House of Eratosthenes

This is what victimology — trying to create an identity for yourself based on your weaknesses instead of your strengths — does to you. It warps thinking. Even within those who never had a chance to think through anything rationally, it takes whatever lopsided, ramshackle, crooked-line thinking they can manage to bring, and warps it more.

It’s not just these two airheads, it isn’t even just rich media whore starlets. The root cause of the consternation here is the question of influence. There’s an unwritten and unspoken rule here, that there is a class to be defined and anyone outside of that class should have zero influence. Those within the class, of course, should have infinite influence. On that, the two rich media whore starlets agree. Their disagreement, clearly, is on where & how the periphery should be drawn. Who should be in, who should not be.

But the premise of the question, on which they agree, is flawed. It isn’t sustainable. It promises the rest of us nothing, no solutions to any problems, only more fighting. And maybe that’s the whole point.

Here’s a shocker.
I tend to give more credibility to folks who meet, and overcome “issues”, and tune out folks who seem to ALWAYS espouse “special” considerations” , because…it’s ALWAYS someone else’s fault.
SEE: “EVERY man I’ve EVER dealt with has treated ME like shit!”
ALSO SEE: The Fisherman’s Wife, and The Blind men and the Elephant.
- CaptDMO | 12/20/2014 @ 09:34
Exactly. It’s the difference between the positive and the negative.

In fact, the more years I see come & go, the more plainly I come to understand that it’s nothing more complicated than that. I’m either gaining an appreciation for opposites, or losing an appreciation for increments between extremes. But then again, on the question of whether opposites really are opposites, increments are nothing more than wedges that prove, rather than refute, the opposite-to-opposite relationship.

Follow the logical results of their premises and they disprove the premises. Even your East-West analogy – they think it’s a refutation to say that certain things are East of some things, West of others? Well, doesn’t that assume a priori that East and West are actual absolute things? Otherwise you couldn’t say your middle position was, in fact, East of this and West of that. They haven’t disproved East and West at all, they’ve confirmed it – they actually had to rely on it to even try to rebut them.

East West, hot cold, light dark. To that, we can add positive-negative: People either try & learn from their failures, or they find excuses. Set up an inventory of lessons they can learn to achieve a better result next time, or set up an inventory of reasons they were never given a fair shot.

Why fabulously successful people willingly insert themselves into the latter of those two, is a mystery to me. I can’t figure out what’s happen here because I simply can’t relate to it. There must be an incendiary hatred there, an anger, or some hole in the middle of the person they can’t fill.
- mkfreeberg | 12/20/2014 @ 10:51
This reminds me of something I read about today’s so-called “Progressives”, that they interpret society as being made up of the Oppressed, the Oppressors, and the Champions of the Oppressed, with they themselves of course occupying the latter position. By this logic, if you are not one of whom they have defined as the Oppressed, and you are not one of the Champions of the Oppressed, then by their definition, you must be one of the Oppressors, and it’s all your fault.
- IcelandSpar | 12/21/2014 @ 07:53
@IcelandSpar,

and yet we conservatives are the black-and-white thinkers who lack nuance. Weird, innit?

@Morgan,

at some level, it might be yet another problem of infantile psychology. Let’s say you cheat on a test and ace it. Because you aced it, the principal calls an assembly in your honor, where you are publicly proclaimed to be the biggest genius in the whole school. What do you do? If you admit you cheated, you’ll never be anonymous again — from being the highest of the high, you’ll crash down to being the lowest of the low. It’ll follow you the whole rest of your career. But if you don’t admit you cheated, you know all the benefits you reaped from acing the test are unearned…

I imagine that most people go a third route, constructing some elaborate justification for their success that doesn’t involve acing the test. “I am super smart,” they probably tell themselves, “not because I mastered the material on the test, but because I was able to fool all of these people into thinking I’d mastered it.” Deception itself becomes a virtue, and you’re smart because you’re the best at it.

I think that’s the position the Rosies and Whoopis are in. They’re compensated so far out of proportion for their “talents” that the whole idea of fair compensation becomes a sick joke to them. They “earn” their pay by gaming the system, so the best gamer of the system wins… and anyone who looks to be better at gaming the system must be destroyed, completely and immediately.
- Severian | 12/22/2014 @ 17:52

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Rosie and WhoopiSaturday, December 20th, 2014

Rosie and Whoopi
Saturday, December 20th, 2014