House of Eratosthenes

112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.

Needed or not, this type of “leadership” has been in demand for the past few years, has it not? People lusting after being-told-what-to-think?

Yeah, sure. You can’t watch the results of the 2008 and 2012 elections and come away thinking anything else. But at a certain point, I think people tire of the obfuscation. Conquest Rule #1: Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. I might flip that around to say something like: People feel a temptation to be liberal about matters most distant. When there is an insulating layer, or the perception of one. When they feel like they can afford to be.

It’s surreal that the Secretary of State makes this comment about a “tortured debate about terminology” and in the very next sentence relies on a term that apparently is in use by pretty much no one, save for himself and his boss. For reasons that aren’t clear at all. But this does clarify one thing: There’s a confusing and “tortured debate” going on, and John Kerry represents the people who are making it that way.

It’s not just with this issue, by the way, and not just this year. It isn’t even just John Kerry.

Clarity is anathema to modern liberals. Sometimes the American people like that; we’re often not in the mood for too much clarity. But, Kerry did lose the election when he ran, which shows now & then we can be fair-weather-friends with the idea of knowing what is being said. My thinking is that, since this stuff is cyclical, we’re heading into that realm again and the smokescreen-pundit is going to be losing popularity in the years ahead. Hope so. And that not too many people get hurt. There’s some pain involved in this part of the cycle, just as there is some unpleasantness when any hallucination reaches an end.

“Waste of time,” feh. Somewhere I made the observation that all persistent and profound human disagreement seems to be conflict between one side that craves details, and another side intent on avoiding them. Ever pay attention to what people do with their time, after telling other people not to “waste” it? It’s enlightening.

“Waste of time” is a crock of shit in the internet age.

Yeah, like everyone I have my time-saving heuristics — “experts are always wrong” and “liberals are always lying” are two of the most reliable — but if ever I really need to get up to speed on an issue, it’s, like, right there. http://www.google.com. I’m a fast reader, but I can get fully briefed on just about any issue in about 45 minutes. For liberals, it should be even easier — often there’s a helpful conservative in the discussion who is more than happy to forward all kinds of links.

If it’s so important that y’all must police the entirety of Teh Internetz about it, shouldn’t you take, you know, five minutes to read up on it? Nobody’s day is that packed.
- Severian | 09/16/2014 @ 07:28
ISIL, ISIS or IS? The Etymology of the Islamic State
http://www.newsweek.com/etymology-islamic-state-270752
- Zachriel | 09/16/2014 @ 13:43
Yeah, and as for the whole “liberals are always lying thing”…I’ve had many a discussion about that. See, when they are in danger of losing power, as they are right now, they will always…without fail…say “Republicans do it too!” If you argue equivalents, they will always claim “just as bad.”
My argument has always been, if 10% of Republicans lie, cheat and steal, and 60% of liberals can be counted on to lie, cheat and steal, there is absolutely no comparison. There is no “just as bad.” It may not be an absolute as indicated by the “always,” but one is white with a tinge of grey, while the other is a dark, festering, moldering pussball of filth desperately trying to pull the white sheet of “Notme” and “IdaKnow” over their heads when exposed to the light of truth.
- P_Ang | 09/16/2014 @ 14:10
P_Ang,

you’re right, of course. That’s why they’re heuristics, not ironclad rules. But when I hear a liberal telling the truth — as sometimes happens — I suspect an ulterior motive. And it’s usually not that hard to find — indeed, it’s often to establish that “conservatives do it too.”

In fact, in the interest of clarity: Very rarely do they outright lie, in the sense of proclaiming a verifiable untruth. They won’t straight-up say, for example, that 2+2 = 5. They’ll strongly imply that 2+2 equals 5, usually by ridiculing the very idea that it could be anything but five (aka “Wow. Just….wow”). Or by claiming that a “consensus” of “experts” says it’s five. Or by asserting that math is patriarchal and homophobic and cisnormative and racist, because among disabled transsexual Masai women, two plus two is five, and also six, and occasionally the square root of pi.

The question then becomes, Seinfeld style: Is it a lie if you believe it? Liberals put so much sheer effort into avoiding facts that it’s often hard to tell what, if anything, they actually know about the subject they’re opining on at such length and volume. In those cases, my heuristic becomes: Watch the syntax. When they whipsaw between vague gassy generalities and weird, hyperspecific terminology, they know something, and are doing their damnedest not to admit it. They also have a marked tendency to drop their pronouns whenever they’re caught in a contradiction. That’s why transcripts of liberal politicians talking so often sound like they’re poorly translated from Medieval Finnish.
- Severian | 09/16/2014 @ 15:00
Everyone is missing the issue.

If you are a multicultural, postmodern, erudite, educated leftist you know that it is impossible to lie because there is no such thing as truth. Lies are for those who believe in truth. There is only the narrative, your experience is colored by your expectations and thus what I (the leftist) say is true if I believe it to be so.

IT isn’t that the left believe in double standards, it is that they don’t believe in any standard but are willing to use the standards of others to denigrate and destroy their opponents.
- Fai.Mao | 09/16/2014 @ 16:27
That’s true for the most part, but what about Conquest’s First Rule, above? Everyone IS conservative about what he knows best. Liberals have to live in the world, too, and if you lie to them — you tell them the post office is on Main Street, when it’s really on Elm Street — they’ll be mad.

Even if you tell them, “oh, in my narrative experience, it’s on Main Street; why won’t you validate my feelings as a transgendered performance artist?!?,” they’ll still be spitting furious, because in this one case — when it affects them directly, materially, and immediately — the truth is out there, and it’s absolute, and f*ck you and the cultural paradigm you rode in on.

That’s what’s so frustrating about dealing with them. They pretend that their little 180-degrees-from-reality Cultural Studies theories are true, and they’ll deal with reality-reality when they have to… and then they’ll turn right around and claim that there’s no conflict at all between the two.
- Severian | 09/16/2014 @ 16:44

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John Kerry’s Leadership is the Kind We Don’t Need and Don’t WantTuesday, September 16th, 2014

John Kerry’s Leadership is the Kind We Don’t Need and Don’t Want
Tuesday, September 16th, 2014