for at least twelve hours, more likely twenty-four.

Let’s make it about some more free advice to Republicans…

…You see the last line of the Palin/Supergirl logo to the left? “And Don’t Change A Thing“? That’s where you are. Don’t change. Wait. Or rather…purify, then wait. These jack-holes spending money just as fast as any democrat; get rid of ’em. That’s just belaboring the obvious.

The “I’m a fiscal conservative but a social moderate” stuff. It’s a phrase tossed around so casually now, so meaninglessly. Check out what that means. Socially, the democrat agenda is to increase the standard of living for those who don’t put much effort into taking responsibility for things, and to decrease the standard of living for those who do. What’s the Republican response to that? If “fiscal conservative social moderate” means agreement with that, then don’t let the doorknob hit ya where the Good Lord split ya. People who work hard, should enjoy more things than people who do not. The market already works that way, and government should make no effort toward overturning that or overruling that. It isn’t something that needs any correcting. It’s just things the way they’re supposed to work. Ants have it better than grasshoppers.

Repeat after me: Equality of opportunity. Not equality of outcome.

Don’t wait for people to be dissatisfied with democrats. Wait for them to be freaked out. For forty-five years now, if you’re a superstar democrat Presidential candidate…that means you are missing standards. Good, reliable character, and superstar-democrat, have been mutually exclusive things. For these forty-five years, if the democrat party is pinning their hopes and dreams on you that means nobody in their right mind would let you spend a weekend with their kids. Not even five minutes, if you’re alone. And that includes loyal democrat voters. Your opposition isn’t about “values are unimportant”; they’re about “values are toxic, and are to be avoided.” In the final analysis, that won’t play in Peoria. During elections, it plays because it is hidden, and only because it is hidden.

But look who bears the party standard during those elections. The electorate is constantly being lectured to look past things, to forget things. Obama’s asshole preacher friend. Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” speech. Clinton’s affairs. Carter’s apologia on behalf of Palestinian terrorist thugs, and general wimpiness.

The democrat party thinks living under the right set of laws, makes a people into a better class of people. That is really their platform — outlaw the guns, outlaw the capital punishment, outlaw discrimination, create a uniform standard of living regardless of the level of effort, and we become “good.” But every election cycle, they claim to have found a super-duper-good guy for us, good enough to be the best of the best among us after we’ve been made into good people. And when they tell us about him, most of their words amount to lecturing us about what information we should not be absorbing and what questions we should not be asking. Obama’s friends. Obama’s ears. Obama’s middle name. Obama’s death panels. Obama’s childhood. Obama’s college years.

How good are these people, if filtration is so much more important than edification, when it comes time to learn about who & what they are? How good of a person could that possibly be? If he thinks the best shot he’s got at winning an election, is for people to not learn things about him?

So don’t change…other than to kick out your traitors, those who contaminate your message by bearing your emblem while failing to capture the spirit that is supposed to go behind it. Stop spending money, and if you can’t stop spending money, at least stop finding new ways to spend money. Run government more like a business, that at least tries not to go broke. Stop interfering with life’s pain…especially when the pain comes as a direct result of individual stupidity, and is so obviously part of the nature’s educational curriculum. Like John Wayne said, “Life is tough; life’s tougher if you’re stupid.”

What an awful campaign slogan, huh. My message for you is a simple one: Don’t be too sure about that. Hire fewer political consultants that wear nice suits and leather shoes. Hire more of ’em wearing plaid shirts, blue jeans and hiking boots. Even better, hire some political consultants who have to wipe fish guts off their hands before they come talk to you, because they’re just clocking out of their “real” job. You’ll start to see things differently.

One last word: Incorporate a plank into your party platform about philosophy. Leave it unwritten if you think that’s best, but don’t keep it a secret, shout it loud and proud. We’ve had a lot of noise made over the last generation or two, about seeing “the other side” of things. This has resonated very well with people who want to elect leaders who look past the packaging, and into the contents, of whatever comes along. This has not worked out well. The electorate has wisely sought keen insight, and they have been rewarded with a topsy-turvy upside-down way of looking at things, and seeing their opposites.

Now, it is all over the place. Anarchy is order. Lawbreaking is law-abiding. Children have wisdom. Old people are stupid. Women make perfectly fine dads. If you champion womens’ rights, you should have wanted Saddam Hussein to stay exactly where he was. Murderers have a right to life. Babies do not. Abortion is a right guaranteed in the Constitution. Carrying a gun, is not. Barack Obama loves America. Ted Kennedy was the Conscience of the Senate. The best cure for the nation’s economic depression is for the government to put us further in debt. Timothy Geithner is a financial genius who is the only logical nominee for Secretary of the Treasury. Bill Clinton does right by people. Financial solvency comes from making everything artificially more expensive: food, fuel, books, data transfer, home ownership, education, cigarettes. Now we’re looking at everything that requires energy to be marketed…which means everything…

The people are frustrated because it seems every move we make to get out of this hole, gets our country deeper into it. The reason for this is quite simple: Our solutions do not work, and cannot work, because we have been taught for decades to see things as the opposite of what they really are.

This is all a failed experiment. Find me a hundred people who are blind to this in 2009, and I’ll show you seventy-five who’ll be able to see it by 2012. The people have had their taste of new-age complexity, and their appetite is on the wane. They still want the insight of their leaders to be necessarily “nuanced” to match the complexity of everyday life, of the reality those leaders are supposed to accurately perceive. But no more than that. Not past the point of diminishing returns.

The time has come for our nation to see things as they really are.

You and John Batchelor may not agree. On anything.
- smitty1e | 08/30/2009 @ 09:52
If “fiscal conservative social moderate” means agreement with that…

It most certainly DOESN’T. Not in this house, anyway. It means keeping the frickin’ gub’mint out of our bedrooms… ALL of our bedrooms… letting people put whatever the Hell they want in their bodies, marry whomever they want (excluding their sisters, brothers, dads and moms. Goats, too.), and otherwise make their own goddamned moral decisions. Don’t go making more of this “social moderate” thing than there is, Morgan.

And you forgot to include the cattle-car thing. 😉
- bpenni | 08/30/2009 @ 11:23
“It means keeping the frickin’ gub’mint out of our bedrooms… ALL of our bedrooms… letting people put whatever the Hell they want in their bodies, marry whomever they want (excluding their sisters, brothers, dads and moms. Goats, too.)”

bpenni | 08/30/2009 @ 11:23

Now I’m confused. Why do you want the government to impose your values on others?
- JohnJ | 08/30/2009 @ 15:19
A recent survey showed…
That the proof is in the puddin’
The RINO meme revealed itself when campaign bullshit has given way to fear of offending the loudest minority vote supporting TV show and “Popular” entertainment
chat fest.

“I’m a fiscal conservative but a social moderate” is no better than RINO.
Social experimentation moderate of ANY stripe garners no respect from
folks like me who have grown up since high school, and watched the cycle of cult leaders come and go several times.
I still scratch myself and wonder what the hell a claim of “Social moderate” is supposed to mean (other than “I failed history and math class, and have an advanced degree in Humanities”) I can only come up with moderately socialist, as in, the illusion of
“special” shackles for the fastest runners-in the spirit of “equality”.

Let me know if “I’m a fiscal conservative but a social moderate” ever has the
words integrity, or productive, associated with the supernumerary citing the meme .
- CaptDMO | 08/30/2009 @ 15:33
Buck doesn’t want that John, he rationally believes they shouldn’t have their nose in any of our personal decisions. I happen to agree with him. What do you care who I fuck or what I ingest? As long as I don’t burden myself on the public sphere, it’s none of your collective concern.

Morgan, I know you are politically much more “socially” conservative than I am, all props for your position, but I think the majority of conservative minded people would be real happy with reduced government intervention, lower taxes and less spending. If we could focus on those items at a federal level and back it up with legislation, the GOP could be a winner. Let the state level work out the social issue with their taxpaying, voting populaces.
- Daphne | 08/30/2009 @ 16:36
Daphne (and Buck),

It comes down to defining things; it comes down to that last point, about ceasing & desisting from this practice of pretending things are the opposite of what they really are. You think you have a good handle on what “fiscal-conservative-social-moderate” (FCSM) means, and within your own sphere of acquaintance/knowledge you probably do.

Can you give me an ironclad guarantee that is all it means anywhere?

CaptainDMO is right. It is a hackneyed phrase that has been overused and abused to the point where it no longer means anything. What do you have to say when FCSM is used as a cover for things that are obviously not true? The “I’m a ‘conservative,’ but I acknowledge global warming” thing for example?

I don’t care if the phrase is sometimes used harmlessly or innocently. The fact of the matter is it’s been dressed up and used as a Trojan horse. Repeatedly. Note that I’m not calling for it to be banned outright; but in so-called “conservative” circles it sure as hell ought to be raising some red flags by now.
- mkfreeberg | 08/30/2009 @ 20:48
[…] Memo For File XCIII Free Advice For Republicans Jeans Are Sexist Worth Remembering I Made a New Word XXXII Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/31/2009 @ 06:37
It most certainly DOESN’T. Not in this house, anyway.

I’ve highlighted the appropriate bits of my comment for those of you who may have missed it the first time through. You know… the guys who got A’s in math and history. And others of similar mind.
- bpenni | 08/31/2009 @ 08:37
[…] SOME FREE ADVICE For Republicans …. […]
- Steynian 378 « Free Canuckistan! | 08/31/2009 @ 12:49

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