House of Eratosthenes

I was reading in a liberal blog all about how people who voted for George W. Bush are a bunch of silly dolts, and of course that people who voted against him and castigate him are much, much smarter. Which liberal blog I was reading, is an interesting story in and of itself, and I will get to that. But for now I want to discuss the premise.

I suppose it is a mechanism in the human mind that determines we see just a tiny bit more of what we want to see, and just a smidgen less of what we do not. On this point, I can’t resist running down a side trail: “everybody knows,” I’m told, that all attributes in the human species, and any other, have culminated as a result of “evolution.” Natural selection. Survival of the fittest. Strengths arriving over time where they did not previously exist, as an evolving species competes for limited resources with other species less-evolved, and thus doomed. What does it have to do with survival in a harsh ecosystem, to recognize falsehoods you find palatible, and to deny truths that you do not? It’s a delicious insult to the prevailing wisdom, but I digress.

Whatever the reason is, the blogger and I both must fall victim to the weakness under discussion, for his “observation” runs starkly against my own:

Those of you who have been around for a while may have noticed something about the conservative blowhards on the net. I’m not just talking about the ones here, but in general. A great example is guns-and-gear forums, which swarm with the kind of person I’m talking about.

The observation?

These people aren’t much for the written word. They can’t spell. They mangle grammar and syntax to varying degrees, sometimes to the point where they’re almost unintelligible. And the worse the problem is, the more vociferous they are about supporting George Bush.

See, I’m sitting here, much more of a veteran than a more practical man would be, of arguing with snotty college students half my age on Internet forums. I have been doing it, pretty much non-stop, since before I began my unbroken biannual vote-at-seven-in-the-morning streak fourteen years ago; since long before I was determined to see the Democratic party go away, permanently; indeed, since you could only do said arguing by going on a “bulletin board” which sent “characters” to your “modem” about what was written in the “room.”

And I’ve noticed the opposite. Take a blistering Internet screed against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — they aren’t that hard to find — and load it into Microsoft Word, you’re going to tie the grammar/spell checker into a raging, apoplectic fit. Perhaps those who type the screeds, are already doing that, as I’ve noticed “apoplectic fit” is a good description of their disposition to begin with.

But it’s a particularly pronounced problem when they argue with me one-on-one, because I feel this sense of obligation to accurately determine what exactly it is they are trying to tell me. And the initial sentence, in particular, is often missing so many articles and pronouns and plurals, I have to read it three times to find out just why it is, exactly, that I’m such an infuriating simpleton.

What’s written above has to do with grammar/punctuation/spelling. What’s written below has to do with logic.

Whether the Bush-haters throw material up on their own blogs to preach to the choir, or don their armor and do battle on the field in some forum somewhere, overall I’ve noticed substantial swagger and confidence in the belief that after they’re done typing and the dust has settled, the point has been made. Indeed it has been, to those who were predisposed to absorb the point in the first place, but this belief shows an appearance of going much deeper. With a triumph that would draw envy from Daniel Webster himself, fresh out of his famous duel with the devil, or earn a raised eyebrow of approval from Spock, just after he and Kirk have short-circuited their latest ancient alien computer with his devastating logic — Internet left-wingers really do seem to believe, to the depths of their souls, they’ve supported an argument. Oh boy howdy, have they ever. All sane men, behold their argument in trembling fear, for your sanity must surely be questioned if your opinion doesn’t emerge from their onslaught chiseled down to precisely match the liberal’s, like a statue from a block.

And what are these liberal arguments, anyway, which are so incredibly compelling they leave no room for any sane man to disagree, or to even question?

I think it is fair to say, that upon weeding out statistical anomalies like the “observation” above, and an abundance of smarmy ad hominems and bits of humor and sarcasm, I have not seen anything written by the Bush-haters except proclamations of what has earned their approval vs. what has not. I mean, clear back to the first day in early 2000, when we nationally recognized a George W. Bush we could do some arguing about. “Bush did x,” goes the argument — and the all who wait for someone to say “x is wrong, because…” are left waiting indefinitely. That bunny trail will not be tread upon by man. Why should the wrongness of x be explained? It’s wrong — we all know it’s true, it simply is.

Two years ago, a presidential election was shoved into overdrive, and a nation breathlessly awaited the challenging party’s official position on the War on Terror. This country has had its share of war presidents, and it has a dismal history of keeping the powers of those war presidents in check. It would have served our interests well, to diligently explore how our current administration was managing our various conflicts and to address the ways in which our freedoms were being eroded in ways said freedoms didn’t have to be.

Well, we didn’t get that. What we heard, was that “Bush” was “torturing detainees” and that our “civil liberties” were being “lost.” Those who researched what torture meant ended up a little surprised, for they found out that torture had nothing to do with torture. Those who looked into what a what a detainee was, found they really were terrorists and terrorist-wannabes who clung to no possibility of innocence, except wherever “reasonable doubt” was expanded to encompass all existential uncertainties in human affairs. In short, some of those acquainted with the truth, applying an objective common-sense standard of vocabulary selection, might be inclined to call them “terrorists” instead of “detainees,” but the more soothing noun was selected to attend to the chore of persuasion, which should rightfully have been left up to the logic.

It’s wrong to torture detainess, we were told, because we’re better than that. Better than that? Really? Better than “waterboarding” some guy who would kill your family along with hundreds of others? Maybe when we’re stoned out of our gourd on pot and potato chips, watching porn and Star Trek re-runs, too lazy to get up to pee, let alone to do that waterboarding.

That’s what people who “are better than that” do?

Those who water-board, to me, look “better” than those who channel-surf. I don’t wish to impose my system of belief upon others, but to me, it seems a worthy question.

Point is, that the answer was not forthcoming, nor was any debate that might lead to it. Waterboarding, like force-feeding someone on a hunger strike, is “torture”; and torture is “beneath us.” In short, our liberals didn’t like those things. That was the extent of the debate. They didn’t like it. They like other things, and they don’t like those.

A similar frustration lay in store for whatever intrepid soul undertook to explore what civil liberties were being lost. Even today, we do have some anecdotes about people being visited by federal agents over their library transactions, but the anecdotes labor under the problematic burden of being not real. What other examples are there? Well, the point really is that the mindset is hostile to the question being asked, not that the substance of the not-exactly-forthcoming answer is lackluster, but I’ll explore the answer anyway:

You can’t do incredibly stupid and asinine things when you’re on a plane. In this case, arguing with security people over your “Suspected Terrorist” pin, can get you ejected from the flight.

I think most of us would agree, having inspected the issue this far, that the substance is lacking. I can’t do stupid crap on a plane now, but before the September 11 attacks, I couldn’t do that either. What civil liberty has been lost here? My point is not that we never found out; my point is, rather, that to tell us the answer, or to demonstrate some diligence in trying to find an answer, was never deemed a worthy exercise. Like the existence of God, or that God is a man, it was an unprovable system of belief, and was always intended to be that and nothing more.

Go right on down the list, and the pattern holds true. We must have a “global test”; really? Why is that? Inspections and sanctions will work; war won’t. Based on what? You like sanctions and you don’t like war, but other than those what have ya got? Nothing. It’s not a baby, it’s a lump of tissue. And your evidence is? Well, it turns out you like to call it a lump of tissue and you don’t like to call it a baby. That’s all. What else…health care is a right, and all Americans deserve a living wage. Okay, I’ve got an open mind, can we explore what “all Americans” do to deserve a living wage? And the answer is — no, we can’t. They just do.

If you were born when I started arguing with liberals on the “innernets,” within the next few weeks you’d be old enough to go to the store and buy me some beer. And those preceding few paragraphs capture the extent of the “arguing” I’ve seen liberals do. They like this thing; they don’t like that other thing.

Now, about the liberal blog. The fellow who appears to have something to do with running the site, had some very kind words for me and offered to do a “link swap,” in which I mention the name of his blog and his blog mentions the name of mine. We point to each other, in other words. I accommodated his request, as you can see in the sidebar where “Empires Fall” is mentioned. Then, I put up a post commenting on how rare it is nowadays, that people can labor under different opinions on the state of affairs as well as about what should be done — and nevertheless find something positive to point out about the other fellow.

Well, I still believe in stopping to notice people who are worthy of that kind of compliment, and I still think “Empires Fall” is worthy. For the next few days or so, I’ll keep their name in the sidebar.

But at this point, I’ve lost most of my interest in figuring out when, oh when, “House of Eratosthenes” will be mentioned over there. His list of blogs is much longer than mine, but it’s neatly alphabetized and I have to assume I would be somewhere under the letter H. It seems to have slipped their minds. Oh well, it really doesn’t matter, this is the blog that nobody reads…if there is a goal, here, it is to make some objective observations about contemporary events and proven matters of fact, and to draw reasonable inferences from those available facts. Becoming a “phenom” in the blogosphere is not really part of the agenda. It never has been.

But just along the issue of people saying they’ll do things and then doing them, had he done it, it would nevertheless have been appreciated.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

I Like This Thing, I Hate That ThingSunday, April 30th, 2006

I Like This Thing, I Hate That Thing
Sunday, April 30th, 2006