House of Eratosthenes

“I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than” Kutcher said during the Teen Choice Awards on August 11. “Opportunities look a lot like work.”

“Amen, brother,” Lemon said to CNN host Jake Tapper. “I think he’s right on, but when did working hard or having a solid work ethic become only a conservative value?”

Ace has an answer:

Because leftists are too cowardly to transmit such wholesome, old-fashioned values. They often have those values, but feel that to tell people “You should work hard if you want to achieve anything” somehow betrays the Leftist Coalition, which is premised on the notion that All Rewards Are Unfair and Anyone Who Doesn’t Have All That He Wants is a Victim of Exploitation By White Capitalists.
:
Liberals who have achieved success know that success is almost impossible without a lot of hard work. But they don’t typically say so, because, I think, they believe the average person is incapable of such and will just feel burdened by expectations they can’t meet if hard work and achievement are talked up as having some kind of link between them.

S.T.A.C.I. is five pillars of liberal wrong-ness, five reasons why liberal solutions can be relied upon to be the wrong ones. The A in S.T.A.C.I. is Abundance — the idea that if you are going to support something, it logically follows that you must be working to make it more plentiful. This is, as I said, “a guaranteed fail because no person or thing has ever become more highly prized or cherished as a result of being more frequently seen. Natural laws of economics and human nature dictate that the opposite must be true.”

I noticed this when lefties starting being chummy with me (us, actually, not really me as an individual) after I got someone knocked up and we didn’t get married. Look how tolerant we are being toward you! And they didn’t seem to notice their teeth weren’t quite meshing with the cogs. It was entirely lost on them that we both wanted to make the very best of the situation that we could, but at the same time, we knew we did things in the wrong order, and would never want the next generations to follow in our footsteps and do the same thing.

I see this with the drugs issue. This weird illogical fastening: “Oh no, you did it when you were his age, so you can’t tell him not to do it.” The waitress is trapped in a starving-single-mom lifestyle, because she has a kid and an eighth-grade education. If you support her in her plight — and you should — then you have to do what you can to increase her numbers. Sure, the liberals are often said to support education. But they don’t want that for her, they want that for the next generation who can grab some government grants. They want more money in the system. But the waitress who can’t get a better job, is an important part of their constituency, so they don’t want anybody moving out of the cycle of dependency. And they’ll absolutely, positively rip you apart if you support marriage. They’ve certainly ripped me a new one a few times. Right back to the drug thing; I didn’t marry that one, so I should not be supporting marriage, how dare I, what a hypocrite I am.

They’re rather consistently anti-learning. How’s that saying go; good judgment is the product of experience, experience is the product of bad judgment. If you go through that cycle, and talk about what you learned & why & how, some liberal’s going to be in your face about it calling you a hypocrite. If you try to communicate what you’ve learned, to others, especially others who are about to make the same mistake — you’ll have many liberals in your face about it.

The one-liner from Ace that summarizes the whole divide:

The average man has it within him to be anything but average.

Today’s liberals think Obama has exactly that. Before Obama, they thought Clinton had that. Mister Average-Man, though, no…he is exceptional only in the sense that he has the good fortune to be alive when Our First Holy President takes the oath, other than that he’s just an ordinary, helpless schmuck who needs government programs.

Saw a great graphic somewhere I didn’t take the trouble to capture, and now I’m kicking myself about it. It’s divided in two, has “How Obama sees people” on the left side and “How Jefferson saw people” on the right. The left picture is of an ant farm, busy with little insect activity. The right picture is a herd of wild stallions, out running across the desert plain, as fast as their hooves can carry ’em.

It has always seemed obvious to me that “progressives” are progressing towards stasis. It has always baffled me that so few others seem to share this opinion.

Ditto the (to me) obvious psychological projection that’s going on. You once thought smoking a joint was a good idea? Well then, you are not permitted to revise that opinion. Even if you experienced a bad outcome, you once smoked a joint, and therefore you must believe, now and forever, that Smoking Joints is ok.

Who are the ones who fetishize the past, and fear change?

What a toxic stew the self-esteem movement has become. Everybody’s special, everybody has unique insight, all unique insights are uniquely valuable…. and therefore nobody can ever be wrong about anything. I see it all the time where I live — freshman go in, seniors come out, and with the exception of their livers the two are indistinguishable. Four (make that five or even six these days) years of “higher education,” and everyone still believes the exact same things they did when they went in. That’s liberalism for you.
- Severian | 08/29/2013 @ 07:56
The basic dichotomy is that conservatives value tradition, incrementalism, and discipline; while liberals value vision, change, and imagination. Of course, it’s a generalization. Most liberals value hard work, just like most conservatives value vision. Each value has its place, and they can work in synergy. Different mixtures will work better or worse depending on the environment.
- Zachriel | 08/29/2013 @ 16:55
Ace did a good job distinguishing between liberals who fail to practice the virtue of hard work, and liberals who chafe at and resist efforts to educate others about those virtues.
- mkfreeberg | 08/29/2013 @ 17:13
mkfreeberg: Ace …

That’s a typical example of taking a slight tendency, then using overgeneralization to attack one’s ideological adversaries.

Most liberals believe in hard work, of course, and most teach their children the value of hard work. There are bound to be some liberals like that though, just like there are some who espouse conservative positions whose only job is spending their inherited wealth. Clue for Ace: Most liberals are not rich Hollywood actors.
- Zachriel | 08/29/2013 @ 17:25
Ah, I see — you got tired of reading minds in the other thread, so you’re up here reading minds in this one. Clue for Zachriel: circular reasoning, special pleading, and other incoherent nonsense doesn’t get more plausible when it migrates from thread to thread.
- Severian | 08/29/2013 @ 17:32
Severian: special pleading …

Heh. Ace uses rich Hollywood movie stars to represent typical liberals, and you talk about special pleading. In any case, you should try to make a substantive response instead.

Out there you can hear the quiet, troubled voices of forgotten middle class Americans lamenting the fact that government no longer looks out for their interests or honors their values, values like individual responsibility, hard work, family and community.
- Zachriel | 08/29/2013 @ 17:41
Couldn’t find obama/Jefferson.

But this DOES involve hard work, ants, and the disease of liberalism:

http://laughingconservative.blogspot.com/2013_03_01_archive.html
- Robert Arvanitis | 08/30/2013 @ 05:01
PS: In the first link, scroll down to the entry March 1st, 2013, at 1:04

This link may take you directly to the image:

http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Instead-of-poison-I-introduce-liberal-intellectual-ants-into-the-popula-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8533788_.htm
- Robert Arvanitis | 08/30/2013 @ 05:09
Robert Arvanitis: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Instead-of-poison-I-introduce-liberal-intellectual-ants-into-the-popula-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8533788_.htm

So, the conservative position is preserve the absolute monarchy?
- Zachriel | 08/30/2013 @ 05:24
In any case, you should try to make a substantive response instead.

Say the Cut-n-Paste kids. You first, sluggers.
- Severian | 08/30/2013 @ 06:01
Severian: You first

http://www.peekinthewell.net/blog/how-did-hard-work-become-a-conservative-value-rather-than-a-human-one/#comment-21092
- Zachriel | 08/30/2013 @ 07:02
Hey, the cut-n-paste kids come back with a cut-n-paste of exactly the same stuff they’ve cut-n-pasted a dozen times before! Score one for substantive rebuttals, I guess.

Though I suppose it would be rather difficult to type with one of those “special” helmets on….
- Severian | 08/30/2013 @ 07:24
Martin you touched upon something that is really important in this post without realizing it.

The left wants the waitress referenced above to always be poor, to always be trapped and to always be needy. Think about it. Who wins elections? Assuming the election is fair then the guy with the most votes. So in order for the party that claims to support the needs of the poor to win the election there must be near majority of poor and needy to vote for them. The left wins elections by claiming to stand for the common guy and if the common down troddened guy ever becomes the guy with some money who is not down trodden they lose their power base.

I don’t think the democrats, at least the high level ones want to see less “poverty” or “oppression” or whatever they call it today because if masses of the victim class start moving into the middle class or higher then they will lose their constituency. So they will provide just enough services to enslave the lower classes and make them dependent upon the perceived governmental largess but not provide them anything that allows them to move beyond their current state. If they can do this and continue to blame the non resolution of the problems upon their political opponents they can create a reliable voting block that keeps the wealthy elite overloads in power.

I hate to sound so crass; but the democrats, the political left don’t want any of the problems they are “concerned” about to ever be solved. They would lose their access to moral high horsemanship. They’d lose their place in the political spotlight and they’d have to get a real job.
- Fai.Mao | 08/30/2013 @ 22:26

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“How Did Hard Work Become a Conservative Value, Rather Than a Human One?”Thursday, August 29th, 2013

“How Did Hard Work Become a Conservative Value, Rather Than a Human One?”
Thursday, August 29th, 2013