This morning I found the text in the headline, associated with this picture over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging:

Meanwhile: In the growing comment thread under that “The Vampire Problem” post, our resident lib gadfly is accusing me of making a muddled, incoherent critique about people on the left, failing to distinguish between leftists and liberals. The accusation itself is a bit muddled and incoherent, but from what I understand of it, by conflating these two memberships I am working a quality of incoherence into all of the comments I make about that set membership because I’ve qualified the set membership in a sloppy way. The evidence for this being, that liberals are generally leftists but everyone on the left is not necessarily a liberal.

Hmmm…I’m sure there are people who agree with that, maybe a textbook/encyclopedia definition or two that support it. It doesn’t impress me as an entirely uncontested truth, and even if it were, it does not necessarily follow that this distinction is important in any way. If leftism is the superset, therefore the criticisms become more fragile and easily challenged when applied to that larger group, is it not nevertheless a demonstrable assertion that individuality and dissent are generally greeted with hostility, and even rancor, on the left? And so statements like “The left believes in man-made climate change” — while perhaps they should become hazardous, they don’t. The leftist who is skeptical of the man-made climate change theory, while he may exist here and there, is an exception that proves the rule.

But also, notice: The man-made disaster theory, like so many other ideas on the left, is a narrative. And not just any narrative. Let’s inspect narratives a little bit. Quoting from myself, in some private correspondence I had to put together (on an entirely different subject) last week:

…we are dealing with, for lack of a better term, what could most precisely be called a “supremely persistent narrative.” Read that as a narrative that is “supreme” in the sense that it takes a back seat to nothing, not even reality itself. It therefore jeopardizes its own integrity by consistently prevailing over that reality rather than conforming to it, or yielding to it. Such narratives are often seen to proliferate and thrive like harmful bacteria, when people start to opine on scientific things without showing any semblance of scientific discipline…
:
Narratives like these take root, like weeds, in all sorts of thinking efforts in every day life. They do a three-step, to keep thriving: Ignore, Pounce and Dream. Facts inconvenient to the narrative are ignored, rationalized away, minimized, gutterballed. Then, when a fact comes along that might have have the opposite effect upon the narrative, which means to nourish it and strengthen it, the person clinging to the narrative pounces like a starving carnivore on this “fact,” lending it much greater weight, through more rationalization, than those other “facts” that were diminished and set aside. And finally, after that cycle has been repeated awhile, but the crown-jewel “fact” that would really slam-dunk this favored narrative fails to appear, the frustrated narrative-clinger simply makes it up.

The challenge to identifying these things is that science itself uses narratives in an entirely legitimate way. “Theory” is, when all’s said and done, just a fancy word to describe these; it’s an “I wonder if” idea with sufficient structure lent to it that it becomes testable. The difference is, if such a theory becomes, what did I say…”supremely persistent”…then, as a scientific theory, it becomes useless. The ignore-pounce-dream three-step is therefore not to be tolerated in science.

Or at least, that used to not be the case.

But anyway, however you define the political left in modern western civilization, whatever term you use, and whether or not you view this superset/subset relationship between left and liberals the way our leftist-liberal gadfly friend here has…none of it matters because we have had this “supremely persistent narrative” going on, on the left, for the last century or more. That the collage, above, is indeed a horror story; humans are a toxin, a sort of disease upon the planet.

Paradoxically, there is another supremely persistent narrative that we are in a process of evolution, and this evolution is toward perfection. The left believes in this with great gusto, and at first blush it seems to be a contradiction, and therefore, a problem. However — I notice this part is not too well fleshed out. You’ll notice when you talk to leftists, ideas themselves undergo an “evolution,” if you will, eventually achieving mobility among leftists, and in some cases hyper-mobility. A good example of this is “I just can’t explain what it is about Barack Obama, He’s so awesome.” The vision of human perfection, you’ll notice, never is quite elevated to this stage of hyper-mobility. You can find a leftist with such a vision, but you’ll have to get him drunk, or stoned, to pry it out of him, and then there isn’t too much chance you can find a hundred other leftists with the same vision. They are not syndicated on this idea, and they do not care to become so.

I believe the narrative about evolving toward perfection, is in fact a branch-off from the narrative about being a pestilence upon the planet. The perfection is a day-to-day neutral environmental effect; we are “evolving” in the sense that we are becoming cleaner, each generation hopefully doing less damage than we did the year before. When the effect is identical with our being here, to our not being here at all, that will be the perfection.

So the Star Trek universe with all the war and famine and disease having been ended — food replicators whipping up Earl Grey hot tea and fudge sundaes on a whim — that’s not quite it. We are to evolve toward a zero. Become more sophisticated, year by year, sure. Articulate, heck yeah. More well-read…only in written tomes upon which our friends, the leftists, have managed to jot in the final word, top to bottom…absolutely. We are to become more cerebral and maybe our heads will, physically, become more ballooned in shape and veined in texture to reflect this. But the ultimate intent is that our impact will be reduced to zero, since the only impact we can have is bad. Yes, even a “lightworker” like Barack Obama. He does good things, but only in the sense that He makes us better, and He makes us better in the sense that He doesn’t actually build things, He just protects the planet from the awful things we do, by putting some new rules on us that stop us from hurting it.

Now there are some certain classes, for the most part victim-classes, that are spared this; as far as the left is concerned, they can proliferate, prosper, achieve greater influence, and not only is that quite alright but that is evidence of this continued “progress.” The left likes to see greater numbers, they’re often observed equating higher numbers with some kind of achievement. Joe Biden famously embarrassed himself coming up with something good to say about East Indians, and managed to fill the bill by noticing you couldn’t go into a 7-11 or Dunkin’ Donuts anymore without having their accent, or something…viewing this remark most charitably, which is difficult, it seems to me that he was engaged in the tired old liberal trap of recognizing meaningful accomplishment in an ethnic group by way of simple population increase.

But that’s a special insult in its very own league, when you think about it. That’s the very best those people can do? Gosh, you’re so wonderful, there’s so many of you!

Of course, higher numbers can translate into more votes, and I suspect this is why liberals — excuse me, leftists — like to see higher numbers within these cherry-picked classes. We know this is true of Jews, women, poor people, their adoration for these higher numbers is strictly all about electoral outcome. There’s the old joke about “democrats love poor people, their policies make so many more of them.” It isn’t really a joke at all.

They’re still stumped when I ask my favorite ethical question: Who cares? If there’s no deity who put us here, no Higher Power who cares about us or what we do, we just sort of grew here like a fungus and someday we’re going to off ourselves, then the planet will spin away, disease free, awaiting its own inevitable demise…meanwhile, we abort some babies to make our wretched lives a bit more tolerable here, in this game of “I got here first, so I have all sorts of rights, you have to get sucked into a sink to make room for me” — what does any of this matter? We invade and depose Saddam Hussein who, right, got it, didn’t directly attack us. What of it? Discrimination? Just something we’re doing in the cosmic wink-of-an-eye, while we’re here. How is it of any consequence at all?

In fact, doesn’t war just hasten the much-anticipated sunset on this long dreary day of environmental damage? Means fewer of us.

Of course I don’t have an answer to that…I haven’t gotten one…it won’t happen. Any time you corner a lib, they look for some way to get morally outraged so they can change the subject. And that question, of course, gives them one in spades.

And so, no, I don’t recognize these delicate set memberships. I see that whole thing as more confusing, obfuscating, decoy squid-ink…and the idealogical split, the way I see it, is an either-or. Whether people see it or not, they’re really just answering the question that has confronted them, “Do humans do?” And, along that spectrum, the so-called “moderates” are just fooling themselves. We’re ultimately all in a centrifuge, bound to get yanked toward one extreme or the other, once we’ve answered that question for ourselves. “Moderate” just means “on the way there.”

For an interminable length of time — I have no idea how long it’s been, seems like forever — my name has been on the subscription list of the Obama campaign. I’m still bewildered and baffled by the thought process of the average Obama supporter. Can’t identify with them even a little bit. And, with the march of time, things seem to become only more confusing. In 2008, they were merely pie-eyed…so I thought…not thinking clearly, maybe indulging in some of what Michael Gerson once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” to wit: Oh look, Barack Obama, a black guy, just made it through a speech without breaking out into rap rhythm, or crapping His pants. Had no idea those people could do that! No other thought process explains how anyone could find Obama’s tedious speeches particularly remarkable…so, when they call the other side racists, it looks like yet another round of racists-calling-non-racists-racists. And so, we had all those people smiling and crying their tears of joy, in late 2008, relieved to discover America was not unready to elect a black guy as President after all. Then they apologized for ever thinking seriously that this might have been the case. Oh, wait, no they didn’t; with the election over, they busied themselves with accusing the other side of being racist all over again, as if the campaign was still ahead of them, oddly.

And now, Obama has finished off nearly one full term, clearly demonstrating the entire time that His brand of leadership is not what our economy needs. I said things are getting more confusing, and here is how murky and befuddling it is now: It is very, very, very important that Obama wins a second term this fall, because if He can’t do that, [blank].

What’s [blank]?

You figure out what that is, on Planet Obamafan…you drop me a line, okay? Because I’m completely lost here.

It is abundantly clear to me by now that they can’t say “If Obama is defeated, the economy is gonna tank.” They’d like to, but a statement of this sort would become such a parody of itself, instantaneously, that it might be tantamount to conceding the election. And so we get a bunch of silly stuff. Rumors that Gov. Romney hasn’t paid taxes over a ten-year period, entirely unsubstantiated, gossip really, and then some innuendo that since Romney isn’t releasing the tax returns the democrats want him to, he must be hiding something.

That is, for the most part, all the dirt the Obama campaign has been able to dish…so, a bit uncertain of these latest steps, I speculate that [blank] must be in there somewhere. The tax returns.

Vote Obama, so that we can have a President that provides paper documents on request…um…oh, dear, that’s a problem. We still can’t have the bin Laden death photo, the college transcripts, a bunch of other things…

And then, it gets weird. Obama has tax calculators that show Romney’s plans will gouge poor people so that rich people can make out like bandits.

So…

Vote Obama, or else the poor people will be gouged. Which means, under President Romney, the nation’s oceans and oceans of debt will become everybody’s headache, not just a problem shoved off onto the “millionaires and billionaires.”

That works about as well as anything else. But here it gets even weirder. We’re all part of the nation, so if the nation’s debt load is becoming so out-of-control, so crushing and so devastating, that should be everybody’s headache…right? Those who insist otherwise, must therefore be insisting that everyone, save for the detested rich, enjoys some “right” not to care.

But this would directly contradict what Vice President Biden said, remember that?

“Wealthy people are just as patriotic as middle-class people, as poor people, and they know they should be doing more,” Mr. Biden said at the town hall in Exeter, N.H. “We’re not supposed to have a system with one set of rules for the wealthy and one set of rules for everyone else.”
:
The vice president’s comments were reminiscent of the campaign for the White House in 2008, when Mr. Biden forecast that wealthier Americans would pay more under an Obama-Biden administration.

“It’s time to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut,” he said at the time.

So we all have to jump in, be part of the deal, we’re not supposed to have one set of rules for the wealthy and one set of rules for everyone else.

Vote for Obama — so we can have that very thing. The poor and middle-class get to sit on the sidelines and not jump in…Obama will make sure it’s the rich that get America out of the rut, nobody else should break a sweat. One set of rules for one, a different set of rules for the other.

Or, maybe I’m reading it wrong. I probably am. But if I am, then the question remains unanswered. Obama must win, because otherwise [blank]. What is [blank]? It’s still blank!

Two possibilities exist: One, there is no answer. Obama, and those who campaign with Him, and those who sympathize with all those who campaign…desperate as they may be to come up with an answer, cannot come up with one. Two, there is an answer but they’re afraid to say what it is. And then, of course, there is Three: I already nailed it with the “two different sets of rules” thing. Spend spend spend, is the plan, and let the rich people worry about the bill because nobody else should have to. Well, if that’s the case, someone needs to clue in the Vice President, or his speech writers.

But either way, this is the unworkable Obama paradox. We’re supposed to be electing these leaders so that the leaders pass laws, including tax policies, and those laws are supposed to make us a better people somehow. Part of being a better person, toiling away under the requirement imposed on you by these laws that force you to be good, is paying lots of taxes, the more the better. And yet — vote for Obama, because if He loses, then everyone is going to have to do this thing…not just the very rich people, but everyone…will be required to pay more taxes…which…makes…everyone…better…

I’m going to stop now, because this stuff gives me a headache. Besides of which, I think I’ve thought this thing out past the point where they have, which makes the exercise something like figuring Pi to twenty digits beyond the decimal point, based on measurements that are good only to four or five digits…someplace beyond back-there-aways, we have begun to process gibberish and essentially just waste whatever time and effort we’re putting into it.

We have a President in charge right now, who writes to me several times a week begging for three dollars.

But He cannot explain why He should win His re-election. He cannot form a list of bullet points, or even a single bullet point, to explain how that helps anyone but Him, and, I suppose, the people who directly benefit from His victory. He’s in charge of America but He cannot explain why He is good for America.

You know, I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

I said on Twitter that I’d be blogging this…our friend in New Mexico is counting on it, from the looks of things. Besides of which, it’s funny. More than a grain of truth to it…

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account…

Liberalism, today, re-defines what it means to live in a community, and not in a good way.

It has everything to do with seizure of money and nothing to do with trust. When we build things while we belong in a community, we are to be denied the credit for building them; the community did that, and we are but its humble agents. Out of our earnings, whatever is above what we “need” as determined by the community, is to be placed in a community inventory.

But the important things about a community, are decidedly absent from this vision. We are not to be trusted with our own sense judgment, or with personal defense firearms, like members of a community; we cannot even earn respect from other members of the community, as community members, it is the community institutions that bestow, and thus direct, this respect.

Why the cognitive dissonance? Because liberalism lies about what it is. It restructures a community, ostensibly to ensure that all members within the community are “equal,” but the real purpose is to minimize the effort put into a conquest by a few members, to achieve maximum result of such conquest — to expand the influence held by those few, over the rest of the community, while those few have to exert themselves as little as possible, do as little as is necessary to demonstrate their dedication and talent, before achieving superior rank over the balance. THAT is what liberalism is in this day and age.

Liberals want us to work and trade with each other just like ants, or bees; breed like fruit flies; raise our progeny just like bovines, with the cow raising the calf alone, while the bull goes on to spread his seed to other cows…

…and argue politics like cuttlefish, squirting off with a load of opaque, confusing nonsense, swimming away from the “threat” as fast as can be managed. Said threat being that cool-headed, rational, reasonable and logical exchange of ideas they say they want so badly.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

The point made here by Professor Sowell is so important, and weighs so heavily upon the election that is coming up in less than three months, that after pondering it I realized it had to be added to the list. That would be the list of three things upon which the election will be turning, or should turn…it doesn’t matter if the things are on the minds of voters as they punch out their chads, or not. Doesn’t matter. History is awaiting an answer to each of them, and right or wrong, history will be using the election results to determine those answers.

The socialists who are trying to turn America’s society upside-down, have been indulging in a sneaky trick here and they’ve been allowed to get away with it for a long time. The trick is a simple one: Define “greed,” at least in the emotional sense, without first defining “property.” It is as ludicrous and silly as it is clever; defining “greed” without defining “property” is like building a brick wall without bricks.

Our American election of Twenty Twelve turns on four things, and all four are a great deal more important than Michelle Obama’s vacations or Ann Romney’s blouse:

One. If you built a business, who really built it? Are you to receive some credit for the personal effort you have put in, the personal risks you have absorbed, the personal assets you had to liquidate to meet payroll during the years when it wasn’t profitable, the hours per week over forty that you had to put in before you could afford to expand that payroll?
Two. If you want to move the business into a community, what test do we apply to make sure the business’ values are compatible? Does the business find out about that, the hard way, when people vote with their feet — wow, just think about the magnitude of capital lost on such a failed venture, it’s staggering — or, is it somehow necessary to vote in mayors and “aldermen” to express this note of rejection that the potential patrons, and voters, are somehow unable to properly express?
Three. Why, exactly, do taxes exist? Are they for funding government’s vital services, or to whittle that Gini number down to size; to ensure that, at the end of it all, no one citizen among us has too much more or less loot than the next guy?
Four. How exactly do we define the word “greed” — does it have to do with wanting to hang on to what belongs to you, or does it have to do with taking possession of someone else’s property?

On that new, last one: The dictionary says it is

Excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions.

Merriam-Webster:

A selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed.

Those are not a lot of help, although the MW definition seems to lean left, implying that the attribute to be criticized has to do with desire for increased quantity, and that it has to do with a differential between the quantity desired and the quantity needed.

If that is to be the case, it is hard to see how we can put our energies behind an effort to drive “greed” out of our society, without the proggies ultimately winning; we would need to be sitting in judgment, in some way, of how much lucre our fellow citizens have managed to stash. We would have to pounce, like starving jaguars, upon any situation in which that amount was “excessive” and greater in quantity “than is needed” — situations in which, in all other respects, everything is above-board and legal.

The alternative being, to resign ourselves to “It meets the definition and that is a bad thing, but no laws were broken so no action will be taken.” But that, with all the passions swirling around, doesn’t seem too likely at this point.

Our current President is running on all four of these things, and has positioned Himself on the wrong side of each one, I think. He’s out there many times a week, saying silly things like this:

“It’s like Robin Hood in reverse,” Obama said of Romney’s tax plan, which would cut taxes across the board by 20 percent, during a fundraiser in Connecticut. “It’s Romney Hood.”

Obama’s quip [distills] an attack that he has repeated in the last week. “In order to afford just one $250,000 tax cut for somebody like Mr. Romney, 125 families like yours would have to pay another $2,000 in taxes each and every year,” the president said at another fundraiser last Wednesday.

His claim is based on a report from the Tax Policy Center, even though the authors — who include one former Obama aide and a former aide to President George H.W. Bush — preface their study by saying, “We do not score Governor Romney’s plan directly, as certain components of his plan are not specified in sufficient detail, nor do we make assumptions regarding what those components might be.”

The Tax Policy Center, according to Wikipedia, “is a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.” One is well-advised, I think, not to trust the online encyclopedia too much after that sentence; I say that based on reviewing the talk pages for Tax Policy Center and, of course, for the very well-known lefty outfit Brookings. I note, further, that although we seem to be eyebrows-deep in noisy, self-appointed “fact checkers” following most other questionable claims from both Romney and Obama, it seems said fact checkers get sleepy when the President says Governor Romney wants to give X many dollars to rich people and take X many dollars away from poor people — the pattern, then, is that our noisy checkers fall suddenly quiet, perhaps sleep in a few extra hours, and it is up to each reader to do his or her own “checking.”

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Warning in effect about naughty language.

Also, Gilbert Gottfried’s voice…

Update 8/8/12: Just to be extra-sure there is no misunderstanding: “Naughty language” means you aren’t supposed to play this in an environment in which things like taste & decorum matter…that means absolutely, positively NSFW.

Hat tip to Gerard.

At least, I Hope so. Adam M. Smith has been sacked from both his jobs, from the look of things, for his poor judgment in harassing a Chick-Fil-A server at the drive-thru, and then videotaping his own harassment and posting it on YouTube.

That embed, again:

In defense of this wart in the colon of humanity, what I think he was trying to do, was this:

This mash-up was uploaded back in ’07, but I know the experiment was going on since before that, as is evidenced by this 2005 comment on the Straight Dope message board:

In principle I agree perfectly that even the less overt forms of racism and xenophobia should be discouraged, but these ads are just so damned smug, righteous and annoying! It’s got so I always change the channel when one comes on. Does anybody else have the same reaction?

I have that reaction, and more:

This whole thing was a dumb, stupid, just plain bad idea.

Put on these “public service announcements” encouraging us — total strangers — to monitor the behavior of our friends, relatives, and other total strangers who simply consume oxygen from the same air space…looking for signs of perceived bigotry, then to act as judge, jury and snotty-lecturer.

The trouble begins with the whole “silence is consent” thing, which is plainly the point of all these ads. Silence is consent, since the whole point is to get the scolding out there…the power of one voice, and all that. If silence is consent, then awarding the benefit of the doubt, must also be consent. So presume the worst. If you look for that prejudiced behavior and you haven’t managed to find it, you must not be looking hard enough.

Again, with my litmus test: Can society continue to operate indefinitely this way? And we’ve found out, first-hand, the answer is no. Adam M. Smith practiced what the videos said people should be practicing. He did everything right. Sure, you can pick a quibble with the fact that it’s the CEO of Chick Fil A who made the comments he doesn’t like, and he took it out on a drive-thru server…which is something of a disconnect…but hey, how can you let that get in the way of the Power of One Voice??

When your cause is glorious, you’re obliged to win. All of the time.

Nifty, cool experiment. I’m sure it was inspiring when it was first thought up. And its ultimate effects are certainly a surprise…at least, maybe, to some of us, not to others of us.

But it isn’t an experiment anymore, we see where it leads. Time to declare the experiment over, m’kay? Go back to being non-judgmental and liberty-minded, as opposed to simply talking about it while scolding strangers.

And the “Freedom Center” owes the country an apology.

From my previous…

To make liberal ideas look sensible…it becomes necessary to make meaningfully similar things look like they’re different, and meaningfully different things look like they’re identical.

I had no idea, at the time, that blogger friend Rick would be linking to this…nor do I have a good idea of how to excerpt from it…

In light of the Chick-Fil-A controversy, I now realize modern man is almost incapable of distinguishing between these four things:

1. Approval and Implicit Condemnation. Just because you support one thing doesn’t mean you’re viciously antagonistic toward another (i.e. “anti-” the opposite.) If Dan Cathy supports traditional marriage between one man and one woman, that doesn’t mean he ipso facto “hates gay people” or is “anti-gay.”

2. Disagreeing and Hating. I disagree with ideas all the time. This does not necessitate hating the person who proposed them. Your beliefs are not your identity.

3. Beliefs and People. This is somewhat similar to #2. Rejecting a belief does not equal rejecting a person. You can reject the validity of same-sex marriage on philosophical and social grounds while still profoundly loving people with same-sex attraction. I reject at least some opinions or actions from each of my friends (such as “double-rainbows are boring” or “playing the lottery is wise.”) They in turn reject plenty of my own. But we don’t hate each other. In fact, just the opposite is true. Our relationship is grounded on a communion of persons, not a symmetry of beliefs.

4. Bigotry and Disagreement. The definition of bigot is “one unwilling to tolerate opinions different than his own”—not “someone who disagrees with me.” Toleration doesn’t require agreement, merely recognition and respect. (Ironically, those quickest to accuse people of bigotry are often bigoted about their flawed definition of “bigot.”)

The solution to these failures is not more dialogue. It’s better philosophy, logic, and reason. Unfortunately, until two people are capable of making these distinctions, healthy, productive dialogue about same-sex marriage is almost impossible.

Now that is good. Very, very good.

Somewhere, I made the comment “Looks like we have our campaign year issue” or something like that. The “We” was the country, not the conservatives or the Republicans or libertarians; and the “issue” is the idiotic remark made by our current President, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen.” In the wake of the Chick-Fil-A hoop-dee-doo, I’ve thought back to this thing I said with the understanding that it is going to require some updating. We have two issues. They have it in common, as consequences, that they arouse great passion in people because they speak directly to the inner psyche — how each individual has developed his comprehension of the world around him, and his methodology of figuring out what to do about whatever it is he’s noticed lately.

I say “as consequences” because, on one side of each issue, the passion is a cause as well as a consequence; on the other side, the passion is a consequence only, it is logic and reason that have detonated it. Liberals came up with a goofy idea and said “We’re just sure this is going to work out super-awesomely,” conservatives took a look at it, saw what would happen, and said “Can’t believe they’re really serious about this.” That seems to be a consistent configuration.

Before these two, there was the Buffett Rule imbroglio. That, too, aroused great passion for the same reason.

So we have three things:

One: I think, if you’ve built a business, the credit for building it needs to go to the government and “roads and bridges,” versus, that’s horse squeeze it’s the guy who built the business who gets credit for building his business.

Two: I think, once the business is built, it might be incompatible with the sensible values of a community so we need to elect some really smart and enlightened mayors and councilmen to tell the business to go stuff itself…versus…uh, if the community doesn’t like the business, it can not shop there, and boy will that business ever end up sorry. Mayors and councilmen should stick to staying within budget and making sure the traffic lights work.

Three: I think, if someone is really rich then he needs to give back to the community and pay his fair share through higher taxes…versus…taxes exist to fund vital services, not to make sure everyone ends up with roughly the same amount of money at the end of it, if these guys want to pay more they can just write a friggin’ check.

It is hard to read my summations and come away with much sympathy for the progressive viewpoint. The progressives, I’m sure, will point out all sorts of reasons for this. The most meritorious will be: I can’t provide sympathy for the progressive viewpoint that I do not have, and I have little to none. They will also say, with far less merit, that I am somehow misstating the left-wing position, missing some subtle but very important nugget of nuance. Well, fine, let’s agree to disagree about that. Liberal positions like these are based on emotion, and there is no nuance in emotion; quibbling about such things is like insisting that only a surgeon’s scalpel can be used to slice jello. It isn’t so. Arguments based on feeling are just feelings. You can divide jello with a scalpel, butcher knife, bread knife, or heck, a chainsaw. Once you spot a valid problem involved with enshrining a primitive feeling into public policy, the criticism stands. To criticize the criticism on the basis that is grounded on some trifling misunderstanding just pulled out of thin air, is, well…just more arguing based on emotion, when you get down to it.

You can apply tests to the three, to show the left-wing position on each of the three is based on emotion and not on reason. If people do not build things, they merely channel the beneficial energies of society as society does the building — does that pertain to Barack Obama’s many accomplishments then? Society won the Nobel Peace Prize? How about when people destroy things instead of build things…did they not really do that? Pop goes the argument, just like a balloon…if it’s based on reason and not emotion. But of course it isn’t. If we need to elect Mayors to tell businesses, with bad values, they aren’t welcome here…does that rule hold for a conservative Mayor in Utah, telling Disney they can’t build an enchanted castle in his area? Pop! And as to the third, what the heck is “fair share,” exactly? Pop! So you see, not only are the progressive positions based on emotion, but measurably so. The conservative positions are also emotional, but they’re not grounded in emotion, the emotion is consequential. Reason has been applied. If a guy built a business, he built the business; if you don’t like the business, you can shop elsewhere; if your taxes aren’t high enough, write a check.

The three have it in common that, in addition to the intensity of emotion, there is a durability as well, a quality of “remember ’til November.” Nobody’s going to go through a drastic epiphany in one direction or the other, about any of the three. In all three, our friends the modern liberals are opposed to freedom.

The unifying principle among the three, from what I can tell about it, is: Roles of hosts and roles of parasites. That is not, I hasten to add, a way of expressing this unifying principle in a way that all sides would agree to it. But here we get into the cognitive dissonance of the liberal mind: Their quibbling with the word “parasite” would be purely semantic.

Parasite (n.):

1. An organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.

2. A person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.

I’m presuming that the weirdly unified body of modern liberal thinking, would take issue with the second definition but not with the first, when the word “parasite” is applied to our government. The government lives off of our works; that is what it is supposed to do.

It also provides services and, unfortunately, a lot of people live on that. The means for these services, it obtains from the “host”; it collects taxes from us, and borrows money in our name, and from those assets it makes block grants to the states, funds food stamps, maintains the precious “roads and bridges,” et al…

In these three, there is a sense that the parasite must be the brains of the outfit. Much like a queen ant, or a queen bee. You wouldn’t leave it up to the drone ants to make a crucial decision like, that crumb over there shouldn’t go into this anthill because it isn’t compatible. Of course, real ants do work that way, but that’s how you kill ’em, you fool the drone into carrying something back to the nest. So I guess the liberals think we’re a step of evolution above that; we are to be evolved versions of ants, with a proper bureaucracy in place, so the queen can say “that doesn’t go here.” Those ants are far too libertarian for today’s “moderate” liberal. Of course, no single drone ant built the hill, somebody else made that happen. A drone ant that “owns a business” would be, I guess, a worker that brings a larger crumb of food to the queen than most of the others…he didn’t really do that, somebody else made it happen. I wonder, would it not be in the queen’s interest to say “Hey, that rocks! Let’s have this worker ant teach something to the other worker ants”? I wonder if ants do that. President Obama seems to have made up His mind that it isn’t going to happen…if you happen to have a successful business, let’s just forget all about it. You pay your taxes, and everyone else will just kind of stagger around doing what they’ve been doing. Socialism, like they say, is trickle-up poverty.

Here we get into the third of these remember-’til-November issues, the Buffett thing. No one worker ant can be bigger than the others; if that be the case, the tax code should be used to even things out. I’m guessing that’s because, there is a finite quantity of resources needed to replenish the anthill, and the queen within it — a bigger worker ant might bring more food to the queen, but he’d consume a greater share as well.

I think we’re seeing why, it’s a huge deal when Ann Romney wears a blouse that costs a thousand dollars, but no biggie if Michelle Obama wears a jacket that costs seven times as much. She’s entitled. She’s the “queen.”

On a related note, I’m noticing a plurality of libs are taking issue with my definition of “Architects,” as in, Architects and Medicators, when I cite Hammurabi’s Code 229 (actually codes 229 through 233), which Wikipedia claims “is generally accepted as the first building code.” That’s the one where, if a family is killed because you built them a house and the house falls apart over their heads, you get crushed to death.

Their incredibly flawed thinking seeks to entrap me in a “gotcha”: Since I approve of 229, and why else would I make a reference to it, why that must mean I similarly approve of government regulation! Weird. So, I define something, with a reference to a nugget of history; that is tantamount to personal approval of it, so I’ve been caught contradicting myself…I guess I’m supposed to go “homina homina homina” off in a corner somewhere while everything I’ve said is expunged from the record or something.

I’m wondering, with unease, if such people have occupations in which they produce something I use. To make liberal ideas look sensible, I notice once again, it becomes necessary to make meaningfully similar things look like they’re different, and meaningfully different things look like they’re identical. “Government regulation,” as we use the term today, and as conservatives criticize it, is not quite like Hammurabi Code 229. It isn’t even close. I’ve actually worked with regulators and, frankly, I have to wonder if these people have. They sure talk a lot about “nuance” when it comes to the proper interpretation of their own arguments, it’s odd how clumsily they noodle out the other guy’s…

The distinction is between codes that are outcome-based, and codes that define the process. Architectus, from the Latin: Master builder. Hammurabi Code 229: If you screw the pooch on this thing, you will be crushed. You’re on the hot seat. You’re the big cheese. That is not what regulators regulate, today; if what we follow today, in terms of “government regulation,” indeed enjoys some kind of solid line of descent from Hammurabi’s “I will suffer no foolish pie-eyed liberals in my kingdom” law, there has to have been a major twisty going on somewhere. But I do not accept that there is any such solid line of descent. They are, in fact, polar opposites. Modern regulation says, the what, where & how are to be decided by people who do not actually build anything. It regulates that production is to be decided by those who do not produce.

Liberals do not understand what it is they are really advocating — in no small part because, when you listen to them criticizing the opposite, you find they have no idea what it is they’re really opposing.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

What a cocknozzle…mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be this…

From The Examiner, which sez…

When he got to the window, he told the young lady at the window that Chick-fil-A is a “hateful organization.”

The woman disagreed politely and said the company does not treat any of its customers differently.

“But the corporation gives money to hate groups,” he said, meaning organizations that believe in traditional marriage.

Even after berating her over Chick-fil-A, the employee remained professional and friendly.

“It’s my pleasure to serve you always,” she said as she handed him his water.

“Of course,” he said. “I’m glad that I can take a little money from Chick-fil-A and maybe less money to hate groups.”

Addictions are always ugly to see.

What starts the virtue junkie addiction, I wonder? Is it something small or something big? I’ve thought for a long time these people were trying to compensate for something they did, like the guy driving a fancy Corvette who has a small dick, they did something awful. Perhaps something in childhood that only seems to be dark, terrible and nasty to a child…like they had their first shot of impulse from what matures into their conscience, and it doesn’t start this growing process quite properly.

Well, the end results are obviously quite ugly. The deeds themselves, from harassing honest and hard-working employees who are just trying to make a living, to passing city codes telling restaurants what sizes of soda they’re allowed to sell, aren’t really the problem — it’s the lack of awareness of something wrong with the cunning plan, or something potentially wrong. This misconception that, if the intentions are honorable, there can be no blemish in the results.

That leads to the very worst of the whole lot. Even the Great Society legislation is caused by this.

Guy’s got some growing up to do, but I’m not sure he’s capable. Also, he used the word “totally“. Blegh.