they called me 'the hyacinth girl'
Here's one way to start, appropriate given the news about ACORN vote-fraud and other shenanigans of late in the news, two little phrases that our lefty friends have taught us over the last eight years: "He's not MY President", and "President-Select". Ok, that second one could come in for a bit of work, maybe "the ACORN President" or the "President from ACORN", but you get the idea.
I've been devoting a lot of thinking about the nature of this divide, and the blog and article hit on the central issue
the resolution is difficult because without using the same word meanings, discussions cannot be rational
thus when trading arguments, they do not mean the same things
another problem I constantly run into is difficulty in getting opponents to stake a well defined argument or even provide one
combined with a refusal to accept empiricism, it makes for tough going
my ideology has a built in path for convincing others operating in good faith from the same basis. no one argues about the value of pi because you can show it to be true. in the same way many fundamental arguments in our ideology are logically consistent and testable. and no one shrinks from defining a position for critique and then accepting errors
i find it nearly impossible to have productive discussions with many members of the opposition
the core problem is this...all i want to do is defend control of my life, and their ideology wants it
my best analogy is that they are the kids in the neighborhood who want to fight you for your bike, and say it's fair because you can fight them if you want. I don't want to fight anyone, I just want my bike.
MtnGoat: "[what he said]"
Ah! I see that we know the same people.
Greg: "Part of the problem is this: "I couldn't comprehend how this did not appeal to everyone." Really? You can't *comprehend* how someone might like the other party's policies? ""
Well, no. Part of the problem is that you overgeneralized what she actually wrote. She didn't say she 'couldn't comprehend how someone might like the other party's policies', generally.
She wrote, specifically, : "I've expressed my enthusiasm for smaller government and fewer taxes, and I couldn't comprehend how this did not appeal to everyone. "
Big difference.
By the way, thank you for your comment Librarian.
"Anyone who claims to believe that they have figured out the "innate mindset" of MILLIONS of separate people has little room to accuse anyone else of lacking "humility"."
I'm afraid I fundamentally disagree, and this is why. I too think I know better...but I refrain from seeking the power to impose my judgements on others. This last step is the fundamental difference.
Secondly, it is perfectly empirical and falsifiable to determine the mindset of people who self select into a demographic (I'll call it statist) by virtue of the ideas they follow.
All I need to is make the claim, and then see if the data satisfies the claim or falsifies it. When I claim that a large percentage of the population thinks they know better and seeks to replace the will of others with their own, by law, and then I observe that this action is precisely what they back, I have in fact verified my claim. If no one like this exists, then it is falsified.
The desire for power over others who have not violated the rights of anyone, is one of the core issues at the heart of statism/leftism/progressive ideology.
Pointing this out doesn't mean I lack humility. It just means I am accurately describing those millions who self select into this ideological category.
"As for "'we know better and we seek the means to impose it'" . .. are you seriously claiming that, despite believing that you have some deep psychological insights into the "innate mindset" of the entire "left", who you assure us are deeply illogical and do not form opinions using rational processes ... are you seriously claiming that you don't think that know better too?"
Nope. Everyone thinks this. It's the human condition.
The point is that only *some* us decide that violation of the negative rights of those who have not violated the rights of others, is OK.
Bottom line: Thinking one is correct is widespread. Thinking other people who violate no one's rights need to be directed by you because of this, is a choice not all make.
The lefts innate mindset has always been one of self reference without humility, in fact this is the entire basis of their creed...'we know better and we seek the means to impose it'. -MtnGoat
Anyone who claims to believe that they have figured out the "innate mindset" of MILLIONS of separate people has little room to accuse anyone else of lacking "humility".
As for "'we know better and we seek the means to impose it'" . .. are you seriously claiming that, despite believing that you have some deep psychological insights into the "innate mindset" of the entire "left", who you assure us are deeply illogical and do not form opinions using rational processes ... are you seriously claiming that you don't think that know better too?
--------------------------------------
Seriously though, Thank you for your timely illustration of the kind of lazy and sloppy thinking I was talking about.
These developments concern me greatly and I have been worried about this for some time. The lefts innate mindset has always been one of self reference without humility, in fact this is the entire basis of their creed...'we know better and we seek the means to impose it'.
The problem here is a deeply rooted one and exceedingly resistant to change..since they already have their minds made up and do not actually use rational processes in many cases to arrive at conclusions, changing their minds is nearly impossible.
Part of the problem is the usage of the wholesale manipulation of words and meaning during discussions. When I am debating a liberal I invariably wind up calling them repeatedly on word meanings...only to get complaints about 'semantics'.
Well, words mean things and unless we agree on their meanings, discussion is pointless. Doesn't bother them. So the basis of reasoned discussion goes right out the window.
Issue two...logic and it's application. I am continually attacked for using 'symbolic logic'...meaning actual logic, by people absolutely convinced they are 'reality based' and 'pragmatic'.
Yet when I point out that being 'reality based' means using real logic and falsifiable and testable arguments, I get back that these are 'just words' and that 'symbolic logic' is 'too limiting'. Well, the reason for that is evident...it's 'too limiting' to allow them to derive what they have already decided, a-priori, must be the correct result.
Then I point out that being 'pragmatic' doesn't free one from ideology, it *requires* the application of ideology because someone must have a goal, derived from ideas, to be 'pragmatic' about. Since 'pragmatism' is now treated as somehow being non ideological in order to get their basis in play on the sly, this simple observation has actually enraged a couple opponents
These and other issues I see repeatedly cropping up leave me with no conclusion other than we are faced with a nearly mindless opponent wrapped tightly in it's own fallacies. They grow more enraged they are not granted the power they see as their right (after all they are 'smart', as any article in The Nation will tell you) and ever more tolerant of misdeeds.
The upside is that action based on error always fails...the downside is they seek the power to expose and impose these errors on all, so that their failure harms everyone instead of mostly themselves.
If 9/11 failed to unite us--it divided us sharply along previously unobtrusive fault lines, surprising many, myself included--then I'm not sure what would - April
Oh, please!
90% of the calls for unity after 9/11 could be translated as: "Now is the time for my political opponents to unite the country by agreeing t o put their own views aside and join together to get behind my agenda 100%"
There are few things as phony than a person who cites the "need" for "unity" while themselves refusing to compromise on anything at all.
Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution." -JP
Likewise, JP,if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is honest disagreement about how best to pursue the war, but only bad-faith attempts to sabotage the war by perfidious islamo-commie traitors and the useful idiots they control.
What bothers me is the increasing tone of nastiness between "liberals" and "conservatives". -teresa
Nastiness is a symptom - The problem is sloppy and lazy thinking.
To begin with. thinking of groups of MILLIONS of people (as are both the "left" and the "right") as monolithic blocks is both incredibly stupid and, sadly, very common.
April: "As for all techies being liberal, I did generalize. I've been out of the con circuit for awhile , unfortunately, but the guys I hung out with were superlibs and rabid. I love techies, hsckers, geeks and IT gaffers. Sorry if you felt I was painting you all with a broad brush."
Oh, now! This IT gaffer was teasing you. Even if others don't (or won't), I do understand context and the fact that generalizations are precisely that.
But the fact is that a lot of techies *are* "liberals" -- socialists, and frequently, mindlessly so and/or incoherently so. The refusal of so many techies to think rationally and logically about social-political-religious matters really took me by surprise.
George W. Bush lost his "conservative' bona-fides long ago. He's now pretty much liberal in every way except presumedly socially.
It's also ironic that the angry messages in response to April's post only goes to reaffirm its messge.
Is Europe dying? I did not think it was.
What bothers me is the increasing tone of nastiness between "liberals" and "conservatives". What is the point? Neither one will listen to the other at that rate. This type of thing usually ends up with both sides standing back and saying "we are fighting the good fight" and no one grows or learns anything. It seems to resort down to a "measuring contest".
It disgusts me to see McCain supporters, in a line waiting to hear him speak, calling Obama a terrorists, a n*****, an arab, and spewing general hatred. It also bothers me when I hear Obama supporters say they that McCain is ill-suited b/c he is old or that he is racist. What good does it do to divide the nation further? Our heads of state are supposed to be an example, someone to look up to. To be honest, there are politicians running right now that I do not have one lick of respect for...none (and there are some that I do).
I feel it important to address "I'm becoming increasingly aware of a growing attitude amongst my countrymen for a more intrusive government". I believe it was the outgoing administration who decided it was legitimate to ask us to put aside our basic rights and install the Patriot Act. There is nothing about that act that is not "Big Brother" or "Big Government". It bothers me that both of our presidential candidates voted in favor of such a disgusting violation of one of the very aspects that is great about America...undeniable freedom.
Finally, I think it is definitely a misconception that computer folk are overwhelmingly liberal. I know many from both ends of the spectrum and do not believe that to be true. In a way, though, that statement comes off as sounding like if someone is liberal, then write them off b/c they are obviously not with it enough to keep up on the issues or form their own opinion (the same thing you were saying about people's misconceptions of conservatives).
Uh, don't forget that "right of center" in the UK is "Left of Obama" in the US.
With your ranting about computer folks you come off as older than 60. If "computer folk" is what is needed to set a stylesheet to show the same font on the index page as on the comment page (Yes April, I'm hinting at your lameness) , then we definitely need more of those, liberal or not.
Looks like Steyn's given you more ink at the corner - your post has a lot of legs!
I wonder if you've heard of Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector whose 1984 interview was posted on YouTube and then Pajamasmedia about a year ago (or so). I also happened to have just read the 1976 FBI file on the Weather Underground, and then last night finished J Edgar Hoover's 1958 "Masters of Deceit" about Communism in the USA.
Now, I was born in 1976, and came into political consciousness around 2002, so I come to the question of the Communist International and its various related movements and entities as a simple student following a mostly written record. However, to read of Obama's mother, his idealized Kenyan father, his actual associations in Chicago politics, including the 1995 launch of his political career in the home of Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, I have to say, if I didn't have the inhreitted legacy of anti-anti-Communism filtering my sense of what seemed reasonable, I would definitely conclude that Obama was more or less a Manchurian Candidate.
In fact, it's quite easy to make the case. But unfortunately Americans - both well-meaning liberals and oblivious conservatives - simply don't have the historical and intellectual-historical background to individually assess the significance of these associations on their own. The media atmosphere - what certain outlets scorn or selectively report - simply overwhelms the imagination. I'm afraid, even if what I think is probably occurring were actually occurring, very, very few Americans would be able to anticipate it - and many of these would be loons.
Well, it looks like the Golitsyn-Bezmenov theory will be tested soon, is now being tested. We'll see if the Left manages "to bring this country to crisis," perhaps under serious pressure from some shrewdly calculated catastrophe or other engineered by foreign powers who, in the current popular sense of things, simply don't exist.
Depressing. But also fascinating!
I resemble your "strong libertarian" contingent of geeks and am saddened to have to agree with your general assessment. Fortunately my career literally allows me to work from *anywhere* in the world. Unfortunately no nation seems to be moving towards a direction of increased freedom - only differing rates of decline. Do I really have to become one of those "well I'll just take care of mine" elites to survive??? (shrug)
"First it was the culture war--a war only one side wanted to fight, and it wasn't us.."
Oh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
And that's only one example, Michelle Malkin has a long post documenting left wing thuggery in this election cycle. This is the typical claptrap where violence used by the left is excused since it's done under the guise of "social justice" or some other pile of bull.
Years ago when I was an instructor at the Marines infantry officer school we used to spend a lot of time talking with Bill Lind. Bill was a famous critic back then of how the military trained and fought, he was one of the few from outside the military who pushed us into maneuver warfare. But in person with the small cadre of Marine captains he was much more blunt, stating adamantly that our leaders were clueless in the art of war and that we (the young guns) were little better given the rigidity of our thinking and our self conception as modern day Spartans. He wrote an article about a military coup in America which I can't find at the moment. I'm at work in Jalalabad Afghanistan and my ISP is in Uzbekistan - thus goggle comes up in Uzbek Russian and I can't read it.
I work an OGA job - and not American secret stuff but a real "other government agency" that being the government of Japan's US AID equivalent JICA and have observed the military effort in Afghanistan for four years now from outside the wire. I see that Lind was absolutely correct in his assessments made twenty years ago. We are losing because of the institutional inability of the military or Department of State to think outside the box and come up with solutions which fit the circumstances on the ground.
I watch what is happening in our election cycle and feel a tinge of alarm. A candidate so unexamined by a fawning media that we don't even know if he was born in our country. A media that goes hysterical at a few boorish comments during a McCain rally yet turns a blind eye to the unimaginable levels of thuggary, vandalism, vote fraud, and intimidation by the other side. I see the first citizen politician of my generation and the most popular governor in the country ridiculed and smeared because she is just like us and nothing like Joe Biden. The same Joe Biden who stole the entire life story of a articulate British politician and tried to pass it off as his own. The same Joe Biden who looks and sounds the most convincing when he is making things up out of whole cloth.
When Lind published his article in the Marine Corps Gazette about a military revolt those many year ago my peers and I shook our heads and said "that's it he is over the line." That article allowed many to dismiss Bill as a fringe crank academic. Now I am not so sure. And that is a very troubling thing to contemplate.
Hey but on the bright side I love this blog - keep up the great work April
April,
I word of encouragement. I used to get upset at the hateful comments that I got from the Left, too, but then I realized that this was an indication of the depths of *their* problem, not my own. I even came to accept them as a kind of badge of honor, not because I am a troll (I never like hearing hate), but because I know I have bravely planted a flag and defended it.
Be thankful that you are fighting the good fight. This defines you. It defines all of us, even those who try to avoid it. For everyone mature enough to understand our times, we are being forced to pick a side. We are being asked to pick the sword up. You have. Godspeed.
"It is liberal elements, both cultural and economical, that have finally united the EU into a body, not ridden by disgusting nationalist and religious wars, and an economic superpower. For a dying Europe, this is in fact the richer Europe, with the highest quality of life and GDP per capita Europe that has ever existed. Imagine that."
I would take issue with every assertion in those two sentences. I live there.
"Greg" is a case study in what Steyn describes here:
" the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution."
Yes, Greg, it IS all the conservatives fault... everything they do is bad, everything you do is good.
Part of the problem is this: "I couldn't comprehend how this did not appeal to everyone." Really? You can't *comprehend* how someone might like the other party's policies? That sounds a lot like that Pauline Kael quote about George McGovern conservatives love to throw around. ("I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon.")
After George W. Bush & Dick Cheney pushed for an executive branch beyond the reaches of normal oversight, locked people up for indefinite periods of time because they were *accused*--but not proven--of being terrorists, shipped people over to foreign countries to get tortured, and demanded the ability to spy on Americans without warrants, it's really surprising to see a conservative claim they were for less intrusive government. Really? When were you going to let us know? (See Glenn Greenwald for more on this: http://www.salon.com/opinion/gre.../22/czar_henry/
Money quote:"In the areas of national security and war — so broadly defined as to include almost everything the President does both abroad and on U.S. soil — the central theory of the Bush presidency has been, as John Yoo put it: “These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.” The Bush administration’s central strategy has been repeatedly to tell courts that they have no right to review the Leader’s decisions. The Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act, the FISA Amendments Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Patriot Act all provide, to one degree or another, the exact same absolute executive discretion and prohibition on judicial review that the Paulson Plan provides, and in doing so, allows the President to decide which individuals — including Americans — are spied on, arrested, detained, rendered, and subjected to all sorts of interrogation methods without any review at all. The administration repeatedly told Congress and courts that what they did — in general — was far too secret to allow any oversight or review of any kind."
) Bob Barr and Dick Armey are for less intrusive government, but they both joined the ACLU.
Finally, I'm always astonished by the willingness of conservatives to use the words "war" with regards to their fellow countrymen. First it was the culture war--a war only one side wanted to fight, and it wasn't us--and now we're to have a "cold civil war." Great. We'll be over here, trying to solve the nation's problems you've created. Let us know when you want to join us.
As for all techies being liberal, I did generalize. I've been out of the con circuit for awhile , unfortunately, but the guys I hung out with were superlibs and rabid. I love techies, hsckers, geeks and IT gaffers. Sorry if you felt I was painting you all with a broad brush.
This country is now, as Steyn has said numerous times, a "50/50 nation."
Steyn is wrong again. It's more like a 60/40 country - liberal/conservatuve.
If 9/11 failed to unite us--
It did unite us but Karl Rove soon put an end to that.
Wow. I haven't gotten hate comments in a long time. Sweet. "Disgusting collectivist" is a mew one.
You are a disgusting collectivist, who has been taught to parrot the same old lines concerning "liberals" in order to feel like he belongs somewhere.
Its not liberals who cowardish suck the government off in the name of "security" in more and more BIG GOVERNMENT "patriot acts" and other kinds of people paid by tax payer money t o sit and watch over other people's emails.
It is not liberals who pretend to whine about others following "the greater good" yet themselves use collectivist terms and higher objectives like "the homeland" or "society"
It is liberal elements, both cultural and economical, that have finally united the EU into a body, not ridden by disgusting nationalist and religious wars, and an economic superpower. For a dying Europe, this is in fact the richer Europe, with the highest quality of life and GDP per capita Europe that has ever existed. Imagine that.
Finally, not even your economic whinning stands up.
It is this "conservative" administration, not only having archived the biggest hit against the US economy, but that it has managed to make a surplus, into a 10 TRILLION debt. (just consider that 85 Billion are 18 Nuclear powered carriers please)
This because your ilk, still haven't understood that debt = tax, blinded by populist tactics like "not putting taxes", unable to understand that wither someone takes dollars from you, or gives you the bills (or negative dollars if you will), ITS THE SAME ACT.
Making, incidentally, this "conservative" administration, the biggest taxing government, over any, oh so evil "liberal" one.
Tax and spend = Spend and indebt.
"Computer folk are overwhelmingly liberal--rabidly, irrationally, liberal--as fluent in black helicopter conspiracy theory as they are in Klingon."
For what it's worth, the dominant IT website in the UK, The Register, comes across as right-of-center.
Very good work on this April!
The media is our mirror- but to them morals, ethics and capitalism are vampires- they don't even have a reflection. When things don't reflect in the mirror no one notices, at first, when they begin to go away. If we cannot get our media to pay attention to these cornerstones of civil society, it will be gone before we know what has happened. The Obama rapture is upon the media. We might not be able to get them to give it up before the election but we MUST follow up and fix blame where it is due when the disaster comes.
YBM
Hey, now! Some of us IT gaffers are conservatives.
You wrote, "a populace willing to pay higher taxes". Abolutely not true. From Clinton to the Messiah, their tax increase proposals have appended, in virtually the same breath, "but only on the rich." We have a populace willing for someone else to pay higher taxes.
Very insightful and sobering post. I just finished reading The Criminalization of Christianity by Janet L. Folger. Scary stuff. I'm not really a doom-and-gloomer or an end-times-predictor, but it's looking pretty bad. I'd love to hear some solutions!
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