House of Eratosthenes

These days I’m getting e-mails quite regularly from the democrats, about the scary guys the Republicans are about to run for President. If I don’t want that to happen I’d better send in some money! But what’s fascinating to me is they so often avoid mentioning what exactly would be wrong with a President Trump, President Rubio, President Cruz…compared to Hillary and Bernie, the two they’re trying to sell.

So it’s finally happened. They’re going with the “Skip the details, we’ll stick with mockery and ridicule for you if you don’t do what we want” technique — on their own supporters. Chip in the cash. Or we’ll make fun of you for being a racist/bigot/chauvinist/homophobe/retrosexual whatever…

It’s odd. Voters have long had a revulsion against political sloganeering that is invested too heavily in “Here’s what’s wrong with that OTHER guy…” Of course, if the voters voted as if that revulsion mattered, politicians and their public-relations arms would very quickly stop using that angle, and that’s not what we’re seeing happening at all. So it’s an ineffectual revulsion. But it’s still there. People talk about it often, and they’re not just making up stuff about it, or about their very sincere dislike. And their worry over it, that if there were positive attributes found in the candidate being sold they’d be hearing about them, so there must not be any; that is sincere too. The democrats must realize this.

And here they are going full tilt. And…failing to deliver on what people didn’t want anyway. “Forget about why you should vote for Hillary or Bernie, we’d rather talk about what’s wrong with those other guys! Except we won’t.” They claim to be “science”‘s BFFs. How strong can one’s tethering to reality remain, over time, when everything worth saying falls short of worthiness of actually being said? When every little observation made, isn’t made at all? When all communication is reduced to winks, nods, rib-elbowing, “ya know”?

Surely they must realize this is not good for them. Perhaps they have taken my advice.

What is liberalism, anyway? The question has been debated and debated around here, and other places too. No, you can’t just go look it up in a dictionary and believe the “experts.” It’s an impossible question to answer until such time as one establishes the level at which one is attempting to define the word. Are we talking about achievement, or effort? Are we talking about political ideology, value systems, or just base human impulses?

If we do consult the experts, are we going to be careful to purge their ranks of any liberals before we put our faith in them? We should. Liberals have a habit of defining liberalism according to what their opponents believe, and if there is any brand of ignorance on the planet more pervasive and eminent than any other, it is the ignorance liberals have about what motivates their opposition. They don’t have a clue as to what motivates conservatives. And they’re proud of not having a clue. So we shouldn’t believe what liberals have to say about what liberalism is. They don’t know a great deal about that either.

Later I elaborated…

Liberalism is an addiction. You don’t ask an addict for his opinion about what his addiction is, or is not. You don’t ask a liberal what conservatives think. The ignorance liberals have about their opposition is a special kind of ignorance. They don’t know, they’re proud of not knowing. They don’t care to learn. They’re proud of not caring.

I dusted this off recently in a comment:

Liberals should not summarize the viewpoints of their opposition on behalf of their opposition, because liberals don’t understand their own opposition. They’re proud of not knowing.

Rationale being…

It is a mental enfeeblement…We do not allow alcoholics to define for the rest of us what alcoholism is.

It is the ideology of the failed. When we pay attention to what’s going on in our political system and seek to form solid and qualified opinions about what’s happening and what we should do about it, we are confronted with a very specific set of challenges. We are challenged to elevate reason above emotion. Also, to think over a longer term of time. And, to do as much for the public good as we can, while burning away as little freedom as possible.

This stuff we today call “liberalism” is a grab bag of ill-advised actions, and some epithets, packaged up for presentation to an audience of opinionateds who have failed these challenges. All of them. “Blah blah blah…should be free!” Or “Is a right! Darn it!” And “You’re a bigot, and a sexist and a homophobe.” No seriously, that’s their entire inventory after you get done with “illegal/unjust war.” It’s just a huge smörgåsbord of unmeasurable, unverifiable “shoulds.” Fifteen an hour! Or me and my friends will get all stomp-footy. Ban these guns! We’ve decided there’s no use for them, even though we’ve never owned guns and never will.

Raise that guy’s taxes! Because we don’t like him.

Now that having all been said. It occurs to me lately — in spite of this tempest-in-a-teapot that is our presidential election — that perhaps my problems with liberals have little-to-nothing to do with liberalism itself. I’ve been noticing a problem I’ve had, going back years and years, having to do with arguing. Supposedly I’m the catalyst of this problem — “Morgan loves to argue.” But, problem: I’m seeing a lot of other people saddled with the same rep. Do they love to argue? It does not seem that this is the case. And I also see arguments arise when I have no intention of causing them to arise. I recall a few very specific incidents from recent years, in which I could see the arguments coming from miles and miles off in the distance — on a couple of occasions, I actually said something about it — and had no desire to see it happen. The common theme that emerges is that the match is struck when someone notices something. And then the ensuing inferno is all the fault of the person who did the noticing. None of the blame, it seems, goes to the person who actually turns it into an argument…

What really throws the trolley off the tracks, though, is: These people like me, who “love to argue” and actually are guilty of noticing things that make the arguments happen…interact with other people, and when they interact with other people they go on noticing things. This doesn’t cause arguments. Also: The people who were victimized by having these things noticed that shouldn’t have been noticed, and with a hearty “What??” strike the match that brings about the inferno, which is then blamed on others — they also interact with other people. And there, more of this arguing happens. So if we’re looking at common elements, the observation does not hold true.

Conservatives, also, do not love to pay attention to politics. At least, not the ones I know. We do not “love to argue.” I notice a particular passage in my last post struck a chord:

[Conservatives] say to themselves…well, fuck this, this dime-store idiot liberal guy has all the time in the world to throw his cherry-picked statistics at me, his Mother Jones articles, maybe troll conservative blogs all day, but I have customers counting on me and I have to get back to work. And then after awhile the other thought enters the conservative cranium, yet again…I’m doing this to set up my retirement, get my kids headed to a brighter future, not be a burden to my family when I’m older. If only the liberal dipshits have influence on our politics, they get to shape our politics, and that will render these local efforts of mine entirely futile. The Counter-Futility. Back and forth the conservative goes, like a ping pong ball…it’s futile to do this, it is futile not to do this…

Yes, this has been on my mind a great deal…it would seem, were I to be sucked into the void of space tonight and someone analyzed these pages to indulge in some sort of post-mortem psych profiling, the picture that emerges is not one of a man who actually loves to argue. Rather the reverse, it seems to me…

The conservatives who clean the crap out of the sewer lines and lay the foundations upon which buildings will be erected, that will house all sorts of publicly funded liberal-egghead think tanks, have come to the unpleasant realization that previous generations never quite learned: They have to make the time for politics. They’ve got to attend to it, as if it’s yet another chicken with eggs not yet gathered, otherwise everything else they’ve done is for nothing. They’ve got to write the code that works, they’ve got to build the diesel engines that successfully contain the explosions, they’ve got to manufacture the action boxes for 9mm pistols that don’t rupture under the stress, and do all the other things that liberals can never do. Then, they have to participate in politics like the liberals do. And the conservatives have to grow all our food.
:
So conservatives have to make things work…food that can really be eaten, code that can really be run, combustion chambers that really do contain explosions…then they have to make time to argue with liberals who don’t have to worry about any of that. Wrestle with the pigs in the mud.

I’m sure to someone on the outside, it looks a lot like “love of arguing” because there’s not much evidence of the resentment churning away, inside, that one should expect to see. Well trust me, the resentment is there. It is concealed behind the most opaque of shrouds, and that is a shroud of resignation and despair. Sure, it would be much easier to provide for this retirement, write that code, prove one’s worth, embiggen one’s salary throughout the very few years available, if one didn’t have to argue with people who think Caitlyn Jenner is some sort of extraordinarily brave not-man-something-else…or that there are going to be more jobs to be worked if the minimum wage is higher…or that clock boy “invented” a clock. Well, there’s a saying for that: “If a frog had wings he wouldn’t have to bump his ass on the ground all the time.” In other words, “if” isn’t worth anything. Cleaning the shit out of the sewer lines would be so much easier if the shit cleaned itself. Well…true…but you can’t do anything with that. The hens won’t bring you their own eggs, either. What of it?

It’s just an additional job we have to do. Yeah sure we “love it,” the way a Norwegian loves Lutefisk at Christmas. Except Lutefisk is something to be associated with pleasant childhood memories, and the Savior of all mankind being incarnated in human form to gift us with everlasting life. Arguing with liberals just has the disgusting slimy jiggly form, the revolting translucency, the unappetizing soapy taste, without any of those endearing attributes to make up for it. Yes, we partake. Pay for it, even. No, that doesn’t mean we have a taste for it. We’re doing what must be done. We’ve tried not-doing-it, and we’re not happy with how that went.

Hear hear. This is what I hate about liberals. I can excuse just about anything else, but they make me use their own dirty, slimy, thuggish brownshirt tactics. I don’t want to have to argue. I don’t want to follow politics. And I don’t want to urge opinion bans, thoughtcrime purges, and the thousand and one things those scumbags do just before lunch… but I have to, because they do.

I think it was Orwell who said about Gandhi, that his genius was using his enemies’ scruples against them. He knew the British wouldn’t throw him in a labor camp, or have him shot, or threaten his entire family with the gulag if he talked, or roll tanks over peaceful protestors. There were probably a thousand Gandhis in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, he said, but none of them could ever be heard from, because before they got around to protesting anything, they were shot in the neck by a secret policeman.

You can’t fight a principled fight against amoral thugs. You have to make those tactics so painful for them that they stop. Only then can we go back to being civilized.
- Severian | 02/27/2016 @ 16:55
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Saturday, February 27th, 2016