Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Me, on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, earlier this morning:
Ever notice?
Things to do if you buy the conservative narrative:
1. Work hard
2. Find ways to enhance your skill set, so you can make more money
3. Spend time with your family, let your kids see what responsible adults do
4. DON’T turn in your weapons
5. Pay your taxes, but get angry when they’re wasted
6. Hold politicians accountable for wasting money on useless social programs
7. Invest
8. Give to charity
9. CHOOSE your own charities!
10. Start a business, if you’re really sure the time is rightThings to do if you buy the liberal narrative:
1. Support Obama’s latest plan to do X
2. Don’t resist
3. Go on Facebook and help us argue with people
4. Sign Joe Biden’s birthday card!!
5. Did we mention, don’t resist?
6. Do less something, do more nothing, emit less carbon
7. Get angry at businesses for…you know, being in business
8. Wait until WE tell you to work hard! — Keep waiting…
9. Send in extra money after you’ve paid your taxes! Nah, just kidding…
10. Just, like, you know, whatever liberal politicians say from one day to the next…just do that, whatever it is…Point is, liberals talk a great game about “coming together and working together.” Very often they’ll get busted for trapping schoolkids in some activity that will never promote the growth of any sort of useful skill, and their defense will be “Well the little cherubs are learning to work together, and that’s worth at least as much as all that data, electricity, stuff.” But when you look at what they want people to do, you see there isn’t much opportunity for us to work together.
Here & there they’ll build whole narratives around some activity they want us to do together, but when that happens you’ll notice the “what are we doing together” amounts to just a big ball o’ nuthin’. Like #6 in that second list.
Follow the liberal narrative, and what happens is, to the extent any of us are doing “work” at all…ironically, it ends up being uncoordinated work. Stovepipe work. There’s a lot of chatter involved in coordinating, but that’s about all it is, chatter. Regurgitating Item #1, “Call your representative and tell him to support Obama’s plan.”
Comparing them to the workplace, liberals are — and they really wouldn’t have much chance to learn this, since it’s a workplace analogy and all — just like that guy who talks up a great game about how he did this, he did that…he’s got no clue what you’ve been doing, you don’t know the workings of whatever it is he’s doing, wouldn’t be able to coordinate with him if you tried. And behind closed doors, he’s telling the bosses “And this place would fall apart without me!! These other guys, I dunno what they do around here. I’m the guy who makes it all happen!!” If that guy has any influence, layoffs follow him around, like a shadow. Whether he does or not, bad morale follows him around like a shadow. Because, while he may talk a lot about teamwork, he does nothing whatsoever to promote it, and quite a lot to diminish it.
The Syrnian-refugee thing? Just another example. What is there, should we decide to follow the liberals’ plan, for us to DO?? Nothing. Just support Obama. Don’t oppose, don’t resist. Log on to Facebook and help us argue with people.
I got three e-mails from the DNC this week. They were asking me to host a Syrian refugee in my home…oh no, just kidding, no they weren’t. They were asking me to sign Joe Biden’s birthday card.
What inspired this? So much! The Biden birthday-card thing…the G20 remarks from America’s First Holy Emperor and the whining that was subsequent to that. A little bit of family stuff. And some frankly rather idiotic ideas I’m seeing about gun control, making college campuses more “safe” and infantile…
It’s not that the people peddling these ideas are looking down the road and saying, “Yes, I want people to be completely defenseless when a madman opens fire in a crowded public space.” I think they’re being honest, for the most part, when they focus on what they say is the big payoff…in that case, “If nobody has any guns, it won’t happen, because nobody will have any guns, like duh.” I think they really do have faith that that’s going to work somehow. Some of them, anyway.
But a lot of them aren’t looking down the road at all. This is the trouble with preening. All of this effort being plowed into shaping and molding a narrative: “Good thing we were here! See how much better we are than those other people?” Just like that hot mess on the workplace I was describing up above. Good thing I was here! Got no idea what those other people are doing boss, why do you bother paying them?
You can’t reliably, or regularly, generate good results when you do this preening. Because those who preen are not predisposed to improve, to repair flaws. To do that, you have to 1) hang around to see how the Awesome Wonderful Grand Plan works, 2) find some flaws and 3) be honest, with yourself first of all, that the flaws are there. That gets in the way of The Preen.
Which means, ultimately, that The Preen has to get in the way of improvement. Any improvement. All learning. The beginning of all learning is “I don’t know,” and you can’t say that when you’re preening. Because when you’re preening, you already know everything. Just like the guy who’s had a few too many, is the best dancer in the room and his jokes are all funny.
For an example of how practitioners of The Preen behave when confronted with these flaws, I can’t think of anything better than what I saw yesterday over at Obamacare Facts. The comment thread is absolutely priceless. Especially the contribution, directed toward the moderator who was scrambling around trying to polish the turd, from sue on 11/5/15:
You’re on glue. You have the stupidest solutions and suggestions I’ve ever heard. Just be honest and admit this is a sham, a shake down of hard working citizens and the freedom of this country. This is a cash cow for the government and the health care industry and we’re all held hostage and being forced to buy into something we don’t want and can’t afford.
We see this with discussions about: Social programs, income taxes, foreign policy, refugees, abortion, religion, campaign finance, free speech issues, gun control, the savings-and-loan mess, climate change, prayer in schools — pretty much everything.
And it wasn’t always like this.
What’s different, I think, is that people are grasping at straws for ways to show what good people they are. We have an epidemic of GoodPerson Fever which is really nothing more than a spike disrupting the supply-demand equilibrium. A generation or two ago, there were ways to naturally show what a good person you were, that didn’t require any actual showing: Pretty much, the ten items on that first list.
Nowadays, they’re all getting more difficult to do, and people are being offered incentive after incentive to not do them. So they’re stuck. Preening. Can’t do anything else, other than maybe vote for a black guy to be President to prove they’re not bigots. Or a woman, to show they’re not sexists.
It’s been a constant drumbeat for a decade, it’s never left us for more than a day or two at most in all that time. It has ruined just about everything…
If it gets any worse, we’re going to have to start considering that maybe it’s a real problem.
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