House of Eratosthenes

I’m seeing quite a few posts in blogs like mine to the effect of “I think I might have pissed off this liberal friend of mine on Facebook and here’s how.” This has been on a hockey-stick upswing now that President Obama, showing an apparent fondness for the idea of getting re-elected, has thrown His entire platform of “end war forever by unilaterally deciding not to participate in it” under the bus by taking action on Libya. The lefties are ending friendships, or threatening to. They’re feeling like they’ve been painted into a corner; they feel that way because that’s exactly what has happened.

Well, my lefty friend wasn’t ending a friendship, but he was making it known that something stung and I had brought the friendly and jocular tone of the discourse to an end, or at least endangered it. How did I do that? I called him out. He’d offered these rejoinders to me of the form “you misunderstand, I am not saying A, I am saying B.” Then he did it again and again and again…each time, I took it seriously, resolving to sharpen my pencil of discussion and place a greater effort on the task of staying within the lines, to understand the other side. But after awhile it stopped making sense. In truth, it had been quite awhile since I began to suspect this was either some tactic being lifted out of a written-or-unwritten Alinsky playbook, or was simply a nervous tic. Either way, I wasn’t taking it as seriously as I did before. How could I?

I should note that he isn’t a lefty, he’s anti-war and anti-Bush. But, you see, there we go again. Quite easy to take at face value if that’s the first protest to arrive fitting this template; when it’s the latest of many, you have to look at it differently.

Sometimes, even if it might be entirely sincere it’s altogether unreasonable. When you deal with real life, there are consequences. You can’t say “No no, I’m not saying I want to get into an accident, I’m just saying why can’t we go 70 miles an hour even though it’s a windy backroad and it’s icy.” You can’t say “I’m not saying I like the idea of losing a finger or that’s what I want to do, I’m just saying why do we have to power off the electric knife before we pick things out of the blades.” Sometimes you have to avoid A to avoid B. Which means — this “I’m not saying this, I’m saying that” can be effectively used, even without the knowledge of the person using it, to avoid reality.

Nor is it lost on me that there’s a soft, subtle dig being tossed out to the other party. Ah, look at this dimwit; he misunderstood what I said here, too! He keeps misunderstanding me! Fits right in to that narrative about only stupid people vote for, or support, candidates or office-holders who happen to be stupid. I should hasten to add this might not be the case with my former work colleague; he’s tossed out lots of flattering bromides about my brainpower, et al. But you see, this is how it’s gotten awkward. There’s really nothing else being said. You’re so smart Morgan, no no, you keep misunderstanding me, I’m not saying this I’m saying that. Well, we agree on the awesomeness of vintage teevee shows, maybe that’s what we should be talking about.

Now, this other guy who was talking to me about it back in ’04, when it was a much more exciting thing: This was the first time I had ever heard of anyone say “No no, I’m not saying Saddam Hussein wasn’t a problem, I am in fact agreeing to the idea that he was quite dangerous, all I’m saying is we had no right to go in and do something about it.” That creeped me out. It creeps me out to this very day. Because I know why that guy said it; this was a chameleon, someone who acted on each new situation for the sole purpose of making his popularity greater than it was before. I worked with him for five years and never saw him once go against the perceived majority, nor do I expect I ever would’ve if I’d worked with him for another twenty.

I think these two agents — lust for positioning oneself with the popular frame of mind, and denial of the consequences of reality vis a vis “I’m not saying A, what I’m saying is B” — combined together, present a danger much greater than the sum of the parts. I think what we’re looking at here is the Epoxy of Doom. Don’t we then act out the mythos of the lemmings, rushing together as a crowd up to, and over, the brink of a cliff? Have we not then eliminated any factor that might stop us from doing such a thing? Avoidance of reality provides the lack of direction and ignorance, and then peer pressure provides the drive. “No no, I’m not saying I want that bad thing to happen, what I’m saying is…whatever all these other people around me are saying.” Okay then, we’re big and we’re moving. Momentum by definition. But who’s driving this bus?

Right versus wrong is measured according to whether lots of “cool” people are doing the same thing. Any logical pondering about actions versus consequences is brushed aside with “I’m not saying that I’m saying this.” And wherever the mob goes, it goes. We then become just a tumbleweed in the windstorm of random chance, do we not? What, then, anchors us or directs us? Have we not then abjured anything that would?

I’ve seen a lot of that, too. I think the not-so-subtle dig — how can this dimwit keep misunderstanding me?! — is pretty much the whole point of the exercise. Since the only thing the left really believes in is their own mental and moral superiority, those are their only possible defenses when threatened.

I mean, have you ever had a debate with a leftist where he said “I think you’re wrong, and here are the facts and the reasoning”… and sustained it? I’ve had a few start that way, but they all seemed to end with some version of “Severian is a horrible, horrible person for even thinking that!” In fact, I bet I’ve never gotten more than three steps into a “debate” before the very notion of “facts” has been called into question. As in:

Leftist: blah blah boilerplate something I remember from a Michael Moore film blah blah Al Gore blah blah the science is settled blahddy blah blah typical sneering condescension.

Me: Ok, but there’s this study over here that says….

Lefty: Oh, sure! That study was funded by Big Something-or-Other. All lies.

Me: yeah, but they include their numbers and methodology. See, this footnote…

Lefty: Yes, they would claim that, wouldn’t they? Probably on Faux News.

Me: Well, no offense, but that’s beside the point. If you’d just look at the numbers….

Lefty: What’s the point? Rupert Murdoch can pay somebody to say anything he wants!!

etc. etc. etc.

Leftism means never having less than a total monopoly on compassion and IQ points. And if you disagree, you’re just a shill for the Wall Street Journal.
- Severian | 03/21/2011 @ 14:11
Yeah, right, exactly. That’s exactly what I’m seeing.

My tentative theory is that we’re dealing with a family lineage of ideas. A “rags to riches to rags in three generations” story that involves toxic ideas instead of drunken humans. To wit:

Generation 1: 1950’s. Idea: Math geekiness leads to good results, and a monopoly on the ability to attain them. If you do your trig right, you can put something in orbit around the earth forever. One day maybe we can put a man on the moon and bring him back again by figuring out how the weight diminishes with the burning-off of the rocket fuel.

Generation 2: 1970’s. We can each make our own reality, man. Perception is reality, man. Symbolism is the new substance, man. Tune in, turn on and drop out.

Generation 3 is a bastard love-child of those two. I looks like I have a unique command of the details and you just don’t get it, man…I have nuance, you’re a blunt instrument, tool of the establishment. And I look like I’m yielding the desirable benefits because I’m taking credit for what these people over here did, man.

It looks more and more like the outcome of a Faustian contract. Like any other, the participant has figured out the downside of it far too late, after the commitment has been made; now, they want to dance to this tune of “I created good results by means of careful, healthy thinking” without having engaged in the discipline, without having made any of the sacrifices and without having done any of the work. Just a lifetime spent figuring out what’s cool and echoing it…but they now want to sing along in the closing chorus of “And we couldn’t have made it turn out this way without sound, disciplined thinking.” Like they want to have their cake and eat it too.

No wonder they’re so threatened when challenged. Here they are coming up with the “right” answers after having copied them from the pages of the New York Times, and these tiresome busybodies like you & me are asking them to show their work. Fluster, stammer, sputter sputter sputter and how DARE you question these nameless people I don’t know who have won Nobel prizes!
- mkfreeberg | 03/21/2011 @ 14:29
I think you nailed it. Aspiring lawyers are told: if you have the facts, argue the facts; if all you have is the law, argue the law; if you don’t have the facts or the law, obfuscate. Leftists are past masters at this, but it’s such a transparent tactic I’m surprised they never get called on it. For instance, when the left starts arguing about how little of our GDP the US spends on healthcare compared to Europe and you ask them, “what does GDP mean and how does one calculate it?” The universal leftist answer is hysterical shrieking about how you must want disabled orphans tossed into the gutter to starve.

There’s no such thing as a fact, they’ll proclaim, unless they feel they’re in possession of one… at which point it might as well be carried down from Mt. Sinai by Moses himself. Heh. Maybe they should put that on their bumper stickers.
- Severian | 03/21/2011 @ 15:07
Makes me wonder if Socrates had to put up with this.
- mkfreeberg | 03/21/2011 @ 15:10
How about the recent lack of mainstream media coverage of the death threats to Republicans in Wisconsin? Easy to see why, you say?

Not to a liberal. First of all, the point I tried to make was that the media didn’t report it because the threats were against Republicans — doesn’t fit the template.

Ready for the response? OK. My liberal friends said, “Well, all death threats are bad.” I said, “Yes we agree on that but the media…” Response, “Well, Bill, there are quite a few other things in the news to report. They must have buried it under those stories.” I said, “Do you really think that? Can’t you just admit media bias?” And, on. And, on…if I choose to stay with it.

No thanks and you’re right. They just don’t seem to understand.
- BillW. | 03/21/2011 @ 20:22
I have noticed this as well when arguing with people who really don’t have an argument. Which is often the case on the left.

As you press them on specific points, they keep shifting the argument until you’re arguing about something completely different.

Hey. “How many Chris Matthews does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer is, ‘RACIST!!!!!'” — Stephen Kruiser
- philmon | 03/22/2011 @ 08:11
Hows about we start a campaign. Call it “Define That, Please.” Whenever a leftist starts going off into one of these rhetorical flights, all we say is: “define that, please.”

So when your typical leftist starts going off on the evils of, say, “capitalism,” you ask him/her to actually define capitalism (either with or without a sarcastic “surely someone as brilliant as you must know that there’s a technical dictionary definition of so basic a word?”, depending on taste and/or if you’ve had your morning coffee yet). I’ve actually done this a few times, and — shocker!!! — it turns out that “capitalism” either means a) something very bad and I want you to help me hate it (cf. “Republican,” “conservative,” “fascist,” etc.).; or b) some huge agglomeration of $5 words, none of which they can actually define either, but salted with enough sneering condescension that they can convince themselves they’ve “won” because you don’t know what “the dithyrambic metapraxis of heteronormativity” means either.

Imagine how quickly leftists would shut up if you just held their feet to the fire about the actual meaning of the words they use. Pretty much all leftist “statistics,” like their “facts,” depend on easily disprovable solecisms. The whole “1 in 8 Americans lives in poverty” thing, for instance — the government’s definition of “poverty” is something like $20K take-home pay for a family of four. Which is not a princely sum, I’ll admit, but it conveniently disregards the cash value of all the government’s “anti-poverty” perks like Medicaid, food stamps, etc.

Not that you’ll actually convince them of anything, of course — if they were amenable to evidence and reason, they wouldn’t be leftists — but at least they’d learn to shut the fuck up around us… which is certainly a victory of a sort, no?
- Severian | 03/22/2011 @ 09:40
Yep, good ‘un. You’re calling for a more focused version of the Socratic method. Hence my query about the philosopher above. Why would you invent something like the “Socratic method”…what use would you have for such a thing…unless you were surrounded by liberal assholes. Why did we have a hundreds-of-years-long revolution of logical, practical thinking in Greece during the last half millennium before the birth of Christ — unless there was some other force pushing in the exact opposite direction, inspiring it.
- mkfreeberg | 03/22/2011 @ 09:47
Indeed. One could, if one were a cynical asshole like me, make the argument that liberalism is, always has been, and forever shall be one big exercise in magical thinking.

For instance: George W. Bush gets a congressional resolution, multiple UN resolutions, a gigantic international coalition, and gives umpteen press conferences outlining his case for action against Iraq… and he’s a unilateralist cowboy warmonger who lied us into an ongoing quagmire (don’t forget the lack of exit strategy!!). Meanwhile, Obama dithers and golfs for three weeks, then decides — on the spur of the moment, as he’s boarding a plane for Rio — to open-endedly commit our air and naval forces to… well, whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing in Libya, without a by-your-leave or even a consultation with Congress. This is perfectly fine.

Aside from the enthusiastic knob-jobbing of people like Andrea Mitchell, this is different from some remote forest tribe’s rain dance… how?

And it all works like this. We have Universal Health Care now — have you heard? Everyone will be eternally healthy now, for free, and it actually saves us money to boot, because Pharaoh Obymandias says it does. What, weren’t you listening to His innumerable press conferences? You’ll also note that the seas have begun to recede and cool ever since He made that Berlin speech. I know leftists who honestly, actually believed this — you could see it in their eyes.

If Socrates were alive today, he’d be hitting the ouzo very, very hard.
- Severian | 03/22/2011 @ 10:07
Magical thinking. Heh heh. Yup, that about covers it.
- mkfreeberg | 03/22/2011 @ 14:39
You can’t really hold their feet to the fire; they’re too slippery. I got this response from a leftie friend after I emailed him sources and numbers to support an argument I’d been making at lunch: “What I’m not going to do is take the default position that I’m wrong because I don’t want to put forward the effort necessary to give a researched response.”

So I guess I’m supposed to take the default position that he’s right because he’s pretty sure he could probably dig up something that sorta supports his argument if he wanted to take the trouble.

Sigh.

I guess we can always talk about the weather.
- mb | 03/22/2011 @ 17:10
@mb

Sadly, this is par for the course with them.
- philmon | 03/22/2011 @ 19:40
I don’t want to put forward the effort necessary to give a researched response.

Heh. I used to get that from leftie friends all the time too. They tried the whole “I have umpteen gazillion facts on my side, and I just dare you to prove me wrong!” gambit that they so love… except that, you know, I know how to type shit into Google. I’d come back with links — “ok, how about this… and this… and this… and this…” — and he’d fall back on “well, I just don’t have the time to prove how wrong with extra wrongsauce you are about all this, since I have soooo many better things to do than obsess over politics like a wingnut.” At which point I’d remark that it took me all of fifteen minutes to come up with all those links… and of course he’d come back with something about how I must be deranged to have that many websites bookmarked, with the implication that Richard Mellon Scaife sent me his personal Talking Points Database and VRWC secret decoder ring… and on and on it went.

So, yeah, it’s probably useless. Fun, though — if only to see them squirm when that little niggling doubt enters their tiny pea brains that they might not be quite as super-duper-uber smart as they like to think they are….
- Severian | 03/22/2011 @ 19:49
Makes me wonder if Socrates had to put up with this.

Why do you think he drank the hemlock?

This “debate” goes back a long time. I remember a discussion with one of my lefty coworkers back in the 1990s. He said “They’re raping the planet!” When I asked to explain what exactly he meant by that, he got very huffy and refused to talk about it anymore.

And don’t get me started on man-caused global warming.

Okay, I can’t help myself because the topic pisses me off. Thought experiment: if someone who had never heard of global warming were presented with the following evidence, what would be his conclusion?

1) Fact: temperatures have been both warmer than they are now (Medieval Warm Period) amd much colder (lots of Ice Ages) over the last [insert large number here] years.
2) The CO2 records appear to indicate that CO2 levels increased 600-800 years years after temperature upswings.
3) The temperature proxies used diverge from reality in the middle of last century, completely failing to mirror the recorded temperatures
4) The human CO2 emissions have increased over the last decade, yet temperatures have either flatlined, or even declined a litte.
5) CO2 can absorb a finite amount if IR radiation.

In truth, I don’t know what his conclusion would be, but I’ll tell you what it wouldn’t be: “People driving SUVs are killing us all!”

I’ll tell you right now that if St. Louis were being ground to dust under a mile thick glacier, the warmist true believers would still be carping about how global warming was going to be the end of humanity. Truth, fact, logic: these are not the tools of the Leftist Jedi.
- Physics Geek | 03/23/2011 @ 09:49
Physics Geek, I haven’t even gotten that far.

I’m still stuck on, “Okay, if the data showed, to your satisfaction, that Earth were getting colder instead of warmer, regardless of cause…would you find that more reassuring and acceptable than the present situation?”
- cylarz | 03/23/2011 @ 23:55

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