House of Eratosthenes

Listening to the Sunday morning talkie-shows, which I guess maybe is something I shouldn’t be doing, I’m noticing these three words are being strung together in sequence an awful lot. They’re also being intoned as a knee-jerk mono-thought, as if we should be inventing one single word to impart the meaning of the three…OnBothSides. I’m not at the point where hearing the sequence makes me want to vomit into a bucket, but I do perceive that I’m heading in that direction. Nevertheless, let’s put feelings aside and think about it logically.

There is clearly some importance attached to including this sequence. This importance may have something to do with a) what’s being observed, b) the social consequences of observing it, or c) a combination of a & b. Logically, I have to conclude we’re looking entirely at b), since I’ve eliminated the first and the third. This has nothing to do with what’s being observed, anywhere. “On both sides” means, presumably, Republicans and democrats — there is nothing else to be presumed, and I don’t see anyone stopping to clarify their meaning if they mean something else. And yet, that split is dated. News-talkie-shows try to be many things, but “dated” is not one of those things…they’re supposed to be about what’s going on currently. We currently do not have a “both sides” split between R&D, since it’s obvious when you say “I am a Republican” your audience cannot safely infer you mean “I support President Donald Trump.” Nor can they safely infer, if you say “I support Trump” that you must be a Republican.

Trump is in the White House, currently serving as our President. So there are three sides, no fewer, that have achieved some level of current importance. In fact, I’ll take it even further: At this current snapshot in time, if you really force the number two into the context of power, the “two sides” that have power right now are the pro-Trump and anti-Trump Republicans. The democrats lost the election, remember? And everywhere. But — I’m taking it as a given that “pro-Trump and anti-Trump Republicans” is not what the OnBothSides people have in mind, when they stop in mid-thought and stress OnBothSides.

Fix It This is, therefore, all about social stature. You call out one party as having a problem, you’re supposed to add in “OnBothSides” to make it clear you’re not singling out a single party where the other party might be equally at fault. This is supposed to shore up your credibility as a neutral, sensible-centrist observer, or something…

So, is the intent to remind us the democrats are equally at fault, when Republicans are called out as having some kind of a problem? This may be possible in certain isolated situations…but, I kind of doubt it because if any one thing has been made clear to me over the years of watching news on the idiot-box, it’s that there is no social-stature price to be paid from knocking Republicans while staying mum on the democrats’ equivalent sins. Why freakin’ bother.

I don’t see anything advantageous or admirable about being a centrist, at this point, I really don’t. In my experience, the honest centrists are new to the whole thing. They haven’t been paying attention to politics, but now realize they must, and they’re willing to learn the most effective way we learn about things: by earnestly admitting what we do not yet know. When they chase after this awhile, read, discuss, absorb, and maintain this “centrist” label, after a time I stop trusting them. You can’t be honest with anyone else if you’re not going to be honest with yourself, and by the time someone has taken the time to learn about what Republicans and democrats have been doing, if he’s preserving some fragile narrative about the sins existing OnBothSides then what we’re looking at is a democrat. Can we dispense with the bull-squeeze and just admit that much by now? ObamaCare is the big problem right now, and it wasn’t passed OnBothSides.

This is something I’ve been noticing for quite awhile now. There are many people walking around us who truly think of themselves as “centrists,” but consciously or unconsciously, from within or from the outside, they have been programmed to filter out any bit of evidence that would suggest anything morally lacking about the political party that is truly morally lacking. Franklin Roosevelt violates the Constitution and puts American citizens in prison camps, of course we all have to look back and pronounce that this was a disgraceful thing — the narrative is that this is a disgraceful thing we did. Not that FDR did. The country. We. But the fact is, if FDR had been a Republican doing that, that’s not how we’d be remembering it. We’d remember it appropriately and correctly, as something that moral-reprobate dictator bastard FDR did.

The OnBothSides obligatory disclaimer, is such an unthinking knee-jerk disclaimer; it has nothing to do with reality at all. How far are we supposed to take this? Teddy Kennedy gets drunk, drives over a bridge, drowns a young woman in his car, we’re supposed to fantasize that at the exact same time, somewhere, a Republican must have been doing the same thing?

Why would we do this?

Turns out, “paying attention to politics” is easy. A lot of people pay attention to politics: They take in the information that is available, figure out what they don’t like, entirely ignore that part, shunt it aside, chalk it up to “some crazy guy running a right-wing blog,” and then obsess over what’s left. They’re like the little kid claiming to have “ate all my dinner” while pretending the vegetables aren’t there, or moving them onto his little brother’s plate, hiding them in his glass of milk, or his pockets.

A lot of people who have no fondness for democrats, do this just because it seems to make politics so much simpler and easier to understand. But if you ask them questions about what they’ve learned, you — and they — quickly find out that they haven’t simplified anything at all. Like much in life, politics actually becomes much easier to understand when you listen to it all, read about it all, and evaluate it all. Certainly we can have legitimate disagreements with each other about what is & is not relevant. But when you’re trying to figure out what something is, you know you’re going about it the wrong way when the answer you get back is very complicated, while reality-based tests consistently show the thing you’ve studied is much simpler than your interpretation of it.

There isn’t much call to talk about OnBothSides when one of the political parties is so steadfastly entrenched in the practice of robbing Peter to pay Paul. When the divide is so enduring and so consistent, that a monstrosity like ObamaCare was passed without a single Republican fingerprint upon it. Character defects in the one party, unmatched by any meaningful counterpart in the other, are exactly what we should expect to find. What kind of politician would find it expedient to rob Peter to pay Paul? A politician who wants to hide things, of course…a politician who will find it convenient, when large swaths of the population lose interest in that part of politics that is disconnected from their next brick of free cheese. And, a politician who knows nothing of, or cares nothing for, the labor that went into the assets being seized from those who worked for them and given to those who did not. Such a politician, we should expect, probably hasn’t worked an honest day in his life, and probably represents not a few constituents who haven’t worked an honest day in their lives. And when we study the democrats, this is exactly what we find.

Without meaningful counterparts, in any large number, on the Republican side. Not OnBothSides.

I’ve always likened it to that “Island with liars” parable they always teach you in logic or circuit-design classes, or discrete math. Except that, instead of a 100% chance to lie and a 100% chance to tell the truth, we subtract 10% from both sides. Now it’s nearly impossible to tell who’s who without in-depth research, which is time and resources wasted. What makes it even MORE complicated is that the liars THINK they are actually telling “the Truth” with a capital-T, because as we edu-macated people know, if you completely ignore factual evidence that opposes your argument, and overstate the value of evidence supporting your evidence, that’s the Truth, because it’s based on fact, despite being a nonsensical, illogical argument. Meanwhile, the Republicans telling the truth 90% of the time are to be considered “fake news” because they disagree with the logic of your “factually-based” argument. The BothSidesDoIt only comes out when liberals realize the 50% agreement/opposition line has been crossed and their argument is on the losing side.
- P_Ang | 07/30/2017 @ 12:57
OnBothSides is the only way liberals can acknowledge a problem. They’re Smarter Than You, you see, so their ideas are rock-solid. But sometimes there are technical glitches with the implementation. Or they will grudgingly — very, very grudgingly — admit to errors of communication or tactics (see, for example, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign. If only she’d hammered “women’s issues” more! Or had better IT guys. It can’t be that she was a horrible candidate with a terrible message who is no good at politics, because see above — Smarter Than You).

In the specific case of Obamacare, the program itself is perfectly fine. It said “Affordable Care Act,” didn’t it? Therefore, Care is Affordable. But a few of the commas in the offsets in the subclauses of the appendices need rejiggering, and since Republicans too are not 100% accurate comma-rejigglers, 100% of the time, there are problems OnBothSides. Oh, and no fair asking how the very same people who were furious with Obamacare in 2013, and calling it a disaster, for not going nearly far enough, are now certain it’s the only thing keeping millions of babies from dying in gutters. Aren’t there enough problems OnBothSides to go around?
- Severian | 07/30/2017 @ 17:51

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“On BOTH Sides…”Sunday, July 30th, 2017

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Sunday, July 30th, 2017