Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
…or, how to destroy modern-liberalism once and for all. I haven’t got all the answers yet, and what I do have no doubt has been gathered by others who are more eloquent at describing it. Nevertheless, it occurs to me someone should be putting this all together in one place. People do make observations about liberals a lot. But I don’t often see these things put together into a strategy to actually solve the problem.
1. There is an intelligence within the liberal movement, manifesting itself through its competence, taking on the responsibility of adjusting the agenda between election cycles. Let us call this the “scheming elites,” since the slickness through which it self-coordinates suggests limited size, and the content of its strategy shows that it does not share all interests with the constituencies upon whose support it depends.
2. There is a demonstrated ignorance within the movement as well, a bloated, voluminous, sprawling ignorance. The argument of: “If democrats win elections when there is economic desperation, they must have an incentive to preserve and create such desperation” is so simple, and irrefutable. When liberals fail to understand it, the only possible explanation is that a cosmetic lack of understanding must be the only method of refutation available to them. This fits in well with other observations made about liberals who fail to understand things: They get emotionally invested in wrong things, and when a logical point is made by someone that exposes the wrongness, they have to do something to disrupt the discussion, to avoid learning logically sound, but contraband, things. We could call this the “ignorant commons.”
3. The liberal movement consists, in large part, of a sustained monologue taking place FROM the scheming elites TO the ignorant commons, with zero feedback, very much like the power structure among the aristocracy and the peasants in feudal times. A great portion of this monologue, measured either in volume or in priority, is concerned with instructions about how the ignorant-commons should do their living, their communicating, their thinking. The instructions run long on “do this, don’t do that” and run short on hard, helpful information. Passive-voice sentences appear very often in the message stream. And these are things the scheming-elites would never, ever practice themselves. Examples abound.
4. One of these examples would be the elevation of emotion above reason. We know this must be part of what the scheming-elites would have the ignorant-commons continue to practice, and yet would never practice themselves, because this emotion-over-reason configuration is so intrusive and so persistent that its practice blocks self-improvement. We know this because Obama voters managed to — chose to — re-elect Obama. This is a choice not to learn from experience. The scheming-elites, meanwhile, figured out they had been in error directing their political resources away from the legalization of gay marriage, and so they self-corrected. This proves a differential between these two halves, about how a thinking and acting person must conduct himself. If the preservation of this differential is key to the enemy’s continuing survival, it logically follows that the destruction of this differential is key to his defeat.
5. The ignorant-commons consistently fail to distinguish between statements about facts, versus statements about what facts might mean. Put more simply, they can’t think. Examples include emotionally unhinged sentiments of conclusion that purport to be statements of fact, such as “Health care should be a right and that’s a fact,” or “Education must be free and that’s a fact.” This makes it easy for the scheming-elites to program the ignorant-commons to have certain opinions; they say, “get the facts” about this-or-that. The ignorant-commons then obey, get told what to think, and with this emotion-over-reason juxtaposition in place, proceed to “feel” like they know something. From that feeling, they get a sort of a hit, like a hardcore junkie. It’s their soma.
6. There is also a hostility against any sort of exceptional thinking, I’ve noticed. It’s the sort of thing you might see more often in a middle or high school setting. If a functional adult sees that a brush fire is about to start, it doesn’t matter if a lot of other people can see it as well; urgent action is required. To an emotionally-invested liberal, like to a seventh-grader, nothing is worth noticing if it hasn’t achieved “everybody knows” status. “Nobody thinks that” is a legitimate rebuttal, even against observations that, once measured objectively and in good faith, would be undeniable. One of the things that distinguishes liberals from conservatives is faith in one’s own ability to validate. A conservative believes himself capable of seeing conflicts between contradictory statements, repeatedly, and eventually from that judging the true state of things. A liberal doesn’t even try. So a conservative, forced to choose, will value the ability to think logically over a repository of verified & verifiable information, whereas the liberal will not, because the conservative can see one can be made from the other with just a bit of work.
7. The potential weakness of the movement, leading to its eventual defeat, is to sever the link between the scheming-elites and the ignorant-commons; somehow, disrupt the flow of information through that pipeline. What would make that easy is that the connection relies on an implicit trust, and the truth of the matter is that this trust is unearned, since the scheming-elites favor policies that hurt the ignorant-commons. In short, the objective is to expose the elites, as parasites. What makes it difficult is that the ranks of the ignorant-commons are constantly replenished, by way of youth reaching majority age. In order to defeat the enemy, such an enlightenment would have to achieve an attrition rate that exceeds the rate of replenishment.
It all depends on what youngsters, marching up to and teetering on the brink of adulthood, manage to learn before arriving at that brink. Modern liberalism has achieved success because it’s taken control of what we today erroneously call “education.” They’ve managed to turn it into a process of emotional investments in emotional investments. Today we’re fighting a problem that has been allowed to mature and grow. It is a Death Star of bureaucratic, passive, “hope the bosses do things to help me” thinking.
But every Death Star has an exhaust port.
Related: Dice explains where this is all going if the small photon torpedo doesn’t find its mark.
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[…] blog of the day is House Of Eratosthenes, with a post on the small thermal exhaust […]
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$ 1 9 , 0 9 9 , 3 6 1 , 6 7 0 , 6 9 4 . 7 2
The estimated population of the United States is 322,505,185
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The National Debt has continued to increase an average of
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- House of Eratosthenes | 04/13/2016 @ 06:42[…] 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 […]
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