House of Eratosthenes

[E]ven Ann Coulter wishes she had a show where she could just hook people up to lie detectors and ask them if they love America.

The results…would be that most of them couldn’t bring themselves to honestly declare their love for the best country currently present in the world.

smeltvertising, commenting in a thread under one of my Right Wing News posts

Socially stigmatize whatever is the opposite of what you want done;

Item #2 on the list of How To Motivate Large Numbers of People To Do a Dumb Thing, Without Anyone Associating the Dumb Thing With Your Name Later On

Switch moderation and extremism with each other, by using the words “always” and “never” to describe any alternatives to your idea

Item #3 on the same list

If a man loved his wife the way democrats love America, how would he treat her? …Asked what exactly it is about his wife that he loves, he’d say not a single word about what she is or what abilities he has learned she has, but instead, about what he hopes she one day becomes. He’d talk about what she wants to be…never having discussed these points of improvement with her, just pulling them out of his own rear end, insofar as how she is to get better.

If You Love Me Like democrats Love America…[then please, kindly, stay the hell away from me]

To quote Screwtape — you see the little rift? Truly loving America has been portrayed as a thought of extremism rather than one of moderation (refer again to Item #3 on the list of How To Make Large Number Of Some Reasonable People Do Dumb Things). Hyper-patriotism…”My Country Right or Wrong”…Heil Hitler and all that. Once we train our independent and competent thinking on which one it is — loving America probably isn’t really the extremist option, is it? Your mother taught you to show gratitude when there was something there to inspire it, didn’t she? When someone did something nice for you, at expense to themselves large & small…that they didn’t have to do? Well how ignorant would you have to be about America’s history, to think that somehow does not apply? How extremely ignorant?

But we have a President with a big long list of America-bashing friends, a list as long as my left leg…who went and apologized for us…ostensibly, for the “blame” we have for this thing or that other thing. But really, if you study the situation to an extent beyond the merely casual, the apology was offered for our mere existence. He did it to make Europe like us moar better. He played Screwtape’s game: Believe America has a great share of blame — not because it is true, but for some other reason. That’s what is cool. Not loving America. Hating it, instead…without using the word hate. Make it look like the first of a twelve-step program, admitting you/we have a problem. But it’s not the first step, it’s more like a means to an end. Apologizing our way out of existence.

How do you make it cool to love America again? Step One: Figure out if you’re telling the truth or lying. When it comes time to polish up the “propaganda,” all those who do not truly believe in it, kindly leave the room. There is no need to gussy this up as a disguised falsehood — loving America is cool. It means people who’ve come before you, have sacrificed for you without even knowing who you are, and you appreciate it. Cool, like sincerely loving a woman.

Conservative Republicans, specifically conservative Republicans who advocate a stronger, more sincere love of country, are not deciding anything at all this year. Or very little. And yet. The complaints against them, somehow have reached a fevered pitch. Why? It really comes down to one reason: They have not yet been adequately muzzled. Don’t take my word for it. Take a sampling of the complaints against them. Said complaints are not hard to find. Read them. Study them. Distill them down to their core essentials. In 2009, it comes down to that, every single time: Not enough of an effective monopoly has been achieved.

When you’ve been handed a “mandate” of sorts to fix things…and you spend all the energy behind that mandate not to fix those things, but rather, to bitch away that your gelded opponents, who are unable to decide anything, but still in possession of a vestigial ability to speak up and say stuff — what is that, exactly? Extremism or moderation?

Is it really smart and cool to switch moderation and extremism in your own mind (Item #3), just because there’s a social stigma (Item #2) that compels you to do so?

Hat tip to Red Planet Cartoons for the image.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
- JohnJ | 04/12/2009 @ 17:48
Extremism in the defense of liberty or in the pursuit of justice…is an oxymoron.
- mkfreeberg | 04/12/2009 @ 18:09
Ol’ Screwtape was on to something, there.

I normally don’t try to take works like that (meant to be primarily spiritual) and bend them to support arguments about secular policies and governmental problems of the moment. But in the The Screwtape Letters, I see the forces of evil twisting logic, pulling people away from Truth, and using every rhetorical and emotional trick available to delude humans.

I find that the only way I could be brought to agree with most of the policies and methods of the Progressive Left is through a similar twisting of mind and emotions.

I hesitate to call a political opponent Evil. But I observe that they appear, in this occasion, to use similar techniques and tactics. The goal of pulling people away from the good parts of Tradition appears to be held in common.

What else is there to say?
- karrde | 04/12/2009 @ 21:16

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It’s Become Uncool to Love AmericaSunday, April 12th, 2009

It’s Become Uncool to Love America
Sunday, April 12th, 2009