House of Eratosthenes

Toward the end of last year I had noticed, and since then I have made occasional reference to, a perfect quartet of “unavoidable flaws with liberal ideas.” They are derailment points on the railway; the liberal-idea-locomotive encounters one among the four, and chaos ensues. The mishap may be recoverable, but be that the case or be it not, the best-laid plan will come undone; any success realized after that point, will be realized by good fortune as a product of chance. And, interestingly, they make the same mistakes in the service of the interests of their agenda and their party, that they do in service of the interests of the country — which, to me, strongly suggests they are absolutely, genuinely, blind to the problems.

They really don’t understand them. Among the loyalists, I think they could be given a couple hundred years to make the same mistakes thousands and thousands of times…and…they’d just keep making them. That is what happens when you rationalize failure. You obviate the need to learn anything from it. And they are experts rationalizing away failure.

Time. They’re drunk on the elixir of friendly historians scribbling down such nonsense as, Franklin Roosevelt ended the Depression. And so they don’t worry about legacies. They’re very often caught neglecting the refinement of the message that would be handed off to history, opting to focus their attentions on the emotional rapture of the moment. The Occupy Wall Street movement, with its sloppy core message that never did quite gel into any useful form, is a perfect example of this.

Commerce. Considering how much arguing they do about wealth and who has it, it just blows my mind that they demonstrate so anemic a grasp on what it is. They show a complete ignorance of the difference between occupations that create it, and occupations that do not. They seem to think the occupations, themselves, are the wealth, and that when an economy moves it’s just thriving on its own built-up inertia, like some sort of perpetual motion device that doesn’t need any fuel. “Get it going” is all that is needed. When I had my first car, I was responsible for gas and repairs; I suspect most liberals just borrowed their parents’ other car whenever they ran into a problem, and then daddy went & had the repairs done and the tank topped off. They seem intractably dedicated to the notion that any engine not running, including the economic engine, will run just fine if someone just turns a key. They see motion the same way they see life — it’s there just because it’s there, and if you start asking chicken-and-egg questions about it it just means you’re a shallow stupid ol’ teabagger.

Incentives. Conservatives and libertarians have been screaming for generations, “If you want more of something, subsidize it, and if you want less of something, tax it.” Granting the benefit of the doubt that our liberals do really want to make things better, they must not be getting the message. They’re constantly advancing plans to subsidize lifestyles that, if improvement of society is the end goal, nobody would want to see becoming more widely practiced. I haven’t been able to get a liberal to define in clear terms what “prosperity” looks like; haven’t been able to get any one of them to say “more people would be rich”…
:
Abundance, and/or omnipresence. I see them constantly trapped in the thought-whirlpool that the goal must be to make something more highly regarded and highly valued, and the surest way to get there is to make that thing more plentiful, ideally, so that it becomes impossible to ever get away from it. This is a guaranteed fail because no person or thing has ever become more highly prized or cherished as a result of being more frequently seen. Natural laws of economics and human nature dictate that the opposite must be true.

Just noticed, over at my Hello Kitty of Blogging account, their vision for our society is most gravely in error precisely when & where it comes in closest proximity to almost making sense:

To understand liberals, you have to understand how their social contract makes sense, and it DOES make sense. In certain situations. Like, on a life raft, out in the middle of the ocean, with a dozen or fewer people let’s say. Water water everywhere, not a drop to drink…

In that situation, I agree with the liberals. If I find out one among us as been sitting on a hidden stash of chocolate bars and bottled water, that guy is a dick. And he should be fed to the sharks.

To understand the liberals, all you have to do is realize they live in this world ALL of the time. They lack the intellectual agility required to flex and adapt to different situations. We have legless people running races. Our kids all have cell phones. Our poor people are fat. They aren’t willing to factor these things in, to acknowledge they might have an effect on the social contract…ironic, since they say the Constitution is “living and breathing” but they want the unwritten social contract to be not only written, but carved in stone. They’re constantly accusing people of hoarding the C-rations and the chocolate and the water, when it makes no sense to do so.

So they react to a situation precisely the way a rational person would — but, not in that situation, in a different one. Let us call this one “Survival Staples” or “Starvation Imminent.” Without any supporting evidence at all, and without even any persuasive suggestion, liberals tend to behave as if the commodity-of-the-moment is in such short supply, and is so crucial to the continuing survival of the humans, be they in collectives or be they merely individuals — that an inexhaustible supply of the whatever-it-is becomes a “right.” Once they’re on this pathway, they get lost, instantly, for they adhere to the notion that mere difficulty involved in acquiring it, nevermind outright failure, constitutes an intolerable encroachment upon that right.

Crime…without an actual “bad guy.” So, of course, one has to be invented, that’s the next step.

S)urvival staples,
T)ime,
A)bundance/omnipresence,
C)ommerce and
I)ncentives.

STACI. Your five-part guarantee that liberal ideas, sooner if not later, will always turn out to be the wrong ones. One way or the other.

[…] “Healthcare Explained” Sexist or Not Staci Dingbat Memo For File CLXI “Just Another Broken Promise” “The Chief Justice Done […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/01/2012 @ 16:24
[…] previously identified time as one of the five pillars of STACI, the implicit guarantee that liberal ideas will always fail. Indeed, the evidence that […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/03/2013 @ 13:21
[…] previously identified time as one of the five pillars of STACI, the implicit guarantee that liberal ideas will always fail. Indeed, the evidence that […]
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[…] from my observations about S.T.A.C.I., the five pillars that assure us that in any given new situation, liberal ideas are overwhelmingly likely to […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/01/2013 @ 08:24
[…] STACI: They behave as if S)taple supplies are in short supply and should therefore be rationed — all of the time, as if we’re always in the Zombie Apocalypse, fighting for quarts of gasoline, firewood or drinking water. T)ime always began yesterday, they can’t remember that their last grand plan failed, or has yet to yield success, and total bliss is always just one revolution away. A)bundance is the sure-fire way to force people to like something, and to force people to dislike something all you have to do is conceal it from view and deprive them of it; the exacdt opposite of the way human nature really works. C)ommerce is something that becomes healthier and more robust if there is merely more activity; there is no “business” other than being “busy,” and prosperity doesn’t come from people genuinely helping each other. And I)ncentive is a mythology, if people are told what to do in the right way, they’ll forget all about their natural inclinations. Or they darn well should! Five ideas…five flawed, erroneous, always-mistaken ideas…and you’ll always find at least some of them in the wake of every failed plan from our friends, the liberals, the grown-up Medicators. They medicate too much, and loss of freedom, loss of respect for human life, poverty, blight and disaster, are the consistent results. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2013 @ 13:23
[…] S.T.A.C.I. is five pillars of liberal wrong-ness, five reasons why liberal solutions can be relied upon to be the wrong ones. The A in S.T.A.C.I. is Abundance — the idea that if you are going to support something, it logically follows that you must be working to make it more plentiful. This is, as I said, “a guaranteed fail because no person or thing has ever become more highly prized or cherished as a result of being more frequently seen. Natural laws of economics and human nature dictate that the opposite must be true.” […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/29/2013 @ 07:32
[…] have a strange view of time; time is the T in the S.T.A.C.I. quintet of reasons why liberal ideas always turn out to be wrong. Any honest inspection of these […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/19/2013 @ 06:52
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- House of Eratosthenes | 10/18/2013 @ 08:01
[…] It never seems to fall within their tight perimeter of thinking, that if anyone really thought of the losers as cradle-to-grave losers, the last thing that person would do would be disrupting his business — which obviously works — to stop and offer the losers some guidance. That would only make sense if the successful person saw some potential there. So by seeing the losers as losers-today-winners-tomorrow-maybe, those who give advice to the losers show the losers vastly more respect than our friends the liberals, who seem to be oblivious to the very concept of improved results by way of expansion of knowledge, as well as to the concept of time. […]
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- House of Eratosthenes | 04/19/2014 @ 18:11
[…] sixth problem is the “A” in S.T.A.C.I., the Abundance. The progressive movement is punch-drunk on the idea that we, the hamsters in the […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/30/2015 @ 03:13

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StaciSaturday, June 30th, 2012

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Saturday, June 30th, 2012