https://libertyunyielding.com/2021/02/18/rush-limbaugh-happy-warrior/

https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=i+will+miss+joe+sobran&d=4918382037046898&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=ozccD4WcoAm8n181j2MSnQ-ctodCfosl

I think the loathing of a lot of Republicans for Rush and Trump is simple snobbery. Rush and Trump (even though the latter was born to wealth) are declasse in their eyes.

I never cared for Rush’s show, but I don’t look down at him nor do I look down at people who do. But I think a lot of NR types do look down at them all.

I think the tell there is when he writes that to a lot of people “Rush Limbaugh was the largest impediment to embracing conservatism.” What? It’s the idea of conservatism (or any other political group) as a social club you might or might not want to join, depending on the classiness of its members (or the intellectualism, or whatever the trait might be).

That’s instead of arriving at political choices through principles and beliefs about good government, liberty, that sort of thing.

Many conservatives who have loathed the Donald Trump era will look back on Limbaugh’s success with regret, realizing that the talk-radio revolution was the giant leap from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

–Michael Brendan Dougherty, “Rush’s Place?”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/rushs-place/?
___________________________________________________

Can they not stop doing this? Dougherty tries to say some nice things about Rush, while alternately slipping in the blade.

The bright spot was the comments mostly slapped MBD’s wrist and pretensions. NR comments these days tend to NeverTrump, but the day after Limbaugh’s death is too rich even for them.

I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point of explaining human nature, not even on this blog 🙂 .

However, the differences among people are pretty obviously going to be due to various combinations of nature/nurture, as well as unknowns such as soul. But I will add that (1) I don’t think people who are not sociopaths knowingly go over to the dark side; the people I know who are hateful and nasty for political reasons think of themselves as crusaders fighting evil (2) some of this has to do with how angry a person is in general, and how many other outlets the person has for his/her anger (3) it also has to do with a person’s sources of information (4) plus the desire to belong is a factor, if a person is in a political echo chamber such as, for example, San Francisco (5) the amplification of nastiness due to social media, which is often a competition to see who can be the nastiest.

You might say, how can anyone participate in such behavior? It’s easy for many people if they have the justification that their nastiness is a way to show how much they hate evil and evildoers. It becomes a form of virtue in their eyes.

And of course, not everyone on the Democrat side participates in that sort of thing.

I believe in Free Will / Choice. I mean I must believe. And this despite all my interest in Bio Determinism. We *must* believe in Free Will or it’s game over for humanity.

It’s obvious that our ‘elites’ believe in Determinism for us and Free Will for themselves and their children…. or they’d send them to Public Schools.

Presumably you champion Moral Fiction because having free will in a void is not a good place to be. We need signposts.

Has anyone here watched Kurosawa’s Ran? The final scene with the blind boy feeling his way toward the cliff’s edge with the shakuhachi accompaniment is a cinematic masterpiece.

PS: Get well soon! FWIW I was an even grumpier person until I bit the bullet and started wearing spectacles. After the fact, realized that subliminal frustration caused by imperfect vision had been eating at me for some time.

Too damn proud. Ha

As I’ve mentioned, I come from a family where all the others became alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill or combos, resulting in four suicides, a murder, much chaos and great unhappiness.

I’ve thought about that a lot without coming to a certain answer. However, I guarantee you none of them pondered their lives and decided they wanted to become an addict or suicidally depressed.”

God Almighty, Huxley. You mentioned some significant issues, but not all that.

Ok, I’m out of philosophical, logical, and psychological references to try and explain what I am getting at here, by referencing a contributing moral cooperation and complicity; i.e., the choice element that at some psychic level knowingly and cynically decides to jump on the bandwagon to hell.

The only thing left is that old RC catechism material I found, and which will be incomprehensible to people not sharing at least an understanding of the implied A-T anthropology underlying the idea of a human being which actually can undertake a ruthless examination of its own conscience and motives. Obviously, some people don’t belive humans are such creatures, much less being entities morally obligated to perform such actions, whether the encompassing framework be purely secular or a more “metaphysical” [ a euphemism used here] sense.

What I can refer to is a William Golding novel written decades ago and published in 1979. It’s an involved novel containing two stories arcing toward a conclusion. I recall loaning the book to a couple of people who found it so disturbing they could hardly deal with it. But that was years ago before nihilism became a fashion. Which leads me to the twins in the story: Matty and Sophiy. What Golding describes is a process in which the girls, or one at least, quite consciously chooses to take that backward leap into entropy or chaos, you might say.*

I think that the description of that process of choosing to be perverse or to cynically join the forces of chaos as novelist John Gardner put it **, is one of the more impactful things I had ever read to that time.

*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Visible_(novel)

** https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Fiction-Harper-Torchbook-5069/dp/0465052266