House of Eratosthenes

A movement to outlaw all jobs that pay less than $15 an hour, would never attract enough support to survive. A movement to destroy the work ethic in children by awarding participation trophies, would suffer the same problem; it would eventually wither away and die. A movement to spare women from any and all responsibility, and help them blame men for all their problems in life, grant them legal authority to kill their unborn children no questions asked, ditto. All of these “movements” would need — have needed — a hook. A way to reel in those who care more about moral posturing than about politics, the ones who don’t pay attention, the ones who can be easily deceived.

It’s got to be about raising workers’ wages, building childrens’ self-esteem, empowering womens’ choices and demanding equal pay. Those “hooks” sell. Sure they are dishonest as expressions of the ultimate objective, but they’re being expressed to people who don’t have time or inclination to assess their sincerity, or lack thereof. So they have their hooking power. The clumsy-moderate sees the advertising, believes it if only on a tentative basis, starts to make an ego investment in it. That’s the hook. Once the ego is invested, good luck talking them out of it.

The Hook It’s the same with “protecting the environment.” Haven’t you noticed, things that get in the way of our work, make it harder for us to start businesses, build products and services to help each other, are never bad for the environment. Higher taxes are not harmful to the environment; never called out as such by those who busy themselves with defending this environment, anyhow. But in a sane world we should be hearing that, and a lot. The beef is supposed to be that “human activity” is a detriment to the environment, and if higher taxes mean anything at all, they mean that you have to engage more of whatever work you’re doing. You have to do that in order to reach the same status you’d be able to reach with lower taxes, and less of this activity. So if increased activity is to be avoided, logic should tell us that higher taxes also are to be avoided.

I don’t mean for that to be come as some big, earth-shattering epiphany. It isn’t one. It’s simply common sense, what ought to be at the very front of our minds as we discuss issues like this. The problem is, it doesn’t even rate afterthought-status. A lot of people don’t think of themselves as “liberals” but they make the same decisions liberals make, and they make them the same way, by thinking too much about rhetoric and self-appearance. Not enough about cause-and-effect, or consequences.

Another thing fitting this pattern: Taking money, power and speech away from “corporations.” People forget that corporations are simply government-recognized organizations. The attack that is being mobilized, is against business, and people who do the business of making products and services other people need. Again, the rhetoric is making use of perceptions and ideas that are antiquated, have lost whatever fastening to reality they might have once had, or never had any such fastening in the first place. “Corporations” versus “workers” is the paradigm, but that doesn’t fit anymore. A “corporation” could be a diner your parents have been running to supplement their retirement income, changing status to attract more investors. A “worker” very often is someone who works at trying to find a job, who hasn’t managed to find one in over a year. Or, an illegal alien who isn’t even supposed to be here, who’s been trucked in, equipped and protected by a left-wing political effort to depress the wages of the unskilled, to make people more desperate and more likely to vote for democrats. None of that has anything to do with “work,” except, once again, to make it harder for people to do.

Some people buy into this because they think “corporation” has something to do with a business’ size. They aren’t backing what they think they’re backing. They appreciate capitalism and all it does for us, but they long for the days of yesteryear when people had ideas, built stuff, attracted investers, and presto now you have another business. They live in fear of a future in which AT&T, Sony, Apple and Time-Warner make everything. I have that fear too, actually. They’re doing the wrong thing about it. Their bedfellows do not appreciate free markets the way they do; their bedfellows seek to destroy capitalism, replace it with collectivism. But again, good luck explaining that. Because they’re “hooked.”

How about gun control? My experience with arguing the issue with those on the other side, tells me not quite. They’re not just clumsily slipping past the salient point that, if you take guns away from people who follow the law, outlaws are the only ones who will have any guns. They’re actively doubting this. From all I’ve found out about them, they really do think if we have more stringent gun laws, we’ll eventually get to that utopia where no one has any guns and the violence will stop. So it works as an additional example in which you have deceivers, who want one thing, and the deceived, who want something entirely different. Because with gun control, the deceivers want a disarmed, helpless and desperate populace; for those deceived, this is but a means to an end, which is the cessation of gun violence. With the other examples, these are alliances that shouldn’t even exist because what the deceivers want and what the deceived want are entirely opposite things.

Throughout it all though — if you were to plot it all out on a chart, two columns wide, row by row — the deceivers who actually come up with these plans, and come up with these “hooks” to get them sold to decent, albeit overly-ego-invested people, want the same thing. It is a plan of destruction, and in all the examples you’ll notice they have targeted the same thing. And that’s human capability. Working at a job that doesn’t demand any skill, until the day the so-called “worker” has come up with a skill he can use to land a better job. Leaving the playing-field without a trophy in hand fake or real, time after time after time, until the practicing is done and the player has what’s needed to earn a real trophy. A woman making her own choices, and in so doing, learning from her mistakes and getting better at making wise decisions (and, everybody else being allowed to talk freely about whatever room she has for improvement). You see the common theme? People make mistakes in Year N, or fall short somehow, but learn; demonstrate the real value of the human species by way of self-improvement, trying harder, keeping past lessons in mind, and making failure into success in Year N+1.

The Left cannot tolerate that. They are at war with humanity, because they crave stasis. No living thing, human or not, can give it to them. Humans get better all the time. That’s what we’re built to do, what we’re supposed to do.

Why does The Left lie so much? Part of it is, if they were more honest, they’d never be able to sell what they want to sell. They have to have their hooks. Another part of it is, when people value what The Left values, those people tend to have a much easier time lying about even entirely inconsequential things.

When [President] Obama told us that his grandfather liberated Auschwitz, that was a gratuitous fabrication — he could have honestly stated that his grandfather was part of the army that helped liberate concentration camps in western Germany…when Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton told America that she was named “Hillary” in honor of Sir Edmond Hillary climbing Mt. Everest, even though that happened years after Mrs. Clinton was born, that also was an effortless deception…

We see in leftism this casual prevarication over and over again. Lois Lerner tells us – and expects us to believe – that her emails were erased with no intent to cover up wrongdoing, just as Mrs. Clinton tells us that the vast number of government records (State Department emails) were destroyed because all the records destroyed had to do with personal matters…

Perhaps, when leftist politiicans engage these deceptions that don’t even benefit them in any definable way, they’re making a statement about who’s in charge, much like a dog pissing on the living room rug to mark his territory. Perhaps it is their way of saying to the hoi polloi: You think you’re in charge, but you’re really not. Who cares what you think? What does it matter what we tell you, what anyone tells you? Silly, dumb voters.

Raising the minimum wage means one thing: If you don’t have the skills you need to land a more demanding job this year, you shouldn’t have those skills next year or the year after. And, you shouldn’t even be able to sell your time until then. Just sit on that bench, use society’s safety-net as a hammock, vote democrat. Stay uncomfortable, stay incapable, and most of all, stay desperate.

The real tragedy is that the deceived-people, many of whom aren’t even in the targeted class, actually think this stuff is “empowering.” Well, it is; the problem is with which groups of people it empowers. It’s not the people who have been identified as needing this sort of help. It’s the deceivers who are selling it all. The human-vultures. Parasites. Destroyers. For the rest of us, it’s the opposite that is the truth. We are being de-fanged, deprived of the tools we need to make it in a world that offers even the simplest challenges — just like a wild animal, if you were to de-fang him, and then release him back into the wild.

[…] Freeberg nails it again. […]
- DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Hook | 08/22/2015 @ 15:53
[…] House Of Eratosthenes discusses “The Hook” […]
- Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove | 08/23/2015 @ 06:57
House of Eratosthenes: “When [President] Obama told us that his grandfather liberated Auschwitz, that was a gratuitous fabrication ”

“I had an uncle … who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps.”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/27/barack-obama/uncle-liberated-camp-but-not-auschwitz/
- Zachriel | 08/23/2015 @ 07:28
From an entirely different source:

The senator got this one wrong.

At a campaign appearance in New Mexico in May, 2008, Obama made the statement quoted in the eRumor. He proudly talked of an uncle who helped liberate Auschwitz. The problem is that Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945 by Stalin’s Red Army. No American troops were involved.

The Obama campaign quickly explained that Obama wasn’t lying and the story was true, but that it was Obama’s great-uncle he was talking about and he was involved with American troops in liberating the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Later a spokesperson further corrected that the great-uncle served in the 89th Infantry Division that liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, which was a subcamp of Buchenwald.

From yours:

Speaking at a Memorial Day event in Las Cruces, N.M., Sen. Barack Obama misidentified the concentration camp his uncle helped to liberate with the 89th Infantry Division during World War II…Obama’s story immediately seems implausible because Auschwitz was liberated in 1945 by Soviet, not American, troops.
:
“Barack Obama’s dubious claim is inconsistent with world history and demands an explanation,” Republican National Committee Secretary Alex Conant said in a statement. “Obama’s frequent exaggerations and outright distortions raise questions about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief.”

Later that day, the Obama campaign acknowledged getting the location wrong but said Obama’s great uncle (his grandmother’s brother) was part of liberating a concentration camp in Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald in Germany.
:
There’s no question Obama misspoke when he said his uncle helped to liberate the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

The question is, was it a “gratuitous fabrication.” So the clarification later on from the campaign is irrelevant. What remains is: Why use Auschwitz? If it’s a cold, cynical calculation that the name-recognition will work better with the riff-raff, the statement fits right into the pattern being described.

The other explanation would be, Obama was given bad family history by word-of-mouth, which sounds plausible, so he made an error in passing it along, unchecked. I’d find no fault with that at all. Might even expect that to be what really happened, if Barack Obama didn’t have some patterns of His own.
- mkfreeberg | 08/23/2015 @ 09:01
Some…all…what difference, at this point, does it make? I submit for your approval exhibit A, of the people vs. Barack Obama: http://www.infowars.com/252-documented-examples-of-barack-obamas-lying-lawbreaking-corruption-cronyism-etc/
- P_Ang | 08/24/2015 @ 06:37

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