House of Eratosthenes

It’s a good time to put some diligent, scrutinizing thought into a subject we’ve revisited often in these pages, namely what the heck is/was this stuff described in today’s day & age with the word “liberalism.” It’s not a simple question. And no, we can’t rely on the textbooks. In this era of the Trump administration honeymoon, liberals are more-or-less identical to the textbook definition of conservative. They respond to incentives, material & otherwise, to cling to the last vestiges of a power structure that has outlived both its usefulness to us, and, God willing, its own naturally sustained life span. This is a subtly different question from what exactly was the Obama era, a challenge I imposed on myself soon after the elections.

I lately came across a graphic I think captures it rather nicely…

Pictured is the California State Senate President Pro Tem, who had some interesting things to say a few days ago about illegal immigration and why we’re obliged to put up with it and pretend it isn’t happening. He seemed to be confessing to a great number of his relatives being in the country illegally, with his full knowledge and maybe even with his full support. We can debate the propriety of that elsewhere, but the fixation of the instant is the other aspect of the image: While all this is going on, our friends the liberals are passing all sorts of very questionable gun control laws and those are to be taken heart-attack seriously, by everyone, everywhere. And all of the time. Law-of-the-land, and all that.

This inconsistency supports some of the primary ingredients I’ve gleaned from the modern-liberal stew over the years: Maturity problems; a failure or unwillingness to define things; the elevation of emotion above reason in critical decision-making. The first of those three refers to — let’s just go ahead and admit it — poor parenting. Liberals, and centrists who are seriously considering becoming liberals, simply weren’t parented the right way and they didn’t learn the virtue of delayed gratification. We see them “protesting,” which more often than not means rioting, because they want something. Just like with a wild animal, that’s all there is. What they want, what they have already, and the difference between those two. That’s on their minds. Nothing else. They want illegal immigration to be legal, or at least, unrestricted; they want guns to be illegal, or more to the point, gone. Having control over only a part of the question of what becomes a law and what does not, they’re left deciding autocratically from one moment to the next what laws should count, and what ones should not. Just like your spoiled rotten and borderline-retarded cousin deciding moment to moment when it’s okay for players’ tokens to collect $200 for passing Go. Wait, that’s no exaggeration, is it? Failure to accept the results of a presidential election are a THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY…until, whoops, it turns out Trump won and Hillary’s fans are the ones who have to accept defeat. Time to riot. Say hello to your spoiled retarded cousin…

It’s said that any derogatory observation made against liberals can be fairly made against at least one conservative, somewhere, and I’m sure that applies here. At least, at first blush. Mr. De Léon’s counterpart on the conservative side would be someone who thinks the new gun laws are stupid, and these would not be hard to find, but that’s not good enough. We’d need to go further and find someone who’s willing to break these laws…and, I suppose, be proud of doing so. This would thin the field somewhat, but I’m sure we can fill the bill. Even after that, though, differences remain. These differences help to illustrate what exactly a liberal is, and why it’s so important to the country that we make sure their best days are in the rear view mirror.

This conservative who regards the duly ratified gun control law as a waste of his time and stupid, and decides to play pick-and-choose about which laws he’s going to bother to follow — it isn’t quite the same attitude as the Sanctuary City liberal. Is it? The disrespect for the rule of law is not quite so pure. In fact, if we look into it we’re likely to find there’s no disrespect for the rule of law at all. We’re far more apt to find a considered sequencing in effect. Something rather like a motorist stuck behind a red light in the backwoods at 2:30 in the morning, that remains bright cherry red minute after minute, with no other traffic around, eventually deciding to run it to make a red-eye flight. Here in the Golden State, a lot of these “common sense regulations” directly contradict the effective use of a sidearm for home defense. So what you should expect to find, is someone who fancied themselves to be put in the position of choosing between the safety of his family, and the law. And came to a conscious decision that the whole point of the law is to protect the innocent, therefore a law that puts the innocent in jeopardy is an unjust law.

This is not the same as your no-borders liberal who simply selects against the law he doesn’t like, as a child would select against vanilla ice cream because he prefers chocolate. Conservatism is occasionally clarified as the “law and order” ideology, but this is an oversimplification. It’s more like this: We have laws to preserve civilization. Conservatism itself, also, is there to preserve civilization, as I said before:

What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.

These people we today call “liberals” have not had a new idea in, depending on your specific topical focus, between a half- and a full-century or more. And it is they who are clinging with bloody fingertips to a receding entrenched legacy power structure. But they remain revolutionaries, and the one thing that unites all sorts of revolutionary movements is this idea of creating a whole new kind of civilization by way of destroying the civilization they find today. They are destroyers. Somewhere, in the middle of that short, straight, slippery pathway between reasonable open-minded moderate and ideologically crystallized liberal, there is some moment of embrace of the impulse of destruction. Perhaps it’s that inability to come to terms with delayed gratification. One nice thing about destruction is that it’s quick and easy.

But there’s more to it than that. I remember a year ago I paid a gardener to dig up the hump in my front yard and level the whole spread, so I could repeat the year-plus of backbreaking labor from the year before on the plain dirt that remained, work which was now nullified. We do this in software development a lot, certainly more often than we’d like. We put a stop to good money being thrown in after bad. “Everything on top of & therefore after this level down here, has been a waste, we are only just now admitting it. Let us dismantle down to this level, and repeat all the blood sweat & tears invested above & after that moment, so we can get it done right.” So I guess twenty layers of evolved civilization must be like twenty digits of an irrational number computed after the decimal point; mess up the third-or-fourth position, everything you did afterward is garbage. The choice that confronts you at Position 20, today, is anguish or more anguish. Admit to this unpalatable thought sooner, you waste less energy. In its own way, it makes a lot of sense.

But the liberal does not seek to conserve expenses or labor by admitting to historical mistakes more quickly. Oh no. Not even close.

The liberal who chooses to break our immigration laws, is distinguished from the conservative who chooses to break our gun control laws, by the lack of any sense of trade-off. The conservative believes in civilization, which means among other things protecting the innocent from those who would do them harm, by way of negligence or malicious intent. Civilization has, unfortunately, embraced a bad law. So just like me paying good money to have a huge ugly hump, along with the fruits of my year of wasted labor, carted off in a truck…and just like the mathematician who has to swallow his pride and re-compute the sixteen digits after the fourth one all over again…he sacrifices.

The liberal doesn’t sacrifice. Whether his identification of these surface garbage-layers constitutes sound reasoning, or is an empty rationalization, or anything in between — he tolerates no sacrifice in arguing for their destruction. This flensing serves his ultimate goal, even though it’s only a fractional approach. It diminishes that which the liberal seeks diminish, which is civilization as we have defined it up to this point.

They really aren’t liberals at all. They aren’t “progressives,” either. They’re destroyers, plain and simple. They were destroyers back in the early days after JFK’s assassination when they found new acceptance and power on our national stage…they are destroyers in this very moment, as I type this sentence. Every single minute in between, they have been destroyers. Whether they’ve realized it or not.

A deserved break.

Thanks for coming back.
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- OregonGuy | 02/10/2017 @ 11:02
[…] V The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… IV The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… III The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… II The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… Really Going to Miss This Old House Will the Last Person […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/21/2017 @ 11:22

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The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… IIThursday, February 9th, 2017

The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… II
Thursday, February 9th, 2017