House of Eratosthenes

At least, in the form of a 3-minute YouTube clip, it is informative. In the first third, it’s free-speech this, free-speech that…they have the right!! Eleventy!!

Liberals are huge fans of the dictum that defense of speech must be stalwart and it must be sustained, as an all-the-time thing. Defense of speech has nothing, NOTHING whatsoever, to do with approval of the speech content, supposedly. They may disagree with what you say, but they’ll defend to the death your right to say it, as the cliché goes. To the death! Big, powerful, tall words there…to the death. Yikes! Death smarts!

Okay, nobody dispensed the apocryphal Voltaire quote this time around. They just championed the sentiment. They have the right! Nothing else needs to be hashed out there, nothing else needs saying, because they have the right — case closed. But…defend free speech to the death? When it comes to something that really hasn’t got a chance of ever snagging their approval, the freedom to say it hasn’t got their approval either. They can barely make it past the two-minute mark.

This is one of the most dangerous parts of modern liberalism, and that’s really saying something. This cognitive dissonance. Defending a person’s right to say or do something has nothing whatsoever to do with approval of whatever it is…and then, suddenly, these things are inseparable, I can’t sit here and listen to you say that because that would be approval. The mixed message is dangerous.

To define how it’s dangerous it is first necessary to inspect how it’s dishonest, but fortunately that doesn’t take too long. Obviously if there is a connection between “I support your right to say it” and “I approve of what you’re saying,” but it is only to be put in line-of-sight of those interested some of the time, then the connection does exist all of the time whether it is seen or unseen. Just as a cup of wine is poisoned whether you saw the poison go in, or not, or a hole in a cattle fence remains there until it’s fixed, day & night.

What does honest disapproval look like? It looks like Joy and Whoopi storming off the stage at the end of the clip. And, we’re not seeing it in response to the Muslims wanting to build a victory temple right by Ground Zero in Manhattan. They don’t disapprove of that, and that’s the real issue. It isn’t a free speech issue.

This dishonesty makes it possible to reach a nimbleness and agility sliding around the Overton Window, that could not otherwise be reached. This stuff we today call “liberalism” distinguishes itself from all other political ideologies, through this desire to move the Overton Window, and achieve planned, conscious guidance in how & where the window is to be moved.

If the Overton Window is about what is accepted as mainstream thought, and the movement of that window is a change in what’s mainstream over time, then we could think of liberalism as a push to move the window and of conservatism as opposition to this. Perhaps we could tighten up the precision on that perception by saying: Liberalism is “Hey, why can’t this window be moved over here?” or “What might we do, to push this thing that’s not in the window, into it, or push this other thing that is currently in the window, out?” And conservatism would also involve some thought-provoking questions, such as: “What was the rationale for positioning the window where we find it today, and what might we be losing if we succeed in moving it someplace else?”

Usually, the answer to the conservative question is: Conscience.

There is a window of conscience that is loosely connected to this cultural mainstream-thinking Overton Window; and, it cannot move as quickly. So when liberals delight in their ability to surround us, their fellow countrymen, with their chatter and their ability to move the window around as if it’s a big chess piece on a board, they risk undocking it from the window of conscience. This is aptly demonstrated at the beginning of the clip, when O’Reilly talks about it being “inappropriate” to build this victory temple and obviously the concern is about the feelings of the family members of the victims of the 9/11 attack. This is a matter of conscience. It’s still just a matter of feelings, but still. Regard for the feelings of others is an important source of conscience. The lefty plank of the The View hostesses, will have none of it.

Oh okay. So what other matters of conscience will they not consider?

Once you undock the Overton Window from the window of conscience that lies underneath it, there can be difficulty involved in getting it docked again. For examples, look up any totalitarian regime from the twentieth century, in a country that was previously democratic, and there are many of those. Any nation that ran through Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is an adequate example. Pretty soon, you’re trampling on matters of conscience that are not limited to matters of feeling; pretty soon, you’re running roughshod over actual situations. This is where political dissidents get eliminated, where you have gulags and so forth, where relatives vanish in the middle of the night. Because after all, now we’ve moved the Overton Window, it’s important to do something to show the window’s been moved, and now this thing we want to do is within the mainstream thinking because of that recent movement.

As we see when Whoopi and Joy get up and leave the set — it can be a perilously short amount of time before truth is a casualty, before it is pushed out of the window. We’ll defend to the death your right to say it!!…unless what you’re saying is actually useful information, and verifiable as true, and then don’t count on us so much.

Hmm. Overton Window. Reminds me of the metaphor for fascism that I made up and tried explaining to my liberal friends. Fascism is like a bowl, with a fringe ring around the rim. Usually, they are easy to identify. However, cause too many to flood to the left (or the right) side of the bowl and it starts to tip. Now what was “fascist” and far and above the socially acceptable line is now standard acceptable (and in this day and age leftist) practice.

They didn’t care much for that. I got a long lecture that fascists can ONLY be right-wingers; liberals call their fascists “communists,” which in the liberal do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do mindset is somehow more forgivable and acceptable.
- P_Ang | 12/12/2016 @ 12:45
“…unless what you’re saying is actually useful information, and verifiable as true, and then don’t count on us so much.”
Nothing new.
Mr. O’Reily did it AGAIN, and the consortium that includes (but certainly not limited to) AOL “news” could only find their usual
racist, sexist, queerxenophobic tool on the top of their first aid boxes.
I think the overwhelming “feedback” of poopy pants is why the meme disappeared in shame (if one can imagine progressive cheerleader squad capability for shame) so quickly.
In the toolbox: Is there a special name for that rubber hammer that folks use to exhibit knee jerk reflexes?
- CaptDMO | 12/23/2016 @ 05:27
Someday, I’ll learn to spell O’Reilly, I SWEAR!
- CaptDMO | 12/23/2016 @ 05:28

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Lose the Whoopi and the JoySunday, December 11th, 2016

Lose the Whoopi and the Joy
Sunday, December 11th, 2016