House of Eratosthenes

So I’m arguing with this lefty college professor, and you can tell already I’ve got him completely creamed because he pulled the “Me and my friends are all political science professors” card. No, c’mon, I’m not making it up it really happened. He’s trying to pawn off that debt-downgrade-Tea-Party’s-fault thing…and I’m not buying it. So that makes me dumb. You know how this goes: The lefty produces a premise, or a “whenever,” or an explanation or a theory, with just a glimmer of promising evidence. It is opposed to common sense in some way. But because of this glimmer of promising evidence it’s supposed to completely change your world view, and from this instant forward you’re supposed to drift around pointing back at this guy, I guess, and tell everyone you meet “He just completely changed my worldview!”

See, you’re supposed to think: It could be…therefore…it must be. This is exactly the way people can no longer afford to think, when they’re in the business of building things that actually have to work, which is why it’s popular with professors. In this case, there’s that passage in the S&P report on America’s debt downgrade that seems to say we could’ve saved ourselves from the natural consequence of spending with wild abandon, if only we’d done what democrats want us to do: Stop worrying about debt when the time comes to spend money, and only worry about debt when the time comes to raise taxes.

Classic prog idea: It makes sense if you’re a wizened sage smarty-pants…and are completely lacking in common sense. Because with your feet planted back on the ground where they belong, you have to think: Well now waitaminnit. If I’m married to someone and our credit gets downgraded, and she’s been saying all along “don’t spend the money, don’t spend the money, we shouldn’t be going so far into debt”…after the downgrade happens am I going to be the one to tell her “I told you so”? Dude…that makes no sense at all.

See how easy it is to prove this is a sucky-ass idea. Just correlate it to real life — and, yeah, to really pound the hammer into the wall, for some folks, we use the female to represent the sensible point of view just like in a detergent commercial, a lot of people won’t respond otherwise. And, just like that, it’s crystal-clear. How is it some people can’t see this? Can it be they know something the rest of us don’t? They sure act like it!

Smug And that is when I had my flash of brilliance. Maybe…maybe…that is the warning system right there. As I’ve been writing in these pages, over and over again right back to the very beginning — we live in a time when there is a rich, vast array of services available to us that spare us from the necessity of rational thinking. We are safe and we can part with a few bucks to spare ourselves from labor, if we want that option…and if you live in California and we’re talking about changing your own oil, unless you have an accepted way to dispose of the old oil, you don’t have the option! People tend to forget what this ultimately means: We don’t recoil from sucky-ass ideas because there’s no reason to.

So we have these ninnies running around, not all of them left-wing shills (although most of them are), plying us with their barely “plausible” nonsense. They’re lonely people because this is how they renew their social contacts — their ideas are found to be antithetical to common sense, but there’s something plausible about it, so the idea must be true and since it isn’t the first thing you’d assume, this makes them brilliant and now you’re supposed to accept the anti-common-sense idea plus tell all your friends about this wonderful, brilliant person you found on the Internet who showed you this truth you’d never have otherwise realized and it just completely turns your life around.

My flash-of-brilliance moment was nothing more than a new appreciation for how often we’re running into this. It’s growing, starting to surround us, it’s everywhere we look now. Someone has a new angle to present — but it isn’t really a new angle, it’s just a bunch of barely plausible crap that’s supposed to win them some friends.

Then I had a moment of exuberant scientific curiosity: Formed this way, an idea would not very often be a good one, would it? It would almost have to be a sucky-ass idea in order to prosper when it is formed in this way toward this objective. So, theory: If an idea makes a person feel exclusively bright…if it’s like a special gemstone he can carry in his pocket that gives him special, individual worth…you can pretty much conclude right there and then that the idea sucks ass.

A I searched through my short- and long-term memory trying to figure out if this gels, I found one single exception and I had my moment of sensible humility. Because, to be completely honest about it, I might very well have had my eyes closed with a big smug smile on my face when I told my fiance and my kid “Fine, you guys keep using your pussy Windows operating system but I’m all fed up with it and I don’t need it anymore.” And this, I must say in all humility…has turned out to be an okay idea. So my decision of what OS to use is just fine, but my theory needs just a little bit of refinement.

Your Idea Sucks Ass If it makes you feel above everybody else, but it isn’t Unix, the idea sucks ass. That’s my hypothesis. With that one little waiver in place, it seems to work. People who feel all smug and special because they’re switching to Unix, are sick and tired of Gates & Ballmer’s shenanigans and they just want something to work. People who feel smug and special about something else, on the other hand…driving a hybrid…drinking out of an eco-cup…blaming the people who said “Hey, let’s not go so far into debt” when the credit gets downgraded…placing an order at Starbucks that takes longer to explain to the “barista” than it does to get the drink actually whipped up, with more calories than a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds — and then insist they make it with non-fat milk — these people all have ideas that suck ass.

It isn’t a hard-and-fast logical conclusion to be drawn. If it was, I wouldn’t be able to grant a waiver from it. It’s simply an observation about the times in which we live. Very, very few of us are charged with the task of building something that might seriously injure or kill us, or somebody else, if it doesn’t work right. And so, to accommodate this vacuum of critical thinking we have demonstrated, we are being confronted by a tsunami of endearing, socially-elevating, smug, talk-with-your-eyes-closed ideas.

That suck ass.

It’s interesting that the same people who hold up that one S & P quote as the sacred writings…then go on to bad mouth S & P for downgrading.

Putting the downgrade aside, do these people still think we should….just continue spending, cut back spending, raise the dept ceiling or not raise it? Should we raise taxes, for whom, for what percentage? Do they even realize what percentage of our country’s taxes are paid, and not paid, by the population?

Can they chew gum and walk at the same time? Yeah, that’s it, can they do that without the S & P telling them they can, or can’t, do it?

From an email this morning:

If you can answer this correctly, you can answer the question on what action to take on raising the Federal debt ceiling.

You come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup and you have sewage up to your ceilings.

What do you do … raise the ceilings, or pump out the shit?
- tim | 08/12/2011 @ 09:37
“Me and my friends are all political science professors”

This merely means they successfully regurgitated their professors’ yappings while refraining from adding on their own anything that might run counter to them.

So it is with all of the soft “sciences” and “______ – studies.”

if only we’d done what democrats want us to do: Stop worrying about debt when the time comes to spend money, and only worry about debt when the time comes to raise taxes.

Gonna have to file that one away in the back of the ole noggin for future use. Excellent summary.

And of course the Exclusive Intelligence/Suck Ass Rule* made me laugh my a** off…. for two reasons. It’s true, in general. And the second is, of course, the clinging to your own idea as an exception. But there is one big difference.

No matter how one feels about Microsoft, one can’t argue that Unix doesn’t work. So it literally boils down to a personal preference that you don’t force on anyone else. The fiance and the kid still get to use Windows. And the household is not negatively impacted.

As opposed to clinging to Keynes or Marx or the IPCC. See those things they want to cram down everyone’s throats (while they conveniently exempt themselves from the negative aspects when they’re in power).

*except Unix
- philmon | 08/12/2011 @ 15:40
This is always the way with the immature, tim. Something happens that reflects poorly on them, and everybody else is wrong, even if two of them being wrong on something would be mutually exclusive.

Lash out, divert attention to anyone, everyone … but yourself.
- philmon | 08/12/2011 @ 15:44

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

The Smug / Eyes Closed / Suck Ass RuleFriday, August 12th, 2011

The Smug / Eyes Closed / Suck Ass Rule
Friday, August 12th, 2011