House of Eratosthenes

Now her team is going to be unfairly saddled with the assignment of selling her. Selling the idea that it somehow makes sense, for a nation under attack, to elect as its leader a woman who can’t even stay on her feet and give speeches anymore, when giving speeches is her whole deal. Why put ourselves under the iron-fisted rule of the Wicked Witch of the West, after she’s been doused with the water and is melting into a loathsome puddle? And, in a sad way, I already understand how they’re going to go about doing this. They’re going to declare anybody who believes the nation is under attack, and anybody who believes Hillary has real health problems, to be outside the periphery of the audience they’re trying to reach. And proceed to ridicule them.

Awhile ago, struggling to understand, I noted that the movement of what we today call “liberalism” seems to be split into two halves, which I called the “scheming elites” and the “ignorant commons”. The thing that separates the two, described from a 38,000 foot level, is that the former is accumulating a useful skill by way of evolving strategies that continue to find measurable success, whereas the latter isn’t accumulating skills at all, useful or otherwise. The former sells things to the latter. It is debatable how useful this skill is, because the skill is in communicating with people who don’t learn anything with either success or failure, because they don’t try to do anything. So one half maintains a tethering to reality, by way of refining the art and technique of aggravating passions in the other half, which has altogether lost its tethering to reality quite aways back and isn’t on any road that leads to regaining it.

As a result, both are nuts in some way. I wouldn’t hire either one of them to do anything practical, even something mundane, like trimming the hedge I forgot to trim this weekend. I would expect all of them to lose my sheers, snip off a finger or two, sue me for everything I’m worth, own my house, and then blame George W. Bush for the mutilation. Maybe they’ll find some excuses for new taxes in the meantime. Manage the country’s response to all of the mass shootings and terrorist attacks this weekend & before? Forget it. But…the competence thing with the scheming elites. They did get Barack Obama reelected. I’m still concerned they could get Hillary in there. I have to be. They do know their own people; they know how to communicate with the insane ones. I guess it’s a question of whether that is the challenge that arises to confront them. And if the challenge is something more demanding than that, like learning how to communicate with sane people who actually do constructive things, can they recognize that and meet the challenge. I suppose that’s the question.

One sign that looks bad for them is their own proclivity to argue in superlatives. Last time anyone talked about polls, Trump had closed the gap and there had to begun to appear some local polls in battleground states, that had him squeaking past her. I am sure the scheming-elites are insane, nevermind what victories they may have in the past that they can chalk up to genuine cleverness, because they have continued to do what they did before; they have failed to adapt. “Hillary is the best qualified candidate EVAR!!” This is not the way the so-called “Trump supporters” have pushed their candidate. The #NeverTrump crowd continues to holler that he’s Barack Obama redux, the leader of a cult consumed by a messianic-complex fervor. I haven’t seen it. The argument in favor of Trump was, and continues to be, “alright yes there is something to be desired in both candidates, but here is why you should vote for this one over that one.”

With Trump running neck-and-neck with her, how much sense would it make for Hillary to be sold that way? Lots. Whoever is undecided in the last half of September, is still undecided for a reason. They’re the ones that have to be reached. We’re talking about the coveted “undecided voter,” which the liberal strategists, the “scheming elites,” are supposed to know how to reach. Well the evidence says they don’t know. They may never have. And they can’t learn how. They must have the capacity to embiggen the intellectual frustum, to achieve Aristotle’s “mark of the educated mind,” the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it. Without that, there would be nothing separating them from the ignorant-commons, and we do know they have that mark that separates them. We know this by their achievements selling liberalism. Maybe they’re capable of making the argument but are afraid of ticking off their base.

So it seems the movement, as a whole, is not capable of channeling that paradigm of “she’s bad, but not as bad as he is.” Because they just can’t process the viewpoint intellectually. And, I suppose, we should expect this. Maturity has a lot to do with the ability to choose from among a plurality of options that all suck; if these people had maturity, they wouldn’t be liberals. And when you step back a few paces and look at other matters besides elections, or look at elections in years gone by, you see this continues to be true. Conservatives think in comparatives, liberals think in superlatives. The issue is one of maturity. Grown-ups compare, because that’s what decision-making is.

The “She’s the best qualified candidate EVAR!!” thing has been subtle, but it has definitely been there. I started discussing this on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, and more than one friend chimed in with: Yeah I’ve noticed this…I thought it was just me.

I think they’re going to keep pushing that, and it’s going to continue to hurt them. Liberals, if you watch how they behave for awhile, seldom to never actually argue anything. Have you noticed this? They put together the narrative, as if re-stating it one more time, and/or in greater detail, will somehow convince those who have yet to be convinced. They may do it a couple times in a row, after which they’ll say something like “I can see there’s no point discussing this with you because you’ll never be convinced.” Seems to be lost on them that you have to actually bring something persuasive before you can play that card. When your storm-out-of-room, slam-door-behind-you sign-off statement is “If this doesn’t convince you then nothing ever will,” there’s supposed to be something of substance behind the “this.”

Also, superlatives just don’t fit this case. If Hillary Clinton is the BEST QUALIFIED CANDIDATE EVAR!!!, then what’s up with all that time that got wasted on Obama, Biden, Kerry…Edwards…Gore…Lieberman…? What happened there? Sexism?

I’m not a shrink and I don’t play one on teevee, but all liberals have Borderline Personality Disorder. (Daddy either spanked them too much, or not enough).

One of the clearest BPD indicators is “splitting,” where any given thing is either All Good or All Bad, and the switch flips with no warning or reason. Anyone who has ever dated a Borderline knows the classic “I love you I love you I HATE YOU!! I love you” pattern. Liberals are that way with politics (and everything else), such that Obama really was the Most Qualified Candidate Ever back when he ran, Hillary is the Most Qualified Candidate Ever now, and whoever they run in 2020 will be the Most Qualified Candidate Evar! then. It’s why both George W. Bush and Donald Trump are evil fascist nazi warmongers who are the most right-wing racists of all time, even though two more different candidates are impossible to imagine…

…and it looks like our hour is up. That’ll be five cents, please. The doctor is OUT.
- Severian | 09/19/2016 @ 09:38
Along with that, Sev, you’ve got that the hard Left is about classes and groups – you fit in that box, they fit in those boxes, and it is an offense against Holy Diversity to move from one to the other.

When you add that to the tendency to classify everything outside your box as Evil, you get a group that basically lives by alienating groups of people. If enough people oppose the thing (and the group) they just alienated, they win. When Hillary snarked about that “basket of deplorables,” that’s what she was talking about…

…but she done screwed up when she pegged the number at 50%. She failed to notice that A) this kind of comment was a major factor in scuttling Mitt four years ago, and B) 50% deplorable leaves only 50% pleasant. People didn’t hear “50% *of Trump supporters* are deplorable,” they just heard that she’d insulted half the country – and they suspected that she didn’t care much for the other 50% either, which Keith Olbermann kindly re-emphasized when he said that the true number was 100%. (It’s not often you see a literal mathematical doubling down, but there you go.)

What’s happening is A Bug’s Life moment, where all the ants are adding themselves up and noticing, Hey! there are a lot more of us than there are of them. Once those groups stop hating each other at the Left’s command, and instead hate the Left together, that’s the ball game. That’s kind of what happened with Gamer Gate, and hopefully it’s happening again.
- nightfly | 09/19/2016 @ 12:18
BPD
I’ve always had “issues” with the whole “at risk”, and “borderline” designations.
I’ve also been torn between “Best (x) EVAR” , or “EVAH!”
I tend to use the second one MOAR! Especially when mocking i-phone zombies.
Probably because I hear quite a bit of language from Massachusetts tourists, and refugees, escaping the tax collector, but forgetting to remove their entitlement caps.
- CaptDMO | 09/19/2016 @ 15:26
[…] “It Was a Rare Example of a ‘Fact Check’ That Simply Checked a Fact” The Comparatives and the Superlatives Thirty-Six Questions Feminists Have for Men I Don’t Give a Flying F*ck Who Pays for the Wall […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/09/2016 @ 16:31

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The Comparatives and the SuperlativesMonday, September 19th, 2016

The Comparatives and the Superlatives
Monday, September 19th, 2016