We need proof. Please post a video of yourself burning your degraded monster membership card, tote bag and complimentary coffee mug. 😉

Guess which one Scalzi fits under best.

And how many people obey his Word, how many are like him on their little safety subcommittee, and how many others are loyal and obedient followers?

I recently followed a link to a post from 2013 by a blogger named Martel, that starts: “One of the biggest problems I see when observing conservatives/libertarians dealing with leftists is that all too often we don’t know who we’re dealing with. Sure, we know they’re wrong, but we don’t necessarily understand the reasons for their error. Therefore, our attacks are imprecise and often backfire. We insult when we should tread softly or coddle when we should go for the throat. We confront issues head-on when it would be more prudent to dance around them, but sometimes we try to yell around the elephant in the living room. We argue Principle to a cut-throat union boss or self-interest to an idealistic young hipster. This post addresses that.”

He posits three basic kinds of Leftist and examines them in some detail:

The Anointed
The Entitled
The Benighted

It’s really great. Of course, you can go further into more nuanced divisions from these three, but Martel’s post is an outstanding overview map of the territory:

http://alphaisassumed.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/they-are-not-what-they-are/

Like Eric says, we need to be effective with our efforts. I believe that part of that effectiveness is in the knowledge that Conservatism can be exhilarating and liberating, and that that includes the need to be cheerfully welcoming to all who find their way out of the Leftist wilderness.

Fool v Knave, Neo’s favored theme, is one framing. I’m thinking more in terms of Devotee (up to Zealot) v Adversary.

The framing doesn’t change the intrinsic meanings, but the way of thinking about the subject does.

Profs Corbin and Parks’ Federalist piece, and almost all the talk on the subject from people of the Right and on Neo’s blog, is descriptive and diagnostic.

Description and diagnosis are necessary parts of the planning process, but at the some point, they need to transition to actionable problem-solving prescription that can transition to laying the groundwork for effective activist activity.

How to proselytize and convert devotees, who are more representative of the critical mass needed to sway the body politic, to a Neo-type changer?

How to compete asymmetrically with the more-powerful activist adversary?

In tune with Neo’s response to Mike, the two types are not the same, and the prescriptive approaches to either should not be the same besides whatever crossover may be necessary.

Lando Calrissian:

That wasn’t part of the deal! You said the wookiee and Leia would stay under my protection!

Corbin and Parks:

Be grateful for the mercy of the Administration’s almighty hand in allowing any departure from imperial Obamacare policy—and pray that we don’t homogenize you any further.

And it was a drone camera whose video corrected the false impression left by a CNN en Espaé±ol report that there was somehow an equivalency in the size of competing demonstrations on Saturday in Caracas, Venezuela. As Daniel Duquenal of Venezuela News and Views complained, the CNN en Espaé±ol report by Guillermo Arduino gave only closeup shots of competing Chavista and opposition demonstrations. However, the drone eye in the sky revealed the vast panoply of the opposition demonstration that seemed to number in the hundreds of thousands.

In both the US and Venezuela- just as it happened in Saddam’s Iraq- CNN should be renamed GNN: Government News Network.

Since I am one of those who has been prominent in aiming the worldview and interpretive principles of the modern left, the now Democrat mainstream, back toward them, and coming up with some rather unsettling, and even dehumanizing implied reductions, it seems only right that I explain – again – part of what I have been doing.

First, although I do not deny anthropological or psychological evidence that there may be some evolved or inherited differences in human moral sensibilities; I am not taking that as the critical point in analyzing moral status.

Second, the implications I was drawing regarding the modern left were meant, to some degree, to be eye-openers for some who were mindlessly mouthing received secular wisdom, as well as to be philosophical lines drawn in the sand between “us and them”.

Third, and here is the tricky part: although I do not subscribe to a hyper-Calvinist [and colloquial] notion of the total depravity of ALL mankind, it seems clear enough to me from even undisputed archeo-anthropological findings, that the human organism across races and ideologies, and sans some kind of moral formation and principle-based behavioral inhibition, which includes the intellect will tend to act under a variety of circumstances like “devils”.

In fact, and to allude to a text many here have mentioned, even the best people seem to act at times like the characters in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.

The current cultural question in dispute is whether there is objectively anything more to man in relation to reality, other than what is reducible to a locus of appetition, a congerie of appetites, and “its” ultimately pointless welling of brute fact urges; which, as part of a background field (monism assumed), form the sum and substance of our real (non delusional) existence.

In my view, there is. In the view of the radical postmodernist, there is not. And it seems to me that people morally separate on the basis of how comfortable they are with the conclusion that there is not.

This is not the place to systematically lay out the antinomies involved in extreme relativism, subjective idealism, and moral nihilism. But I suspect that anyone who is dissatisfied with the doctrine of a moral universe which is in principle the product of an ultimately unintelligible reality, whether they be they cradle “liberals” on the one hand or some kind of natural rights (religious or not) proponents on the other, will find themselves generally inhabiting the same moral universe.

Ultimately that is a universe of rational men where reason – like, but over and against the nihilist’s turtles – “goes all the way down”; and not that of self-created monsters who have with a wild-eyed rictus grin thrown themselves backwards, to paraphrase Golding*, into the entropic darkness.

[* “Darkness Visible”]

That principle would cut away a lot of the innocence argument. Since it is Mike’s own argument, I won’t make it for him.

The fantasy Fs that’s part of the Leftist religion (you can be part of a religion even if you aren’t the preacher or the god), need to get more virgin sacrifices if they want their Messiah to lower the sea levels and equip them with divine miracles. For those death wishes, that is.

Actually the one death wish that Guy Benson actually cites over at Hot Air falls more into the knave category, too. I cited it based upon the headline that there are probably generic death threats (die because you’re evil); shoulda read it first.