House of Eratosthenes

Number Eleven, yay! Our proggie friends will be quick to remind you, though…along with our hippie friends, and who can blame them…there’s a dark side to this. “Don’t encourage him, nothing good can come from it!” Heh. They’re right. Or, mostly right anyway.

On the other hand, there is one good thing about it. If you follow the link, and you have a Facebook account that allows you to read, you’ll notice there is a lively discussion ensuing under the statement that won this coveted honor. Said lively discussion is drawing topic drift the way a new wool sweater attracts cockleburs, and cat hair. So the award offers the opportunity to pick up where the earlier observation gave way to all these charged agendas…like, thou shalt not speak ill of ANY immigration, legal or otherwise…makes us look like racists…what broke Detroit…

Here’s the full statement, in context:

We have things that are supposed to be illegal that “really” are not, like sneaking across our national border, and we have things that are supposed to be allowed but are “really” against the “law,” like for example forming a Young Conservatives group on a college campus, smoking cigarettes, or wearing a “Proud to be American” tee shirt to a high school on Cinco de Mayo.

It is dangerous, living under two sets of laws like this. It’s not an Obama problem, it’s a baby-boomer problem. The hippies have reached the age where they’re expected to be in charge of things, but they still want to rebel against authority when they are the authority. Their generation has manufactured a contradiction which, I’m afraid, is not finished with doing all its damage yet.

Elsewhere, I waxed lyrically of the great schism that is taking place: People are arguing about definitions. I summarized it more elegantly off-line, in an e-mail:

Our “civilization” at the moment…is embroiled in a cold civil war, in part because it has grown quite the appetite for young people who are not curious, youth who have little or no use for definitions, who can easily be told what to think. This cold civil war is between people who refuse to define things, and people who MUST see to it that things are strongly defined before they can do what they do.

Architects and Medicators. People who solve the problems they encounter by way of thought, versus people who address every thought-challenge by way of feeling, often losing sight of the difference between feeling & thought. The “cold civil war” is still cold, but it’s been heating up for awhile, and is approaching an ignition point as we close out Anno Domini Twenty Fourteen.

I continued this observation in Thing I Know #435:

I notice there is an ability some people have and some people do not have. We might think of it as the ability to comprehend definitions that have provide no objectively discerned meaning, applying interpretations that require the human element. Is this room tastefully decorated, is that joke funny, is it fun to watch that person give a speech. In our time, this ability is generally mutually exclusive from the ability to perceive truth. It isn’t hard to demonstrate: Was so-and-so only kidding when he said such-and-such. We see people heckled, ridiculed, scolded, for failing to “get the irony” or for having taken something too literally. The danger involved in diagnosing learning disabilities in, and prescribing medication for, these people is that it sidelines most of the people who might have the ability to get something useful built. An irony-genius, or denizen of a relative-reality universe, isn’t in a good position to build anything involving any level of complexity because you have to perceive hard, concrete, cause-and-effect relationships to do things like that.

People like me who entirely lack that other ability, that “comprehend fuzzy definitions” ability, actually can get irony pretty well. Matter of fact, we can see irony better than those who accuse us of not being able to get irony.

For example: The irony of this cold civil war, in which those who seek to avoid definitions, find they must labor toward entirely defrocking the other side of any status or influence whatsoever, so that nobody of note or significance is taking the time or trouble to define anything — is this. Should they win this cold civil war, they will lose everything. I mean everything. The things they want, the things they need, all these things rely on something being properly and meaningfully…defined.

But the cold civil war is approaching some sort of flash-point. Or anyway, it’s in some state of ascension, unprecedented ascension, about to get as bad as it can get. Because those who have worked their entire lives to rebel against authority, now find themselves in the position of being the authority. It’s on them to find some way to reconcile this. It’s a job that can only be done poorly, or not at all.

And so, as I said, we have two sets of laws. We have things that are illegal but “really,” wink-wink nod-nod, aren’t. And other things should be legal — in fact guaranteed rights — but actually are, wink-wink-nod-nod, Verboten.

Right or wrong, good or bad, that’s where twenty-fifteen finds us. Can’t wait to see what happens next. Happy New Year!

Standing ovulation!
- vanderleun | 12/31/2014 @ 18:00
Hear hear!

Aiding and abetting this hippie attitude is what Nightfly calls Directive Four:

“A journalist is always the underdog crusader.”

They are addicted to this narrative and self-image at all costs. They MUST be the eternal Prometheans showing the way to enlightenment at great personal risk – though it cost them all they have they soldier on bravely, bravely, forever fighting The Power of Darkness.

Which, in the Age of Obama, means the media is so often reduced to the position of MSNBC… no, not the one with the kneepads, but the one where they report the “absence” of news as news. Fast and Furious is not news. The IRS scandals are not news. Benghazi is not news. The utter failure of Healthcare.gov is not news. &c. Rachel Maddow is Kevin Bacon in Animal House: “Remain calm! All is welllll!!!!!”

Fascinating, ain’t it? And since every generation tries to do the opposite of the one that came before, how much longer will it be before the Xers and the Millennials turn authoritarian?
- Severian | 01/01/2015 @ 06:59
Congrats, Morgan. You come up with a lot of pithiness, so it’s good to see it recognized.

Sev, if I had to sort of synthesize what Morgan said with what I said, I’d observe that the media, whatever their protests, don’t act as if they “Speak Truth to Power.” In fact, as Morgan observed, they ARE the Power, or serve the Power, or suck up to the Power. (Yup, just like high school.)

That makes their behavior clear. If they were just reporting on events and challenging people in authority, they wouldn’t have the gnawing, bitter resentment of the rest of us that they exhibit. They wouldn’t regard the reverses of one particular party (and always the same one!) as personal defeats. They would, in fact, be on our side, a citizen press redressing the government for their grievances.

They’re clearly not. They are passing the word from the Government Olympus, and we mortals ought not dare to oppose it or disbelieve. They treat us basically as apostates, and Fox News as open heretics in full schism. And they investigate our alleged wrongdoings, not theirs.
- nightfly | 01/05/2015 @ 08:55
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- House of Eratosthenes | 01/11/2015 @ 13:48

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Wednesday, December 31st, 2014