Question authority, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting comment from “Cary Kembla.” It’s an attempt to explain Democrat voters who continue to believe the biased MSM and authorities who’ve been wrong so many times:

I think the dimension that is lacking in these people is skepticism of authority. I’ve thought about this quite a lot trying to come up with the answer to the exact same question you are. I think the answer lies in part at least with childhood experience of authority. Was early Authority (parents, teachers etc) *good* to the child? Sure, it might have made honest mistakes here and there, but was it basically loving and life affirming? If so, the child grows up to believe that Authority in the adult world (politicians, mainstream media, bureaucracy etc) is also basically good and honest, and has its best interests at heart.

That may indeed represent a certain proportion of people on the left. But it doesn’t represent the generation of leftists with which I’m most intimately familiar: my cohorts.

They are generally the people who were the rebels back in the day. They were the ones with the “question authority” bumper stickers. But it turns out they were only questioning authority when they believed that authority was on the side of the political right. When the authority came from the left it was and is sacrosanct.

I wrote a post on the subject in 2021, and I reproduce a portion of it here as follows:

If you’re of a certain age, like I am, you probably remember those bumper stickers that exhorted us all to Question Authority. It was the mark of a thinking person not to take everything at face value, in particular the words of the government or government agencies.

I remember once going to an SDS meeting when I was in college. I was never a leftist but I suppose I was toying with it a bit at the time (this was during the Vietnam War). But what I saw and heard at that meeting repelled me on a gut level and I never went back. That one meeting cured me of any interest in taking the left as an authority on anything, except their angry, ranting, incoherent, narcissistic selves.

I wish I could remember what was said, but I don’t. I only remember the sense I had of dangerous people who were also stupid, and yet very very arrogant. That just about summed it up.

And now we have those same people, grown old, but they’re not running social media. It’s a younger crowd, and they have decided not only that they’re not going to Question Authority when the Democrats are in charge, but they’re not going to let anyone else Question Authority either.

And so we have this sort of thing:

…[I]n April Facebook blackballed a mother for daring to criticize the radical Marxist and racist policies of her school board.

Since then, Facebook has shut down a pro-Israel Christian site with 77 million followers and blocked the viewing of reviews of a climate book by former Obama science advisor Steve Koonin that raised doubts about the theory of human-caused climate change.

… This isn’t just Facebook; it’s everywhere. The left wants freedom of speech when the left is not in control. But once it does take control, the left wants to shut up anyone who disagrees or questions the authority of the left.

And now Tulsi climbs onboard

The New Neo Posted on by

She explains here why she got on the Trump train:

I thought this deserved its own thread.

In addition, I note that the RFK Jr. endorsement and this from Gabbard didn’t just happen totally organically. Trump was reaching out to these people, which I think was smart. I’m going to assume that, as the author of The Art of the Deal, he promised both of them some kind of future role. But one has to get elected in order to fulfill such promises, and I believe they both will help any chances Trump has of winning. What’s more, as RFK Jr. said, they actually do have some things on which they agree. The first of those things is the danger of a Harris presidency that would enable Democrats to further institutionalize and solidify the power of the left, perhaps for many generations to come.

RFK Jr. burned his bridges and goes all in

The New Neo Posted on by

RFK Jr.’s family has been issuing statements disavowing him before, so this sort of thing is really nothing new for him.

Now RFK has said something quite eloquent about MAGA, that slogan that has been practically considered the equivalent of Heil Hitler by the Democrats. Here it is:

The phrase has troubled liberals who think it is a call for a return to an America before civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights. But I have a more generous interpretation, one that is truer to my experience of Donald Trump as he is today. “Make America Great Again” recalls a nation brimming with vitality, with a can-do spirit, with hope and a belief in itself. It was an America that was beginning to confront its darker shadows, could acknowledge the injustice in its past and present, yet at the same time could celebrate its successes. It was a nation of broad prosperity, the world’s most vibrant middle class, and a idealistic belief (though not consistently applied) in freedom, justice, and democracy. It was a nation that led the world in innovation, productivity, and technology. And it was the healthiest country in the world. I have talked to many Trump supporters. I have talked with his inner circle. I have talked to the man himself. This is the America they want to restore.

Kennedy is also suggesting that more Democrats will be coming into the fold of what he calls Trump’s Unity Government:

Perhaps Tulsi Gabbard? This is getting even more interesting. I’ll take any good news I can get.

Customer support has gotten even worse, if such a thing be possible

The New Neo Posted on by

In the past two days I’ve spent several frustrating hours locking horns with so-called customer support for three companies. The terms “customer support” and “chat” became fairly Orwellian quite some time ago, but the situation has gotten even more ridiculous because the chatbots now seem to operate along forced-choice lines, with pre-written tabs with answers from which you must choose in order to go on to the next step. If nothing fits – well then, tough. If you arbitrarily choose an answer even if it doesn’t fit, then you get on a track from which you can’t escape and which has zero to do with your problem.

Fun. And in the case of some companies, there’s no way to talk to a live person without the chatbot deciding that you merit that reward for your labors. I didn’t qualify, apparently.

However, one of the three companies, Amazon, does have a phone number to call if all else fails. You might be amused at what I was calling Amazon about, which was basically to try to keep the company from giving me way too much money as a refund for an item I’m trying to return. The item originally cost around $37.00, but when I went through the online process to return it, Amazon was eager to give me a refund of about $160.00. When I mulled over that particular ethical dilemma, I found that I just couldn’t accept the largesse. So I tried again, and now Amazon wanted to give me about $60.00, which was an improvement but still didn’t sit well with me.

The chatbot was completely flummoxed by this situation, which didn’t fit any of the chatbot’s choices for me and thus was nonexistent as far as the chatbot was concerned. The actual person with whom I finally talked – after a call with the usual authentication brouhaha and a remarkably short stay on hold – at least understood what I was describing. But she said the computers were malfunctioning and she couldn’t check my account or do anything about the problem. She then made the helpful suggestion that I call back later. I replied that I’d already spent an inordinate amount of time trying to save Amazon money.

So I’m postponing the whole thing in hopes that Amazon gets its act together with the refund through the online process, which is ordinarily quite easy. But this isn’t really about Amazon, which at least had an actual person with whom I could actually talk, even if that person had a thick accent and lives halfway across the world. Her heart seemed to be in the right place. It’s the forced-choice chatbots that are incredibly annoying and have definitely gotten worse lately. Chatbots used to actually be able to respond to somewhat open-ended free-form statements or questions, but from what I’ve seen lately, they now lack that versatility.

Is it any wonder so many people are so testy these days? Not only do we have to deal with what might be the imminent fall of Western civilization, but we have to deal with increasingly sadistic versions of customer support.

The rest is history

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently discovered a podcast called “The rest is history” that’s as entertaining as it’s informative. That’s a combination you don’t often see, but these Brits manage it somehow. Warning, though: it’s addictive.

Each podcast is more or less an hour long. But the hour goes fast. I tend to listen either when I’m relaxing or when I’m doing some boring chore. When YouTube first decided I might be interested in the podcasts – YouTube is sometimes pretty sharp about that sort of thing – I watched one of their discussions of the French Revolution. It’s part of a lengthy series, but it was this one about the royal family’s attempt to flee the country when things were getting very dicey. It’s gives you a good idea of the flavor of the podcasters’ approach:

Then I watched one segment of another multi-part in-depth series, this time on the Titanic disaster. It was another topic I felt that I knew a great deal about already, and yet it held my attention very well:

Next I watched a five-parter on Luther. Fascinating.

You can find their videos at this link. If I’d had history teachers like this I probably would have been a history major.

Commenter “AesopFan” explains my own position vis à vis liberal Democrat friends and family, for the most part

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the description [emphasis mine]:

[From] JFM > “These are educated people who always take the news at face value. I can’t understand this. It drives me crazy.”

When they only see the news from one side, in which so much that we know about is omitted, distorted, or flat out invented, their opinions become understandable.

Not correct, but understandable.

Sadly, rectifying their erroneous impressions is time-consuming and requires background that they just don’t have.
I access probably ten times as much political and social news as most of my Democrat-voting family and friends, since I’m a Poli-Sci addict, and there is no way I can get a long enough hearing from them to convey all that information.

Change stories are interesting: so many are like Neo’s, where the sudden, unexpected, discovery that their news sources have lied about something important motivates an investigation that reveals many, many more lies.

It’s hard to know what that tipping point might be, for any individual.

The other problem is that they really don’t even want to know — literally; a recent group email from my family made that clear, in a rather off-hand fashion.

I won’t disturb their delusions, because there isn’t time in the day.

And even though they are all very nice, moral, generous, kind, productive, hard-working, intelligent, and educated (when that word had meaning), they are totally dependent on the Regime Media for their information.

And they believe the propaganda.

I would say that’s a correct depiction of 95% – perhaps even 100% – of my Democrat family and friends. In addition, some of it is a description of 20th century me – except for the part about not really wanting to know.

Perhaps the “want to know” versus “don’t want to know” dimension is the one that ultimately decides whether a person is open to political change or not. I will add that I believe that, for most of the people I’m talking about here, the “don’t want to know” crowd is usually intellectually curious about other things and open to taking in information. It’s just that politics taps into a much more emotional area of the psyche, in many instances the same one occupied (or not occupied, depending on the person) by religion. And then there’s the added dimension of the high social cost of leaving the fold. It’s huge, and when I went through my change it’s something of which I was naively unaware, which made the change easier for me.

When the media is lying – and lying in unison – and the vast majority of the people a person knows read the same sources and get the same information, an edifice of belief is built up. Much of it is based on distortions, omissions, and lies. But most of the time the person doesn’t know that or even suspect it. Sources on the right have been so demonized – for example, “Faux News” – that it usually precludes watching them. And if someone comes along to challenge the person’s point of view, unless the listener is highly motivated to sit and listen for hours, the challenge can easily dismissed by the listener as error or ignorance on the part of the challenger. That’s because part of the narrative the listener has taken in is that the other side is listening to lies all the time and basing their opinions on lies.

As I’ve described in my change story, there were some special circumstances for me that meant I was able to keep an open mind. I was so naive at the time the process began, post 9/11, that when I started reading many media sources online instead of the few print sources as I’d read before (consisting mostly of the Times, the Boston Globe, and The New Yorker), I was unaware of the political orientation of the authors of my new online sources. I was instead evaluating their logic and veracity in three main ways. The first was whether the authors were making logical points, the second was whether their predictions about future events were mostly accurate, and the third was whether they quoted public figures correctly when I checked against the transcript of a speech or interview. I found that some sources were consistently much better than others at doing those things. And after a year or two of this sort of close reading, I discovered to my surprise – I might even say to my shock – that those more reliable sources were all on the right.

One of the reasons I was able to do this was because I had recently separated from my husband and was very lonely, and therefore had a great deal of time on my hands. I had moved to a new place where I only had a friend or two. My son was now grown up and living several hours away. I was getting my news online for the first time in my life because I didn’t want the hassle of disposing of stacks of old newspapers. And so, without even realizing it, I was also reading conservative sources for the first time in my life, as well as the usual liberal sources I had always read without even thinking they were biased. I discovered that they were.

It’s not that sources on the right were free of bias. It’s just that they fulfilled those three criteria far better than media on the left did. That was really a huge turning point for me.

And then I discovered Thomas Sowell’s books, and that was another watershed. He brought it all together in a framework and provided structure for what I was already noticing and thinking in a far more disorganized way. After that, there was no turning back.

And so here I am.

The reaction to RFK’s announcement, plus some thoughts about the DNC production

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have missed the heart of RFK’s speech yesterday, the part in which he excoriated his own party for their un-democratic behavior, particularly their lawfare against opponents. He doesn’t spare Harris or her enablers in the press, either.

It’s of note that apparently, when RFK turned his critique to the subject of the MSM’s dereliction of duty, the MSM decided it was time to cut away from his speech. Yesterday I saw a clip demonstrating that, but I’m having trouble finding it today. It’s also unsurprising that the Kennedy family has disavowed RFK, as they have many times before.

And here’s what an actual RFK Jr. supporter, Bret Weinstein, has to say about the endorsement and whether he’ll be voting for Trump. He’s not previously been a Trump admirer, to say the least:

And then there’s the Beyonce hype from the Democrats (although it’s unclear with whom it originated), with the usual cooperation of the MSM. Beyonce has long been a megastar, and the rumor was spread that she’d be appearing the last night [see *NOTE below] of the DNC – which happens to be the same night Kamala was speaking. Beyonce was nowhere to be seen, but the gossip swelled the ranks of the watchers, so that Harris got a nice big audience. This may backfire, of course, because more exposure to Harris does not necessarily enhance her appeal.

I think Ben Shapiro has one of the better general observations about this 2024 campaign:

*NOTE: When I was trying to type “the last night of the DNC” I made this typo: “the least night of the DNC.”

The Democrats’ 2024 campaign: it’s lies all the way down

The New Neo Posted on by

Politicians lie. Of course they do. But I’ve never before seen the sheer volume of lies that the Democrats are putting out this year – at least, not in the US. Their platform consists of lying about Trump and what he plans, and issuing vague generalities about how wonderful it will be when the Democrats get back in power.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but Democrats are in power right now.

Two topics in particular are the subject of many of the lies, and they both have to do with what Trump and the Republicans have planned if they’re victorious. It’s the ultimate strawman argument, and the Democrats count on two things. The first is that the MSM won’t fact-check them, and the second is that listeners won’t fact-check them either. So the lies will be believed, people will not only remain fearful of Trump (based in large part on previous lies that Democrats and the MSM have told about him) but will become even more fearful at the prospect of a Trump second term. The Democrats are basically saying: vote for us through fear.

And yes, Trump lies. But his lies are almost all of the bragging exaggeration type: the size of a crowd, for example. They are relatively harmless and there is no comparison to what the Democrats do.

I could spend a lot of time fact-checking the Democrats, but others have done it before me. So I’ll just be lazy and link to a sample of articles on the subject: this one deals with Kamala Harris’ DNC speech; this one deals more generally with the DNC speeches; this one is older and is about the lies concerning Project 2025, lies that continue; this one is about lies concerning Vance and Project 2025.

NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to this saying.