Archive for June, 2021

Don’t Trust the Narratives

Sunday, June 27th, 2021

Something got me hot and bothered about narratives thirteen years ago, which would be just after our election of America’s First Holy President…but it’s impossible to say what it was now because YouTube has yanked the video. And my memory is not filling in the gaps.

Narratives are important. They represent the broadest gulf within supposedly responsible thinking people — how they’d like to think they think, versus how they really think. Narratives are responsible for all the polarization in our society. Wherever the discourse deteriorates, and reasoned discussion melts down into shouting matches, bordering on a fist fight, there are narratives.

A narrative can be true, false, or partially true. Narratives can represent things that are known, unknown, or are probable based on other things that are known.

Narratives are convincing because they’re so often at least partially true, and at least partially known.

However — and this is key — there is no such thing as a narrative that is fully known and fully true. Such a thing then becomes a fact, and ceases to be a narrative. Truth can assert itself, and there’s no social appeal involved in repeatedly asserting something that is so plainly true that it’s obvious to mediocre people.

This is why narratives are not to be trusted. The loudest ones are the ones that are pretending to be something they aren’t; the falsehoods, and the uncertainties, marching around cloaked in the disguise of known, sure facts, which is something a narrative can never be.

You hear them most often, and expressed with the most bumptious confidence, when the speaker literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and is trying to convince himself.

Father’s Day 2021

Sunday, June 20th, 2021

This year, just like any other year, celebrations of Father’s Day will be rather subdued. Now part of the reason for that is that we Dads are spoiled, in a way; the best way to celebrate FD is to “let” us grill food for everybody else to eat, outside, and that can be any day we have the necessary supplies available, and don’t have to work.

We can find any one of a number of ways to treat Mom right that are out of the ordinary. If your Mom is like most Moms, pretty much anything you can do that will involve her skipping a cooking or cleaning regimen, will be as good as anything else you can do. So Mother’s Day is a special one-off, by design, whereas Father’s Day means we stay home and use our grilling equipment, on a summer Sunday on which we’d be doing that anyway.

Natalie Wood
I’ll be doing that today. Me, the Dad.
I don’t look that good.

Unless you’re dealing with a situation in which the male space has been whittled down to nearly nothing, it isn’t set apart from the other weekends. So to fix that, you have to do something like invite friends over to help with the eating and such. Which we’re doing.

But there’s a darker reason we celebrate Father’s Day quietly. Here, as in many other places, we go the extra mile to avoid offense. A lot of people see a celebration of fatherhood as an attack on the moms, especially the single moms.

This is not a competition. Moms and Dads are both important. However, one thing that should be noted this Sunday is that humans are better than other animals, and anything that sets us apart from them, in a good way, is to be celebrated. And the thing no one ever wants to discuss is that fatherhood does that while motherhood does not. Following the momma in a Congo line is a trait that applies to many lower species. And it applies to humans, too. But eventually the kids have to mature and take on life.

There are some species that mate for life. The father sticks around, and raises the kids. With most species that is not the case. He does what has to be done for him to become a father, then he’s out of there and the momma raises the kid. Humans are unique, in that we can go either way.

But one way is better than the other way.

We’ve got a lot of people walking around among us who are laboring under the misunderstanding that if daddy goes and takes a hike — or is sent packing — not much is lost, and most-to-all of the recovery needed can be achieved by heading to the courthouse and extracting some money out of him. This flawed idea endures, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t make sufficient sense for anyone with a name or reputation worth defending, to string the words together in sequence. No one says it, but many act on it. Also, very few people who have actually lived under such an arrangement, would agree with it. Daddies are not billfolds.

On Father’s Day, that should be our motto: Dad’s not (just) a wallet. There’s more to it than that.

What Are They Really Trying to Say?

Tuesday, June 15th, 2021

One of the many ways we’ve all helped to bring about this progressive whatever…”revolution” I guess is how they like to think of it…mess…anyway.

We have made it a rather reflexive habit to assume the best of their intentions. Others more articulate than me, have already commented on this. But we also make charitable assumptions about their inferences. “We have twelve years to save the planet” comes off sounding like: There is a line, or a curve, of exhaustion of some resource; someone has made an assessment of how much of that resource there is, done the necessarily math on it and come up with that amount of time.

Sure there was fraud in the 2020 elections, but not nearly enough to change the result.

The protests are/were mostly peaceful.

ALL non-binary kids are born that way.

Epstein hung himself.

Hillary Clinton is the smartest woman who ever lived.

Hydroxychloriquine will kill ya dead.

Donald Trump mocked a disabled reporter and called Nazis “fine people.”

Being on time, is a western/white-person concept.

Russia is our enemy and they put Trump in the White House.

China, on the other hand, is not our enemy. The virus came from…well just don’t say it came from there.

I have many different copies of this sort of list floating around…other people have started their own lists. Listing all of them is not the point, this is not “Pokemon” and we don’t gotta catch ’em all. Some of this stuff has yet to be falsified and might very well be true. The interesting thing here is what we hear when liberals say this stuff. We presume the message is “I’ve gone out and checked it, or I’m speaking on behalf of someone else who has.” We say it’s raining outside. That must mean it is.

Well…no.

A lot of the time, this stuff is: You see, what we’re trying to do is build a new world, in which everyone believes…it’s raining.

Or…we want to do some stuff, and we’ve figured out we’re not going to get any of it done until such time as everyone thinks it’s raining. So spread the word.

Or…So-and-so said it’s raining outside, and you see, what we’re trying to do is build a new world in which everyone trusts that guy implicitly. So do your part to make sure everyone thinks it’s raining outside, because he said it is.

Or…I have already repeated that it’s raining outside, so I have an emotional investment in the idea that it’s raining outside.

Or…Give up on fighting us, we have the votes that it’s raining outside, right or wrong.

Or…We don’t give a crap what you think it’s doing outside, we have your kids trapped in our “education” system and we’ll teach them it’s raining outside.

This is the frustrating thing about arguing with liberals. Heard one of them the other day say “Joe Biden is obviously competent” and, when asked for evidence, he didn’t have anything. He just said something about the spending programs being extremely popular, which his opposition quickly showed wasn’t even true. When you have a friend or a relative offering up these chestnuts, you have to make these spot-decisions about whether you’re talking to someone who’s stupid, or evil, or a combination of both, or maybe just emotionally invested in something of which they can’t let go. But you also have to make an interpretation of what they’re really trying to say. No one anywhere is truly qualified to say “Man is screwing up the atmosphere.” No one’s pulling out a super long ladder, climbing up and looking. So on that one, we can rule out the idea that they checked to see if it’s raining and are reporting on what they say. They’re doing something else. A lot of the other things they say are like that too.

We Aren’t Done With Trump

Tuesday, June 15th, 2021

That’s one thing I know for sure. It is a Northern Star of stasis and certainty in an enormous sky of constant movement. An oasis in a desert of hazardous predictions that, tempting as they may be, cannot be assured with any genuine confidence. That’s one we can take to the bank.

On whether or not he’ll be President again, or whether he’ll be abducted by aliens at midnight tonight, I haven’t a clue. None of that is relevant; no one really cares about it; it’s minutiae. When people talk about any of that what they’re really talking about is “Are we done with him for good?” That remains true whether they want this to be the case, or not. It is the operative question. And we’re not.

The opposite belief, “Thank God that’s over,” is an absolute impossibility. It is putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Further than that, it’s a just plain stupid supposition. How do you see such a world of tomorrow, emerging from the eddies and currents of today? There’s no path from this to that. None. The tube’s been squeezed, his constituency has tasted meaningful representation. The Morlocks have been out of the underworld.

It’s like the crown heads of Europe saying “Thank goodness they’re all done storming that stupid Bastille and got that guillotine stuff out of their systems.”

For the past several years I have occasionally read “psychological profiles” and the like, struggling to triage a borderline mental illness that is Trump support. It’s actually Trump hatred that is more mystifying and more baffling. I’m sure history will ultimately record it that way. It is the #NeverTrump types who more closely resemble the witch hunters in Salem. And those witch hunters are the ones on the wrong side of history, whose wounded consciences and mental enfeeblements continue to fascinate us. Isn’t that obvious? If we could time travel back to 1692 and put one faction, or the other, in straight-jackets and padded cells, it would be the hunters, not the witches or their defenders. We relate to the hunters, but we think the worse of ourselves when we do, and that’s what makes The Crucible a dark story. It makes us wonder what’s wrong with us. That correlates to the Trump-phobes, not the Trump-philes.

This is not empty, biased, rah rah “Hooray for Our Side” stuff. It is objective reality. When you “know” there’s water in the pool just because someone’s trying to warn you there isn’t any, and you hate that guy, but you don’t really know very much about the water level in the pool — it’s time to reassess. And that’s where they’ve been for awhile. They don’t really know anything about Hydroxychloroquine being particularly dangerous, or that the Voldemort Virus didn’t originate in the lab to which President Trump was directing his scrutiny. They just didn’t want to agree with Orange Man on anything. And look how certain they were.

What has been happening here is not new. It is the dynamic of “Forgotten Man” politics. History doesn’t offer us much by way of these events coming to a sudden stop. They don’t. They burn away like old tire fires, across years and decades, even centuries. America herself, arguably, is just one long “Forgotten Man” political saga. Well, Trump’s constituency was forgotten too, and for a good long time.

Now, the Trump haters are wallowing in their marinade of “Thank goodness that’s over” and doubling-down on the forgetting, turning it into a pillorying. A pity-party of “blame those guys for everything, and be loud about it.”

It is a tactical error of historic severity, and proportion. It is a screw-up worthy of documentation and preservation across the ages.

But, dividers can’t become uniters. It isn’t in their physiology. They’re doing what they do. They can’t stop.