House of Eratosthenes

He has replied to us yet again, and again chose to debate in this passive style, leaving it up to us to find the trackback. That is, of course, exactly what we did to him, because that’s what he did to us. Perhaps he finds the situation as humorous as we do, but his more likely motivation is the usual: Wants to be seen by other liberals saying the right liberal stuff. We’ve seen this before. The evident terror, renewed on an hourly basis, of being thrown out of the “good liberal” club, and the enthusiasm for being seen saying the right things so it doesn’t happen.

The issue is eliminationism, which is the desire encased within a political ideology to obliterate those who don’t belong. I unwittingly set off something of a firestorm by commenting, innocuously I thought, that this is exactly what I see liberals do. Now, why liberals think conservatives do this, is something you can go look up, and they do have some evidence to support their cause.

It falls into two categories:

1. Humor. “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee,” [Ann] Coulter said. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.” Smart thing to say? Definitely not. Serious threat, or a joke? Well gee, since the answer to that one is given away by the person who said it…I’m gonna go with joke, Alex.

2. Cause-and-effect logic about the state of human affairs, and how it coincides with the law. They’re illegal and they have no right to be marching down our streets. They have no constitutional rights. They don’t have First-, Fourth-, Sixth amendment rights. They’re here illegally and they chose to be here illegally.

THAT’S IT. Every one of their examples, have fallen into one of those two categories. (There are other examples, like the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Japanese Interment event during World War II, but those were liberal democrat initiatives; Elf and his friends have yet to acknowledge that, so far as I know.) The examples produced by Elf & Co. are fairly solid, including quotes, with citations, and none, within the information available to me, are open to question or dispute. But everything I’ve seen that really came from a conservative, in word or deed, falls into one of those two categories.

I’m not going to get into a link war with Elf as he wants me to do. It’s quite pointless. He said I didn’t come up with a list of my own to counter the list of his friends, when in fact I did exactly that. I came up with four items. I didn’t link to these, I simply said I did come up with a list. Get a load of this response.

Freeberg starts off with this claim: “As anyone who clicks through and reads my original work knows, I did offer a list of examples.”

No, actually, he didn’t. Here’s what he wrote:

Those groups, and many more, I’ve seen exposed to “complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.” “Unfit for participation in their vision of society.” Earlier in the piece, the author further defines eliminationism as something that “cuts the target off from the community support it might normally enjoy and leaves them feeling even more isolated.” Is it possible to jot down a more apt description for what has been done to the Boy Scouts?

Bzzzzt! Sorry buddy, no that isn’t the excerpt I had in mind. Try again. And no, I’m not going to point you to it. I’ll just say it’s a list with four things. Happy hunting, Sparky.

Why am I being so evasive? Because the terms aren’t defined yet. Liberals, obviously, have an emotional investment in their monopoly on eliminationism. Look at all this backlash, and all I said was that within my experience — emphasis on my, since personal experience is a personal thing — liberals behave exactly in the manner I see them ascribing to others. And when liberals get emotional about things, they come up with terms that don’t have serviceable definitions to them. “Swift Boat” as a verb. “Greed.” “Wealthy.” I see “eliminationism” as just another one of these. It seems to have a definition, but it really doesn’t.

And from here on, the same thing happens all the time. The word takes on fuzzy boundaries, and whenever these boundaries are sharpened within a situation, this is done temporarily, in chalk instead of in ink, for the benefit of the liberal viewpoint in that situation.

Here’s an example. If you don’t have any intention of obliterating me, but you want to silence my viewpoint, is that eliminationism? Some of the conservative-on-liberal citations of eliminationism count on this being answered in the affirmative. But if that’s answered in the affirmative, the Hush Rush law certainly should count as an example coming back the other way. (Perhaps this is a good place to point out that “fairness” is another one of those nuisance words, the words that don’t have a definition except for a definition that is blury, temporary and/or situational.) Apparently, with regard to Hush Rush, the answer to my question suddenly changes; a desire to “hush” is no longer eliminationism. So we see, the boundary of “eliminationism” is sharpened, but only temporarily and situationally. Conservatives commit eliminationism upon liberals if we wonder aloud — or silently — if the republic can endure what some liberals say about it. If we simply bring up the fact that, in generations past, what counts today as “free speech” would have been sedition and would have been a shooting offense, that’s eliminationism. We need not indicate that we should go back to doing things the old way. Simply pointing out how quickly our standards are diminishing, with some tincture of alarm or dread, is good enough.

But liberals, it seems, have to be caught red-handed personally slaughtering us before they’re guilty of the same thing. That’s what I mean by sharpening the definition of a word situationally and temporarily.

And that’s why I haven’t come up with a list. Mr. Elf can play stupid all he wants, but anyone who’s interested already knows how this will end. I’ll say “what about this? what about that?” some forty times, or whatever, and he’ll just say doesn’t count, doesn’t count, doesn’t count. That is, if he engages me directly. Something he hasn’t done yet. So this is a pointless effort in a number of ways.

And I just don’t find that kind of thing interesting anymore.

I think Elf doesn’t quite realize it yet, but what he’s revealed about himself is that he doesn’t really know any conservatives, or if he does, he doesn’t talk things out very much with them. If the feeling that your opinions will not be welcomed is a symptom that you’ve been…eliminationalatiated…and he had some conservative friends he’d talk things out with, the fact of the matter is he’d need no list from me. He’d already know.

Because liberals are utopianists. You hear it all the time — “There is still racism out there.” Sure, there shouldn’t be any. And sure, it sounds pretty alarming when you say there is some. The first response is that yes, we should go ahead and get rid of it. Sanitize the place. Disinfect it. Nevermind how. We can’t have any of that racism.

Seems reasonable.

But you should realize at the outset such a venture subordinates the sensibilities of the individual to the cultural norms of the community, a violation of civil rights if ever there was such a thing. It’s still a defensible campaign, at that point, but then you realize the devil’s in the details. For example: Over the weekend, Bob Herbert found some racism in one of McCain’s new ads; he found it in representations of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Washington Monument, which weren’t even there for Mr. Herbert to find.

Of course that isn’t eliminationism. But it does make one point clear: Utopianists are, by nature, well on the way to eliminationism — when you take into account that the same folks who want to sound the alarm about some kind of “ism” being found, are the same folks who want to define what it is. Elf and his friends, it seems to me, want to define eliminationism in exactly the same way Herbert wants to define racism. Like Potter Stewart said about pornography, they’ll know it when they see it.

So in producing my own list, I’d be challenging the self-anointed. Challenging the self-anointed is something you just don’t do.

If I were to do such a silly thing, I might take the time to gather up anecdotes like, for example, Bookworm’s:

On the eve of last November’s election, a six year old girl who lives around the corner ran up to me chanting, “Bush is evil! Bush is evil!”

I was at a party last year when a woman I know suddenly burst out, “I hate Bush. He’s evil. I wish he’d just drop dead” — and everyone around her verbally applauded that statement.

At a lunch with some very dear friends, the subject of the Iraq war came up and one of my friends, a brilliant, well—read, well—educated man, in arguing against the War, announced as his clinching argument the “fact” that “Bush is an idiot.”

An acquaintance who had to go to the Midwest for business commented with wonderment, “They’re different in the flyover states. They don’t think the way we do.”

But Elf doesn’t just want me to offer a list. He wants to review it, too. And, I presume, post his findings, without notifying me of the posting, letting me find that by trackback. And, I further presume, in reviewing the list, whittle it down to zero with this justification or that one. Lemme guess…Bookworm’s little stories can’t be verified. Well, I can’t verify some of Orcinus’ stories either. But of course they count. That’s how it works. Having noble, progressive, wonderful fuzzy liberal intentions, means never apologizing for a double-standard. That’s why the self-anointed are not to be challenged.

I don’t find that kind of thing interesting anymore, either.

No — here is what I find interesting:

Just this weekend, Rachel was soliciting advice on how to talk to liberals. And someone — namely me — had made a great point about them. You might call it the “If you cannot convince me, it must not be so” doctrine.

6. Keep in mind who’s supposed to be convinced.

You know liberals don’t feel that good about what they believe, because a lot of these things start out with the liberal saying something like, as an example, “why do YOU THINK we went into Iraq?” So we’re having a conversation about what YOU think. And then as you present the case for taking down the Hussein regime, the liberal will use the talking points to shoot each one of those down…in so doing, swiveling the argument around into a (failed) attempt to convince him of something. This is actually pretty funny if you see it as the trap that it is, because people who feel secure in the things they believe don’t convert every single conversation into a failed attempt to convince themselves of something different. Just keep in mind how the argument started, and say “well, okay, but you asked what my opinion was, and that piece of evidence is good enough for me.”

With that in mind, my original point stands. What Orcinus described, is consistent with what I’ve seen a lot of liberals do. You can disagree with them…and hang around…so long as you are outvoted, ruled unconstitutional, intimidated into silence, shouted down, or rendered dormant in some other way. That’s what I’ve seen liberals do in my personal experience. If Elf disagrees, he’s perfectly entitled to his opinion, however wrong it is.

And since this conversation started out of what made sense to me, Mr. Elf, I should report to you (in your own passive, craven, just-wait-for-you-to-find-the-trackback way) that this still makes sense to me. My success or lack thereof convincing you of something is quite off-topic. You’re supposed to change my mind, and at this point you have yet to succeed. You’re welcome to give it another go once you find this post is out there, waitin’ for ya.

I mean, if liberals are not capable of eliminationism, this situation with Mr. Elf seems mighty strange. Look what we have going on here. If I’d kept my thoughts to myself about Orcinus’ original post, we wouldn’t be having a dust-up. But I blogged about it. Making my opinion known caused some kind of a controversy. But I’d better not notice that making the opinion known is what causes the problem, or else we have another problem. And of course it’s all my fault for not keeping my silence about what I’ve noticed…something liberals aren’t supposed to do.

Quite to the contrary. On the liberal side of the “aisle,” it seems making a controversial statement, is exactly the point at which the glory begins. Someone else makes a statement liberals find controversial, and you get all the derision, all the bullying, all the propaganda, all the shush-campaigns, that they complain about — and often, hallucinate about — in others. Liberalism is fast becoming, nowadays, an ideological manifestation of Thing I Know #235:

Thing I Know #235. What a self-parodying mess it is when a command hierarchy is constructed within any rebellion, for there it becomes undeniable: The rebel is only a fair-weather friend, at best, to the act of rebelling.

Their core philosophy is to challenge others, while they themselves don’t want to be challenged.

Not.
Worth.
The.
Time.
This.
elf….
- vanderleun | 08/05/2008 @ 01:06
Like I said, the elf is in great company.

Please. Society is never gonna make any progress until we all learn to pretend to like each other. Now, let’s go over there and make these hideous strangers feel welcome.
- mkfreeberg | 08/05/2008 @ 01:33
I got nuthin’, I can attain the adored and respected
mantle of elite by simply echoing the “little peoples” dismay.
Yeah, small pond……that’s the ticket.

Maybe that way, I can get a coffee at Starbucks for a mere (US$)$2.00 in the afternoon! (with proof of purchase at regular price that morning)*sigh*

Note:Exclamation point use ironic only.
- CaptDMO | 08/05/2008 @ 09:24

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If You Cannot Convince Me, It Must Not Be SoTuesday, August 5th, 2008

If You Cannot Convince Me, It Must Not Be So
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008