House of Eratosthenes

So whoever didn’t get the news, Andrew Breitbart dropped to the ground Wednesday night, or early Thursday if it was after midnight, walking near his home. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. I remember when my mother suffered a death that made no sense at all, and since she was loaded with talent we rationalized that God needed her for something. It made sense and it still does. It makes sense with Breitbart. And now, Andrew Breitbart is doing in death what he did so well in life: Exposing the plain fact that, whoever chooses to lean left politically to make themselves more decent people, had better pick some other way to get it done because that method falls short.

We needed that and we still need it. For far too long, and for far too many people, left-wing ideology has been a litmus test for human decency. It doesn’t work and the consequences have ranged from the slightly disappointing to the tragic.

The first exhibit to be offered by the warrior from beyond the grave: Matthew Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone: Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche.

Click through and read it yourself, for I find the comments much more remarkable than any of the content. I write, specifically, of the comments that defend the piece and launch these counterattacks against anyone who finds something in it to…well, gee, I dunno, what do you think. Some guy with political opinions different from some of the staff in Rolling Stone literally drops dead, and before the body is cold, this respectable publication puts up an article calling him names straight out of a sixth-grade school playground.

And here is my observation. Actually I have two observations, a minor and a major. The minor one is: Leftists don’t quite so much judge you and find you wanting if you disagree with them — although they do — it’s more like, they judge you unfit if you disagree with them and are effective in stopping or reversing the agenda. This makes sense. You had it figured out already, didn’t you, that this is not a conflict with ideas quite so much as a conflict with political agendas. So someone like me, who writes for a Blog That Nobody Reads but hasn’t achieved what Brietbart managed to achieve; and the several acquaintances I’ve made who also write for blogs, some bigger some smaller, who are in more-or-less the same boat. If we drop dead, we’ll still all be bad people, but Breitbart is a super-duper bad person even though, among the rest of us, his political leanings would have been unremarkable. Some of us would be more rightward-leaning and some of us would be less so. It isn’t about ideology, it’s about achievement.

But that’s the minor point.

The major point to be made is, when loyal leftists engage this battle of political agendas…the culture war…and write smut like this. They do not respond to criticism the way Andrew Breitbart responded to criticism. Breitbart, it has been pointed out many times, wore it like a badge of honor. He was fully aware, you see, of the truisms made in that above, minor point. He re-tweeted the most vile tweets made about him. As Taibbi mentions, and this is central to the point Taibbi is making as I understand it — Breitbart would have tweeted links to the Taibbi piece.

The major point to be made, from the comments defending Taibbi’s editorial, is: Liberals respond to criticism about their most deplorable comments with wall of defensive flak that demonstrates confusion between approval and comprehension. Read the comments yourself and you’ll see what I’m talking about. If you don’t love Taibbi’s piece, you don’t “get it.”

I don’t think this is a cynical peer-pressure maneuver. It might have started out that way, or not, but it is not that. I think it is pure defense-mechanism. Here they are with all these lifelong-nurtured and sustained liberal opinions, investing various amounts of energy in keeping them strong and broadcasting them to whoever will listen. Why? (And why do you have to spend energy keeping those beliefs…I don’t have to spend any energy at all to remain convinced that. let’s say, there are three feet in a yard…but let’s let that one go.) You do it so people will understand, or be inclined to believe, or be persuaded — or to force people to understand — that you are a good person. To form a crowd, or become a part of one, that is all on the same wavelength…and to elevate your stature within that group.

That’s why people believe things that cannot be proven because they’re simply not true — and no evidence will ever arrive to support such things save for evidence produced by flawed experiments and deliberate cherry-picking. Things like, when you raise taxes the economy does better, we “ease the pain” of working families who are struggling when we make the gas prices go up, a higher minimum wage lowers unemployment, those bad guys will stop being mad at us when we apologize for burning the Koran, we can end war if we just sit down with our enemies and talk out our differences…and the like. Industrial-era carbon emissions raise something called the “earth mean temperature” even though, as said metric has been measured over the last ten or fifteen years, it hasn’t been going up. People repeat all this balderdash anyway to make themselves better liked, and that’s why they do things like call a family man, in the first twenty-four hours since his demise, a “douche” in a major glossy publication that his four children and widow will almost certainly see, hot off the presses. In this round-about way of thinking, and in some otherworldly universe, it makes them better people.

And then it doesn’t work, when they’re criticized for it. Because the critic is saying such obvious things, like: You know, if you followed the classic-mom advice “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” — no disaster would ensue. That would have been the preferable way to go. Deep down, inside, they already know this…so they lash out.

They confuse, like I said, approval with comprehension. You aren’t granting the former, so you must not possess the latter. You don’t “get it.”

Memo to Taibbi, et al: Got it. It’s crystal-clear and I, and others, understand perfectly — a “respectful” nod from one warrior to another, a little salute to the Viking’s funerary boat before you launch the flaming arrow and set it all ablaze. We see exactly what he’s trying to say, we get it…and wrap your head around what comes next…we’re still doing what you’ve learned to do, pretty much constantly, by way of reflex more than conscious thought. Judging the work and finding it meritless. We’re doing both of those things, understanding fully and disapproving. Yes, at the same time.

When Ted Kennedy died of a brain tumor, I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate, due to (a) my great aunt died of one and (b) I dunno, I’m still somewhat human. Couldn’t think of anything nice to say either, so I simply expressed my sincere condolences to his family and friends who were grieving. And I still caught shit from people who kept saying “Don’t you believe in forgiveness?” Well of course I do; that’s a stupid question. However, to achieve for forgiveness you have to admit that you had sinned and you have to beg for forgiveness and/or pay some sort of compensation. Fat Teddy’s compensation? A lifelong seat in the Senate and a postmortem lionization instead of a jail cell. He paid no price, did no time for his crime and actually made a decent run at the Democrat presidential nomination, which tells you lots of things about that party, none of them good.

You know what’s funny about dicks like Taibbi? We understand them. Perfectly. But they understand us like Hellen Keller understands her colors. And since they cannot comprehend, they choose to make caricatures of people like us and then project the motives that they would have if they were us and their cartoonish assumptions about non-lefties were correct.

The one good thing about dickless wonders such as Taibbi is that yesterday, of all days, they simply could not help proving Breitbart’s point about them. It’s who they are, and it’s good for it to be exposed more frequently.
- Physics Geek | 03/02/2012 @ 10:33
Don’t know if you’ve read his update, but this is part of it;

“But I guess no homage is complete without a celebration of the whole man, and the whole man in this case was not just a guy who once said, “It’s all about a good laugh,” but also someone who liked to publish peoples’ personal information on the internet, hack into private web sites, tell lies in an attempt to get his enemies fired, and incite readers to threats against his targets and their families, including death threats. I left all of that stuff out of my obit, but now, thanks to you readers, that’s all in there as well, leaving, for posterity, a much more complete picture of the man.”

And the name Gleick popped into my head.
.
- TMI | 03/02/2012 @ 14:13
Fucking lame.

He must have missed the part of the video where Breitbart challenged the press to come forward with one provable Breitbart lie. Just one. What, Taibbi would’ve turned the whole thing on its head if only he was there?

Fucking lame-ass motherfucker.
- mkfreeberg | 03/02/2012 @ 14:45
Isn’t Breitbart the guy who offered a hundred grand for anyone who could *prove* that those black Congressmen were spit-on, or were on the receiving end of racial epithets, during their provocative walk through a Tea Party rally? Of course, nobody tried for the money. It was Breitbart’s way of sticking a pin in the balloon of the leftists “the tea party is racist!” narrative…and sadly for the Left, it worked.
- cylarz | 03/03/2012 @ 04:58
Andrew Breitbart died and I believe he knows it. Matt Taibbi is dead inside and does not know it.
- wtng2fish | 03/04/2012 @ 20:11

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Let’s Call It “Taibbi Defense Mechanism”Friday, March 2nd, 2012

Let’s Call It “Taibbi Defense Mechanism”
Friday, March 2nd, 2012