Why new facts often don’t matter once a belief system has been established
From commenter “Mac” on the thread about Biden lying about the new Georgia voting law [emphasis mine]:
For a lot of Democrats, I don’t think [they regard lies such as Biden’s as] even lying, in the sense of knowingly telling an untruth. They believe it. They’ve worked themselves into such a state of hatred toward Republicans that the master truth–that Republicans are white supremacists attempting to establish a white supremacist dictatorship–makes all details irrelevant. As in my anecdote above about giving water to voters–those who raged at me never referred to the specific fact at issue, but just battered away at the master truth. There is no doubt whatever in my mind that they believe it.
I think Mac is correct for most rank-and-file Democrats. Leftists and especially leftist leaders operate somewhat different and might be aware of the true truth, as it were, but for them the ends justify the means. What are their ends? Some believe they actually will be benefiting humanity by taking power, but others are just in it for the power. I have no idea what the proportions are, but that’s the division I see.
Back to the ordinary Democrats, though, without whom the leaders would have much greater difficulty seizing power. A belief system is ordinarily built from many separate pieces, like a house made of bricks. Ultimately, it becomes very strong and not just a group of bricks – but a structure on which the people living in it rely. If a single brick is undermined, or even a couple, the structure stands (I hope I’m right about this, not being a builder). The structure stands until enough bricks are removed that it collapses, or until someone takes a wrecking ball to it.
There’s also something known as a keystone, which is: “1. the wedge-shaped piece at the crown of an arch that locks the other pieces in place 2. something on which associated things depend for support ”
Removing a keystone – if a person has a keystone within his or her belief system – can cause a system to collapse in a fairly sudden and dramatic manner. I think that, during my own change process, both things happened – a slow accruing of evidence as well as some more sudden and important revelations (my change story contains some examples of each, but here’s one of the latter). Another person who had a “keystone” change experience was David Horowitz, a far left activist whose change to the right was originally sparked by learning that certain leftists he thought were decent were actually cold-blooded killers.
Most people’s belief systems are very very recalcitrant to change, and some are even impervious to it. In the latter cases – which I think are quite common – every small brick that might be removed from the edifice is almost immediately replaced with another brick, making the structure about as strong as before. Maybe even stronger, because it’s withstood many challenges. That’s the function of propaganda – to suppress the truth if it undermines the preferred narrative, but if the truth gets out, to immediately change the subject and come up with a new story to replace it. Then when that’s challenged, there’s another story and another and another for people to use to shore up anything that might be crumbling .
I believe that’s what Churchill meant when he said something of this sort:
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
For some people, it’s just that smooth a process. For others, it requires only a small adjustment before hurrying on as before.
Here’s the thing: The Dems get their “news” from the NYT, WaPo, NPR, CNN, PBS and MSNBC. I don’t believe a word from any of them.
This is a very serious problem. The Press has a role in our government and they are failing at their job.
I suspect that rather few (only those completely ignorant of history and completely misguided about human nature) truly believe that their “progressive” policies, which cannot possibly lead to any genuine improvement (let alone the chimerical “equity” or “social justice” they espouse), are of any real benefit to those less fortunate; what they crave is power, control and social position, with its attendant privileges, as well as the illusion of moral and intellectual superiority to their ideological opponents.
There is the keystone of an arch and the cornerstone of a structure. A cornerstone set on unstable ground, or not set true and plumb, will cause the entire edifice to be unstable or prone to collapse. Best not question the cornerstone of one’s beliefs, there is power to be siezed and used for “justice.”
om:
That’s a good metaphor too.
A liberal acquaintance of mine countered every policy argument during the Obama administration with “you’re just angry that a black man is president”. Today he merely replaces it with “that Donald Trump isn’t president”. Thus, all his points are satisfied and yours are irrelevant. I do think he genuinely believes it.
DWaz. Sounds like a labor-saving proposition In addition, there is no way to confute it, since of course you wouldn’t admit your opposition to Obamacare is racist.
But, when things become so bad they can’t be ignored….he might say it’s leftover from Trump but even he can read a calendar. Just keep reminding him who he voted for. Won’t change his mind, but you’re owed some satisfaction.
There’s a pathological anger abroad in the land, discussed here several times, and which under conventional terms of analysis makes no sense.
It is as if the left’s apparent successes in the political sphere have not sated them, but driven them to even greater emotional frenzies. Everybody is remarking on it.
I suppose the base attitude and the emotional investment in the progressive social justice revenge narrative has been there for awhile. But we who are the targets just did not quite appreciate the depth of the hostility and the vehemence of feeling, until Trump came along and put a temporary halt to their cherished “fundamental transformation program”.
It is quite common now to see homicidal expressions of hostility toward white males in general expressed as a matter of course by woke females. Just as a matter of routine.
This should perhaps, be unsurprising. The appetite for homicidal revolution seems historically have grown in intensity with the actual resolution of legitimate grievances in situations where utopian ideas were prevailing. In those cases the eating only fuels the appetite, and the quest becomes for a purity which is never satisfied.
Nonetheless it’s shocking to see the murderous rage of so many physically weak and unprepossessing females, and soy boy “gurls” of a nominally male sex.
But it is not just them, as many have pointed out with regard to their own middle aged kids and associates.
A very successful woman who I will not describe too closely, is at her wit’s end in dealing with chronically angry and emotional colleagues at a major university medical school and hospital. They are so unrelentingly negative … these well to do medical professionals … that the situation is becoming untenable.
Well, “manifesting as pathological”. My off the cuff guesstimate is that in many university towns populated almost completely by woke progressives, 35% or more of the population has been diagnosed with some mood or emotional disorder and is on medication in the best of times.
j e (3:55 pm) said: “I suspect that rather few . . . truly believe that their ‘progressive’ policies, which cannot possibly lead to any genuine improvement . . . , are of any real benefit to those less fortunate . . . .”
Respectfully disagree, with no studies or documentation of any kind to back it up — only my seven-plus decades of lived experience. Despite your accurate description of many of that ilk, I do think that many of the True Believers *are* in fact true believers. Ummm, the wrong people got into power. Ummm, it really hasn’t been tried yet. (Ummm, proffer your own excuse/explanation in this space.)
And, let us not forget, they are watching an *entirely* different movie in an *entirely* different movie theater. Walter Duranty lives! — and, you know, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
I sometimes try to refute my beliefs. Am I just greedy? Am I just too unsympathetic to the plight of those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder? Am I too demanding of my fellow humans because I expect them to be responsible for their lives? Do I not see how difficult it is for those born in poverty? Why do I believe that a meritocracy works better than an enforced equality? And so on.
The answers to the questions come mostly from my own life. Though I was not born in poverty, my family was not well to do. My childhood memories are of there never being any money for “nice” things or frivolous expenditures. My clothes were always clean but usually hand me downs from my older brother. I learned to fish for trout in the local stream at age seven. It was not a sport, though I enjoyed it.. My family ate all the fish I caught and during WWII, trout helped make up for the meat that we couldn’t get because of rationing.
My family told me the way up economically was through education, but we had no money for college. Fortunately, in those days, it was possible to scrape together enough for the state university by working a summer job and doing odd jobs during the school year. That this is no longer possible is a a reason to be empathetic to young people from poor families. But, of course they can now borrow the money, but if the degree doesn’t lead to a job, where are they, except in a form pf debtor’s prison. The only help I received from my family was that I was allowed to live at home rent free during the summer when I was working full time.
My degree in geology lead to a good job with an oil company. When I got my first monthly pay check from the company of -wait for it – $325, I was glad I managed to stick it out and finish my degree. Wow, that was big money to me.
I could go on about the experiences that have shown me that free markets, hard work, meritocratic standards, being responsible, recognizing and correcting bad decisions have all been a part of my life experience. A hick from the mountains of Colorado managed to make it to a comfortable retirement while serving in a number of responsible positions.
Then, there has been the travel and reading I have done that have shown me the folly of kleptocracies, oligarchies, Banana Republics, and down right Communist paradises. The story of Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe alone should be enough to open anyone’s eyes to the folly of Communism. But how many have read that story?
My efforts these days are in supporting mass educators like Prager U., Hillsdale’s “Imprimus,” and blogs like the New Neo. Yes, we’re fighting the academic behemoth and the MSM, but there are still a majority of Americans who don’t buy the collectivist Woke Supremacy line. Biden and company are not disguising their intentions. That may be a wake up call for many. Well, we can hope.
J.J. (5:36 pm) asserts that “there are still a majority of Americans who don’t buy the collectivist Woke Supremacy line.”
Comforting, yes, but a majority isn’t nearly enough . . .
(By the way, J.J., I appreciate your in-a-nutshell life story.)
Neo, I’m glad you found my point worth amplifying.
“Some believe they actually will be benefiting humanity by taking power, but others are just in it for the power.”
Yes, and for some it’s both. They really do think they have the solution for most of the world’s ills, and that implementing the solution requires a great deal of power. And I think they also really like the idea of control, though they don’t necessarily admit it to themselves. After all, they really should have it, because they deserve it, because they have the solution. The ones I know are not at all cynical about power, just perfectly confident that it should be in their hands
Many suffer from what I think of as “smart kid syndrome.” They have higher-than-average IQs and tend to make good grades, and so forth. And especially if, in adolescence, this sets them somewhat (or a great deal) apart from the beauty queens and jocks, whom they can’t help but envy a little, they tend to start thinking “I’m smarter than them, and so I ought to be running things, in which case things would be much more better.”
I find myself thinking of the word “control” rather than “power” about some of these, especially the women. In general women tend to be more detail-oriented than men, and a mother or teacher of young children has to pretty much micromanage them all the time, otherwise there’ll be complete chaos. And a good first-grade teacher is really good at that. But it becomes pathological if extended to governing a country, and that tendency is part of what made Hillary Clinton so unpalatable: people sensed that she wanted to exercise very precise control over every aspect of their lives, because if she didn’t they would inevitably screw things up. Gretchen Whitmire has the same vibe.
The ideological component is important.
But don’t forget the demonization component.
Or rather, the demonization/ideology nexus. That is, the grim development that successful and ongoing demonization of one’s opponent becomes the bedrock (keystone? cornerstone?) of one’s ideology.
So that to gain the support of those they’ve successfully brainwashed, those who aspire to power have only to stress that they are against the demon and the supporters of the demon. And this, they are certain, will enable them to do whatever they want.
One might expect that so-called 21st-Century liberals would understand the downside of such rampant demonization.
It appears that one would be wrong. Very wrong.
And because demonization has been so successfully employed, all the wicked tacticians have to do is insist that they are rolling back the policies of those demons, acting contrary to demon wishes, making sure that the demons are excluded entirely from society (as they should be).
Make the persecution of those demons a moral imperative. (Gosh, where have we seen that before?)
And keep on making sure to keep the spotlight on those demons, stress the heroic fight against them, pound them and warn against them constantly, so as to reinforce their own power—and distract the public from their own abuses, failures and scams and scandals.
As the 20th century has shown, such a “technique” works amazingly well.
That is, until it doesn’t…whereupon it causes disasters of untold dimensions.
Doesn’t bother the Democrats, though one bit (so it seems).
And so, welcome to “Warped-World”.
The harder and longer the narrative is shored up the more sudden and immense the shift will be when reality finally breaks through. This is why any talk Romania is a problem for the Left, as remarked on by Sarah Hoyt recently.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/03/27/throne-of-lies/
I like the cornerstone metaphor. But here’s mine; A gigantic vacuum which requires all these false beliefs. Pulls them in. It is not supported in a positive sense by other components. It feeds on them and is never satisfied. It cannot allow for anything to exist that might take the sustenance out of its next feed.
Where does it come from? I have no idea.
A black hole of falsity. Where does it come from? Theologically? It is Easter soon.
A good article that echo’s the same theme. The second bullet really summarizes the people who are the most deluded. Their votes and their belief doesn’t really impact them in a material fashion.
If their job disappeared with the lockdown, they would think different.
If BLM riot torched their neighborhood, racial solidarity doesn’t seem so critical. I think many Black Lives Matter signs will disappear from front yards.
If illegal kids showed up in their classroom hindering their dear ones academic progress.
If unaccompanied children peddled drugs and recruited their dear ones into gangs defund the police doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/but_at_least_hes_not_trump.html
You can tell any Biden Supporter. You should be happy. YOU VOTED FOR THIS! Never let them forget it.
• Emotions are more determinative than logic when deciding on a vote.
• Many of these “emotional” voters are personally unaffected by their candidate’s positions.****This is the crux of most of the Biden vote.
• Personal family history and “team” affiliation are almost impossible to overcome.
• The liberal media prevent balanced vote-influencing information from ever reaching Democrat voters.
Whenever you get into a discussion with a deluded one always ask to provide data to back up their assertions. If they do so and they come across contrary data, suddenly “facts” gets called into question. The contrary data will start shifting the ideological keystone. The worldview ground gets a bit more sandy.
Change is a process and not a moment.
Spartacus. Hence the SJW version of “we”. Instead of being the standard first-person plural including the speaker and one or more others involved in the issue at hand, it means something quite different.
It’s a price “we” have to pay. Means not the speaker or the listeners. Means people they never heard of and likely wouldn’t be civil to if they met. Bitterly clinging irredeemable deplorables. In fact, those who are impacted are retroactively made unworthy and so deserve it.
But it’s okay to say it because “we” was in the sentence and thus it covers everybody. Even as everybody knows it doesn’t.
“we” must examine the roots of our anti-asian anger. Nope. Those other people, as long as they’re white, have to do it.
I once said to a person going on in this fashion that “we” included the speaker. So I said, “You should stop, I never started, so that’s two and we’re on our way.”
Some confusion ensued and the subject was changed.
I’ve asked for data. I’ve also tried to figure out if I breathe differently when I’m thinking about how I’m breathing than when I’m not thinking about how I’m breathing.
Good points Richard. You put the burden on them to “prove” their collective “we”. That is what Fascists do. Create the “we”. See the link below.
American Thinker has been really strong along with American Greatness.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_commonalities_between_the_rise_of_the_nazis_and_the_tactics_of_the_american_left_cannot_be_ignored.html
You are doing your part. You are engaged in the marketplace of ideas. Keep it up.
I was on Zoom call with some old friends, all of whom are liberals. One mentioned that he watched the prosecution’s opening argument in the Chauvin case. After he was done regurgitating what Andrew Branca calls “emotion-laden baggage”, someone asked if watched the defense’s opening argument. “I watched about 10 seconds and had to turn it off.” God forbid some counter factuals should disturb the edifice.
Thomas Sowell said “The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees”.
A college degree, and the more ivy the better, is much too often equated with intelligence and leadership. Yet these are the people who are the most likely to have never even patched a bike tire.
An education can be eye opening and mind expanding, but without a little grease/dirt under the nails and a few skinned knees, I think it less, rather than more, likely that wisdom and judgement follow.
Excellent post. I have been avoiding USA news recently, except for reading your posts. It is disheartening.
I am waiting for the Newneo and Horowitz moment to ‘wake up’ and ‘enlighten’ Democrats that, in the recent past, never would have excepted the ideology of the current Democratic Party. It makes no sense and exposes corruption in obvious form.
Richard:
Clinton and Obama both went all over the world dropping apologies for things, that they proclaimed, that same “we” did in the past. And that was always portrayed as courageous for them to do and they gathered great praise from the press, worldwide.
They’ve worked themselves into such a state of hatred toward Republicans that the master truth–that Republicans are white supremacists attempting to establish a white supremacist dictatorship–makes all details irrelevant.
A question for the group: what false beliefs about Democrats do most Republicans hold, do we think?
Do we think? We are after all deplorable and irredeemable. You know privileged, heirs of the patriarchy, the oppressors, ……
Or
Do they think? Are there limits that will stop them in their quest for “justice?” Or is it now all just “pay back” plus some?
“It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it anymore you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.”
Terry Pratchett, Guards Guards
Frederick, it’s a fair question, and the fact that we ask it is part of why I don’t think there are as many. Republicans have to confront reality about liberals more, because they control so much. Not all the time; I’m sure we have blindspots as well. But I think less. I know Democrats that know no Republicans (or think they don’t), but I don’t know many Republicans that know no Democrats.
Once that kind of thinking is established “fact,” it is difficult to impossible to snap anyone out of it. That’s why I really don’t think this is a mere political belief. This is right up there with religious dogma.
You can’t fight religious dogma.
We are talking about people who think we’re Nazis. They have already punched, hurt, burned and/or killed a few already. From this to annihilation of kulaks and filling gulags won’t take very long.
(Well, if you think about it, we Americans did fight against religious dogma twice. The first one asserted blacks were meant to be “servile” – slaves. It took 600,000 dead Americans and total scorched earth in one region of the country to prove the opposite.
The second one believed their Emperor was a descendant of the gods and nothing awful would happen to their islands. What do you think it took for them to abandon such belief?
Yeah, you guessed it right.)
“Well, if you think about it, we Americans did fight against religious dogma twice. The first one asserted blacks were meant to be “servile” – slaves. It took 600,000 dead Americans and total scorched earth in one region of the country to prove the opposite. ”
Actually the first one held as its sacred creed that Blacks were meant to be free. I don’t recall the South going on a Crusade to convert the North to the joys of Slavery.
BTW, how’s all that emancipation been working out? 🙂
In the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, Smith wants the government to set aside some land for an actual good cause, but other senators have been scheming to use the land to make themselves rich. The bad guys in Smith’s state start publishing lies in the major newspapers, making it look like it is Smith who is scheming to make a fortune off it.
Smith filibusters as long as he can, as a small hometown newspaper writes the truth, but the bad guys injure the newsboys and destroy the small paper. People believe the lies and send Western Union wires to Washington to get him to stop the filibuster and give up. That’s when he reads the huge pile of wires and collapses in exhaustion and despair.
Claude Rains, one of the crooked senators, suddenly sees what his machinations have done to the honest Smith and Rains confesses loudly in the open senate.
The MSM and social media creatures have been doing the same thing as the corrupt newspapers in the movie, keeping the truth from people.
What we need now are a few Claude Rains characters, who have once had noble aims but who are now crooks, who might have moments of epiphany and tell the truth in public.
Very reminiscent of the coming of National Socialism to German cities and towns in the 1930’s in all my readings.
“Very reminiscent of the coming of National Socialism to German cities and towns in the 1930’s in all my readings.”
You’d probably nod knowingly if you were reading or listening to someone commenting how ironic it was that Generals always seem prepared to fight the Last War. And yet here you go…
In all your readings? Shades of the Melians, the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Empress Theodosia’s Alternate No. 3 Manicurist and a cast of thousands more would disappointed that the vast and broad sweep of echoing and rhyming tragic human history counts for little in your world view.
Yes it was a Big Bad Thing. No, it wasn’t the only thing and what’s coming down the pike is a New Thing just like a myriad of Old Things and not just your Old Thing. Excessive tunnel vision won’t help you to surf the wave.
Zaphod, I think you’re forgetting that it was the South that attacked Fort Sumter.
@Jonathan Card:
Fort Sumter being like in the South like kind of like and kind of like occupied by Federal troops, which Federation Southern states were attempting to secede from which in theory this Holy Constitution Object did not forbid.
There’s this fellow called John Brown… Perhaps you’ve heard of him.
Again, I don’t recall Southern Politics throughout the 1840s and 50s being hysterically obsessed with forcing the North to adopt slavery or otherwise destroying the foundations of Northern society and economy, do you?
Did Harriet Beecher Stowe and many others not write what were in effect religious tracts inciting Holy War against the evils of slavery?
Yes, yes… Slavery Bad… all men yadda yadda.. But we are not here to debate this. What I am disputing is ignorant statement above that the South fought a religious war. The North did. And this inability to see that Boston Brahmin Universalism and its modern day Liberalism bastard child descendants ARE *religions* — and false ones at that — is a big problem for all of us.
The South just wanted to be left alone. One can debate day and night the morality of Slavery in the abstract, or even in the concrete (imagine you’re teleported into a world where it’s been extant for a few hundred years and abolishing it would destroy your world, your economy, your personal security). But the North was, by the 1840s determined *not* to leave the South alone.
If there’s any analogy to the present day, and one has to be careful with analogies, it’s that the Woke simply won’t leave us normal people alone.
Frankly much of the readership here should be happy as clams (well maybe not clams) that many of the meanest maddest reactionaries such as your humble correspondent now see that a good deal of this recurrent societal canker emanates from the Puritan Strain Gone Rotten (IMHO it started out Bad anyway) rather than courtesy of the Usual Suspects 😛
Not sure that the North “fought a religious war.”
Sure, there was a religious (and/or moral) component involved; but the Emancipation Proclamation was not made in 1860 or in 1861 or in 1862.
It boils down to what extent the Abolitionists, though extremely vocal, actually influenced the body politic.
Primarily, It seems to me—but this is, of course, heavily debated—Lincoln, to preserve the Union, stressed the national/political/legal aspects of secession—and he did this intentionally, just as he “officially”, at first, ignored the pressing need to end slavery (though this need was hovering, hugely, in the background).
That the secession of the South was heavily predicated on the issue of slavery is indisputable; but there were other reasons as well.
Perhaps, the most one could say is that the North’s “crusade” to end slavery (though not consistently held across the board) was balanced by the South’s “crusade” to keep that “peculiar institution” (though the issue of regional assertiveness in the face of perceived Northern patronization and growing dominance was a parallel theme).
In the end, the South—in a “Don’t tread on me” moment?—decided to secede, which shifted the debate, in a major way, to one of nation/constitution, which, was perhaps “fortunate” for Lincoln.
In the end, keeping the issue of slavery on the back-burner was unsustainable; but was the “crusade” the issue of ending slavery the “crusade”? Or was it the illegality of secession, and the pressing need to keep the Union intact?
Can these be separated? (I think they can—though this debate, by its very nature, will no doubt be unresolveable.)
It’s a matter of stress and perception….
^^ This is a sober, fair and balanced exposition. Somehow I survived ingesting it 😛
Having fired my Parthian Shots, I’m now going to take the pretend moral high ground and refrain from further side-tracking the thread 😛
Anyone interested in what the North and South actually had to say about themselves and each other in the 1850s would do well to google around Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug. He has this thing where he likes to dig out original sources which were best-sellers at the time and quote at length from them. It’s worth remembering that it’s not just that the Victors get to write the history of this mid C19 conflict, the Victors (Universalists, Liberals) have been re-writing the re-writes of this and every other bit of subsequent history ever since as the Overton Window has moved ever leftwards. So a lot of what we think we know… All we can really do is go back to the sources and read what those lying @##$@@s back in the day had to say for themselves rather than what multiple generations of lying #@$@$%s later accreted.
Listening to the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings on the radio while putting in a tile floor was my keystone moment. I had the radio on NPR while I spent hours over days on the task and Biden and Kennedy along with others were so obviously the intellectual inferiors of Thomas (and Anita Hill) it caused me to think that maybe, just maybe the Republican party was not the KKK. (Rather amazing I hadn’t noticed Robert Byrd nor the KKK’s founding history, nor which party Lincoln and MLK were in.)
DNW,
“It is as if the left’s apparent successes in the political sphere have not sated them, but driven them to even greater emotional frenzies. Everybody is remarking on it.”
It is not a simile. It is. You don’t need the, “It is as if” at the beginning of the first sentence. That’s one of the indicators that the philosophy is evil. It cannot be sated.
Mac @5:51pm,
Not sure where their IQs rank on a bell curve, but there is no question their egos are far out on the right asymptote. Imagine waking up in the morning and believing, “If only everyone would do as I say the troubles of the world would be fixed.”
I am Spartacus @9:12pm,
I keep picturing Daisy and Tom at the end of, “The Great Gatsby.”
Shocka!
If YOU so much as TRY to prevent us from stealing an election then YOU are a racist:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-says-hed-strongly-support-mlb-moving-all-star-game-out-of-atlanta
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/mark-hamill-hollywood-wont-work-georgia-voting-legislation
(And no doubt YOU are also a racist should YOU even attempt to point this out…)
Actually, one would think that Biden should be VERY GRATEFUL to Georgia. Very grateful….
RE true believers versus cynical opportunists among the Dem leadership, I find it it helps to consider them as two distinct factions. There’s the Loony Left, currently ascendant, and the Crooks & Thieves, who ran the party openly for a long time but who now must pay at least lip service to whatever this week’s LL hysteria might be.
There’s plenty of overlap, mind. In particular a lot of the longtime urban Loony Left leaders are also lowercase crooks & thieves. (Just because they can.)
But, MASSIVE irony: It’s the core Crooks & Thieves faction, in it primarily for the graft, who are our last best hope the Loony Left Dems will be stopped short of nuking the filibuster, jamming a flood of tyrannical laws down our throats, and quite possibly starting something really messy.
How so? Now that the $1.9 trillion StealFromUs has been rammed through and the Crooks & Thieves have hundreds of billions of loot to play with, the more intelligent among them may just possibly be aware that helping their Loony Left start a civil war could interfere with long-term enjoyment of the plunder.
Here’s hoping.
@porkypine:
Tier 1 Crooks and Thieves have bolt holes around the world and just have to jump in the Gulfstream to GTFO when SHTF. South Island of NZ is a popular spot.
When Obama put the FBI onto Kim Dotcom in 2012 for IP Privacy in order to quid pro quo Hollywood donations and Kim Dotcom (very colourful individual) managed to throw a lot of money at the problem and make it go away and not be extradited, a lot of folks took notice.
How did we let ourselves descend into this mess of a social technocracy?
> We have put formal education and celebrity on pedestals of worship, as possessing the insight, wisdom, and virtue of superhuman deities … while summarily dismissing wisdom presented outside those channels as not worthy of consideration or trust.
> We also put “non-profit” status on a pedestal of worship and trust, while treating those honest enough to state their intent to profit with perpetual suspicion and the application of restraints in a manner reminiscent of Gulliver.
> We have come to believe that rules are the answer to every problem, assuming that compliance with them removes the need to think beyond them – and deal with their failures by creating more rules to cover the exception to the rule.
> The above has combined to establish the conventional wisdom that all of us, except the elite few on the above pedestals, are incapable and unworthy of competently managing your own lives … and therefore you should be given a pass on the responsibility to make your own decisions to get through life; instead being content to just go to work, or to school, and trust The Pedestaled to make your decisions, use your resources, and dictate what you can and can’t do from their lofty heights as though they are standing right beside you … all in the name of establishing their definition of the “greater good” as though it is one-size-fits-all.
Under these assumptions – benignly accepted by millions as simply the way an “advanced” civilization is to live, and is beyond question – the incentives to develop and exercise competence are highly diminished among the masses, who come to believe that they can’t really rise above their situation and should just (f__k up and) trust their “betters” in grand Flounderian fashion.
OTOH, The Pedestaled come to expect such trust and OUR SUBMISSION, regardless of their actual competence, oblivious to their own human limitations and capability for perpetrating evil upon others like a bull in a china shop.
By this way of thinking, reinforced by The Pedestaled for decades, we have been led to sell OURSELVES short as though we’re shares of GameStop, and let them establish their rule over us.
This also has the effect of effectively unplugging most of the distributed intellect in the world from the problem-solving processes. Intellect that might not meet the standards of MENSA or rocket scientists, but combined with its proximity-informed insight is far better equipped to solve the problems around the individuals possessing it.
Instead, we have centralized decision-making by an elite few, who come to believe that faceless, industrial approaches and economies of scale can be applied to solve problems with up to 330 million living, breathing INDIVIDUAL variables in this nation alone. That’s akin to trying to text on your smartphone with a sledgehammer.
It is this way of thinking that can be leveraged by a crisis-not-to-waste to open the door to the Great Reset, and the intergenerational decline under the then-entrenched oligarchic rule that will follow.
If we want to reverse this lemming parade we are on now and make it stick … getting ordinary people to QUESTION the world around them, then build trust in their own insights and NOT delegate their decisions to others – even if that looks like more risk and effort for them – is essential to diminish the power of The Pedestaled and engage that distributed intellect.
Perhaps the first question to ask a True Believer, is …
… how can the “experts” and “leaders” you put so much trust in, ever know YOU well enough to get the answers right for YOU from the top down?
And they said comedy was dead…
https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1377402995126624257
H/T Ron Coleman twitter feed
The South just wanted to be left alone.
If that had been the case, there wouldn’t have been any Bleeding Kansas, any Dred Scott decision, any Civil War over the election of a free-soil candidate.
Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist, wrote about the nature of intellectually closed systems:
“A closed sysem has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of causistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you ourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history…In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.
The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emoional hothouse…The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself. “
Cornhead…”Here’s the thing: The Dems get their “news” from the NYT, WaPo, NPR, CNN, PBS and MSNBC.”
And also from their Dem friends on social media.
The power of the Narrative is so great that it is hard for actual facts and reality to break into it. I’ve been thinking lately about something I see as a metaphor for the media situation: the cruise ship Royal Majesty, which (in 1995) managed to run aground, in good weather, despite being equipped with GPS *and* LORAN navigation systems. Writer Asaf Degani describes the environment on the ship’s bridge:
“As the gray sky turned black veil, the phosphorus-lit radar map with its neat lines and digital indication seemed clearer and more inviting than the dark world outside. As part of a sophisticated integrated bridge system, the radar map had everything–from a crisp radar picture, to ship position, buoy renderings, and up to the last bit of data anyone could want–until it seemed that the entire world lived and moved transparently, inside that little green screen. Using this compelling display, the second officer was piloting a phantom ship on an electronic lie, and nobody called the bluff.”
Until the bluff was finally called by reality itself, at 10 PM, when the ship jerked to the left with a grinding noise. The GPS antenna cable had come loose, and the positions displayed and plotted were based only on dead reckoning. The LORAN displayed the correct position, which was 17 miles off from the GPS-displayed position. No one had bothered to check the LORAN while underway…the GPS-derived information was so comforting and convincing–and no one had noticed the two small letters ‘dr’ on the GPS display, which meant it had lost its signal and defaulted to dead reckoning…which can become increasingly inaccurate over time.
The bridge environment on the Royal Majesty, where “the entire world lived and moved transparently, inside that little green screen” seems quite analogous to today’s media environment.
Many thanks for the Koestler quote, David.
This mercurial, often-difficult genius—interesting that Hungary produced so many—knew whereof he spoke.
Related:
https://twitter.com/RBPundit/status/1377608456077766659
Barry Meislin @7:42am,
Speaking of comedy, on that twitter thread you posted someone asks, “Why won’t she just leave so the school district can just focus on kids and re-open the schools? Why does it always have to be about her?”
Her question seems very sincere. You can tell she’s a sincere person because her Twitter avatar is a very artful sketch of a young woman wearing a surgical mask.
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Zaphod – Sure, the top Crooks&Thieves-faction Dems have options to run away to overseas boltholes if they let their Loony Left provoke SHTF. But it’s a lot more comfortable and fun to spend their stolen dollars here at home if they can (and the stolen dollars will likely be worth a lot more too.) They do have a strong incentive to rein in the Loony Left short of SHTF.
Whether they’ll succeed, that is the question. As someone else pointed out upthread, the LL’s Blackshirts aren’t picky about whose house they show up at, so the Crooks & Thieves have to be careful about any obvious obstruction. Ideally they blame it all on those Evil Reps. Of course, the LL is crazy, but not entirely stupid, so it’s unclear if the C&T will get away with that. Interesting times, for sure.
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I trust NOTHING that the media tries to tell me. I can see thru their lies.
For probably the third time: I highly recommend that anyone wishing to expound on the psychology of the persons actually precipitating and then participitating in, the Civil War, buy, and read cover to cover, Commager’s “The Civil War Archive.”
There may be better and more complete volume or two collections of official documents and private letters from the period, but I have not seen them.
The first link below is offered for two reasons. The first is the cheapness of the copy. The second is an illustration by way of the one review from 2003, of how misty eyed emotional some people still become, not about kith and kin and locale, but about ideals which they approach with a sacrificial religious reverence.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-civil-war-archive–the-history-of-the-civil-war-in-documents/707704/#edition=5315226&idiq=44138762
https://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Archive-History-Documents/dp/1579121101
M Williams commented earlier, “Thomas Sowell said ‘The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees’.”
Donald J. Trump has an Ivy League degree. QED
Mac claimed:
I grew up as one of the smart kids Mac seems to envy. Perhaps Mac was one of the kids who tried to humiliate me in school by calling me “Brains”, then clumsily tried to copy off of my paper or expected me to do their work when so-called group projects were assigned. Maybe Mac was a jock and imagined that kids like me who excelled in the academics schools are intended to nurture envied him. No I didn’t “envy” the jocks, I admired their skills and sportsmanship. They worked hard to earn their places on our high school teams. (Or by ‘jock’ did Mac really mean ‘bully’? Bullies are losers and only losers envy bullies.) We smart kids know from lived experience that things are “much more better(sic)” when we’re “running things” (e.g., the previously mentioned group projects).
For the next four years Mac and the rest of the US population will experience having a dullard and a bully “running things”. Good luck, Mac.
Inertia is a law of Nature and nature.
. I don’t recall the South going on a Crusade to convert the North to the joys of Slavery
You need to learn something of the literature of the era. And of Roger B Taney.
I grew up as one of the smart kids Mac seems to envy. Perhaps Mac was one of the kids who tried to humiliate
Take it somewhere else.
I put this up on the “Gascon” post, but it is even more relevant here.
I won’t do the excerpt again, but recommend reading the article and seeing the video of Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector to Canada, who came to love America and tried to warn Americans about the KGB’s plans.
He nailed the Left’s procedure for destroying America exactly.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/to_understand_2021_watch_a_kgb_defectors_mid1980s_interview.html
AesopFan:
Dan Bongino discussed Yuri Bezmenov and played an interview made with Yuri (80s or 90s?) on todays and yesterdays podcasts. Yuri called the process as “demoralization” of the American public.
“Demoralization is, in a context of warfare, national security, and law enforcement, a process in psychological warfare with the objective to erode morale among enemy combatants and/or noncombatants. That can encourage them to retreat, surrender, or defect rather than defeating them in combat.” Wickedmedia
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Here is THE Second Amendment intent “keystone”. The Heller case was based upon history. Fifteen professional historians filed THE pro-control historical brief that the dissenting justices understood as “going along with” their strongly held prior belief system. The entire historical foundation of the pro-control universe is the expertise claiming historians’ assertions backed up by by their PhD credentials.
The historians’ numerous errors, omissions, and off track claims that the pro-control narrative is founded upon and given to the Supreme Court in their Heller brief have been fact checked (fisked) in a long series of short posts at my Google Blog, On Second Opinion. All 24 parts are directly accessible from the Fisking Index link at the page top of any page. The series title is, Root Causes of Never Ending Second Amendment Dispute.
As I keep saying, I don’t KNOW if the media is/are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dem Party, or if it’s the other way round, but it’s OBVIOUS that they are in CAHOOTS. CLEARLY, they are in bed together.
Facts don’t matter to the left because they’re operating on emotion and that emotion is rage.
The rage comes from 3 groups:
1) The highly educated and highly successful who don’t believe they deserve their success. They willingly listen to, and repeat, any claims detrimental to the founding of the country or daily aspects of life in the USA. They believe that any country that allowed them to be successful must be destroyed. Among these you’ll find the tech oligarchs, the commissioners of the NBA, NFL, MLB and many CEOs. To borrows a phrase from Bill Clinton, they’re practicing the politics of self-destruction. It’s corporate suicide by politics.
2) The highly educated and unsuccessful who don’t believe those in fly-over country deserve their success. It’s both envy and the sad reality that we represent their parents. They rebelled against their parents and it’s not working out for them. Consequently, we must be destroyed to remove all evidence of their failure.
3) Those who just want to see everything burn. They know none of what is being proposed will work, they know it’s all a bunch of lies but they want to watch the destruction. However, they somehow think everyone but them will suffer the consequences.
I believe that the leadership of the Democratic Party is operating purely on self-preservation. They’ve created a rage mob and now they fear being labeled “insufficiently committed to the cause”.
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Facts is not what the Liberal Democrats are interested in all they want is control over us all all 365 days a year 24/7