House of Eratosthenes

Fascinating thing about this whole Syria thing is, the issue has come to the forefront so quickly that it hasn’t been “properly” polarized into left vs. right. Other than the fact that President Obama wants to go ahead, there’s really no definition for which side is supposed to take which position. I suppose that might be good enough. But that whiplash 180-degree reversal, in which the lefties are now war hawks and the righties are the ones saying no-go, has thickened up the two-in-the-middle.

That term I just used requires explanation. It has to do with how the American population forms opinions on the issues that now & then come along. Think back on the electoral maps you see ahead of a tight presidential election. The states will often be shaded as: solid blue, light/leaning blue, pink/leaning red, and solid red. Sometimes there will be a toss-up state that will be colored gray. I contend that what you’re seeing there is an unusually honest presentation of the American citizenry’s opinions on any given issue. The two pieces on the ends represent those who have made up their minds, aren’t about to change, are given little to no reason to. We have a whole system that works around this. For example, if Hillary Clinton runs for President, how much time and energy will she spend chasing my vote. None, right? That goes both ways. Mitt Romney didn’t chase the forty-seven percent. That’s how it works.

The gray in the middle, on Syria, has been whittled down to nothing. Very few people are going to say they don’t care about Syria. And yet, who can find it on a map. People are ignorant, which is undesirable, but they also know they need to find out more, which is healthy. And so it could be said our people are not truly ignorant. They are Omar Khayyam’s “students”: knowing not, but knowing that they know not. Until they know, they lean. They lean toward a go, and they lean toward a no-go. I suppose I’m in that crowd myself. I know this is a very silly situation that has been brought about by President Obama’s clumsiness, but I’m not locked in to the idea that we should not go in. I’m just kinda leaning that way. Not much chance I’ll change my mind, but it’s definitely possible.

But because there’s no gray here — or a negligible slice of gray — and establishment lefties have such enormous incentive to get their ideas sold, and their ideas are even sillier than they usually are AND people have been pushed into making up their minds in a short amount of time; we’re afforded a rare opportunity to see how this dissemination is done. Being a “lean toward no-go” guy, I have to pay attention to this because of the possibility that they’re producing the right answer by way of the wrong process. Not that I’m that important to them. But their outreach efforts include the goal of reaching people like me, here, although you’d never know it by listening to them.

They’re more after the second piece, the light blue, leaning-left one. They’ll take as many of us “pinks” as they can get, but we see in this situation that they are really hammering away at the light blues. For those who are inclined to use this to study up on how they do their marketing the rest of the time — and I am — this is a rich learning environment. The technique is one they use often, all the time really. And they should; it works well for them. Very, very well.

Another unique thing about this opportunity is the thing that can’t be mentioned: The President’s position on this is just plain daffy. It’s as if, as He approaches the very pinnacle of achievement within His entire lifetime of winning when common sense counsels that He should not have been winning, knowing that it’s all downhill after His second term in our nation’s highest office, He seeks to make the pinnacle a proper pinnacle and sell the biggest load of squeeze that’s ever been sold. His “I didn’t draw the red line” remark is a classic case of a lie out of time, a whistle-stop-era whopper captured in the age of YouTube. How did He think He’d get away with it? He couldn’t have…could He?

From what I can make out, we are seeing a recruitment effort aimed at the second, light-blue piece of the constituency. Over and over again, in our friends and relatives, we see the light-blue turning solid blue and this is usually by way of ego investment. It works just like a hook in a fish’s mouth: Once it’s on there good-n-proper, the line can be jerked any which way and the fish will be compelled to follow. Just as a good fisherman gets the technique down, so too does a good lefty apparatchik. Bound the mark’s ego to the idea that two and two make five. Get that one thing done, then the line can be pulled any which way afterward. It may be spelled out right in front of the mark that four is the correct answer, and the mark will refuse to believe it.

Global warming threatens to doom us all even though there has been no global warming for fifteen years. President Obama is a super mega-awesome wonderful guy in ways nobody can quite define. There’s no reason for anyone to oppose His policies outside of racism, even though those policies are widely unpopular and are doing a lot of economic damage. With the hook in the mouth, the mark can embrace contradictions. The “even though” stuff is navigated easily, his mind just sort of glides over them, like one sheet of silk over another…and he becomes a solid blue lefty guy without even being consciously aware of it.

Part of the reason this is possible, I’m now convinced, is because of the challenge aspect of it. The leaning-lefty guy wants to embrace the contradictions within the nonsense, because the nonsense is there. Some measure of difficulty is involved, and they see the difficulty not in the ways we learn to see it when we think responsibly — “maybe there is difficulty in accepting this because it’s a load of blarney” — but more like the way a college freshman sees the difficulty in a hazing. “Hey, if it was easy then everybody would be doing it. At the end of this humiliation, I’ll be part of the in-crowd.”

Because this situation is unusually silly, the technique is working even better than it normally does. I keep hearing about this treaty. America finds the use of chemical weapons abhorrent, because we are signatories to a treaty. President Obama is lucid and wise, and figured out that action must be taken. Action, like…a “shot across the bow” calculated to do nothing to alter the outcome? A behavior-deterring, capacity-degrading shot across the bow? We signed a treaty that said we should do silly stuff, like that? That’s the argument?

It is the silliness involved that makes the argument appealing. It is the movement of the bait that makes the fish want to bite the hook. It implies benefits of exclusivity await the freshman, after he has joined the club. If the argument made better sense, the appeal would not be there. An argument that is so sensible as to be self-evident, would be an invitation to join a club that includes, or ultimately will include, everyone. Who the heck wants that?

The message from the liberal intelligentsia to the two pieces in the middle has to do with in-crowd membership, here as well as with other things. It is a message of “Are you in, or out?” The darker and more vibrant colored pieces on the ends, are left almost entirely alone, since they’re going to be whatever they will be. The message to the light blue piece is “here is what you have to do to get in,” and the message to the pink piece is more like “your shunning is complete, or it is imminent, better mend your ways now.” With a side dish of “we get it, you don’t, poor little slope-forehead throwback.”

Takes a real smarty-pants to figure out that two and two make five.

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The Four PiecesFriday, September 6th, 2013

The Four Pieces
Friday, September 6th, 2013