House of Eratosthenes

People who follow politics only casually and haven’t seen a reason to commit to either side, get to be loud in our country. It’s the price we pay for our affluence; our populace, or certain portions of it, get to enjoy bizarre, unfitting luxuries and that is one of them. Some of these neutrals figure they’re neutral because they know something the idealogs don’t know, although they typically can’t say what that is. But while they’re running around being loud, one of the ideas they tend to purvey is that the committed conservatives and committed liberals argue more-or-less the same way, just in different directions. And this is attractive to people who haven’t been paying attention at all.

It’s a case of the blind leading the blind.

It’s quite wrong. Or at least, if one dedicates oneself to paying attention to figure out what’s really happening, rather than just to pick up casual, surface-level observations to drop into the next coffee table conversation with friends, co-workers or relatives, this is the first domino to fall.

Liberals, I notice, generally don’t believe in cause and effect. They certainly act like they do, but they don’t. Conservatives say “Increasing the minimum wage costs jobs” and liberals say “No, it actually creates jobs” — seems like here we have an earnest point of discussion. But…we don’t. Conservatives can offer a cogent rationale: Raising the price of any product or service, will generally reduce demand. This is not only strong reasoning, it is the basis of economic theory. Supply, demand and price are interrelated, and this is how markets work. The liberal rebuttal seems to consist of little more than “Paul Krugman says, and who are you to question him,” infused with some “If you get to do that, our side gets to do this” verbal nerd-slap-fighting.

I’m noticing this lately because conservatives have noticed Putin had left things alone while Trump was in charge, a notion that the dedicated liberal overlooks, or rejects, just because it doesn’t gel well with his feelings. As I wrote earlier, we as a country would do well to seriously discuss this idea that bad guys are intimidated into inaction when our leadership is, shall we say, hawkish. Such a discussion might be short, but we wouldn’t know for sure because our liberals don’t want us discussing it. But history seems to support the idea. And again, there is a cogent rationale: Bad guys who run around doing bad things, make decisions about whether or not to do them before they act, and they decide these things in their own self-interest.

Liberals say “inequality” — whether they’re talking about wealth, or income, they typically don’t say — leads to social instability and upheaval. How this works, I don’t know, and you can’t tell me because you don’t know either. They won’t say that part either. It seems to have something to do with the emotions of the people who are causing the social instability and upheaval. Left to guess, I would have to surmise this is a threat that if we don’t redistribute income so that unproductive people get some of it, the unproductive people will march through the streets BLM-protest-style, smashing things. On the other hand, that’s not fair because I’m going beyond what the liberals are actually saying. On the other other hand, that’s the best I can do because they’re not being clear about it.

They establish some link between capitalism and “climate change” that is trashing the planet, but it looks like communism is harder on the planet than capitalism ever has been.

They link some good things to their purported causes, too, like electing Barack Obama President led to the termination of Osama bin Laden. Gotta give ’em that one. Except for one thing: How? What specifically did Obama do to make this happen?

Conservatives say if we let entrepreneurs and other business types keep more of their profits, we’ll see economic benefits for all. Liberals smear that as “Trickle-Down,” but history supports it, and so does common sense: You want more of something to happen, you make it easier and more rewarding for the people who are doing it, you get more of it. Liberals say if we have more infrastructure and education, we’ll reap the same benefits. But when we don’t, they move the goalposts and begin indulging in bizarre arguments that we never should have wanted what we thought we wanted in the first place. Education, so goes the goalpost-move argument, should not be all about making more money, it should be more about making the student into a well rounded individual. On this issue, we could see some agreement between conservatives and liberals, if the liberals would just hold still: Educate the kids, so they grow up with practical skills, learn to provide for themselves, and there’s a benefit for all while we make some serious inroads on that inequality problem. Seems doable. But the liberals tailor their arguments for people who can’t pay attention or remember anything.

It seems a lot of the time like liberals appreciate inequality just fine. Replacing the ABC’s and three R‘s with gender studies, would be a great way to perpetuate inequality.

It is a solid, cogent argument to speculate that Putin invaded Crimea when Obama was President, because Obama was President, and he invaded Ukraine when Biden was President because Biden was President. When Trump was President Putin invaded nothing, because Trump was President.

“COVID happened under Trump’s watch,” on the other hand, while true, is not solid or cogent. Again, it’s just “I get to do this if you get to do that” verbal nerd-slap-fighting. The question remains outstanding: Why? What is it about Trump being President that caused the pathogen to escape the Chinese lab? Or motivated the Chinese to release it on purpose? The most obvious answer would be “They wanted Trump to lose the election so the whole thing was a setup.” We don’t have supporting evidence for all that just yet, but if it emerges, it would hardly be a reflection on Trump himself. Rather, it would indicate that someone had something to hide, and were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep it hidden, which would suggest that replacing our President was the wrong thing for us to do.

What we have here is truly a remarkable thing: We have an ideology dedicated to the proposition that events are spontaneous, that nothing happens because of anything else. An ideology that is unaware of the simple concept of cause-and-effect. And that’s something that, on an individual level, its adherents must realize is a real thing. I mean, to go about their day-to-day lives, they must get this, right? What do liberals do every day? Maybe…go to Starbucks to get a seven-dollar daily drink before bitching about how hard it is to make ends meet? So they must know, to get the drink, you have to reload the card…? My point is, the politics apparently are making them stupid. They understand, when they just do their daily-routine things, the events cause other events to happen, and then when they immerse themselves in politics and start spamming conservative blogs with nonsense, suddenly they don’t understand this anymore.

They think “the January 6th insurrection” was such an awful, terrible thing. Conservatives come back and say “Well yeah, BLM had been rampaging through our cities all the previous summer, law enforcement did little to nothing about it, and that sent the message that political violence was okay.” Pretty simple summation, and you get here before you’re obliged to condemn this act or uphold that act. It’s an old, respected custom, that if we don’t prosecute crimes, they become okay and we shouldn’t be surprised when the crimes happen with greater frequency and with more damage done. But somehow, when you get to that point in the discussion, liberals activate their amnesia-shield of “I don’t comprehend cause and effect because it’s too complicated,” and start topic-drifting, goalpost-moving, or filling the sound space with nonsense and noise in some other way.

The longer I watch them, the harder it is for me to chalk it up to true amnesia, lack of focus, or any other kind of incompetence.

To harp on the point that COVID happened under Trump, and then waste time on bogus “fact checks” that say high gas prices aren’t Biden’s fault, is worse than hypocritical. It’s flagrantly dishonest. It says something about our discourse, and the environment in which it takes place, that liberals not only engage in the duplicity on a routine basis, but feel comfortable doing it.

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Things Happen Because of Other ThingsTuesday, March 8th, 2022

Things Happen Because of Other Things
Tuesday, March 8th, 2022