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...
Don’t tell the democrats but they’re miscalculating again. Steyer and Bloomberg have figured out, or are listening to someone who’s figured out, that Trump represents a sea change, a hairpin-turn so to speak, and white straight male pricks who never admit to their mistakes and can’t be told anything are in vogue right now.
Now I’m up to 32 years as a server and/or software engineer, one or the other…I’ve spent the entire time around arrogant pricks, and occasionally have been one myself. I’ll let you in on a secret here. If you win as often as Donald Trump, you aren’t really that arrogant. “Pride goeth before a fall” is a real thing. You have to admit to your mistakes. To me it’s pretty obvious Trump must do this in private. There is a consciousness, an awareness, that such-and-such a move was a mistake and it requires a course correction. Look at his various dismissals. There are people who can’t come back, like ever…Bolton, Bannon, Sessions, Tillerson…those are mistakes. There are others who can come back anytime. Hicks came back, and the door is always open to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Not mistakes. So there is a process of evaluation going on here, resulting in thumbs-down at least as often as thumbs-up.
You have to have that humility in order to win more often than a coin toss. Keeping it hidden is an option…especially for a hotelier and casino owner, or any dedicated marketing professional. But you must have it. You have to learn as you go. You have to be able to answer that question “What do you know now that you didn’t know a year ago?” To do that, you have to be able to admit you were wrong about something.
The country still hates arrogant men, and probably should. Trump’s base only appreciates his style when it comes to watching liberals get humiliated. Oh yes, that’s great stuff. But whoever is out there following Trump as part of some sort of personality cult, worshiping him as a religious figure…that’s not typical, these people do not have the numbers to put him or keep him in the White House. The people who brought Trump electoral victory had to learn to accept his personality, which is more drag than lift.
And to bring them/us around, Trump had to generate positive results more consistently than a truly arrogant man would be able to bring.
The appearance of being an “arrogant man” is very often just that, an appearance lacking supporting substance. That’s because when it comes to men, this society we’ve built for ourselves tends to think things out in crude, binary form: You either admit to mistakes or you don’t, and your admission of mistakes must be public, and frequent. This is wrong. The hero worship that comes our way for our “intelligence” or “big brains” or whatever, is as wrong as this condemnation for being arrogant — very often, I notice, coming from the same people. Somewhere along the way I came to realize that people who commented on how intelligent I was, were merely noticing that I had some and was ready, willing and able to use it. Having and using intelligence is not evidence that you have any great abundance of it, it just means you have some. So that’s a mistake. Another mistake is in requiring some sort of “quota” of I-was-wrong confessions, and if you don’t see that many out of a person then he must be arrogant.
Nobody says that out loud. But it’s very popular, I see, to make snap-decisions about a person’s level of arrogance as if that premise held true. Not only does it not work, but with greater and greater technology and a cushier and cushier lifestyle for us all, it only becomes more errant, diverging further and further away from reality as technology brings us more comfort & convenience, and changes our priorities. The day-to-day problems that confront us are really not that demanding or complex. If you do have some intellect and you are willing to use it, and the problems do not change in any meaningful way, you should make fewer mistakes with the passage of time — even if this intellect you’re applying is only average. That’s the whole point to having intelligence. Unless the problem changes meaningfully, your mistakes should dissipate and diminish after awhile. A lot of people don’t get this. I’m still rather surprised at how many.
Good luck to Ban-it-all Bloomie and Tom Steyer with their “But I’m a jackass too” campaigns. This is going to be a lot of fun to watch this year.
Related: What TF is Wrong With Putting America First??
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