House of Eratosthenes

I’m way behind on my e-mails, yet again. It’s part of a curve with a very large arc to it, as we slowly stagger back toward sanity following this wild, crazy summer with the house and so forth.

During these wild spates of sorting dozens and dozens of pages of e-mail, as I question whether I’m going about it the most efficient way, I’m also noticing things I otherwise would not notice. Great volumes of news articles, opinion columns, blog comments, marketing communiques, et al, flow past me, days’ or weeks’ worth in a matter of minutes, and I start to see trends.

My observation is that when liberals disagree with everybody else, I perceive that the liberals, and everybody else, are talking past each other. They live in a different world. That’s not news, of course; my observation lately is how that world of theirs is separated from everybody else’s.

This mystifies people, myself included, especially when liberals take positions on things that are so readily refuted by easily observed facts. Like Michael Moore’s famous “There is no terrorist threat,” for example. Here on Planet Earth, real people like you and me hear that, and we interpret it to mean:

“I’m putting my credibility on the line here, there is no terrorist threat.” Or, “I can support the position, with facts and logic, that there is no terrorist threat.”

That is not what liberals mean to say at all. What they mean to say, in this instance, is: “We wish to promulgate the notion that there is no terrorist threat.” Or, “It benefits our political objectives to promulgate the notion that there is no terrorist threat.”

This is what Reagan was observing, although perhaps he didn’t consciously realize it, when he said: “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” (Yes, really.) It’s got to do with this bit about “knowing.” It doesn’t mean the same thing to liberals that it means to normal people. What they “know,” is what they wish for others, as many other people as possible, to also “know.”

But as to whether or not it “is so”? They couldn’t possibly care less. That goes for things like:

The border is secure.

We are more free, when we start throwing people in jail for refusing to officiate gay weddings.

There is no need for voter ID because there is no such thing as voter fraud.

That doesn’t sound like something George Washington would have said.

ObamaCare is working great.

Muslims, as an identifiable religious sect, are no more dangerous than Christians.

Global warming, on the other hand, will kill us all.

…whereas, a global warming tax of some kind will surely save the planet.

Iraq was never a threat to us.

With things like this, proggies live on a sort of “Promulgation Planet” — they do not live on Earth, with the rest of us, because when they say “X” they don’t mean to say “We stake our reputation and our credibility on X.” What they’re doing is showing us the moves to a sort of dance. Put your left foot here, put your right foot there, ObamaCare is working great, the Washington quote is spurious, the border is secure. It is the message itself, not the content of it or the support for it, that matters.

It is the kind of warped thinking that arises, in a naturally consequential way, from valuing consensus as proof. The next step in the fallacious thinking is to try to shape reality by shaping the consensus.

Update 10/28/14: I’m sure I could add to those examples all day, but it’s hard to see how I could have missed this (via Hot Air): “Don’t let anybody tell you that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs…they always say that…Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs”.

Clinton’s comment will likely be used frequently to attack her as another big-government Democrat as she begins her widely assumed presidential bid.

Gee, ya think? How unfair that would be, like, golly.

What makes more sense: “I’m putting my credibility on the line, we have the proof that businesses do not create jobs.” Or — “It benefits our political objectives to promulgate the notion that it isn’t businesses that create the jobs.” You go on down through the daisy-chain of risible lefty statements, and each one may at first sound like it’s supposed to be an expression of defensible and verifiable truth. Many of the promulgators certainly do seem to feel that way about it.

But, in each case, you’ll find it makes a great deal more sense to evaluate the expression as a set of instructions, to be exercised and then relayed to more who will likewise relay and exercise: How to minimize the damage to a failed political ideology that does not, and cannot, deliver on its promises.

I am truly starting to believe that liberals’ public statements are no more than mating calls, as meaningless as the cheeps and skwawks of birds.

You can have a calm, reasoned private discussion with a liberal, but the minute a third person enters the room, the conversation becomes a performance. Now the liberal’s statements aren’t designed to convey information, nor his questions to elicit it. They’ve switched frequencies and are now emitting sorting signals. Is this new person a member of my flock? If so, we are the ingroup; we must band together and point-and-shriek at the intruder. If not, then I am the outgroup, which is unacceptable. Flutter away!
- Severian | 10/27/2014 @ 05:31
An elephant is like a rope.
NO!, It’s like a snake!
No, I’ve actually touched an Elephant, and it’s like a tree trunk!
etc…etc…
- CaptDMO | 10/27/2014 @ 16:22
[…] Down to Two Minutes Mark Udall Tells the Truth: Content of Their Color The Power of Narratives Promulgate Moron Messaging Meta-Sloth Liberals Are in Favor of Restricting Government The E-Word and the […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/02/2014 @ 10:42

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