Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Norman Geras came up with some “observations of [his] own, of a supplementary nature” contemplating the subject of people who defect from The Left. He lists seven motivations for such an exodus, the first six of which read like this:
Could there be, anywhere, defectors from a left that, in a world by no means short of tyrannies, torturers, rank abusers of human rights, widespread poverty, extensive hunger, episodes of genocide, was obsessed above all with two countries, both of them democracies, as the source of all political evil – the United States and Israel? Just watch my dust: it’s a left to be left.
But the seventh is really food for thought:
But then who would want to defect from a left which saw itself as uniting certain universal values, values like freedom and equality and justice, with the interests and struggles of the unfree, the wronged and the oppressed everywhere? Well, I don’t know who would want to defect from this kind of left. But when I ran into them I’d try to persuade them not to defect. I’d tell them that there’s a left worth belonging to, and that those who belong to it should limit their defections to parting company with the lefts that discredit its values and its better traditions.
It really does get one to thinking. All these ugly traits of The Left, every single one of them seems to have roots in this idealistic vision.
Maybe I’ve already noodled this one out — in, coincidentally — seven steps. One of my sidebar nuggets lays down a broadside assault upon The Left in one of the most devastating ways possible: Pointing out how their well has been poisoned, without setting out trying to do that. Nowhere in the essay does the word “leftist” or “liberal” appear. It simply exists to point out weaknesses in thinking, and it ends up enumerating some faux-intellectual maneuvers that, today, define and typify The Left. And they’re intended to be recalled in a sequence. Perhaps, there, we’re looking at the migration of the ripe, sweet, juicy fruit described in Norm’s bullet #7…to a wrinkled, fetid bulb of compost matter that inspires the remaining six.
I have no doubt whatsoever that my first step to insanity does exactly this:
The first step to insanity is to confuse the subjective with the objective. This is necessary. You can’t go insane without this, but it’s much easier to do than you might think. All you have to do is think of value judgments, inferences, and other cognitions of yours as measurable when they’re not, and vice-versa; lose track of, and any interest in, what another capable mind might conclude when looking at the same thing. Simply put, you insist on debating things that aren’t really debatable, and settle on the realization that anyone who thinks differently than you do must be a flaming idiot or must have something wrong with them. Stop believing in perspective. Things are the way you think they are…unless you don’t like whatever that is, and then there must be “shades of gray” involved.
Are all these viewpoints of liberalism rather like the viewpoints of a woman, as she ages from a gorgeous maiden into a wrinkled old hag? Is it unavoidable, when you dedicate yourself to “freedom and equality and justice, with the interests and struggles of the unfree, the wronged and the oppressed everywhere” — to “stop believing in perspective”? To begin a habit of “debating things that aren’t really debatable”? To confuse the subjective and the objective?
Maybe it isn’t unavoidable. But it damn sure is easy.
I think, what we have here, is a useful definition of a conservative. We’re leery of “values like freedom and equality and justice” until they’re stated in very specific, precise terms, and even then we remain suspicious. It isn’t the nobility of the intent that concerns us, it is the history of human events that is to be written afterward.
We see such vaguely stated, glittering glorious visions kind of like that lady ghost in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the one who materializes as a beautiful maiden in front of that chubby Gestapo guy and then rots into an ugly skeleton in the twinkling of an eye, making him scream his fool head off in horror right before his face melts. We know our history, we see liberalism as exactly that kind of foolish pipe dream, and we see the eventual result as an inevitability.
And with all these defectors from liberalism, there must be something to that.
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