House of Eratosthenes

As I get older, I notice my observations about things — on some level — become, paradoxically, simpler. Perhaps this comes from OO design methodology. You remember the classic XYZ Corporation example: Salespeople have regions and make flat salaries, commissions and bonuses; but before they are instantiated as salespeople objects, they are employees, and as such have employee numbers and seniority dates. At the next level up, they are U.S. citizens and have Social Security numbers, then they are human beings with heights, weights, genders and dates-of-birth. The point is that one learns to look for the common attributes. It is a skill as well as a habit, and one is never finished fully developing it.

Now, how long have I been studying modern liberalism. It was impossible to ignore which side was right & which side was wrong during the Ford/Carter/Reagan years. My interest in the whole thing waned sharply during Reagan’s second term, along with everybody else’s I think, and I was entirely apolitical by the time Bush and Quayle were sworn in. Bill Clinton fixed that for good. First time I saw a photo-op of him in a school classroom babbling away about a whole lot of nothing, realizing this was our next President of the United States, I formed more-or-less the realizations I have right now: We are in the middle of a culture-clash about superficiality. The central issue involves what you might say is the proper response to snake-oil salesmen selling bad products, who sound good. And have already managed to convince “everybody” else. With scare-quotes around “everybody,” since what is meant by that is the illusion of everybody. That faction which has managed to erect a veneer of unanimity. Managed to dominate the conversation.

After that, the forces in my personal evolution have consisted of merely more nudging, mostly gentle but occasionally jarring, in the common direction. I found out the woman I divorced before Clinton came along, was a passionate democrat, and realized how much money I’d have saved if I simply took the time to figure this out sooner. Then came the shutdown and the Lewinsky scandal, both of which proved that there is an aristocracy of charisma in our superficial society, filled with lovable bumpkins who can get away with pretty much everything, things that would destroy you or me in an instant, and there are teeming throngs of adoring airhead fans who think that’s just wonderful. Then came the Florida election debacle, during which our liberals became much nastier, and the 9/11 attacks. Throughout all of this I have spent much more energy studying modern liberalism for one reason: It’s been proven to me that I have to.

Liberals are just like a roaring house fire. I have other things I have to get done that don’t have anything to do with studying liberals. But, at the same time, if I attend to those things and ignore the liberals, they’ll flare up and fucking consume whatever I manage to put together anyway. And, I’m picking up the vibe, generally, that I’m not alone in this. Those of us who build things, or want to build things, are conflicted. There is only so much time in the day, and we can spend a lot of it ignoring the liberals — but if we never pay attention to the damage they’re doing, they’ll destroy all our stuff and everything we manage to get done will be for nothing.

Which brings me to a realization already familiar to me. Futility. Perhaps it is not merely an effect of modern liberalism; perhaps it is the goal.

I am entertaining the notion, as I have before, that it is all about failure.

Modern liberals live on a wholly separate planet, strewn across its entire surface with opposite-thinking. They think they’ve managed to salvage our nation’s credit-worthiness, by selling the idea that debt doesn’t & shouldn’t matter. For those who have trouble buying into that, our Vice President once famously said we have to spend more money to keep from going bankrupt. If our country has a problem with ignorance because it doesn’t do enough listening, the people to whom our friends the liberals think we should do more listening are the…children. There it is again, see: The inexperienced are to be seen as experienced, and vice-versa. The ranks of the leftists seem to be disproportionately swollen with the presence of asshole-makers, those who treat nice people as if they were mean people, and mean people as if they were nice. The climate-change scam has now managed to achieve ninety-five percent certainty even though the predictions are wrong. ObamaCare is evidently their idea of great legislation. Hillary Clinton is evidently their idea of a smart woman. They’re constantly braying that the Tea Party is by its very nature stupid, intransigent, unreasonable and kooky, although the core message of the TP is really nothing more than “maybe we should try not to rack up so much debt.” Sarah Palin still scares them and they still hate her, even though she resigned and went home just like they wanted her to do, and she isn’t forcing anyone to buy strange creepy new insurance policies from a crappy website that’s never up. They think the national parks should be locked down. They think our country’s borders should not be. When President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went on record to say they would refuse to negotiate during the shutdown, they strangely concluded that the Republicans in Congress must therefore be “holding the country hostage,” and should bear all the responsibility for the shutdown. They’re constantly in a state of fret that some sort of life-staple they demand from the government is going to be disrupted in its supply, and this apprehension of theirs seems genuine…their solution to this is always to have the government manage more things. They sanction discriminatory practices, in fact, insist on them at every turn, and they call this “equality.” Planet Liberal seems to be going through a “global warming” of its very own, of sorts, from which there is no terrestrial escape — of opposite-ness. Pole to pole, all around the equator, continent to continent and sea to sea. Everything is perceived by the vocal intelligentsia as the exact opposite of what it truly is.

To all of this we can add what may be the highest base abstract superclass: Victory is to be treated as failure, and failure is to be treated as victory. President Obama sucks, they admit, but they support Him anyway. If someone comes along to counsel or nudge toward success, they react with rage; the simpler the counseling, the hotter the rage. They seem to need, and want, and appreciate having, thin waists and fat wallets just like the rest of us. It is the dispensation of true wisdom that might lead to such desirable outcomes that really cheeses ’em off.

Think of: Two men come across undiscovered land, stake their claims, and get busy building their houses before the cold winter rolls in. One man succeeds at this and the other fails. Normal people like you and me might say, the man who succeeded at exactly the same problem in exactly the same conditions, using the same tools, with the same supplies at his disposal, might have some good information to share with the man who failed. Not so to our friends the liberals, from the opposite-ravaged planet. To them, “true” wisdom comes from the sad sack who had to move in to his friend’s abode for the winter. What really matters is “what it’s like” for him; there may be some information in the universe somewhere that’s still relevant, but this is the first-and-foremost, most important thing. And among those who need to pull up a chair and listen endlessly, the one guy who most urgently needs to receive the information about how it feels to be a loser, is the guy who managed to get it done. He has the most to learn. He should listen, listen and listen some more to the endless caterwauling about the despair, the cold, the rain, the embarrassment, the dependency, how awful it all is…and then he should pay higher taxes for his friend who has to be on the dole now. Maybe they can dismantle that fancy house, then one guy can live under the roof and the other one can have the walls.

And this is true with every domestic policy they have to offer. Haven’t you noticed? Those who have managed to produce the things we all want, need to shut up, pay their taxes, and stand by waiting to be told what to do…by some “regulators” who are thought to be supremely wise in some way. Although, common sense says that if the regulators knew anything about producing, they wouldn’t be regulating, they’d be producing.

The point is: In their world, losers always have something to teach the winners. Winners have nothing to offer by way of useful knowledge, to the losers. No non-achievers can ever be told anything they might need to learn, to become achievers. That, to them, is hateful. It’s disrespectful. It makes the losers feel like losers.

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.

The disagreement here is about whether losers have anything to learn. From that, spring all the other disagreements, it seems. Which are much more contentious than they need to be, since the modern liberals are so far off-base that they insist it is the losers who should be doing all the teaching, and the winners should be doing the learning. From the losers.

It’s odd that when it comes to partisan wrangling in Washington, they don’t follow through. When democrats negotiate with Republicans, suddenly the modern left understands victory just fine. The same goes for elections. As incumbents and as challengers, liberals act during elections exactly the way conservatives act with things that are outside politics. They play to win. It’s only in the policies to which they want to commit the rest of us, that they treat defeat like victory and victory like defeat.

“It’s…complicated.”
No, it’s not.

SEE: Olianna, David Mamet
from his more “matured” years.
Or perhaps his latest (non-play) social commentary, “The Secret Knowledge”.
- CaptDMO | 10/19/2013 @ 09:14
[…] House of Eratosthenes discusses The Fail […]
- Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove | 10/20/2013 @ 06:56

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Friday, October 18th, 2013