House of Eratosthenes

I got a note today from a friend. “Rush, do you know the major differences between us and Democrats? Aside from the policy differences, what everybody knows. What is one of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans?”

And the answer provided here is the left cannot get over losing and move on. We can. They are like children who always want their way, and when they don’t get their way, they whine, they cry, they demand all the rules be changed so they can get their way.

They can’t get over that Hillary lost. They’ve never gotten over that Bush won twice. They want to change the Electoral College. They want to do all kinds of crazy things because they cannot and will not accept losing. You might think that that’s a little simplistic, but it actually isn’t. It is a fundamental feature of the ongoing American constitutional republic. It’s part of the peaceful transition of power.

If one side decides that they are not going accept the results of duly constituted elections, we’ve got a major, major problem. If one side develops the attitude that they should never lose and when they do, it’s because they got jobbed and they turn around and begin to investigate everybody and everything that resulted in their losing, we’re gonna continue to roll along like this.

They’re like a bunch of spoiled brat, pampered children, a bunch of irresponsible little kids who cry, whine, and moan, except they’re not kids. They’re wealthy people with lots of power who refuse to accept that they have ever been rejected.

And so whoever rejects them, whoever votes against them, whoever defeats them is gonna pay one hellacious price so that they don’t try it again. That’s what we’re smack-dab in the middle of here.

I’d been noticing this myself. Not that I haven’t commented on it before, but the air is getting fairly thick with rule-changes proposed by liberals and democrats; not stuff that is innately “progressive,” for which some rationale can be offered about how the rule changes are going to help you and me. Just stuff that would help democrats win elections.

One or two of these might seem reasonable. “Hey, we represent the downtrodden and the oppressed, and because elections work such-and-such a way, we can’t get a break so our guys can’t get a break.” But I feel a tinge of proxy embarrassment for liberals and democrats right now — which they don’t seem to feel — because there’s so much rule-changing needed to help them this way, all of it important, and all of it right now. I mean, the question just naturally emerges: If your ideas need that much help, and all at the same time…have you re-thought the premise that you should be winning? Maybe you shouldn’t be.

I’ve had this John Podhoretz column saved in my stack since last week, and it’s just become even more timely now with the crashing and burning of the so-called “investigation.”

In recent days, Democrats have been trampling all over each other to get to a microphone to trumpet massive structural changes to American public life.

First, several presidential candidates are calling for an increase in the size of the Supreme Court. Nine justices are too few, apparently. In a proposal that seems straight out of the writers’ room at “The West Wing,” Beto O’Rourke wants the court apportioned by party, with five Democrats and five Republicans, and an extra five chosen by the 10 partisan ones.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed a proposal to lower the federal voting age to 16 (an idea already being contemplated at the local level in Oregon and the District of Columbia, and gathering steam in California).

Oh, and a great many Democrats want to abolish the Electoral College. This is nothing new for modern Democrats, who feel the Electoral College makes it too hard for them to win the presidency.

Podhoretz offers an explanation:

Here’s the thing, though. Eighty thousand votes won Donald Trump the election in 2016 — votes scattered across three states that Barack Obama had won twice.

If you put aside all the high-flown talk about the grand meaning of the Trump victory and what it tells us about America and our history and white supremacy and blah blah blah, the challenge for Democrats in 2020 is pretty simple. They need to get 80,000 new Democratic votes in those places, flip the states, and reclaim the presidency.

They won in 2018 by not being lunatics. Democrats seem intent on testing the proposition that it will take a lunatic to beat a tweeter.

Mkay…it’s worth looking at that, because somewhere there’s a plan and wherever there is a plan, there must be planners. But that isn’t all of it. The Republicans have lost presidential elections too, in which the electoral college, while not changing the outcome from what a national popular vote would’ve been, certainly did magnify the defeat. Romney’s loss in 2012 was particularly close. I don’t recall any calls for this rule, that rule, that other rule to be pitched out the window so the Republicans could win next time. Rush is right. There’s a meaningful difference here.

It seems whenever there’s any kind of a contest, be it an election, discussion, town hall debate, talk radio rant, cable teevee scream-fest, workplace water-cooler melee…conservatives have this passive faith in the parameters of the exchange that liberals do not have. The latter are constantly screeching about how from this point forward, such-and-such a thing has to be done such-and-such a way, and not the way it’s always been done, otherwise it’s NOT FAIR. Whereas the former has no counterpart to this. They hope they can make their point operating under the game-rules as they exist already, and if they can’t, well. They’ll just be hoping some wisdom and maturity set in to the audience members next time.

I see a great example of what Rush is talking about in this Twitter-flurry about Quilette, and universities:

Dr. Katja Thieme, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, took to Twitter recently to enact her own unique brand of McCarthyism. “YES. If you are an academic and you publish in Quillette, we see you. We fucking see you. And we are looking right at you.”

This was in response to the following tweet by a Denison University History professor who stated, “And any member of our field who publishes with Quillette should lose all credibility.”

One of Thieme’s followers then followed up with the astonishing suggestion that there should be a literal blacklist of academics who have written for the magazine. “It would be nice to have a list of Canadian academics who have published in that shitrag.”
:
It has become fashionable to spout nonsense such as Quillette is “racist,” or Quillette is “white supremacist.” When asked to provide evidence, accusers often claim that they do not have to provide evidence, or they just never respond.

The breezy dismissive rhetorical gesture of “both sides do it” does not work here. There is something in the liberal well-water that makes them act this way. I’m looking, once again, at how normal people mature. What they learn as they are about to enter, or soon after they have entered, adulthood.

One of the things we have to learn is how to cope with a system as we find it. Building a new widget is actually pretty easy. Well it’s not…really…perhaps what I should say is, building a whole new system, while intellectually taxing IF you hang around long enough to see what goes wrong with it, and take your orders about how to correct and refine it…falls short of demanding a certain discipline, that coping with a legacy system does indeed demand. I’ve seen this in software development fairly constantly. I’ve been one of the worst offenders. To do this thing, you have to do that thing first, and that way, and before you can do that you have to do this. The impulse sets in like a rapid fever: Oh for chrissakes, can’t we just scrap it and start over again? There’s no way, if we started over again, it would end up being this complicated, or unpredictable, or hard to use, or, or, or.

Which is often correct. But the point is, we can’t just go through life that way. We don’t have the time and resources to keep rebuilding everything from scratch. Sometimes, you have to stop programming, and accept that the system will be telling the humans how to behave, rather than the other way around.

And then comes the most painful truth: A lot of us have started to program computers, because of our failure to accept this. We developed our talents after taking our marbles and going home, after being called on to join a conga line, executing the right dance steps at the right time — and failing. We started building systems because we hadn’t developed the maturity to use a system someone else had built. After we learned how to do some cool stuff and put together some semblance of a marketable skill, then we matured. I see this in my colleagues often. It’s frustrating. “Hey, look what I built, now we don’t have to use that anymore.” Uh…okay, that’s nice. But “that” already has documented instructions, a bunch of bugs that have been opened and then resolved, or else documented as won’t-be-fixed, and we have software engineers in five different time zones who already know how to use it. People wonder why so many programmers are liberals. I think some of it has to do with what comes naturally to programmers, and it isn’t our innate and common strengths. It’s our weaknesses. It’s got to do with what’s wrong with us, not with what’s right with us.

What we’re dealing with here is Chesterton’s Fence:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

It takes a lot of maturity to say to yourself, “I don’t know what that thing is doing here. It may have a purpose that is still relevant but outside of my knowledge.” When we see liberals going on about “Hey hey now, you/we don’t need to do it all stupid the way we’ve always done it, we can do it this new way” — what they’d like us to be seeing is what they see themselves, some special, keen insight. But you’ll notice this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If you take “I just figured out we don’t have to do X, we can do Y,” you have to envision someone who lived a long time ago decided we should do it the other way. With using fossil fuels that can work…but did some guy who lived a long time ago really decide we should leave millions of people without health insurance?

Liberals swallow this stuff because they don’t scrutinize the claims coming from their own side. No Virginia, the Electoral College was not established to preserve slavery. But you just try telling ’em that.

A couple of years ago, a Brit by the name of Rory Sutherland made an interesting observation: We seem to be in the midst of mass producing Chesterton’s-Fence-Wreckers.

Ideas such as electoral reform, a single-European currency, or the removal of the monarchy, for instance, are all intellectual enthusiasms rarely shared by ordinary folk. All three ideas seem to make perfect sense until you think long and hard about what the hidden virtues of the previous irrational arrangement may be…We could add to this list of expert failures of judgment the promotion of low-fat diets, the support for free movement of labour and the promotion of diesel cars. All were trumpeted as self-evidently good ideas by experts, because experts all shared the same narrow frame of reference. So yes, diesel cars did reduce CO2 emissions: the experts were right there. But widespread use of diesel in cities came at a terrible cost in particulate pollution, which lay outside their model.

There is a huge cast of well-paid people, from management consultants to economic advisers, whose entire salaries are earned by ripping out Chesterton’s fences. Interestingly, these are mostly male-dominated industries (men are more prone to narrow systematising than women). Silicon Valley, which is overwhelmingly male, is possibly the worst offender of all. The very fact that a fence is over ten years old, requires atoms in its manufacture or creates employment for human beings is reason enough for them to want to get rid of it. [emphasis mine]

This observation of the male-female split is interesting. It certainly does apply to my above cranky-rant about programmers. This newbie who never bothered to learn the system already in place, and busied himself with crafting a replacement no one but him wanted, in my recollection is almost always a “him.” I’m ashamed at how often I might have been the guy, and I have to admit a female counterpart wouldn’t have been so likely to make that blunder.

But in politics, the gender-divide falls away. Elizabeth Warren wants to get rid of the Electoral College. Nancy Pelosi wants to lower the voting age to sixteen. Hillary Clinton wants to regulate the financial industry in a whole new way, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to get rid of capitalism, passenger jets and cow flatulence. We have lately become quite accustomed to the pantsuit-termagant caterwauling without restraint, in true Chesterton’s-Fence-Wrecker style, about “don’t do it that way start doing it this way.”

Why do women allow us men to blunder along making that mistake, all by ourselves, in software development? And then so unabashedly match our weakness when it comes to national politics. You’ll have to ask them. It’s off topic here so I’ll not get carried away with speculating, but by all means if you figure it out let me know.

But in all these “games,” the rule holds that when you play and lose, the right thing for you to do before playing again is to improve. Reconnect. Study. Grow. Learn.

Changing the rules, getting a blacklist started, and demanding a rematch is for mental children, perpetual nuisances and ankle-biters.

[…] House of Eratosthenes: Speech has never been more dangerous nor points of view more opposed. When the demand isn’t “why didn’t you denounce this” or “why didn’t you apologize for that” it is may be “why did you misgender me?” You can go to jail for saying “he” instead of “she”. […]
- True but Forbidden 15: - American Digest | 03/29/2019 @ 11:23
On men and software:

Men like systems/procedures that form a framework to work within. They may be loose, they may be completely spelled out, but men prefer to work within guidelines. Any improv will be ad hoc, and dependent on a clear path not being spelled out.
Men like the structure. When they retire, or go through a prolonged period of unemployment, they drive their wives nuts setting up systems to run the household. Men like to do this, starting completely from scratch, because this new system will FINALLY make sense.
But, the new system will not work – in households or in software development, because they never take the human element into account.
People are messy.

Women don’t – generally – handle national politics well, because it doesn’t allow them to take advantage of their greatest strengths – interpersonal relationships, and preference for bending the rules. They can do that locally, where the rules are not as strict, and all the players know each other, and benefit from working together. At the local level, government is an extension of their community activities, and they have a clear sense of what needs to be done.
At the national level, decisions are made without reference to alliances, but on the basis of what’s good for that politician, and what compromises he has to make to get his way. Any alliance tends to be as durable as the ones on Survivor (not at all). This hurts women’s feelings, and ignores their need to bond.

And, feelings are what rule women’s decisions. HRC is determined to take Trump down, because he hurt her fee-fees. No joke. Her self-esteem was.badly bruised. She is treating him like a boyfriend who was’t properly respectful of her feelings, and she wants him DEAD – AFTER TORTURE.
- rau | 04/20/2019 @ 14:44
Wow…that jives with everything. Hillary’s conduct, the behavior of my ex-girlfriends, even software engineering. Very astute.

Of course in this day and age, even the most credible and durable sex-stereotypes are in a state of decline, since we’re fascinated with gender-bending and encouraging men and women alike to pick up the worst habits of the other sex: Men are supposed to subscribe to the litany of “My feelings are more important than the rules” game, just like a woman, and women are supposed to drive like hell as if everyone else on the road is just dumb cattle, an obstruction & nothing more, just like a man. So the contrast is deteriorating. But until full entropy is reached, yes I see a lot that is accurate in the above.
- mkfreeberg | 04/21/2019 @ 07:28

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