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More change stories — 56 Comments

1. My favorite comment was this one:

   “My ‘epiphany’ never really happened. I was 12 when Carter was elected in 1976. Four years of that f***in’ moron was all I needed to know where I stood when I became old enough to vote.”

   Posted by: Third Eye at March 22, 2011 07:31 PM (Ojzt3)

   Who said Jimmuh never did any good?

2. I still don’t know what I was waiting for
   And my time was running wild
   A million dead-end streets
   Every time I thought I’d got it made
   It seemed the taste was not so sweet
   So I turned myself to face me
   But I’ve never caught a glimpse
   Of how the others must see the faker
   I’m much too fast to take that test

   Turn and face the strain [changes]

   I watch the ripples change their size
   But never leave the stream
   Of warm impermanence and
   So the days float through my eyes
   But still the days seem the same
   And these children that you spit on
   As they try to change their worlds
   Are immune to your consultations
   They’re quite aware of what they’re going through

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8v486aUYu0
   i was once Ziggy Stardust, but i changed.. 🙂

   ==================

   On the turning away

   From the pale and downtrodden
   And the words they say
   Which we won’t understand

   “Don’t accept that what’s happening Is just a case of others’ suffering Or you’ll find that you’re joining in the turning away”

   It’s a sin that somehow
   Light is changing to shadow
   And casting it’s shroud
   Over all we have known

   Unaware how the ranks have grown
   Driven on by a heart of stone

   We could find that we’re all alone
   In the dream of the proud
   On the wings of the night

   As the daytime is stirring Where the speechless unite
   In a silent accord Using words you will find are strange And mesmerised as they light the flame

   ‘Feel the new wind of change
   On the wings of the night
   No more turning away
   From the weak and the weary
   No more turning away
   From the coldness inside
   Just a world that we all must share
   It’s not enough just to stand and stare
   Is it only a dream that there’ll be
   No more turning away?

   from A Momentary Lapse of Reason….
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX_Fu6JW0fM

   ==================

   Walters & Kazha – The War Is Not Over
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6lNjSA40o

   I slowly walk into the night arround
   To see how dreams of people die

   They gently fall from windows all around
   And crash against the ground like glass
   And I’m so sorry I’m so helpless in this angry world
   If only I could change it for one day

   Refrain
   The war is not over everyone knows it
   It’s just a reason to make us believe
   That someone’s the loser someone’s the winner
   To make us believe that’s the way it should be
   But I don’t wanna believe

   In the story they all tell this fairytale has gone to far

   I take a step and dare myself to be free

   To see how beautiful we are that everyone can be a star

   If only we would start believe in dreams
   Believe in who we are

   The war is not over……. 🙁

   maybe we should learn the “authors songs” and learn?

   Be Thankful
   Words and music by V. Vysotsky
   Who cares that your old lady’s always nagging?
   Who cares that your career just took a dive?
   Who cares that, once again, you’re off the wagon?
   Be thankful that at least you’re still alive.
   No sweat – your only jacket doesn’t wear well.
   No sweat – the nightmares kept you up till five.
   No sweat – somebody mugged you in the stairwell.
   Be thankful that at least you’re still alive.
   Oh well – you’ll never play the ukulele.
   Oh well – you’re looking pale and sleep deprived.
   Oh well – your hair’s been falling out lately.
   Be thankful that at least you’re still alive.
   So what if you’ve got footprints on your forehead?
   So what if you are breaking out in hives?
   So what if your cholesterol is horrid?
   Be thankful that at least you’re still alive.
   Big deal – you are a nail and not a hammer.
   Big deal – another summons has arrived.
   Big deal – your spent your weekend in the slammer.
   Be thankful that at least you’re still alive.
   It’s true – a man must pay for every blunder.
   It’s true – I’ve made the bed in which I lie.
   It’s all so very true – I only wonder,
   Whom do I thank that I am still alive?

3. Typo alert: it’s Stranahan, I think, not Carnahan.

4. An interesting comment on the radio Rush. As I recall now it must have been in or around 1990 when I’d taken a job that required a 3-4 hour drive twice a week from Southport Ct to Cambridge. It was a long haul and I’d run through a lot of books on tape and taken to listening to the radio, and then to talk radio. And even though I was working for a liblib organization I found myself listening more and more to this guy named Rush.

   Strange to think of it now, but that was the case.

5. Mrs. Whatsit –

   I don’t know what it is about that name. I made the same mistake a few days ago, writing “Carnahan” instead of “Stranahan.” Maybe it’s just that we all know one “-nahan” name most saliently, and it’s Carnahan.

   More frighteningly, maybe neo read my exchange with the other commenters where I said “Carnahan” and I subliminally infected her with error.

   Kind of like an “inception,” eh? Perhaps I should start commenting at DailyKos.

6. kolnai: yes, all your fault! I blame YOU!! 🙂

   I will change it pronto.

7. My usual question: How did you maintain your libness in the face of the real world?
   Subsidiary questions: What did you choose to ignore? What/who did you discredit in order to avoid addressing? So forth.

8. the last movie star just died…

   🙁

   rip elizabeth taylor…

9. Richard Aubrey –

   Great questions (not addressed to me, I realize, but let me take a crack) –

   1) While I was never an orthodox liberal, I was what used to be called a “left-anarchist” – essentially an unformed, unprincipled radical who rejected pretty much all forms of authority on principle, or what passed for principle.

   My experience is that liberalism and leftism more generally is more about values, a kind of cosmic faith, than it is about “the real world.” I would hear someone say, “hey, come on, the world just ISN’T LIKE THAT,” and my response was to shrug and say, “Well, it should be.” Hope and change, basically. There’s a subtext which amounts to a belief that if one can change the inner self – think of a Buddhist monk attaining nirvana – then the world too can change, or attain nirvana. So one thinks more about aiming to “change the inner self” – crucially not just one’s own inner self, but everyone’s – rather than doing anything practical.

   So there’s a different attitude about the real world – even if it’s acknowledged to be recalcitrant, we still have an obligation to be holy and purify it as much as possible. You’ll notice that given the ethereal, non-practical realms academics exist in – the surface similarity of college to a kind of utopia is hard to miss – it should be much easier to find liberals and leftists there, because such disdain for reality is hard to maintain for someone who, say, farms for a living.

   As for non-academic liberals, there really isn’t much of an ideology there, for most of them anyway. A good chunk is just people who were raised by liberals, and so have taken liberalism as their “team” and identify with it. For others its single-issue – say, abortion. I’ve known several women who are conservative in every way, but say they could NEVER vote Republican because of the abortion issue. Surely that’s not uncommon.

   Anyway, speaking for myself, as a presumably “academic” leftist I survived contact with reality by pretending that reality was infinitely plastic and adhering to a nutty kind of spirituality that seemed to justify that opinion.

   2) What did I choose to ignore? It wasn’t so much that I chose to ignore anything – I was always an ecumenical reader, which is probably what saved me in the end – but, as the second part of your question indicates, I discredited a lot that I did pay attention to.

   My thinking, such as it was, was something like this: People who write for established systems are spiritually dead conformists who are surely sincere, but who have no vision. If that is “life,” then death is better than life. Real life is being an intense, eccentric, individual’s individual, and that means holding that all idols richly deserve their twilight, and all iconoclasm is healthy.

   It is impossible to be consistent with such a position, but that’s the position. I simply a priori decided that I would learn everything but believe nothing. This had the beneficial effect of ensuring that I didn’t believe standard-fare liberals any more than conservatives; but in some ways it made me worse, because it brought me to the fringes where I would read Chomsky and post-modernist French philosophers as if they were religious texts. The self-vitiation that implied is embarrassing in hindsight, but…well, youth is wasted on the young I guess.

   In sum: the “real world” is ignored because we (leftists and radicals) denigrate its importance while we elevate the importance of the “inner self.” Autonomy is the ultimate shibboleth of the left, and not coincidentally, that word means something very different from “liberty” or “freedom” – it literally means “self-lawing,” or “giving the law to oneself.” In leftist hands, THAT means, “creating one’s own reality.”

   What you choose to ignore after that is simply a matter of personal fiat.

   That’s my experience, anyway. Probably not representative, yet bizarre enough to at least be fascinating.

10. Artfldgr: Here.

11. kolnai
    Bizarre, perhaps, but not a statistical outlier.
    As I may have said before, I knew the Weather Underground Linda Evans in college. My luck. Never met the other one.
    She struck me as more than a little off. If I had to describe it, she seemed to think that some huge Daddy figure was in charge. If something needed to be changed–practically everything was wrong–then Daddy would fix it if it were brought to His attention. If he didn’t fix it, it was because he was evil and liked it that way.
    Now, of course, it wasn’t God. It was that those in power were supposed to see things as a poorly-educated undergrad saw them and react as she wanted. Otherwise…. Days of Rage.
    This is not to say, of course, that the KGB and others couldn’t have played her and her colleagues like an ocarina.
    There was no such thing as opporunity cost, trade-offs, downside, the possibility they may have misunderstood anything. They wanted it and they wanted it NOW!
    Of course, I have no idea how she got to be so nuts, and by extension so many of her colleagues.

12. Here’s another Rush epiphany: In 1992 I was an active Perotista, one of the gung-ho organizers in my area. At some point an acquaintance told me that Rush Limbaugh was calling Perot crazy, etc. I responded “why should I care what a racist sexist homophobe thinks?” I kid you not, I actually said that, and I had never once listened to a word on his show–and I was never a liberal or a conservative-basher….just misinformed about Rush, as so many are. That’s how effective these Leftist smear campaigns are.

    I started listening to Rush as soon as Clinton won, heard the opening riffs of his theme song “My City Was Gone” by the Pretenders, and found out that I agreed with damn near everything he said–and that he was hugely entertaining. Never looked back.

13. I grew-up in New York City and, minus nine years away, live there today. My “transition” was started and completed during the 1970s. It involved a combination of factors. One was NYC’s financial crisis due to: mis-spending; “do-good” programs that did no-good; municipal unions (what else); and the implementation of the Cloward-Piven ultra-leftist program to break the bank, by enrolling as many people as possible to receive welfare — whether eligible, or not. The other concurrent event was the OPEC oil embargo. Here, the wild conspiracies were off the charts. My favorite being that of the major oil companies “parking” their tankers outside the continental limits to further boost oil prices. Another “nutcase” story involved oil company efforts to suppress the “existence” of a car that could get on the order of 75+ mpg. Also, I got to see the evil of price-controls with federal controls on oil and natural gas prices — they not only did not help, but maid the problem worse. The final step was Jimmy Carter who, despite his “late-in-the-game” oil/natural deregulation efforts, was an utter “malaise” disaster. As 1980 approached, there was the clarity, logic, and common sense of Ronald Reagan — I haven’t looked back since.

14. As I’ve related before, Angela Davis was my unwitting guru. Several things she said to me in conversation (striking in their cynicism and ruthlessness) troubled me more than I consciously realized at the time, but resonated subconsciously for a year or two until I went to Berkeley.

    At that point, seeing leftist politics in the making, at first hand, her remarks resurfaced in my consciousness and the scales dropped from my eyes.

    So thanks, Angela!

15. I was never very political, and when I voted I would vote republican because most of the conservatives that I did know had their act together pretty well, and that was what I wanted to be. Most of the liberals I knew were pretty loopy, and I had already had enough of that in my life. But the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings woke me up. I remember watching them on NBC. They brought in Anita Hill, and she testified, and then when it came time for the folks to testify on Thomas’s behalf, they cut off the broadcast. At that point I realized they were trying to destroy this man, and I was furious. That was when I found Rush, because I was doing restoration work on a big old house and had no one to talk to about this, and I couldn’t believe I was the only person outraged about it.

16. I lived in solidly “D” neighborhood in NYC and was in public school in 1948, during the Truman-Dewey election. My all-time favorite political rumor* circulating among school kids was: “If Dewey is elected, there will school on Saturdays.”

    *May have posted it before.

17. “You don’t know you are spoonfed liberal lies until some fact or logic, well put, breaks through.”

    The single biggest contribution Fox News has given us is the willingness to report on things that the rest of the broadcast media would stuff under the rug. I think just about everyone in the country assumed that what Cronkite, Rather, etc… told us WAS the news. That they touched on all the important stuff and whatever remained was either much less significant or insignificant. More over, I think people accepted that not only WAS it the news, but that it was being told in an objective manner. That’s a risible notion now, but when we had 5 channels to choose from, we simply didn’t know any better.

    Thank goodness for Rush, the Internet and Fox. And for Reagan who helped make Rush possible.

18. It’s interesting to me that, when a liberal-turned-conservative speaks about the conversion — as you all have, and many thanks for it! — it tends to follow the pattern of “everything makes so much more sense this way, and I can see the folly of my former ways”.

    This makes me wonder: how do conservatives-turned-liberals describe their epiphanies? (I know, Neo has written about how such conversions tend to be far fewer, at least by anecdotal evidence. Still, one wonders.)

    Here’s my expectation. As we’ve said before, conservatives think liberals are stupid; liberals think conservatives are evil. (As I’ve said before, this is a direct consequence of Churchill’s “anyone under twenty who is not liberal has no heart; anyone over forty who is not conservative has no brain”. Liberals therefore think conservatives are heartless, i.e. evil; conservatives think liberals are brainless.)

    As such, I expect that, were we to ask a conservative-turned-liberal to describe his epiphany, it would sound something like: “I became increasingly uncomfortable with conservatism, because it all seemed so mean-spirited. They were too willing to accept the world as it is, and that’s not good enough — so I chose to be with the people who would remake the world into a better place!”

    In other words, I suspect that new conservatives will talk about how this makes more sense; new liberals will talk about how they feel better.

    Any thoughts? (Or feelings, for that matter?)

    respectfully,
    Daniel in Brookline

19. Daniel: I think you are correct.

    Also, I believe (haven’t seen statistics on it, though) that although conservative-to-liberal conversions are fewer, they tend to occur earlier in life. At least, that’s my impression; you hear of very few mid-or-later-life conservative-to-liberal conversions, and many of them appear to be what Churchill would call a “re-rat” (someone who was originally liberal and then conservative returning to the liberal fold). But if a young person is raised in a conservative family and hasn’t really formed his/her own independent political identity yet, and then goes off to college or gets out into the world, then he/she might become a liberal after being exposed to liberal arguments, thinking, books, peer pressure–and also, sometimes, as a rebellion against the parents.

20. neo
    I can see the rebellion. But being “exposed” to an idea when you know better, or know enough to know there’s an alternative and thinking about it might make sense is probably not a slam dunk conversion from right to left.
    Peer pressure, though, is important. Especially with the profs saying or implying that we here, we happy few, are the intellectual and moral superiors to the great unwashed “north of Grand River”, or whatever.

21. Richard Aubrey: you wrote “being ‘exposed’ to an idea when you know better.” “Know better” assumes a process of critical thinking was involved in the adoption of the idea in the first place. In many cases, when people adopt the political belief system of their families of origin, that’s not the way it works; it is just accepted on faith rather than arrived at by reason, whether the political persuasion be left or right.

    See this.

22. neo.
    Correct. However, it is true that the family’s position is known, known to be held by people who are not notably horrid and awful–until the kid gets to be a sophomore, anyway–and may have some validity.
    That is different from not being aware there are genuine alternatives.

23. Daniel in Brookline,

    Its difficult to stand in someone else’s shoes; but I think you’re on the right track. Conservatives see liberals as impractical and divorced from the realities of human nature. Progressives think conservatives are heartless people who just won’t give utopia a chance.

    “I heard it was you
    Talkin’ ’bout a world
    Where all is free
    It just couldn’t be
    And only a fool would say that.”

    — Steely Dan

24. Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

25. from what i see in the groups i have floated through its about social belonging and a kind of local minima of a collection of satisfying beliefs.

    As kolonai has aptly pointed out, a desire for simplification, which is what ideology offers that religion doesn’t (though those who haven’t thought deeply about will argue otherwise).

    one is about meeting the expectation of an external thing you respect, the other is about temptation.

    each subset offers a slightly different mish mosh of stuff, and you will often hear them list off a litany of different things they were over time. [msm sometimes makes fun of it]

    very few understand how the world around them works. they have a lot of confidence in their education which really sucked as they dont understand things. while standing proudly believing some myth about their superiority, they are often the opposite of that myth.

    they believe is is of a higher IQ to percieve which social topics and points to be on the side of. a kind of IQ by maxing out some pc score card where you have all these issues to have a side on.

    they never say i dont know, and or ask for an explanation. they dont mind being ignorant, just its not polite to expose that in any way. its not fun.

    even worse, most do not know what they are even if they give you terms they cant define as a description. and by define not spit out a memorized thing that they cant really explain or put in context.

    they wont look stuff up.

    they dont like long texts. many claiming dyslexia as a nice way to side step it.

    they all come from broken homes, even if they dont. they have all believed to have suffered enough to sing the blues, but many are tone deaf.

    they do not respond to cognitive dissonance.

    they do not value experience, as that makes people unequal.

    many want what their grandparents had and do not know how to get there. even if they do, their partner probably doesn’t.

    there is so much you can see when your quiet and you pay attention…

26. imo conservsative to liberal transformation occurs when you think you know better on how the human world should be.
    thus a bit of egoism and a bit of detatchment from reality

27. Well, I wasn’t ever liberal– my politics probably were formed when I was a little kid, and an old couple we knew were forced out of their home because there was an endangered bird nesting on their property.

    They had no house, no income, and still had to shoulder the expense of the land they couldn’t set foot on– I think they’d had a little hobby farm there, but I was a little kid; about the only thing my folks would say about it was that we were not to tell ANYONE about the Bald Eagles or even the red tailed hawks that nested in some areas.
    (The endangered bird died, by the way– I don’t know if it was before or after the old couple did. The eagles are still flourishing, and the red tailed hawks were flourishing until they shut off the water that irrigated the trees they lived in and the fields they hunted in; no idea where they went.)

    Later on, I heard the hushed stories from arrowhead hunters; my mom explained that they didn’t dare tell the archeologists what they knew, eve though they knew where most all of the burial sites were, the crafting sites, hunting areas, because they’d be arrested for picking up arrowheads. (Those folks are dead of old age, so it’s safe to mention.)

    My dad, about the quietest, calmest man you’ll meet, still gets spitting mad about the stupid things governments do in their massive, prideful ignorance. Sometimes here, sometimes in other countries.

    My folks’ only demand when we were growing up was that we consider what side a story was being told from, and why it was being told to us, and what source they were using; that alone made sure we don’t generally believe the MSN. Doesn’t help that they get so many things we know wrong.

28. Don’t underestimate the power of peer pressure and tribal identity, especially on the young. I went to a private school in the South, which you’d think would be pretty pre-selected to be conservative. Yet I can recall even in my teens the prevailing attitude among the other kids (and the teachers) was generally that Reagan was stupid/wicked/crazy. They couldn’t quite support the fiasco that was Jimmy Carter in 1980, but there was a lot of oh-so-superior “they’re all crooks and idiots” equivalencing.

29. “My dad, about the quietest, calmest man you’ll meet, still gets spitting mad about the stupid things governments do in their massive, prideful ignorance. Sometimes here, sometimes in other countries.”

    Sounds familiar. From an early age I was taught that government was to be feared and government officials have only their own personal best interests at heart.

30. we consider what side a story was being told from, and why it was being told to us, and what source they were using;

    In appropriate contexts I like mentally to prepend to each of the other person’s statements, “He wants me to believe that …”

    That helps me to keep perspective, and emotional distance regarding the truth value of each assertion.

31. My transition was a slow one. I was born and raised in lib-land by libs. There was a decades-long transition where I saw that the lib explanation of the world didn’t make sense.

    On the way to getting a BS, I worked for about two years in institutions for the mentally retarded and for psych patients. I left those places concluding that while as a society we have an obligation to help those who cannot help themselves, 1) there are probably financial limits to the funds we are able to use to help and 2) funding does not necessarily mean solving. Some problems may well be intractable, though some may claim that they have the program that will solve the problem. In short, the experience left me skeptical of those who said they had the program that would solve XYZ- if only it would get funded.

    Probably as a result of the death of a childhood friend in a gun accident with his younger brother, I became an ardent pacifist during the Vietnam War. When push came to shove, the draft board granted me 1-O status. From the genocide in Cambodia I concluded that as long as vicious thugs roam the earth, no one has clean hands- ardent pacifists included. In Cambodia, we gave peace a chance. Didn’t work.

    A further separation from lib-think came from my working in Latin America. The “progressive” catechism on Latin America then — and now- circulating in the universities didn’t explain the facts I saw on the ground. Liberal guilt explained nothing about what I saw in Latin America.

    For a long time, my political stance was — a plague on both your houses. Over the years, my stance has been more of the “un-Democrat” or “un-liberal.” Or Post-Liberal.

    After nearly all Senate Democrats voted against Gulf War I, I decided that I would never again vote for a Democratic Party Presidential candidate. The best role for Democrats to play in foreign policy, I decided, was to do the ordering at ethnic restaurants.

    In looking at the “we are enlightened/tolerant and you wingnuts are bigots” line that libs push, I am reminded of my high school years. The rural faming community I lived in sent students to a regional high school in a bigger town. The bigger town was more liberal and better educated than my home town, and looked down on us as “dumb farmers.” Years later, I reminded myself, that was coming from oh-so-enlightened libs.

32. A few years ago I was working at a job where a Vietnam vet came to work. He mouthed off about republicans on occasion. I got the supervisor to start leaving talk radio on in the shop part of the time. The daily line up went- in order-Beck, Rush, Hannity….. by the time I left that job that vet couldn’t stand the democrats, and his main problem with the republicans were that they wouldn’t stand up to the democrats! He never did really like Rush- said Rush was arrogant (i agree) -but still listened to him anyway-lol

33. I get a kick out of telling libs that if somebody like me, ex-grunt and retired insurance pedlar, knows better than whatever they’re selling, how about all the smart(er than me) people, which has to be a lot.

34. Unfortunately, some of my relations have bought into the thing so far–upscale job on one hand, part-volunteer job on the other–that requires forcing oneself to believe in and preach (mostly) the green side of liberalism, I have to be cautious. They quite literally cannot afford to believe differently. Two kids in high school.

35. In looking at the “we are enlightened/tolerant and you wingnuts are bigots” line that libs push, I am reminded of my high school years. The rural faming community I lived in sent students to a regional high school in a bigger town. The bigger town was more liberal and better educated than my home town, and looked down on us as “dumb farmers.”

    In visiting friends in the Bay Area I’ve gotten pious platitudes about what The People wanted.

    I suggested they visit a Wal-Mart to see this constituency at first hand.

    End of discussion.

36. “In visiting friends in the Bay Area I’ve gotten pious platitudes about what The People wanted”.

    Well, technically, in the way you phrase it, your friends are right. What “The People” (Caps) “want” varies greatly from what people want. “The People” is an abstraction; a favorite among leftists (although some on the populist right invoke it too). Because it is an abstraction, it can be (and is) hollow: and can be filled with anything.

    Leftists and liberals revel in speaking about “The People” and “The Public Interest”, because these terms are so vague and impossible to define. It is quite easy to insert one’s own ideology here. And, no amount of argument or evidence will conclusively defeat it. Show a lefty 20 polls indicating that a vast majority of Americans do not agree with what he insists is in “The Public Interest” and he will: first, insist that all the polls are skewed, poorly worded and invalid, and second, insist that the people just don’t understand what is really in their interest. This is elitism 101. Yet the left never seems to appreciate the irony.

37. Richard Aubrey says, “I knew the Weather Underground Linda Evans in college.”

    Occam’s Bear says, “Angela Davis was my unwitting guru. Several things she said to me in conversation (striking in their cynicism and ruthlessness) troubled me more than I consciously realized at the time, but resonated subconsciously for a year or two until I went to Berkeley.”

    Eeeeyuuuuu…. I hope you washed our hands and brains thoroughly after coming into those contamination zones.

38. gringo says,

    “From the genocide in Cambodia I concluded that as long as vicious thugs roam the earth, no one has clean hands- ardent pacifists included. In Cambodia, we gave peace a chance. Didn’t work.”

    Pacifism is morally and ethically irredeemable. There is nothing moral or ethical about allowing evil to triumph. However, one has to pick when and where one fights. Picking the wrong fight is exactly why we’re bombing Libya as we type.

39. Well, technically, in the way you phrase it, your friends are right. What “The People” (Caps) “want” varies greatly from what people want. “The People” is an abstraction; a favorite among leftists (although some on the populist right invoke it too).

    Yes, exactly. I suspected that the phrase evoked urban hipsters in a Starbucks. I wanted to disabuse them of that image. Mission accomplished!

40. I never knew any far left muckety-mucks as high up as Linda Evans or Angela Davis, but my freshman year in college I hung around the local SDS chapter because of its antiwar stance. What killed it for me was hearing an SDS honcho saying that Lenin should be studied in universities the same way that great authors, scientists, or philosophers were studied. The reverence in her tone when she said “Lenin” was readily apparent.

    While I was on the left, I knew enough about the USSR, courtesy of a high school Politics course, to realize that the only thing “great” about Lenin was the number of people he had killed.

    That finished my hanging around the SDS.

41. Gringo says, “The reverence in her tone when she
    said “Lenin” was readily apparent.”

    “But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
    you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.”

    Even John Lennon got that right.

42. Parker, that particular Lenin-praising SDS honcho also stepped away from the abyss. She didn’t go the Weather Underground route, but chose to work at an entry level job in her profession. She has been an elected official for over a decade. From her website she seems like a tax and spend Democrat who has never met a social program she doesn’t like, and who loves taking her picture with higher-up officials.

43. I just thought I’d reiterate Neo’s theory about right-to-left conversions, but also echo Trimegistus’s point about the importance of peer groups. I grew up in a very conservative household, and I was quite conservative up until about age 15 or 16 when I began to drift more to the left, partly as rebellion against my parents, and partly as an attempt to fit in with the “intellectual” peer group at my high school. As I’ve written before either here or at AVI’s website, in my case, the conversion never really took full effect, but I was always willing to give the benefit of the doubt to liberals and to their ideas and so on. I continued in this mode thinking of myself as a left-leaning moderate through college and graduate school. I think one reason that I couldn’t identify completely as a liberal or as a Democrat, though, was that I had seen what a fiasco Carter had been, and I knew that Mondale was just as bad.

    My parents started listening to Rush Limbaugh when I was in graduate school, during the Clinton years. At the time, it was easy enough for me to dismiss what he said because it was easy to fault him for his many generalizations and logical fallacies and such. So I didn’t think much of him, and it was easy for me to dismiss all that I heard.

    But the truth was that I was never a big fan of Clinton, though I generally always gave him the benefit of the doubt until the Lewinski scandal broke, and it seemed obvious to me that he was lying and that the political left had no principles in the way they rushed to his defense. So I began to wonder what else he was lying about. I also began reading more conservative writers and thinkers, but I still resisted identifying as a conservative because I was uncomfortable with the “religious right,” and I still bought into the leftist stereotype that said all conservatives were social and religious conservatives, etc.

44. My track has been right — left — right +.

    Parents, Goldwater Republicans, formidably intelligent, good debaters. I was a sort of junior Republican (made phone calls for Nixon in ’68! I was 12 years old) and scorned the lefties.

    College, didn’t want to hear about politics. Thought all the policy wonks were a crashing bore. I loved reading history and minored in it, but I loathed the one political science course I took. It was about different ways of analyzing how nation-states made decisions in, for instance, the Cuban missile crisis. Rational actor model? NAH, too old-school and humanist. They were high on the Organizational model and the Bureaucratic model. There were some valid ideas in all this, but I kept thinking how dreary it all was — all the drama drained right out of, of all things, our closest approach to actual nuclear war.

    But then, after I graduated, thanks to some interior problems, I had a fiendishly difficult time getting on my feet financially. I found out something that the conservatives never discussed: Not everyone can pull himself up by his bootstraps. Some of us, even from “good families,” need extra help.

    Second thing: Reagan appointing James Watt as his sec. of the interior. Who, everyone said, was keen on strip-mining our national wilderness. This was the ’70s, and conservation wasn’t nearly as entrenched as it is now. I’m an animal lover and Girl Scout; I deemed the conservatives callous about our natural resources. As many were.

    Third thing: I am pro-choice. I see it as a choice between legal, safe abortion, and illegal, unsafe abortion; not between abortion and no abortion, in reality. I’m in favor of abortion rights in the situations of rape, incest, and the life of the mother in any case.

    So I was an Independent for many years (my early training in loathing Democrats held me back for a long time), then I registered as a Democrat in the 1990s. After the fall of the USSR. I always knew the Dems sucked at foreign policy.

    But: I always hated Communists and disliked Socialists; I’ve always been a patriot; I’ve never been a pacifist (it has always struck me as a very costly species of moral vanity; besides, I’ve read way too much history).

    So, after finding out that the Dems lied about the Republicans’ “stealing” the 2000 election, and didn’t give a damn about destroying the citizenry’s trust in our election system, and THEN their absolutely appalling perfidy after September 11th, I became a yellow-dog Republican.

    For any northerners who don’t know what “yellow dog” means — Southern Democrats used to say (thanks to the War of Northern Aggression), “Before I vote for one of those gol-durn Republicans, I’ll vote for a dang yaller dog.”

    I will never, as God is my witness, vote for the Democrats again. (Well, maybe if the Repubs run Old Scratch. But I’ll at least find something good to say about the Devil before I do.)

    I just started listening to Rush Limbaugh a few months ago. I mentioned to my very conservative brother that I had no idea where you could hear the guy, and he cracked up and said, “He broadcasts from NYC!” which floored me. Bob told me RL was on AM 770 at noon, and, feeling like a Communist in a basement listening to the Voice of America, I tuned in.

    Man, that’s what it was like! I’m still not crazy about his attitude towards women, but it wasn’t nearly so extreme as I’d been led to believe, and on almost everything else, to my astonishment, I found myself agreeing with him. Amazing.

    I keep having that “Oh, my God” experience when I read about yet another thing the Left has lied to us about. The most recent being the truth about nuclear power. But having been through the drill several times, I now sigh, turn to the conservative/rationalist voices, and see what’s really going on. I didn’t know that there were no deaths or radiation poisoning at Three Mile Island, for instance. The way they all carried on about it at the time, you would have thought it was The End Of The World.

    Once you see through the magic trick, you can never get taken again.

45. Re the latest Stampede (that’s the magic trick — they stampede us all like sheep over a cliff, banging on mess kits and pie plates) about nuclear energy: I have been reading about a lot of problems with wind farms that I’d never seen reported in the MSM. Ditto “green” gas alternatives, the Volt, solar power, and so on. These strike me as boutique energy sources, good for certain rather limited applications, but not anything that will work for transportation, industrial power, or our residential grid.

    I’ve also been reading several nuclear engineers’ accounts of how safe nuclear technology really is, including storing spent fuel in Yucca Mountain. It’s interesting, and appalling that the “reporters” simply don’t bother or don’t want to get the whole story. Lazy wankers, most of them.

46. Beverly, if you’re new to Rush, it’s not surprising that you’d be put off by his apparent attitude toward women.

    But I encourage you to keep listening. He started broadcasting in Sacramento when I was just starting college, and (under the influence of a whackjob prof who was a “principled vegetarian” who wore leather shoes and belt because, well, leather is only a by-product of meat production, so it doesn’t count – and Birkenstocks didn’t come in faux) I don’t think I heard even five minutes of him until many, many years later – but my sister, who stayed in Sacto, became an avid listener and eventually talked me around to trying him out. I conclude that he’s a lot like Heinlein in how he thinks about women: there’s an old-school tone of either gallantry or dismissiveness, depending on whether the woman in question is being an idiot in his opinion, but either of these tones comes out only situationally. For instance, a woman caller will bring out the gallantry; Sec. Clinton will bring out the dismissiveness, because he perceives her as a woman who betrayed her own principles and got where she is today by dint of marrying the right man. Palin gets kudos for her social conservatism and ability to deliver a strong conservative message to a wide range of people. He’s also not afraid to point out a woman’s attractiveness (or lack of it), even when it’s irrelevant. But when he speaks of the professional work or writings of a woman in whatever field, he focuses on the work or writings, not on her gender.

    In general.

47. I’m finding myself in the strange position of having to talk my young teenage son OUT of reflexive conservatism. I have to give him the arguments on the other side because I want him to approach his philosophy thoughtfully. I’m not saying I give him ONLY the other side’s arguments, of course. And I tell him what I believe, and why. But when he starts railing about confiscatory taxation and paying for people who just choose not to work and so forth, this kid whose only job so far has been cleaning the bathroom at the neighborhood pool, for cash, I feel that I must make sure he understands the concept of a safety net (as well as the need to limit its extent and applicability).

48. On the issue of “change” by being exposed to arguments and evidence one never knew existed, check out this debate on green energy and economic recovery:

    http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/past-debates/americas-house-divided-renewable-energy/#dm-col-a

    It’s long, so if anyone chooses to not watch it, just check out the upper right hand side where the pre- and post-debate audience positions are listed.

    Pre: 46% for (clean energy will drive economic recovery), 21% against, 33% undecided

    Post: 43% for, 47% against, 10% undecided.

    That’s pretty amazing, but on the other hand it seems clear that the “for” side pretty much stuck to their guns, as did the “against” side. The interesting thing is that nearly all of the undecideds, apparently, went to the “against” side.

    I have no idea what it means, but the very non-random breaking of the “neutral” voters for the pro-market side is fairly eye-popping. Honestly, I didn’t think Hayward and Bryce beat their opponents THAT bad. Both sides did a pretty good job, although I did think the pro-market side won. Still, it wasn’t an utter evisceration from what I saw.

    Just throwin’ that out there.

49. I figured out long ago that liberals are people who never learned the right thing to do often doesn’t feel right. Whether it’s having an old beloved pet put out of his misery or a downtrodden individual being actually concerned for by making sure he isn’t made comfortable in his downtroddeness.

    They are the world champions of under delivering in direct proportion to their habitual over promising.

50. Off the subject here is a sentence from a Reuters story on the terrorist attack in Jerusalem “Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike. “

51. Beverly
    Very interesting story. Three Mile Island got a lot of folks fired up. One local RC bishop gave his flock conditional absolution.
    That’s usually reserved for Catholics going into battle–first time in America was for the Irish Brigade going into the line at Gettysburg–when they don’t have time for confession. You repent your sins and sincerely intend to go to Confession at the first opportunity, should you have one in this life, and your “soul is not troubled as it rises” (ht. Mackinly Cantor..”Gettysburg”).
    Interesting how many people lied to you, isn’t it?

52. Richard — Yes, I was lied to on so Many subjects.

    Starting to actually listen to conservative broadcasts, instead of listening to slanders of them, was AMAZINGLY eye-opening. So many things were the opposite of what I’d been told.

    It reminded me of the lies and propaganda of the Soviet Union, on a smaller scale but just as comprehensive. The thing that enrages me is that the authors of these lies actually know they are lying: they’re acting from malice and hunger for power. Which is why refuting the lie makes zero difference to them — they simply present Another lie, ad infinitum.

    So, listening to Limbaugh in Manhattan really is like listening to the Voice of America behind the Iron Curtain. I’d write to tell him so, but I doubt I’d get through — I know the man is inundated.

    I also had heard about his bombast and arrogance. I think he has some of that, but I’ve noticed that he also sends himself up pretty regularly. I’d no idea that he had a sense of humor, for example.

    But it’s still a strange feeling, to find yourself enjoying listening to someone you’ve been told for years is a chauvinist pig and Prince of Darkness. I had the same feeling of unreality when I actually listened to Robert Bork on C-Span. He came across as thoughtful, intelligent, and patriotic in a good way. And he mentioned “the Ratchet Effect”: he said that conservatives never seem to be able to reverse any of the liberal depredations of our Republic, only slow them down some. The ground the Left gains, like the Arabs in the ME, is never ceded, only increased at the next opportunity.

    Last thought: I think what we’re up against is the Battered Westerner Syndrome/Battered Patriot Syndrome, the same psychological mechanism as the Battered Spouse Syndrome. If you’re attacked relentlessly, and mind-f***ed on a daily basis, you start to doubt yourself and go into a defensive crouch.

    The Leftists are the ultimate Bullies. The only thing that will tip the scales is for us to go on the attack. God knows we have a huge amount of ammunition and myriad targets of opportunity. The ONLY reason they’ve been getting away with murder is that we’ve not been ruthless enough about exposing their lies and perfidy — constantly, at full volume, without letup.

    We need to be like the kid in the Christmas Story, who finally turns on the bully and beats the tar out of him. No more problems with that kid. (Of course, the forces of destruction we face are far more serious: we need to don our Lancelot armor and tilt against them for all we are worth. This is a fight to the death, something our enemies have long understood.)

53. One more thought: I remember in the Lord of the Rings that Aragorn had a hard time convincing the Hobbits that he was on their side, and rightfully royal. His appearance was shabby, and the folks in Butterbur’s inn were suspicious of him; even Butterbur. But the Hobbits were able to see through the grime and tatters to the noble soul beneath. That was a theme of Tolkien’s — that the Good often seems foul, and the Evil often seems fair, and seductive.

    And there are stars and high beauty forever beyond the polluting reach even of Mordor.

54. Okay, one more wonderful author: C. S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra. No clearer depiction of the mindlessness and relentlessness of evil has ever been penned, that I know of. Weston, who was possessed by the devil, became an automaton of destructiveness and sadism. Nothing reached him: his soul was locked in damnation, which he himself chose out of a voluptuous masochism. This phenomenon is something that Tolkien also noticed: the Orcs both loved and loathed Sauron.

55. Beverly,
    I got to be more concerned with such matters when my ego got involved.
    Decades ago, there was a lefty bishop named Gumbleton whose public pronouncements were outrageously full of flat lies.
    I, for some reason, felt insulted. He’d never heard of me. But I was out there, part of the masses he was trying to influence and his lies were so obvious that the masses would have had to be utterly stupid to believe them. That he was telling these lies meant he thought the masses were exactly that stupid. AND THAT INCLUDED ME! Not to be stood.
    So I wrote him a letter explaining the reality of whatever the immediate issue was and assuring him that I–and by extension–most other folks were not that stupid. IOW, I wasn’t trying to correct his misimpression of the facts of the matter, but trying to assure him nobody believed him. I knew he wouldn’t stop saying the wrong thing because he found out better. I figured he might modify his pitch if he thought people were on to him.
    Anyway, that’s my method with libs. “I know you know better. I’m an ex-grunt with an extremely modest GPA from Enormous State University. If I know better, how about all the smart people? Which is pretty much everybody,”

56. Neo- I’m pleased to see all the “change” comments here. This after all is how I discovered your blog all those years ago.

    “A mind is a difficult thing to change”-too true.

    …but with courage, intellectual honesty and integrity, when the facts on the ground change…

    we change.

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