House of Eratosthenes

This is incorrect, in this day and age; it needs an update. Both sides believe in absolutes. The liberal absolutes eventually must contradict each other, whereas the conservative absolutes ultimately have to work, because conservatives work.

The liberals say you have an absolute right to everything. The question arises — although it shouldn’t — “what exactly is everything?” That is decided by committee, essentially. It’s a mystery who or what that committee is, but somewhere at some central location, some decision is being made on an ongoing basis about what all these rights are, and what the latest addition to the rights-cluster is supposed to be. Today, for example, it’s getting married when you’re gay. Fifteen years ago it was serving in the military when you’re gay, fifteen years before that it was filing a bunch of nonsense lawsuits when you’re a woman, and your workplace offends you for some reason. Next few years it will be something else.

Until you’re “born” though, you are absolutely nothing. And “born” may mean emerging all the way from the womb, or merely becoming “viable” so you’re capable of living outside your mother’s body. This is the “vaginal finish line” concept. On one side of the line you’re entitled to absolutely everything, and on the other side you’re entitled to absolutely nothing.

Really, the only places liberals don’t believe in absolutes, are with concepts that any kindergarten child should be able to tell you are supposed be absolute. When “everyone deserves” something, and you talk with a liberal about it for a little while you see “everyone” doesn’t really mean “everyone.” They don’t want Rush Limbaugh to live forever because ObamaCare is getting him all the health care supplies and services he needs, for example. “Everything” doesn’t mean “everything” when everyone is entitled to that everything; the state has to reserve the power to take some of that “everything” away. When you attend workplace sensitivity training and you’re told “everyone deserves to be treated with respect,” you don’t have to sit in on the session too long before you find out that isn’t true. You can’t contradict yourself more sharply or with too much more of a hairpin-logical-turn than to say “the intent of the accused is irrelevant, the perception of the offended decides everything, these rules are put in place to make the workplace safer and more comfortable for everyone.”

Also, everyone deserves a better standard of living. But, if you watch liberals a little while, you’ll notice their solution to every problem has something to do with making goods and services more expensive…at least, for those who choose to do honest work to earn them.

Conservative absolutes are much simpler and more sensible. You have an absolute right to decide everything, save for whatever will, or may, bring harm to others. Liberals have managed to smear conservatives as crusaders for more rights and privileges only for the affluent. The reason this has worked so well is that conservatives defend the decisions people make to earn a lot or to earn very little, but there aren’t very many people around who choose to earn little. Most of the people who make that choice, do so out of depression and a failure to understand their true potential — they become liberals. There are fewer people who achieve a full working understanding of what they can really accomplish in life, and choose to direct that toward things that are not materially rewarding. But there are more than you might think. Housewives. Soldiers. Teachers who have mastered useful, hard, STEM skills and choose to pass them along to the next generation, rather than go full-tilt on making a living with them. Parents who find their niche in the big city, and make bank in it, but give it all up so they can raise their families in a more kid-friendly place. Point is, conservatives support all these decisions: Work much and earn big, or work less and earn less.

Your Rights End Where My Feelings Begin Work as hard as you like.

Play as hard as you like.

There are absolutely no limits, save for the limits involved in negotiating with others. Your employer has the absolute right to pay you as much as the two of you mutually decide your time is worth. Or, to offer as little. You have the right to take it, or walk away.

When you play, you play as you like. You can even sign some waivers and do some rock-climbing, parachuting, bungee-jumping or four-wheeling. You can go to a restaurant and eat meat, with polyunsaturated fats. Brought to your table by good-looking young women in skimpy clothes.

Liberals live in a surreal, topsy-turvy, twisty-stretchy logical universe of Ordinarily, However, Therefore. Since everything is up for appeal, the sense of commitment that would ordinarily be part of every absolute statement, is consistently missing. Although they won’t admit it when they’re proclaiming the absolute, every absolute can under the right circumstances be ordinarily‘d down into a however and then be therefore‘d into a nullity. One of my favorite examples is the “right to privacy” enjoyed by a woman who uses the ladies’ restroom; ordinary she should be entitled to this, however we have to think of the pre-op transsexuals and their right to work in a safe non-threatening environment, therefore one sacred victim-group has to make way for another sacred victim-group. It’s a ranking system among super-entitled victim groups. You might think of it as a totem pole, with this identity above that one, which in turn is above yet another one, all in a vertical arrangement.

It’s all absolute. But dynamic with the passage of time, such that the totem pole itself might be rearranged, with one victim-group emerging on top of another victim-group that in years past had been supreme. We saw this a few years ago with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama struggling for the nomination within the democrat party; it wasn’t about positions on issues, since Hillary’s and Obama’s positions were not remarkably different anywhere. But it ended up being a huge fur-fight dust-up, because they were struggling for victim-group supremacy, with Hillary representing resentful females and Obama representing the blacks who’d pledged allegiance to the United States of victimology. Which group had the coveted license to Ordinarily, However, Therefore the supposed “absolute rights” of the other group? And a shift took place, since Obama prevailed. In years previous, it would have been the women who’d come out on top: What would happen in the 1980’s if a woman brought a discrimination suit, or a sexual harassment suit, against a black guy? She would’ve prevailed, his rights would be Ordinarily, However, Therefore‘d into nothingness, against hers. As of 2008, it goes the other way. So the faces move around on the totem pole.

Liberals are rigidly absolute about winning, I notice. They must always win. If they treated the interests of the country with the same reverence as they treated the interests of liberalism, they would be wonderful stewards of our nation’s defense. But, of course, they don’t. If your sister ever married a man who loved her the way they love America, you’d be honor-bound to drag him into the street and give him the righteous beatdown that Sonny gave Carlo.

People should not be capable. They shouldn’t be independent, they shouldn’t be skilled, they shouldn’t be resilient, they shouldn’t be self-sufficient. They shouldn’t have rights, at the individual level; all of their rights should come either from membership in some designed victim-group, or from positioning through election or appointment. The only exception is for the guy at the very top of the totem pole, whose face really does represent one, and only one, person who outranks everybody else. That guy’s rights really are absolute, really are literal, and really are static with the passage of time. You’ll notice all the filthy leftist commie mudpuddles all over the world, have always had one guy like that. One Emperor Palpatine. But the truth is, all of the liberals who are in a position to brandish some kind of power over other people, and harbor some ambitions to accumulate more power, fancy themselves as eventually becoming that guy. They’re playing a game of “musical chairs” with each other.

The biggest lie in the world is that liberals are for equality. They’re for the opposite. Lining up all the liberals in the country, with each liberal having more power than the liberal to his immediate left, the resulting shape is a perfect asymptote straight out of math class, with the curve approaching the axis into infinity but never quite meeting it. Some nine-tenths of them are indistinguishable from one another in this respect, approaching the “zero power” axis. These are the Epsilons, the great unwashed, the ones who figure they’ll never make more than nine dollars an hour and “The Rich” are all out to screw ’em. Those remaining are the power-brokers, the ones in the musical-chairs game. Their sales pitch is “more power behind that throne over there, because tomorrow I want to be the one sitting in it.” The Epsilons who don’t think they’ll ever make more than nine dollars, are the ones buying this sales pitch.

Liberalism will continue to thrive, and grow stronger, as long as these two sides wallow in the false narrative that they share a common ambition. During that time, the “absolutes” they push are genuine, and sincere and firm as any other proposed, in the sense that there is no ulterior motive anywhere to rescind or controvert those absolutes. That happens later, with the passage of time, after the interests change. That’s the way it is throughout all of human history, when promises are broken. It isn’t because anyone intended for the promises to be broken when the promises were made; it’s because the interests changed.

Ordinarily, However, Therefore. And after the Therefore, the promise is lost to history, living on not even in recorded history or memory, like Ozymandias above the knees.

everyone deserves a better standard of living

And there you have it. Better than what, comrades?

It’s always fun to watch Science’s BFFs trying to justify the application of an absolute standard to a concept that’s inherently relative. Garrison Keillor is a repugnant lefty scrunt, but his bit about all children in Lake Wobegon being above average is solid gold.

I suppose we must give the left their due, though — contradictory as it sounds, this is the one place where their “thought” is perfectly logical. It’s something I was trying to get at over here. If you accept, as all liberals instinctively do, Karl Marx’s old dictum that man’s social being determines his consciousness, then the only standards of acceptable behavior are Society — whatever that is — and Government. Until the feds specifically make a law against it, the only operative check on any behavior is the disapproval of one’s peers. Check any internet discussion board to see how well that’s working out.

This is the only way any of their attitudes make sense — and they DO make sense. I’ve finally realized that. Like pretty much all thoughtful conservatives, I’ve struggled for years to make logical sense of leftist positions. This is how it works.
- Severian | 04/15/2013 @ 07:21
I was having one of those “inch-deep-and-mile-wide” discussions with a Liberal friend regarding morals, right-and-wrong, good-vs-evil (and whether or not that was even an option) when he offered up the classic Liberal “trump card” in morality:

“You know, I believe there really are NO absolutes.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Definitely,” he replied.

“Are ABSOLUTELY sure about that?” I asked, trying not to laugh as I emphasized the key word.

“Yes!” he confidently stated.

“Oh,” I said with a Mona Lisa smile.
- pilgrim1949 | 04/16/2013 @ 09:46
Not sure I’d have been able to hold that in.
- mkfreeberg | 04/16/2013 @ 09:48

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The AbsolutesSunday, April 14th, 2013

The Absolutes
Sunday, April 14th, 2013