Leftists and reality
Here’s an interesting question from commenter Geoffrey Britain:
What is the practical difference between an entrenched ‘confirmation bias’, that is immune to contrary fact, logic, reason and common sense…and ideological fanaticism?
How does a person who stops “all such meanderings from the Truth as the Party sees it and wills it” differ from an ideological fanatic?
I can’t help but conclude that the millions of AOCs are well beyond confirmation bias.
It may be a distinction that doesn’t matter all that much except in psychological terms, but the difference is whether the person is consciously lying or whether the person believes what he or she is saying.
Remember in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when O’Brien is torturing and brainwashing Winston, and he holds up his fingers and asks how many fingers, and Winston keeps saying what he sees? Here’s the passage I mean:
O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.
Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him…
…’Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one….
‘But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ‘It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’
O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.’
He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.
‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?’
‘Yes,’ said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Four.’
‘And if the party says that it is not four but five — then how many?’
‘Four.’
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four.’
The needle went up to sixty.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!’
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!’
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Five! Five! Five!’
‘No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?’
‘Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!’
Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
I put up the whole long quote because the passage is so amazing. I first read it when I was about twelve years old, and it chilled me to the bone.
I discuss the phenomenon at greater length in this post. Here’s an excerpt from that:
To keep one’s eyes on the prize, whether that prize be…idealistic goals…or the simple drive for absolute power voiced by the fictional O’Brien when he tells Winston “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power”—it is necessary for the follower to filter out reality and to believe whatever is seen as bringing the world closer to the goal.
The mental gymnastics involved are described very well in another literary work, this time one of nonfiction, the autobiography of Communist-turned-government-informant Whittaker Chambers, entitled Witness [emphasis mine]:
When I first knew him, Harry Freeman [who later become the assistant US chief of Tass, the Soviet news service] was just out of Cornell University, where he had brilliantly majored in history…the best mind that I was to meet among the American Communist intellectuals. It was an entirely new type of mind to me. No matter how favorable his opinion had been to an individual or his political role, if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly. That was not strange, that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrasment. There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one. If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else.
O’Brien would be proud—now that’s the sort of mental flexibility that the Party needs and desires.
Of course, rationalization and denial of facts that don’t fit a person’s previously held beliefs is not just a province of the Left. It’s a general human trait, and that is why a mind is a difficult thing to change. But the Left carefully nurtures, fosters, advocates, and even requires this sort of denial, whereas it is my observation that the Right (and this was something that was formative in my own change experience), while hardly immune, is much less demanding that its adherents dismiss and deny logic and inconvenient facts.
Yeah, I think it’s pretty apparent that most politicians don’t actually believe what they say and that goes both ways. Like Barack Obama was never against gay marriage and now some of these candidates jumping on the GND bandwagon don’t believe that stuff but it’s politically expedient to jump on it now.
And of course Republicans do it also. McCain was a big border hawk when up for election and then after not so much. And he’s far from alone.
A short while ago there was a note about a great Dartmouth teacher, Jeffrey Hart, conservative altho he voted for Obama. I’m sure he believed that he was voting more for his principles.
I recall another book with a quote along these lines, about intelligent people:
All intelligent people know how to lie to themselves, so that they believe the lie.
(? The Passion of Ayn Rand, by Barbara Brandon, wife of the cheating-with-Ayn Nathaniel Brandon).
When you believe the lie, you’re not consciously lying.
Mark Twain: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
(some say he never said this)
When Dems believe their own lies, they’re no longer lying. But their beliefs remain founded upon untruths.
I’m pretty sure Obama knew his “you can keep your doctor” was untrue as he said it.
I’m pretty sure Bush knew he was being truthful when he claimed Saddam had WMDs — but he was wrong. (Since Saddam had been lying to his own generals?)
I think most of the exaggerations of Trump are things he considers close enough, or in the right direction, of the truth. (Tho lying about Stormy; yet who cares?)
I fear that AOC really believes she is being “morally right”, even if factually wrong. She’s scary that way.
Re: the difference between an entrenched confirmation bias immune to factual persuasion and ideological fanaticism…
“the difference is whether the person is consciously lying or whether the person believes what he or she is saying.” neo
In and of itself, yes. Yet, when faced with reasoned, factual persuasion it is impossible to maintain confirmation bias without willful blindness and, that is what determines when confirmation blindness has become ideological fanaticism…
It still seems right to me that the first sacrifice upon ideology’s ‘altar’ is truth.
When we lie to ourselves, deep down inside we know it. We simply embrace the lie because we decide that either the truth is too painful to face (moral cowardice) or the consequence of not embracing the lie is too painful to contemplate.
I suspect all lies spring from fear. As lies motivated by greed are fear based as well. Greed’s insatiability is based in the fear of never having ‘enough’.
Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson laid the heart of greed out for us… https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=movie+key+largo%2c+rocko%2c+yeah+i+want+more&view=detail&mid=D38F6E2FCA575C079B18D38F6E2FCA575C079B18&FORM=VIRE&PC=U316
Deep down, Rocko is a frightened man who externalizes that fright, if others are frightened of him, then he can tell himself that he has nothing to fear. But only as long as others fear him, can he maintain that lie. Willful blindness must have its support.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
That’s an interesting thought, often quoted, but it never impressed me. It seems a general quality possessed by all humans except perhaps those with extreme OCD and probably not them either.
IMO Fitzgerald was a first-rate, gorgeous stylist, but hardly a first-rate intelligence though he tried damn hard to be one. See “Tender is the Night.”
I’ve yet to encounter a Democrat in fora like these willing to acknowledge that Christine Blasey was trading in some seriously dubious material. Every notable aspect of what she had to say and the documentation provided was consistent with the thesis that it was a fabrication. I did encounter a few, however, who fancied that the inconsistencies in her account were probative, indicative of psychological trauma inflicted by MK and MJ. One such person was Prof. John Haas of Bethel College. I don’t think the parents paying tuition to Bethel College are getting their money’s worth.
As I have written here many times before, the old U.S. “audience,” comprised of those who had gone through the Depression and WWII, was made up of tough, experienced, realistic, patriotic, pragmatic types—nobody’s fools.
Thus,, when—during those very hard and trying times–they were presented with Communism and the Party’s dogma as the alternative to the American experience and values, the Republic, and Capitalism, they almost uniformly rejected it.
So, many Leftists/Communists, via Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions/culture—their unrelenting, comprehensive, several generations of Leftist attacks against all the major building blocks and foundations of our “bourgeois” societies here in the West—the Family—the Church—the School– went about the patient, generation’s long project of changing the nature of that “audience.”
What that future, upcoming audience knew and didn’t, their knowledge base, what they were aware of, what they believed, their morality and religious beliefs, who and what they revered, the History and analytical tools they were taught, their world-view and expectations, the very language and thoughts they used and didn’t–all to make them less able to analyze things, in essence, unable to compare and contrast what they were going to be presented with as an alternative with other examples from history and, thus, to be much more gullible, more receptive to the Communist’s pitch, when a reformulated and disguised version of it was presented to them.
One of the main overarching goals of this Gramscian campaign was to subvert and warp– to bust things up–to make things generally worse, to disrupt and shatter our social cohesion, our core values, and our common vision, to increase social tensions and violence, to disrupt interpersonal and interracial bonds and trust, to soften us up by shattering our cultural and social norms and unity, to Balkanize people, to divide them up into competing groups–each one at war with all the others—to disrupt and warp, to transmogrify Art, Literature, and Culture into things that increasingly presented and celebrated what was ugly and perverse, to disrupt the family, its internal dynamic and relations between husband and wife, parents and children, between males and females, to disrupt sexual norms, relations, and satisfaction.
The aim of creating all this disruption and generalized dissatisfaction?
A hurting and much more dissatisfied audience, one that has been blinkered and very thoroughly propagandized, “dumbed down,” an audience living in an increasingly uneasy and unsatisfactory world–one full of disruption, chaos, turmoil, conflict, and violence–a world that they have been told by their professors, the MSM, and the Entertainment Industry, is seemingly falling apart–is likely to be much more receptive to and willing to accept the Communist’s alternative solution, one that claims to be able to solve things by changing the “corrupt” and “unfair” traditional Republic and the Capitalist system that is–they say–at the root of, and causing all this widespread dissatisfaction.
And that is our state of play today.
It is an amazing statistic that 42% of Americans believe that the Russians altered the vote in 2016.
The poll.
Half of Clinton’s voters think Russia even hacked the Election Day votes (only 9% of Trump voters give that any credibility at all). Six in ten Trump voters believe there were millions of illegal votes cast on election day.
How this could have been done is not explained. I consider this an example of an “extraordinary popular delusion.”
I don’t know if information can reverse this. Much of the reason for such insanity is the state of public education.
@Tom Grey I believe it was Josh Billings’ quote. As I remember it … “It ain’t ignorance that causes so much trouble. It’s folks knowing so much that ain’t so”.
“It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
– George Costanza
Tom Grey…
Saddam, himself, asserted that he’d conned his generals.
His logic was that even a Potemkin atomic program would freeze the mullahs.
THAT’S why EVERY agency from the MOSSAD to the CIA to the KGB believed he had an atomic program.
Across the entire globe, not ONE spy agency thought otherwise.
They also looked over their shoulders — confirmation bias of a type.
Snow on Pine:
Very well said.
Snow on Pine on February 23, 2019 at 5:56 pm at 5:56 pm said:
…
So, many Leftists/Communists, …went about the patient, generation’s long project of changing the nature of that “audience.”
What that future, upcoming audience knew and didn’t, their knowledge base, what they were aware of, what they believed, their morality and religious beliefs, who and what they revered, the History and analytical tools they were taught, their world-view and expectations, the very language and thoughts they used and didn’t–all to make them less able to analyze things, in essence, unable to compare and contrast what they were going to be presented with as an alternative with other examples from history and, thus, to be much more gullible, Vmore receptive to the Communist’s pitch, when a reformulated and disguised version of it was presented to them.
* * *
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/life-among-the-wokescolds/
huxley on February 23, 2019 at 5:34 pm at 5:34 pm said:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
That’s an interesting thought, often quoted, but it never impressed me. It seems a general quality possessed by all humans except perhaps those with extreme OCD and probably not them either.
* * *
See my above quote from “The Wokescolds” — these are first-rate intelligences, but they are not very smart people.
Geoffrey Britain on February 23, 2019 at 4:43 pm at 4:43 pm said:
…
It still seems right to me that the first sacrifice upon ideology’s ‘altar’ is truth.
When we lie to ourselves, deep down inside we know it. We simply embrace the lie because we decide that either the truth is too painful to face (moral cowardice) or the consequence of not embracing the lie is too painful to contemplate.
* * *
I’m reading Peterson’s Twelve Rules book (finished #10 last night), and he addresses this very thoroughly in Rule #8: Tell the Truth, or at least don’t lie.
Tom Grey on February 23, 2019 at 4:41 pm at 4:41 pm said:
…
When
Demspeople believe their own lies, they’re no longer lying. But their beliefs remain founded upon untruths.* * *
Indeed.
Which is why, ultimately, the Left always fails.
But a lot of other people suffer while they are doing it.
“It’s not a lie, if you believe it.” George Costanza
As far as it goes, that’s true. It’s also true that to keep believing a lie takes needing to believe it and refusing to open one’s eyes.
No lie can withstand the light of truth unless that person’s eyes are tightly shut.
Snow on Pine,
Speaking in general terms, the generation that went through the Depression and WWII (my parent’s generation) gave birth to the Baby Boomers (my generation).
In seeking to protect their children from the vissitudes of what they had had to endure, they fashioned a generation divorced from the reality of the real world. They shielded their children from what had given them fortitude and, in doing so fashioned a generation of spoiled brats. By definition, spoiled brats lack the qualities necessary to accept reality and in turn, have fashioned a generation of snowflakes.
Geoffrey – I’m part of the Baby Boomers as well, and my parents did NOT raise their kids to be brats. Fortunately, there are quite a few of us; unfortunately, we are old and dying off, and too many of us did not have any children (I was the only one, of four, to give our parents grandchildren).
But, a lot of us BB’s also did NOT raise our children to be snowflakes, and I hope there are enough of those to keep civilization going.
A good example of how confirmation bias becomes ideological fanaticism.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/donald-trump-gay-rights-hero/
I have a friend from university that has evolved into a leftist SJW. Now this friend is one of the smartest people I have ever known. He went to law school, contributed to the Law Review, clerked for both the state and national supreme courts. He went on to a partnership in a prestigious law firm.
Yet, for all that intelligence, my friend was outraged by Nick Sandmann suing the Washington Post. He wrote…
“BREAKING: Entitled smug little smirking racist files $250 million lawsuit to show that he’s learned empathy from the experience. He’s complaining that he’s been “targeted and bullied” because of coverage of his role. So, yeah, this suit will fix that. (Jerk.)”
In this case, it isn’t just that he bought in to the story at the beginning because it fit the narrative he wants to believe. In this case, he is willfully denying all the facts to the contrary that emerged in the following week.
In my mind, THAT is fanaticism. If I were asked to define the difference, “confirmation bias” was what the majority of the press did with this story. “Fanaticism” is continuing to believe the story after solid facts to the contrary are revealed.
Reality — the term, word or notion, if you will — has long seemed to me a creaky, brittle chunk of more or less modern business, even though (if not because) it’s so readily acceptable to our hurried modern manner of speaking and thinking. It’s highly useful, I guess. Perhaps most useful insofar as we are helped by its means to lightly skip away from the ancients’ more troublesome alternative — the being of beings.
Does this word, our term “reality”, originate in medieval legal terminology, like “real” (thingy) property, real estate?
Does anyone know its origin or care to know how it came into our speech, or when? Are we instructed as to these circumstances when we are introduced to “reality”, this splendidly handy term?
And if we did know or care about the term as a term, a word, would such knowledge help us get our minds around the problems it poses us, should we happen to pause a moment to ponder the matter? It’s a puzzle.
sdferrer,
Okay, there is no reality. 3+3 is 21. It’s not a puzzle. It is reality. Your reality, but not mine. 3+3 = 6. I can count on my fingers, no toes required.
I’m not sure how to take your comment parker, or understand it, unless maybe you mean to suggest that not caring about it truly is at the heart of the thing? Or tell me, if otherwise?
One last time sdefrr, because I am sleepy, old, and somewhat tolerant. ” get our minds around” get our minds around what, exactly? Your silly world view? Goodnight, going to bed. Hope you wake up to realize there exists reality, but expecting it. Bigly sad.
I seem to have caused you to presume parker that my puzzlement with our nice word reality and its origin is somehow (I wouldn’t know how) equivalent to denying the fundamental presence of being in the world, along with the associated difficulties we continually encounter in our attempts to account for the manner and matter of this being, whether our own personal existence or that of everything else with which we encounter or are acquainted along the way. Far from denying existence to our facilely given reality, no, it’s that very given-ness that starts us on our quest to answer, just what is all this stuff, anyhow? How is it? What is it? And so on.
So start the physicists, for instance, who chase after their quantum particles without yet obtaining a final satisfaction that they’ve quite exhausted the questions looming over their project.
And that’s not to say that the physicists’ is the sole path to follow in this quest. One other of which may even be a kind of philology, as here.
If, however, rebuking is necessary to this end, consider it well and truly done, so we can leave it there.
blert, regarding the Iraqi nuclear program, what about that Saddam-Gaddafi connection?
In seeking to protect their children from the vissitudes of what they had had to endure, they fashioned a generation divorced from the reality of the real world. They shielded their children from what had given them fortitude and, in doing so fashioned a generation of spoiled brats. By definition, spoiled brats lack the qualities necessary to accept reality and in turn, have fashioned a generation of snowflakes.
I have no clue why people’s image of those born between 1938 and 1958 is defined by a caricature of college students ca. 1968. People of that vintage who obtained baccalaureate degrees were about 20% of the total, and few of them were enrolled at places like Columbia. The enlisted men fighting in Viet Nam were just as much ‘Boomers’ as were the pretentious brats who joined the Students for a Democratic Society, and vastly more numerous.
The real problem with those cohorts in comparison with those who came earlier was their heightened propensity to resort to street crime, street drugs, and divorce courts. Especially divorce courts. (And, while we’re at it, their grooming was bad and none of their popular music could improve on Brubeck).
It’s hard to have a solid grasp of “reality” when you have been deliberately denied the traditional frame of reference from which to view and understand it, and “discrimination”—judging things based on a set of standards and, then, ranking them best to worst, as a way of deciding courses of action—is the baddest of bad words and concepts and, to coin a phrase, is “discriminatory,” unfair, and racist as well.
If whole swathes of our past history here in the West have just been wiped from your ken, and what is left has been transmogrified—twisted and “re-imagined” to fit leftist ideology, and to denigrate and pillory the villains they have created.
If you are just completely unaware of the whole body of historical knowledge and the political ideas, examples, and philosophy that informed our Founders, and have been told—moreover, that each and every one of those Founders was a scoundrel; a bad person, someone not to be studied, revered, or emulated.
If you have been taught that there are no standards, that morality is a sick joke—the tool of the “oppressor.”
If you have deliberately been denied all of the analytical tools that a traditional “Liberal Education” used to equip people with; all that solid instruction time replaced with propaganda and twaddle.
If everyone is somehow simultaneously both a “winner”’ and a “victim.”
Then, your view of “reality” is the kind you get when you look into one of those deliberately distorting fun house mirrors.
You’re in a turbulent sea, the rudder you used to have has been ripped away, you have no firm place to anchor, no lighthouse to guide you in, and no safe harbor.
And with no firm place to stand, with little knowledge of what came before, with no historical examples to go on. and few tools to dissect and examine rhetoric, arguments, and proposals, you are left pretty much defenseless against meretricious arguments, and an army of flim-flam men and women.
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I think I’ll watch and read up on the Spanish Civil War as a background to our current reality of PC, SJWs. Race Hoaxers, Antifa, as recommmeded by ace.mu.nu this morning:
http://ace.mu.nu/#379905
“No one expects the Spanish Civil War!
I have two [recommendations]. Begin with this six part BBC documentary available on YouTube:
https://bit.ly/2SHXfrc
Then Stanley Payne’s The Spanish Civil War.
Caution: It does rhyme with today and is therefore scary as hell.
I recommend the YouTube first to get an overview on the incredibly complex political situation with numerous acronymed parties you may have difficulty keeping track of such as the “Radical Republicans” who were, in fact, a law abiding center right party.
Posted by: Anonosaurus Wrecks, Tyrannosaur Wrangler at February 17, 2019 11:13 AM (+y/Ru)
The Spanish Civil War (Cambridge Essential Histories) by Paul Stanley
This book presents a new history of the most important conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War. It describes the complex origins of the conflict, the collapse of the Spanish Republic and the outbreak of the only mass worker revolution in the history of Western Europe. Stanley Payne explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the complex web of republican politics, while also examining the development of Franco’s counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines why the conflict provoked such strong reactions at the time, and long after. The book also explains the military history of the war and its place in the history of military development, the non-intervention policy of the democracies and the role of German, Italian and Soviet intervention, concluding with an analysis of the place of the war in European affairs, in the context of twentieth-century revolutionary civil wars.
Or, if $13.30 is too much, the Kindle edition of The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction can be had for only $6.15.”
Now back to om, aka, Captain Obvious,
Sorry, I haven’t taken the time to learn the HTML formatting. AesopFan should be my example of one who has.
>learned empathy
What’s with modernism and leftism and its overt concern for empathy, or at least its fetish with the usage (like diversity)?
GRA
Organic, free range, high vitamin E, brown, large, small, jumbo eggs. All diverse, yet all equal when making the leftist omelette.
Roy N,
The world has an abundance of intelligent fools. In fact, intelligence is what separates the fool from the merely stupid, who haven’t the mental capability to embrace foolish ideas. Only willfully blind intellectuals can cling to historically and factually disproven ideas.
Liberals are divergent. Progressives are monotonic. Conservatives moderate perturbations. Principles matter, then we reconcile.
Roy Nathanson on February 24, 2019 at 1:48 am at 1:48 am said:
… If I were asked to define the difference, “confirmation bias” was what the majority of the press did with this story. “Fanaticism” is continuing to believe the story after solid facts to the contrary are revealed.
* * *
Excellent.
Snow on Pine on February 24, 2019 at 8:26 am at 8:26 am said:
..
If whole swathes of our past history here in the West have just been wiped from your ken, ..
If you are just completely unaware of the whole body of historical knowledge and the political ideas, examples, and philosophy that informed our Founders, …
If you have been taught that there are no standards, that morality is a sick joke—the tool of the “oppressor.”
If you have deliberately been denied all of the analytical tools ..
If everyone is somehow simultaneously both a “winner”’ and a “victim.”
Then,
* * *
… you’ll be a Leftist, my xon.
Art Deco on February 24, 2019 at 7:54 am at 7:54 am said:
…
I have no clue why people’s image of those born between 1938 and 1958 is defined by a caricature of college students ca. 1968. People of that vintage who obtained baccalaureate degrees were about 20% of the total, and few of them were enrolled at places like Columbia. The enlisted men fighting in Viet Nam were just as much ‘Boomers’ as were the pretentious brats who joined the Students for a Democratic Society, and vastly more numerous.
* * *
As with the Snowflakes and OWS cohort, giving a bad name to all of their generation, the minority that screams loudest (in support of the Leftist narrative) gets all the publicity.
The Left would really rather we not realize how greatly We out-number Them.
I have no clue why people’s image of those born between 1938 and 1958 is defined by a caricature of college students ca. 1968.
We had fantastic PR!
So good most people “remember” Woodstock (1969) as having been stocked with long-haired hippies. However, if you watch the film, most young men in the audience (as opposed to the musicians and stage hands) were somewhat shaggy, but no more than that.
The long-hair Jesus style didn’t arrive en masse until a few years later.
om
Then Stanley Payne’s The Spanish Civil War.
Stanley Payne has written a number of books relating to the Spanish Civil War. He is especially good at setting the table for the Spanish Civil War, explaining why the conflict was so bitter. He destroys the traditional narrative of the “the elitist Fascists wouldn’t let the democratically elected Republicans/Popular Front carry out their programs- programs which were carried out in accordance to the law and the Constitution.”
As Payne relates in more than one book, the big problem was “unpunished violations of the law.” For a bullet point on why the Civil War happened, consider the killing of José Calvo Sotelo. Guardia de Asalto (left wing government) personnel killed and kidnapped José Calvo Sotelo in response to Falangists killing José Castillo, a Spanish Police Guardia de Asalto (Assault Guard) lieutenant.
As José Calvo Sotelo was a member of Parliament and a leading spokesman for the right, his killing was considered an escalation. The government’s not arresting Calvo Sotelo’s killers- even more damning when it all knew that government operatives kidnapped and killed him- is considered the trigger that began the Civil War. Within days after the government refused to arrest his killers, the war began
Unpunished violations of the law: sound familiar?
Here are some of his books:
Alcalá Zamora and the Failure of the Spanish Republic, 1931-1936
Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936 : Origins of the Civil War
Franco and Hitler
Spain: A Unique History
The Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism
The long-hair Jesus style didn’t arrive en masse until a few years later.
I’m recalling it from 1970 or 1971 in the suburban town I was living in.
Everyone seems to have missed the point of neo’s including the passage from 1984. To O’Brien, truth is what the Party says. He’s not dissembling when he says four is five. If the Party says 2 + 2 = 5, that is the Truth. If the Party says, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” then that is the Truth. If the Party says Jussie Smolett was attacked by two white men wearing MAGA hats and carrying rope and bleach at 2:00 am in a 20 below wind chill in Chicago, then that is what happened.
As O’Brien concludes, if you don’t believe that, you are insane.
“As O’Brian concludes, if you don’t believe that, you are insane.”
Proving that it is O’Brian that is insane. As, when the insane gain control of the asylum, they must declare the sane to be insane, since they are, by definition unable to function in a sane manner. Sound familiar?
Torture. I’m going to tell a story on myself, and I am hardly proud of it. Oddly, neo, I am compelled to do so by your mouse story.
I had a mouse problem a year or so ago. One night I find all three mice in my bath tub. They’re looking at me as I stare down on them. What do I do? I turn on the faucet. Then I go to sleep.
The next morning I stumble into the bathroom and what do I see? Three mice furiously swimming for their lives. And it breaks my heart. Yes, I have a heart.
So many things went through my mind. Including, this could be me. I’m a Sailor. If my ship goes down am I in the big scheme of things more than a mouse? I have the right to kill vermin. But I have no right to torture disease vectors.
I killed them as quickly as I could. Really, I thought that they would drown in minutes. So basically I’m the a**h***, But I’m a stupid a**.
What relevance may this have? I have no problem killing you. But I won’t torture you. As a hunter I take pride in the quick kill. I can tell you that as an intel officer there are no answers to any questions that you may give that justify sacrificing my soul.
“Interrogate.” That’s such a nasty word. Let’s stick with “Interview.”
Neo quotes Whittaker Chambers in his work Witness:
I am reminded of the conduct of some on the left before and during World War II.They were vehemently against Hitler, but upon the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Non-aggression Pact, their antipathy to Hitler was toned down. They were anti-war before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22,1941, but after that date decided that war wasn’t such a bad thing. Woodie Guthrie supported the Communists because of their union activism with farm workers, and extended that support to Stalin. Mapping Woody Guthrie Woody sang this song over the airwaves at KVFD in Los Angeles,
That song and his support of the Hitler-Stalin Non-aggression pact got him fired at KVFD. Frank Burke, his manager at KVFD, was a lefty but not a Stalin sycophant.
Woody met Pete Seeger in New York City in 1940. Woody, Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes and others formed the Almanac Singers. Being good Communists or good fellow travelers, the Almanac Singers put out anti-war songs- at least until June 22,1941. Kaufman writes of the anti-war Woodie.
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Woody, along with fellow Almanac singers like Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes, decided he wasn’t against war any more.
As far as I am concerned Woody and Pete Seeger and the like deserved all the grief they got after World War II for their slavish adherence to the party line.
46. Guthrie, “More War News,” quoted in Klein, Woody Guthrie, 135.
18. Guthrie, quoted in Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 215.
19. Guthrie, quoted in Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 215.
2 + 2 “=” 5 is a political congruence. Not coincidentally, their motto is “In Stork We Trust”.
Gringo: Thanks for your analysis.
In his nineties Pete Seeger admitted maybe he got a thing or two wrong about Communism. Woody died much earlier of Huntington’s
I danced in that circle and sometimes I miss it.
“…the difference is whether the person is consciously lying or whether the person believes what he or she is saying.”
A difference that makes no difference. It’s also redundant. If someone is consciously lying to achieve an agenda, they believe that the agenda is worth lying for. If they believe that, then they believe the lie.
This is how The Daily Show can ridicule Jussie Smollett with abandon and fail to relate their previous support to his lies, just as they act as though Covington never happened.
The delusion created by the lie this audience tell itself is that they can win the day with the best intellectual conversation. You’ve convinced me, here and elsewhere that you know the lie but you cannot let go of it for fear of the decision it would force upon you. So, you protect yourself with this lie. Yet, it’s suidicdal.
How weirdly out of place today’s fanaticism has become, especially in light of the last two hundred years. A fanatic who brought down the Bastille and joined in the endgame to the Reign of Terror had his genesis in the pure hatred of what was unbridled oppression, ultimately to become what he hated.
Today the oppression in the US is a fable. The SJW fanatic who hates it, hates the story of oppression told to him by well-meaning agnostics. The Oppression Story is the fanatic’s substitute for evil in the soul of man, and therefore himself. He has transcended that oppression, fights it and therefore has become cleansed, and anointed to judge. He must return over and over to this fable, however, to seize on any travail as evidence, much as was seen in the Salem witch trials.
The non-existent ever present evidence garnered at every opportunity reinforces the story. The Smolletts provide the theatre where the story may be acted out. It is his soul the fanatic now misses and fears most of all. For that, he has become a monster. The monsters seek out their own to build conformity and validation. They will devour anyone who sees them for what they are. Those who are not part of the story, are now the oppressors. The fanatic SJW’s are moral infants; children with monsters under the bed, fearful, loud and insistent. Ultimately, they have to burn down the house.
“I’m pretty sure Bush knew he was being truthful when he claimed Saddam had WMDs — but he was wrong. (Since Saddam had been lying to his own generals?)”
Actually, Dubya did find WMDs in Iraq, but Karl Rove covered them up to sabotage Hillary’s still-unannounced 2008 primary campaign for President. New York Times said so, though they have recently deleted all mention of their accusations against Rove in their report (but unfortunately can’t seem to erase the reactions to the article from other sources).
A fanatic who brought down the Bastille and joined in the endgame to the Reign of Terror had his genesis in the pure hatred of what was unbridled oppression, ultimately to become what he hated.
There were seven prisoners in the Bastille at the time it was liberated. One of them was there on what amounted to a civil commitment order.
The Ancien Regime in France was notable for corruption, inefficiency, and grotesque self-indulgence on the part of the court and the nobility there resident. It wasn’t notable for ‘unbridled oppression’.
“You’ll never get rich by digging a ditch”– ah, but under Socialism’s milling commissars and gauleiters, ditch-diggers, there’s gold in them thar hills. Problem is, Socialism’s ditch is a mass grave, and the gold that El Jefe seeks is in your teeth and wedding band.
The French Revolution, like most revolutions, was begun not by the poor and oppressed but by the middle class. The middle class, or in France, the Bourgeoisie, which resents the privileges of the aristocracy. The Girondins were a nice example of a middle class that overthrew the aristocracy and tried to rule but were, in turn, destroyed by the radicals like Robespierre and Saint Just. Even Danton, who pressed for the death of the King, ended being Guillotined by them.
We see the Democrats, which was once a workers’ party, producing radicals like Bernie and AOC.
Tatterdemalian—There were brief mentions over the months after our invasion of Iraq—about U.S. troops systematically searching throughout Iraq, and finding–here and there–small caches of chemical weapons (and indications that a lot more such weapons could have been there at one time), chemical weapons R & D, production equipment, protective gear, and antidotes.
But no one wanted to ask the obvious question.
Why all this expensive gear bought and/or developed to produce, test, and protect against chemical weapons if there were no chemical weapons present?
But, while there were these scattered mentions of such finds, they were never put together to form a complete picture and, it was obvious, that no one wanted to connect the dots.
I also remember several, what I though were fairly convincing reports, of intelligence sources on the ground, backed up by satellite imagery, reporting that a long line of trucks, reportedly under the control of Soviet troops, were seen leaving storage facilities in Iraq, and transporting what could have been a substantial amount of chemical weapons from Iraq across the border into Syria, shortly before our invasion.
Again, either completely ignored or blown off by the MSM.
They had their story, and they were “stickin’ to it.”
Cont’d–I had thought that those infrequent, scattered reports should have been taken more seriously, should have been given more credence than they were.
But, knowing what we now know–from the hard evidence of our senses and our experience –the products of our “lying eyes”–about the quality and content of the supposed “journalist’s code of ethics” and the “veracity” of the supposed “news” reported to us by the MSM, one can be forgiven for viewing that MSM reporting on the Iraq war and MSM’s coverage of and conclusions about of the absence or presence of any WMDs with more than a little skepticism.
I guess the key, overarching question, covering our entire world-view and every part of it, a world-view largely received from/influenced by the MSM, is:
Just how many key, determinative pieces of information have deliberately been left out, how many partial truths, how many carefully edited to be shaded a certain way and skewed, how many flat out lies have we been told and sold by the MSM, and how far back does the lying–especially their massive, 24/7, non-stop lying, the creation of a whole alternative world and supposed “Reality”–go?
“But no one wanted to ask the obvious question.”
They already had their answers all planned out in advance, and gleefully rewrote their questions repeatedly to get the answers they wanted.
They truly believe, with fanatical certainty, that rewriting history can change the past. Not even the destruction of their utopian future will deter them for long.
“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
Mark Twain
Mark Twain would have a field day with today’s faithful leftists.
God cannot lie. Everything He says becomes truth the instant He says it e.g. “Let there be light” and there was light.
Who says “you can keep your doctor” or “the GND will stop climate change at an affordable cost” is not a liar but a man who thinks he is God.
“How far back?”, Snow on Pine, is, heh, an aptly good question. Particularly when we begin to suspect that somehow, someway, we are complicit in fooling ourselves. Just what overarching particulars have we unwittingly accepted on too poor an evidence?
To trace merely a tad of this sort of backward examining thread, ought or can we translate “world-view” — with hyphen or without — as “weltanschaung”, possibly implicating our notions of history as such in these questions of reality? History, after all, is pleged to us to be the securitor or final judge of leftism as given. (“Right side of history”, the dangling refrain we hear all too often from the lips of our vaunting betters.)
We can then ask “when and how did history take over the job of Providence?”, since this too is an historical question, and therefore, I presume, permissible to the leftist. At a guess I’d almost bet just about the same time when “reality” took on doing the job that the “being of beings” was once wont to do, but it’s only a guess.
As was once said, we take these views in with our mother’s milk, so generally don’t even tend to notice their difficult peculiarities.
Mike Mahoney:
I think that you are the one creating a delusion for yourself. No one here has indicated that the day can be won with intellectual conversation. People who come to a blog like this, however, have a tendency to like to discuss things. Not just politics, but many many topics (a recent music thread, for example, has over 100 comments), intellectual and/or emotional and/or trivial.
Sdferr–
Since there are both sins of omission and commission, perhaps another good question to ask ourselves is, just how much of the actual Reality they don’t want us to see (and they are certainly aware of) have those in the MSM left out, deliberately ignored, just not reported on, deliberately refrained from telling us about?
How much has been cut out of the words and pictures they present to us, how often have they turned their heads, narrowed the field of vision of their lenses, pointed their cameras in one particular direction and away from another, or just totally airbrushed inconvenient things away?
The picture presented as illustrative in the story about the excellent health care in Cuba focused on the one clean, modern, and well equipped room in the otherwise dirty, ill-equipped, and wretched hospital.
I am reminded of those old Soviet and Nazi propaganda photos, in which a person who has suddenly fallen out of favor with the Party or great Leader has just been airbrushed out of the picture, “disappeared.”
On the subject of Reality, I have written about my experience here before, but since it is directly on point, it bears repeating.
Our university library had a set of the multi-volume “Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” published in the days when the old U.S.S.R. was still in existence, and one day, back then, our library received a strange looking grey, lumpy envelope from the U.S.S.R. publisher.
In the envelope was a razor blade, a couple of replacement plages, and a set of instructions.
We were told to use the razor blade to carefully cut out the couple page biography—with picture—of someone who had fallen out of favor—had become a “nonperson”—and we were directed to do our bit towards making him a “nonperson” and “disappeared,” by carefully replacing those pages with the two pages in the envelope—if I remember correctly, about some particular species of Pine tree—and we were then to send the verboten pages we cut out back to the publisher.
Needless to say—after we had a good laugh at it—we ignored these instructions, and envelope and all went into the circular file.
There’s a currently running avalanche of propaganda immediate to our view if we turn our browser address to “#Venezuela” on twitter, Snow on Pine. Apart from the genuine human political power drama at play in that unhappy nation, we can witness on that site an astounding interplay of balls-to-the-wall political ideological thrust and counter thrust in “real-time” (invoking here another use of our handy word “real”, in perhaps the most unreal context imaginable). It’s a virtual zombieland at our fingertips.
“The picture presented as illustrative in the story about the excellent health care in Cuba focused on the one clean, modern, and well equipped room in the otherwise dirty, ill-equipped, and wretched hospital.”
Remember that even Great Leader Hugo Chavez died of an infection during simple exploratory surgery in the cleanest, most modern, and well-equipped room in all of Cuba.
In the end, not even Great Leader can escape the consequences of their own socialist beliefs. If we win, they may be killed; if they win, EVERYONE will be killed.
Snow on Pine —
There was a find by U.S. troops — the 82nd Abn, IIRC — of a large WMD storage facility which had been discovered by the UN inspectors and sealed. The seals were broken and all the contents were gone. That made the headlines for one day, then utterly, completely, vanished.
Richard Sanders–
If my memory serves, back then I also saw stories that reported the discovery of a very sophisticated–and expensive–abandoned mobile CW/BW lab, custom built, I believe, in Germany, there was also a report of discovering a buried fighter, I believe equipped with CW rockets, and a report of finding a warehouse containing sets of Russian made CW protective clothing and atropine injectors.
Sorry, Saunders.
You see the theme here.
If we can’t have confidence in and trust that the MSM will be diligent in searching out the truth, and every bit of it, confidence that they will report things fully, fairly, and accurately–as they used to say, “without fear or favor,” confidence that–captive of this or that cause or ideology–they won’t withhold or twist things.
Why, then, we can never be sure that anything that the MSM shows or tells us is supposedly the “truth” about anything is truly complete, real, and accurate, never have the assurance that what we are being told, what is presented to our vision is, as they say, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
So, was there really any sizeable amount of WMD in Iraq, or was there not?
Well–given the MSM’s track record, especially it’s recent track record–if we have to rely on the MSM, we don’t really know with any confidence or certainty, do we?
And we will probably never know.
P.S.–Check out Peter Braestrup’s 1994 book, “The Big Story,” about the reporting done on the Vietnam War, and how reporters quite often stayed in the hotels, and bars (and probably the bordellos too) of Saigon, and didn’t actually go out into the field to gather information.
About how they used to spice up the story, and so give a false and deceptive impression of how badly the war was going, by quite frequently being filmed in front of a supposedly just recently crashed and still on fire jet aircraft.
The problem was that this crash was old, and these “newsmen” would set the same aircraft on fire each time, get it smouldering again, and, then,they filmed their coverage with it in the background.
Remember that even Great Leader Hugo Chavez died of an infection during simple exploratory surgery in the cleanest, most modern, and well-equipped room in all of Cuba.
He had metastatic colon cancer and had been ill for years. He wasn’t long for this world no matter what infections he had or did not have.
Snow, the media gives Americans delusions on many things, including moon lander religion.
As for the WMDs, finally people figured it out. But it doesn’t matter because so long as “Bush lied, people died”, they could blame 9/11 on an “inside” job of the “Bushes”. However that worked.
See how that works? Conspiracy theories are bad, via the CIA and MSM, until they need one to make you look stupid.
The problem was that this crash was old, and these “newsmen” would set the same aircraft on fire each time, get it smouldering again, and, then,they filmed their coverage with it in the background.
Humans are so easy to manipulate.
Check out this bigger budget op.
https://youtu.be/xciCJfbTvE4
What relevance may this have? I have no problem killing you. But I won’t torture you. As a hunter I take pride in the quick kill. I can tell you that as an intel officer there are no answers to any questions that you may give that justify sacrificing my soul.
One hit, one kill.
Some of these rat traps I first used were the first generation wooden models and the springs would not activate properly on the rat neck, crushing it. Instead it would hit the side or the back, and the rat would be just crawling around sometimes, trying to run with the trap, while badly wounded. If it gets unconscious, usually the guts and backside would be eaten by his “buddies”.
Sometimes just got to get a stick and hammer the head dead or stomp on them. This was actually more effective than using a sword to stab them, as the point would be so small the rat would still be screaming and bleeding. Although cutting one’s head off would deplete them of blood in seconds and they would go silent.
People use water because it is easy, let nature do the work. That kind of laziness tends to lead to State solutions like gas chambers.
The reason why the US loses to the Deep State is that the DS looks at you Americans the way we look at vermin and livestock. The power gap is even more orders of magnitude than the one between humanity and vermin.
See this article below, very relevant to our discussion of “Reality,” what it is, how it is presented, and how to deal with it at:
\\https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/the-red-queen/
Matt Ridley’s “The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature” (1994) is a marvelous work of journalistic synthesis I can unreservedly commend to everyone.
Take a look at this article about England’s Tommy Robinson, who is being mercilessly persecuted and has been “de-platformed,” prosecuted, and jailed by the British government for telling the truth about Islam, Muslims, and their effects on England, focusing especially on Muslim grooming gangs.
Its pretty interesting and instructive to see how Robinson has managed to expose how the BBC tried to craft a hit piece on him, and how he turned the tables on them.
See https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/02/24/panodrama-tommy-robinson-reveals-undercover-recordings-bbc-journo/
AOC and Cory Booker and their mindless ranting about cow farts and meat eaters tells us that they are both crazy and out of their minds the facts that cows have been on this earth since Adam and Eve but its only now according to these two wackos their contributing to Global Warming/Climate Change which proves Liberalism,Enviromentalism and Animal Rights is a form of Insanity cuased by a strict vegan diet and their own stupidity