Newsmen took Robert Gibbs to task about President Obama’s campaign trail promise to craft the health care bill transparently, going so far as to say it would be televised on Cspan.
Those promises were compiled as YouTube clips below, together with a clip of Nancy Pelosi’s rejoinder that a lot of things were said on the campaign trail that aren’t going to happen any more.
YouTube Direkt
Obama’s pledge
embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt
Pelosi’s rejoinder
An Election Promise is now almost synonymous with a Lie. Few voters believe that an election promise will actually be kept, but many vote according to what they are promised anyway. There’s even an entertainment factor. According to Wikipedia, evidence suggests that politicians actually benefit from creatively misleading voters because “a party that does not make exaggerated promises might appear bland, unambitious, and uninteresting to voters compared to the one that does. Sometimes this can give the exaggerating party an advantage over the truthful one.”
But although the politician may lie, he may also be expected not to break his promises blatantly or obviously. In the Edwardian age, upper class men and women were often unfaithful to each other. Nobody minded for so long as scandal was avoided. Infidelity was not the issue. Blatant infidelity was.
Shame no longer attaches to lying. It falls upon those who are caught lying. One of the most important public relations tasks of the past was to keep embarassing questions from being asked. The mark of good manners was not to notice the spitoon right next to the carving board.
This kind of hypocrisy is corrosive because it allows people to temporarily believe in things they would never credited in their right minds. Recent political life in common with the theater required the audience to suspend disblief; a convention that was supportable as long as the design margins were so great that the voters were essentially shielded from the worst consequences of their lying politicians. September 11 and then the financial meltdown showed that lies could no longer be kept onstage. While the stage villain remained on the boards, the real villains could go on to loot the public treasury and kill thousands.
Perhaps Barack Obama is perhaps the last gasp of nostalgia; the last hurrah for the Kennedyesque indulgence of electing someone for his charisma and personal beauty. Deep down in their hearts a considerable number of those who voted for Obama knew he would never conduct the health care negotiatons on Cspan or even keep them safe. But there was something hypnotizing about the possibility of magic; something compelling about the prospect of getting something for nothing; something touching in the hope that if you truly, truly believed in hope and change from an associate of Tony Rezko and the Blag, that you would really get it. Tyler Connoly catches the mood:
Do you remember that scene in Peter Pan after Captain Hook has poisoned Tinkerbell? Tinkerbell’s light is fading, and has almost gone out, and Peter turns to the audience and says, “She’s going to die unless we do something. Clap your hands! Clap your hands and say, ‘I believe in fairies!’” It’s wonderful to see all the children in the audience clapping their hands and shouting.
I remember watching Mary Martin playing Peter Pan on television when I was a kid, and thinking that I was really saving Tinkerbell’s life. I believed in fairies with all my heart, and I shouted it at the top of my lungs. “I do believe in fairies!” Miraculously, Tinkerbell heard me and her light came back.
But the President isn’t Peter Pan and Nancy Pelosi isn’t Tinkerbell.
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. . . . and Nancy Pelosi isn’t Tinkerbell
No, Rahm Emanuel is
. . . there was something hypnotizing about the possibility of magic; something compelling about the prospect of getting something for nothing; something touching in the hope that if you truly, truly believed in hope and change . . .
I’m not proposing this, but these words and thoughts almost provide compelling reasons to disenfranchize a whole lot of people.
Almost.
That path would be even stupider than the voting behavior of so many Americans. It would be better if a sufficient, critical mass of American voters turned their BS meters way up and actually paid attention to the readings they got.
That and an enactment of term limits for Congress may start a reversal towards a sober government for an actually free people. But it would only be a start. I will leave it to other posters to offer their portions of the formula for return of good governance.
Foreign leaders are surely aware of Obama’s blatant lies. How can they ever trust the US while he is in office?
And life is not a cartoon. But the current bunch in DC are the best of Disney, Hanna-Barbera, and Looney Tunes.
Has anyone noticed how much vampires have come into vogue in entertainment?
Some years after Buffy put paid to the vampire mystique by showing that a skinny girl could kill them with ease, they are back bigger than ever.
An essay I read a few decades ago contrasted the legends of Ireland with those of Transylvania. It asserted that leprechauns and vampires reflected basically different attitudes of the societies that produced the legends. There was much treachery in the history of Transylvania as compared to that of Ireland. The vampire myth reflected people who were not what they seemed, friends who could become enemies, and that people could be in the thrall of dark forces that sapped their wills.
So now vampires seem to be the most popular myth in the USA. Makes you wonder. Have treachery, lies, and being not what you seem on the surface become an accepted part of our culture? Or if not accepted, at least expected?
The Thrill Is Gone
HopeyChange was always nothing but a poor retread of an imitation of the ghost of Camelot. The press thought that they could climb onboard a gravy train and all have glamorous lives like Pierre Salinger did. To his credit Salinger did make good on his threat to move out of the country when Bush was elected. He also ended up shilling for internet hoaxes that transferred blame from arab despots and psychopaths to US government conspiracies. He still got himself buried in Arlington.
If the Republicans take the house and do it with mostly conservative Republicans then with the House’s power of subpoena it could get real ugly for a lot of pure as driven snow Democrats and their allies, such as ACORN, Holder, SEIU, and a host of others.
However it could be a whole lot worse for the Democrats if they hold onto the house and a large number of people believed they did it through fraud.
You can come back from political defeat eventually, but it is hard to recover from a physical defeat by enraged people who believe they have nothing to lose.
Re: #4 RWE, on vampires
see: http://www.studiobrien.com/writings_on_fantasy/twilight.html
Barack Obama is a lie. Was a lie. and will always be a lie. I saw it right off and never bought into it. other more naive and idealistic fellow countrymen ie young white females and blacks, and the liberal media, were so wee-wee’d up to elect this guy (for historical/guilt reasons) that they actively ignored all the obvious facts. in a way we really don’t need CSPAN transparency, its obvious who he is and what he (and reid/pelosi types) wanna do: fundamentally change America into a Euro-Canadian style weak socialist “state”. the CSPAN transparency trope was a campaign talking point designed to rally the troops and further distance himself from the perceived Bush bunker mentality. what’s sad is that Obama probably believed every one of his naive campaign promises. i guess the white house is for on the job training, whether it should be or not.
I’m not sure the problem will get any better with a Republican elected. It just seems that people expect politicians to lie. They hear what the lips say, but they rely on other sources for truth or confirmation.
But in the end it leaves those people jaded and resentful and corrodes the relationship between a government and its people.
The whole thing goes back to our old friend, the principal-agent problem. Politicians are the voters agents. I think the voters don’t mind the occasional excursion to the trough as long as the politicians fundamentally behave like hirelings of the voters. But when government reaches a certain size, the pols — of both parties — become a law unto themselves. They are free agents and often sell themselves to the highest bidder. Sometimes that bidder may not even be American.
So some way must be found to reduce the power of politicians so that they become once again beholden to the voter. Then the lies won’t become so casual. This it seems means taking a lot of the government’s toys away from it. Slimming it down. Keeping it on shorter rations.
But how to do this at a time when private sector employment is down and government employement is burgeoning? It’s like the Blob. Growing and eating all before it. Just because the Blob can momentarily take the form of a handsome, tall man before it eats you doesn’t make it any less the Blob.
Legislation by ambush, brought to you by the Kabuki Pelosi makeup artists.
An Election Promise is now almost synonymous with a Lie.
Now and always, worlds without end, amen.
Words have always been cheap, whiskey costs money. Politicians are always rated on what they do, never on what they said. But Obama has never done anything, and yet he got elected, you may say. And, that is the shame. Nobody ever even *looked* at him, Hillary’s entreaties to the contrary. He was clean and articulate, he wasn’t Hillary, and then he wasn’t McCain. And now he’s POTUS, and we’ve got him where we want him, God help us.
Buffy was in many many was the precursor of the Twilight Vampire phenomena. Which is basically female hypergamy gone wild. Girls/Women want the most dominant, physically powerful, handsome male in the group and will share them if they have to (but they don’t like to). See Tiger Woods. The fantasy of vampires is that some chick uses her uber-hotness and specialness to snag him and make him the same dominant, abusive, a-hole that women love, but faithful to HER.
That’s it — a pathetic fantasy equal to that of male nerds enamored of skinny, ass-kicking waifs. Who if they existed, rest assured would chase the Alpha males and exhibit only loathing of the beta males.
It is indeed magical thinking, I know “respectable” and older, White country club Republicans who believe this nonsense too.
George Bush didn’t lie. He ran promising to lower taxes, to try to improve schools by introducing accountability, to assist faith-based organizations with federal dollars, to attempt Social Security reform with a historic promise to “touch the third rail [of American politics],” to bring prescription drug relief to seniors, and to do something about immigration.
He put a lot of effort in all these things, to the point that conservatives were scandalized he actually meant what he said on the last two, and dismayed over how the education effort got derailed away from vouchers into a Ted Kennedy bill (No Child Left Behind).
It is quite ironic that the catch phrase so often associated with him is, “Bush lied,” when in fact he was one of the more reliably truthful pols to come along in a lifetime.
I suppose the lesson of Bush is what honesty gets you in politics. And that’s a shame.
When we accept lies, distortion and misdirection from our own information stream…we cannot expect that the politicians who benefit from the rigged “facts” will feel the need to adhere to integrity, honesty or fidelity to the voters.
Big Journalism (also the name of Andrew Breitbart’s new site) sold out the truth and we all pay the price for that treason to the voters.
The Fourth Estate is a pre-fab shanty built solely to cover for the lies of politicians left of center.
There are no consequences for lying, distortion, broken promises on the left. In fact, it is an engraved invitation to do so.
From the center …rightward…it is a risk that you will be uncovered and excoriated.
So to say that “all politicians lie” is a truism, but to say that the risk is the same for all politicians… is not.
If you have one word only to describe the administration, it is: dishonest.
If you get two words, they are: dishonest and incompetant.
If you get three words, ……
Fantasies occur when wealth allows them and the basic conflict between what people want and what they can get is too great. Women are bound by modern life — they would prefer a dominant, a-hole type of jerk, but modern life produces basically Jim from the “the Office” or the Steve Carrel character. Only a few a-holes get produced in modern, middle class White America.
We are faced with an ugly reality just like women are in the dating world: we cannot have it all. We have lots of tribal based men, who are angry and without women in their lives, willing to kill and die, for basically the promise of sex in the afterlife, not much different I would note …
THAN AVATAR. Think about it. People are spending a billion collectively for a fantasy of sex with a giant blue cat.
These tribal people motivated primarily not by reading the Koran but lack of women in their lives, have access to technology as a commodity and we are paralyzed by our commitment to diveristy/PC/multiculturalist nonsense.
Things are in balance, but eventually things will break down. A broke-down economy, punitive taxes (from Health Care), and terrorism run rampant by a paralyzed PC elite. Fantasy breaks down. There was an account of a girl in Beslan praying for Harry Potter to take her and the others away in his invisible cloak. Sad and pathetic. For those who backed Obama, even worse. They are adults. Though they live as children.
Once the fantasy is seen as a tawdry freakshow, the reaction will be ugly. Both on the fantasists and those who bought it. Consider AVATAR in the light of a successful terror attack killing thousands of Americans. Who will pay to see US Marines killed by savage primitive cats as the triumph of the movie?
But again, we are not as different from Muslim men as we might think. Look at those folks seeing AVATAR — a promise not too different from 72 virgins.
But the President isn’t Peter Pan
Well, there’s a sense in which he is. In one of J.M. Barrie’s sequels to his original novel, he describes Peter Pan as not knowing his parents. The Wikipedia summary of Peter’s character is telling: “Peter is mainly an exaggerated stereotype of a boastful and careless boy. He is quick to point out how great he is, even when such claims are questionable.”
Obama is going to “surge” air marshals, putting them on all US overseas flights. Better late than never.
6 Toad: You can come back from political defeat eventually, but it is hard to recover from a physical defeat by enraged people who believe they have nothing to lose.
Resorting to violence to solve political problems is not in the American character. Even when a pro-abolitionist President was elected, the South tried to solve the intractable political problem of slavery in a free Union by walking away from that Union, and paying for the federal property they seized, and it was only when Lincoln pressed the issue of keeping Fort Sumter that things escalated into the Civil War. Since then not even the conversion of the nation into a socialist workers’ paradise under the New Deal led to armed revolt.
14 Whiskey: Buffy was in many many was the precursor of the Twilight Vampire phenomena. Which is basically female hypergamy gone wild.
Are we reading the same Twilight Saga, Whiskey? If men read all four books and put their precepts into practice, they would have women falling at their feet, because it is an example for men on how to be nice to women…starting with the idea of NOT having sex with them until the third book.
“Recent political life in common with the theater required the audience to suspend disbelief; a convention that was supportable as long as the design margins were so great that the voters were essentially shielded from the worst consequences of their lying politicians.”
There you have it. The great middle of the voting public, busy with their lives and their distractions, not readers of BC or other engaged sources, have been used so long to a comfortable design margin that they could vote for the One simply to make themselves feel good. Even when their BS meters were pegged.
6. toad:
“If the Republicans take the house and do it with mostly conservative Republicans then with the House’s power of subpoena it could get real ugly for a lot of pure as driven snow Democrats and their allies, such as ACORN, Holder, SEIU, and a host of others.”
Not gonna happen so long as the nomenclatura control mass communication in the US.
Seems to me that the electorate spends a great deal of time lying to itself as well. If politicians’ lies flummox the electorate, it may just be the strain of maintaining displacement of their own self-deceptions onto their “leaders”.
This is particularly true of the Left. They live in a world more detached from reality than the most bizarre religious cults of history. Beyond the doctrinaire leftist faithful, the useful idiots, the opportunists and the mindless receivers of that cultural Marxism that we call “popular culture”, a great many other Americans have internalized the media to the point where in their inner lives they see themselves more or less as actors in some sort of “inner” TV mini-series. The individual’s spiritual and emotional life has been corrupted to the point where what is core and true in human existence, the individual expereince of being, is cast asides as a bothersome illusion and illusion has been put in its place.
It is certainly no revelation that politicians lie. This we have known for quite sometime. There was still, however, heretofore some belief in the institutions. As they become corrupted by lies so do the world views of the electorate. Awake conservatives have for some time known that things were other than they appear to be. The question is, how do those not so awake or so armored react when the edifice comes tumbling down, or, more importantly, threatens to come tumbling down? My guess is the self-deception increases. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet, if you ask me. If you think it is loony now, just wait a bit.
It is true that our culture has been corrupted by a lack of shame, but this is a side-effect of broader corruptions. When faith has been rejected and only positivism and economic or political determinism rules, when pure materialism and scientism are the only valid faiths, then little is left but ambition and appetite on one hand, and a mournful and passive acknowledgment of the possibility of a truly human society passing away on the other. Little can avoid cynicism. We have taken but a small portion of the human and called it the whole of the human, and then placed that at the center of the cosmos. That Obama sits in the WH should not really surprise us nor should the blatant lies of his circle.
When one risks one’s very livelihood and reputation by voicing simple truths that would have been held as obvious by even the dullest soul in times past, it is no wonder that the soul is corroded. We are, as I have often said, at the center of a spiritual crisis; it is merely now being expressed politically.
I think it is unwise to imagine that it will unwind in a reasonable and civilized manner, not when this would require not only that half of the population admit that they are wrong, but admit that everything they imagine themselves to be, everything that they imagine that they know and all that they hold dear are grimy self-delusions, and that they willfully sought out these lies, their own weaknesses lashing them further and further on down the path of delusion, decadence and corruption.
I do doubt that most can face this or face it in a manner that well lead to calm and smooth reform.
As to the condition being the same under the GOP, well that depends on who they put up for election. It may be true that they are not quite so bad as the Dems merely because they have less practice, but it seems clear that the only route to reform lies through the GOP at this point; the Democrats have been so thoroughly corrupted in mind, body and soul as to lose contact with reality altogether. It is certainly not true that the GOP is basically the same–all one need do is look at the Obamacare vote. This is where we must start.
The ultimate question is twofold: Are there enough people left that have the will and the drive to move toward real reform, and are do the institutions have enough left in them to stand once the rot is cut away?
I suggest at this point it is impossible to tell. A year from now it will be clearer.
The line from Obama “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” Is the greatest line of B.S. that i ever heard and millions of people took it down Hook, line and sinker
17. dannyfrommiddletown: That last word you were searching for is “stupid”.
If you added another it would be “greedy”.
23 Mongoose: The ultimate question is twofold: Are there enough people left that have the will and the drive to move toward real reform, and are do the institutions have enough left in them to stand once the rot is cut away?
Reform health care in America? We already have a health care system that is the envy of the world. Dictators from Libya to Uganda to Palestine come here to get the latest non-invasive heart surgery. Yes, there is rationing based on the ability to pay, just like everything else has been, is now, and always will be in this world. The only claim Canada or the UK can make is that their rationing is based on a bureaucrat’s determination, allegedly following a procedure, and nothing so crass as money. But that bureaucrat’s salary is paid by the system, and there’s no value added.
20: Terista:
What is your point there? Americans tried the political process, it was perceived as a failure and violence resulted. Revolutionary war, political process was perceived as a failure and thus the Revolutionary war. In 1946 the citizens of Athens Tennessee tried the political process, it failed and a battle started. There has been more than one incidence of violence that occured in the US against the powers that be or criminals that the authorities didn’t respond to. I’d also suggest the Jacksonian culture of the majority of the US populace as defined by Walter Russel Mead is still extant. Given the violence exhibited by SEIU thugs, and a number of leftists groups, violence by the Jacksonian members of the populace is much closer than realized.
If the red eyed rage that arose over the TSA handcuffing Michael Yon because he refused to tell them how much earned a year is any indicator, everybody better hope that the left loses in the mid-terms.
4/RWE. Yes. I have to check the spines of new romances at the library — if it says “Paranormal” I put it back on the shelf. Ick!
My daughter says that part of what bothers her about the surge in vampire lit is nearly all the vampires feel guilty — it is common now to go after roadkill, of all the crazy things. I doubt any of the novelists have ever butchered or hunted in real life. Anyway, DD misses the complexity of a truly evil paranormal character. [And Whiskey, she thought Avatar was awful.]
11/W. For some reason, your blob made me think of the Blancmanges at Wimbledon, but gone evil…
I have seen that people who practice hypocrisy in their daily lives, by lying without shame, then find it easy to lie to themselves, and eventually no longer recognize the truth. Perhaps Batman can shed insight on how Papa Ray and the rest of us could coax them toward an awakening to/awareness of the truth? [Extra credit: why is it that I can tell when people lie to me?]
Lies by politicians we can live with. Obama’s lies seem little different from the lies of politicians before him. What is dangerous about Obama is not lies, but disengagement. With momentous events swirling all about him, President Obama seems blissfully disconnected, like a swimmer off the beach, aware in some dim fashion of the nearby looming landmass, but not a part of it. We have elected a president who is seemingly strangely detached from the events of the world. That seems to me not a good thing.
Alone on the beach with the sky turning gray
The timeless sea murmuring low
I spotted a swimmer a distance away
He seemed to be someone I know
He called me a greeting and waved me a hand
He grinned in an infectious way
And said “Why are you standing alone on the sand
Come into the water and play”
‘Twas Hussein Obama and now very near
He swam with strong strokes in the surf
He shouted “Now let me make perfectly clear
You’re standing on my favorite turf
I love shifting sands they permit me to be
Anything that my people desire
I always allow my positions be free
I never go wire to wire”
He emerged from the surf with a bound up the beach
The sun was just breaking new day
“A whole new world order is just in my reach”
He grinned a grin toothy and gay
“I’ve won in Iraq and in Afghan I’m fine
In Yemen we’re rounding them up
Our Iran position is coming on line
Good fortune is filling my cup”
Then back in the water now sparkling with sun
The breakers all brilliant with foam
I watched as he swam knowing he was The One
And turned and walked slowly back home
dannyfrommiddletown @ 17
“dishonest, incompetent assholes”
I’ve said that about them many times.
wretchard–
Since about last October I’ve been wondering, and saying to people that I wondered, how history would come to view the 2008 election and Obama’s rise from nothing, based on nothing, and how so much of the country and world came to fall in love with a corrupt but otherwise empty suit. I figured I would be dead before enought time passed for historians to get a good bead on that. But, I think your closing paragraphs about the hypnotic power of belief in magic may a very good starting point, and since he and his administration have screwed the pooch much earlier than I expected, maybe I will live long enough to see some real answers.
The political process fails when it fails; that is, when everybody feels that it fails. In a way saying that “the political process has failed” is like those movies when a cage door comes down on the hero and his girlfriend, they shake the bars and say “we’re trapped!”. If it’s true you don’t have to say it. If it’s not true saying it won’t make it so.
The decline of the Democrats in the polls, the falling market share of the MSM, the rise of the Tea Parties, indeed the whole upsurge in political interest argues that the political process is not dead. Indeed it is very much alive. The only thing is that the process is frustrating, limited and slow and possibly capable only of temporary results.
In a way that suggests that much that cannot be accomplished via the political process must be achieved by cultural means. That’s even slower. But the reality is that the Left have been at the business of cultural warfare for decades. It’s not realistic to think it can be reversed in a few months.
In the last 2-4 months I’ve had any number of friends, relatives and colleagues tell me how disappointed they are in Obama and how they wish they had listened to me before the election. I’m sure many BCers have had similar experiences.
The thing is, I live in Chicago, in Hyde Park, in Obama’s old State Senate district, and while I never met him I know any number of the people who got interviewed and quoted by the adoring media in 2007-2008 when they all came to Chicago to do bio pieces. And I was not shy about my doubts and concerns re Obama as President, in Sept-Oct-Nov 2008.
My point is that the “hypnotic magic” that wretchard writes about was stronger in those people than first-hand testimony from someone they knew and (somewhat) respected. They heard me (they now assure me), they did not even try to refute me on the basis of facts or judgement, yet they chose to believe the obvious lies and spin rather than even seriously consider the honest opinion of a friend.
Powerful magic.
If one burns their insurance card and dodges the death panel draft…where does one go, since Canada is not a safe harbor?
Why is it that I can tell when people lie to me?
In my experience, shifty eye contact and body language are the giveaways.
Mongoose #23
“Beyond the doctrinaire leftist faithful, the useful idiots, the opportunists and the mindless receivers of that cultural Marxism that we call “popular culture”, a great many other Americans have internalized the media to the point where in their inner lives they see themselves more or less as actors in some sort of “inner” TV mini-series. The individual’s spiritual and emotional life has been corrupted to the point where what is core and true in human existence, the individual expereince of being, is cast asides as a bothersome illusion and illusion has been put in its place.”
Post-modernism brought to the masses, in a phrase.
PM, once the dabbling of a few in the ivory towers, has suffused into the population at large. Thirty years ago the notion that one’s individual narrative defined the universe existed in probably less than a few thousand people in the U.S. and those only in certain limited venues, and would have been looked upon as lunacy by ordinary, productive citizens. Now it is the predominant meme for millions, perhaps a majority. And yes, Mongoose, you correctly point out that a large component in making that possible has been the vacuum left ‘when faith has been rejected’ and the humility inculcated by religion is missing from such a large chunk of the population.
“I think it is unwise to imagine that it will unwind in a reasonable and civilized manner, not when this would require not only that half of the population admit that they are wrong, but admit that everything they imagine themselves to be, everything that they imagine that they know and all that they hold dear are grimy self-delusions, and that they willfully sought out these lies, their own weaknesses lashing them further and further on down the path of delusion, decadence and corruption. I do doubt that most can face this or face it in a manner that well lead to calm and smooth reform.”
It has often been noted that one of the signature traits of leftists in general and postmodern leftists in particular is the absolute inability to admit error. The reasons for this are threefold.
First, much of the leftist mindset is based on insecurity. As I pointed out on the previous thread, you’re dealing with people who believe in their hearts that “If I read the NYT, or listen to NPR, and go around calling myself a liberal, I automatically get to call myself a highly intelligent being”. Admitting error would mean that there is something more to mental excellence than joining the “club”. That is something that frightens someone who knows, deep down, they haven’t really got “game”.
Secondly, from a logical point of view, the artifice of their worldview is a house of cards based largely upon a few premises which are incorrect. Pull out even one and the artifice crumbles. Therefore, in order to maintain the “beauty” of the house, none of the cards can be permitted to move.
Lastly, mental laziness comes into play. If their cherished premises are not true, and the worldview falls apart, then a great deal of hard mental work must be done in order to rebuild. That is work that they simply lack the energy to do.
Whiskey #18
“Fantasies occur when wealth allows them and the basic conflict between what people want and what they can get is too great.”
You left out a key component to fantasy, Whiskey.
Although fantasy needs both of those factors, it needs a third – perpetual adolescence. The adolescent mindset is particularly prone to substituting fantasy for logic and a real-world action plan (college boys with Che T-shirts, for example). As our society has become expert at prolonging the length of time our youth spend as adolescents instead of limiting this most toxic phase of human development, so too has the population become more prone to fantasy and less so to practicality.
As you are wont to point out, that is likely about to change.
PA Cat @ 19 -
So are you saying the reason that Obama won’t release his birth certificate is because he is a girl?
;>)
Imagine the same world of today with the Republican Candidate having won. Would the GOP really be better off? I don’t think so.
I was much more aligned with McCain’s platform than Obama’s, yet I voted for Obama because I saw in McCain someone who would project the same flailing Bush policies to a world more tired than ever to bear them.
I supported Bush since he first took office, yet I see he had much to do with the seeds of financial destruction. Did he do anything conservative in relation to Social Security or Medicare? Did he crack down on Fannie Mae or chase ACORN into hiding? No, he stuck with the status quo and went with the “charred fields” approach.
GWB’s way of providing an obstacle to BHO was to spend all money possible. Sure he left a donut hole but he spent everything anyone would let him.
The comptroller of the US has been warning for years and years. So far the 11 trillion dollar federal deficit is not but about a tenth of what social security and medicare are overpromising.
If BHO does the same thing with medicare and social security that he has done with medical payments, he deserves credit for being the first do effectively get anything done (assuming that the Democrats prevail in their current efforts on medical care payment model).
Mock BHO all you want, but really he is doing more of the dirty work for you than GWB did.
I think the first thing about regaining the truth is to cut down on the “white lie” and the “extended truth”; to try and to relate things as they literally happened. I sometimes find that my mind has “Hollywoodized” a memory. Arranged the sequence to make it more dramatic. It might be the same thing, but it may sound a little better redacted.
There is often little real gain in the truth as such, but I think it helps in the mental discipline of seeing things and ourselves as we truly appear in the mirror. When we act our age, our weight, our level of competence, without necessarily denigrating ourselves, we regain some level of honesty which we didn’t realize we’d already lost.
This has the virtue of preparing us to face the big one. The small little lies set us up for the big one. The little lies don’t kill us really, but the big one for which it has prepared us, often does.
Lie to Me
Totalitarian government requires the use of Newspeak (clever) lies, which in turn requires doublethink insanity (or the sanity of stupidity) from “the masses;” and in both cases “The Party” comes out on top of the individual.
“His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of Doublethink; to know and not to know; to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies; to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic; to repudiate morality while laying claim to it; to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.” George Orwell- 1984
Even the names of the four ministries by which we are governed exhibits a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts; the ministry of peace concerns its self with war; the ministry of truth with lies; the ministry of love with torture: and the ministry of plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink; for it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.” George Orwell – 1984
Courage is required to speak truth to counter lies of “The Party.” Without courage liberty and prosperity dies. Ultimately cowards become serfs.
The political process fails when it fails; that is, when everybody feels that it fails. In a way saying that “the political process has failed” is like those movies when a cage door comes down on the hero and his girlfriend, they shake the bars and say “we’re trapped!”. If it’s true you don’t have to say it. If it’s not true saying it won’t make it so.
Hmmm. Maybe. I don’t mean to fisk the statement here, wretchard, it would make me feel impolite as a guest, but…I don’t know.
The political process failing…at least the safeguards failing, the checks and balances failing…may do so before the frog feels the heat of the boiling pot. In the Alinsky model, it was all about not allowing the masses to “feel” the change. By the time they woke up, it was already done.
When one wakes up to the situation already in progress, with the needle and the damage done…an excited utterance is not to declare evidence to the world, but to align one’s thoughts with the reality…to eliminate suspended disbelief. To shake oneself back into the harsh fact that something terrible is afoot.
The decline of the Democrats in the polls, the falling market share of the MSM, the rise of the Tea Parties, indeed the whole upsurge in political interest argues that the political process is not dead. Indeed it is very much alive. The only thing is that the process is frustrating, limited and slow and possibly capable only of temporary results.
Again, not to be impolite…the process may be “alive”, but it has a disease so horrific, potentially fatal. “Very much alive” is, I suppose true of someone in a coma. But the level of “life” is not optimal…or what one would call true “living”.
Our information stream is diseased. Big Journalism is an enemy within. We cannot even get basic facts upon which to self-govern this land of ours. Without that, we aren’t voting…we’re guessing. The “process” such as it is…is a sham. That’s a living death. And the “awakenings” are short and fleeting.
In a way that suggests that much that cannot be accomplished via the political process must be achieved by cultural means. That’s even slower. But the reality is that the Left have been at the business of cultural warfare for decades. It’s not realistic to think it can be reversed in a few months.
It may never be reversed if we don’t address the seminal issues. If we continue to treat the symptoms instead of the disease. We can’t self-govern this land of ours based upon a pack of lies. First, we need the game to stop being rigged. If we don’t do that, we will never truly be free.
Craigicus -
How precisely does one chase a group like ACORN “into hiding” without shredding the Constitution?
Prosecute them for crimes and fraud, yes; report on their abuses and agenda, of course; but your prescription sounds a bit fascist to me (and I’m certainly no fan of ACORN).
Also, W did, in fact, attempt to do something about Fannie Mae. It was fear of Dems accusing him of racism and the knowledge that their great ally of the MSM would probably make it stick that deterred him from pressing any harder than he did. If you want to make the argument that he should have said “damn the torpedoes” and pushed on regardless of the results to himself, that’s a valid criticism, but you can’t say he made no effort.
I would also point out that ‘effectively getting anything done’ doesn’t necessarily mean something good.
Craigicus @ 37
“If BHO does the same thing with medicare and social security that he has done with medical payments, he deserves credit for being the first do effectively get anything done (assuming that the Democrats prevail in their current efforts on medical care payment model).”
That was a joke – right?
If not lets run through the three Ps.
Principle – I am against slavery. The “model” creates slaves of both givers and receivers of medical care.
Practical – It will bankrupt us and give VA quality service at best.
Personal – I do not want to be a beggar or a thief. That is the end result of the “model.”
OH! I get it now. You are trying to demonstrate W’s premise that some folks want to be lied to. Great example.
Mongoose/23: “If politicians’ lies flummox the electorate…”
“The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.” George Orwell – 1984
When Jimmy Carter was running for President the first time I was shocked to hear that most of my relatives and friends in SC said they were going to vote for him.
I would ask them, “Do you agree when he says he will do this and this and this and this?”
Their response was universal and even more shocking, “Oh, we don’t agree with any of that! He is just saying that to get elected. He is going to turn out to be very conservative, just you see.”
I saw a lot of hope and optimism in the country when Carter was elected, but 6 months later I pointed out to the Carter voters that he had done all those things he had said he would. The response was as universal as their first reaction, “That SOB! He did all of that stuff! He is no conservative! How can you expect a politician to keep his promises? You can’t trust those guys!”
Obviously, my friends and relatives were operating in a state of delusion that was rare; it did not even require the politician to lie to them. They lied to themselves for the politicians. The good news is that they pulled out of it, fast.
But most Obama voters, upon being polled after voting, did not even know which party was in control of Congress. Most probably don’t even know that Obama is not keeping his promises. They are not only capable of lying to themselves; they are incapable of recognizing the truth.
Bismark said:
“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
toad,
the TSA handcuffing Michael Yon
This is the third thread on which this false story has cropped up. Yon was not questioned and arrested by TSA but by CBP. Can Customs as part of their authority to conduct warrantless searches of everything that crosses the border ask you about your business? The answer is yes. If we are supposed to do anything here, especially on this thread, it should be to encourage accuracy and refute the mimetic panic that leads to poor choices and disastrous policies. The conduct of the officers he dealt with at Sea-Tac may have been brusque or ineffective but we should share good advice on how to conduct yourself when dealing with LEOs whether from CBP or IRS or the local PD.
Marty,
Given how small Hyde Park-Kenwood is it struck me as significant that I knew the man who hired Obama (Geoffrey Stone) and the man who hired his wife (John Boyer) but never met the man himself. They were hiding him, even most of the faculty at the Law School had no contact with him. Three days ago Parcbench claimed that Michelle Obama was ordered to surrender her law license due to “extortion.”
Mongoose/23: “This is particularly true of the Left. They live in a world more detached from reality than the most bizarre religious cults of history.”
“Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… If human equality is to be forever averted; if the “high,” as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently; then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.” George Orwell – 1984
The meme that Bush lied was as vicious as it was untrue. Thank our liberal media.
Obama’s ‘gift’ is that he can convince two people of diametrically opposed views that he agrees with each of them. If you listen closely there are code words and slide arrounds and he has a sell-by-date on what he says. Friends of no further use go under the bus. Still the liberal elites and media fawn over and protect him.
The ordinary people who have to pay the taxes and take the casualties of his debauched security look like they are starting to shake off the effects of the coolaid.
Langley @42
Please elucidate on your assertions of slavery. As someone who has been indentured to the private health care system how is the proposed privi-public system any worse in the sense of being owned by “the man”?
The deeper question addressed here is whether the voters just like to be lied to.
In partial response, I would like to focus on the depraved media. A campaign or so ago, a reporter claimed that the media could swing the vote 15 points, 15%. That seemed like a lot, but he made a good point. If the media is as monolithic and biased as ours, even smart voters have trouble making sense out of things. Clearly the New York Times will not only distort, but it will make a story disappear or never exist. The New York Times avoided the Van Jones scandal for weeks until he resigned. Readers of the NYT, had no clue this was a story at all. Climategate went on for weeks and was ignored by the main stream media. This is enormous mal-practice. This is un-professional. This is a throwback to the old Pravda days where unfortunate people were dodged out of pictures and became un-persons. But this is the main stream media today.
Recently with the rise of alternate internet sources and FOX more complete information has become available. Suddenly there is enormous conflict as the old liberal elite’s consensus is challenged.
I am optimistic. I think the sun will shine in and we will all be better for it. No more 15%.
But am I realistic? We shall see.
OK, go ahead and blame me. It is Wisconsin, Spring of 2008. Wisconsin has an open primary. The Republican Party has pretty much decided on John McCain, especially after Mitt Romney drops out in the name of unity behind the war effort. There is an opportunity to cast a “meaningful” if not pivotal vote between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Even if one was going to vote Republican in the general election, it still mattered very much who was the Democratic Party candidate. After 8 years of the war in Iraq, even Republicans were soured on George W Bush, or maybe even especially Republicans or perhaps self-styled conservatives were going on and on on right-wing blogs about how terrible the Bush years were — No Child Left Behind, Medicare Prescription Drugs, the putative immigration reform, an so on. Even before the banking system almost collapsed, one got a sense that the Democrat getting to be President was a high probability.
Question was, which of Senator Clinton or Senator Obama was the least-bad for the country since you were going to end up with one or the other anyway.
One response that swayed me to Senator Clinton was when Senator Obama was going on and on about meeting with the most odious dictators “with no preconditions”, a campaign promise that has been fulfilled in spirit if not yet in deed, Senator Clinton burst out in a debate with “You don’t agree to meet with someone without getting something up front in return.”
Both Clinton and Obama were lawyers, but something told me that if I was in a real bind and needed a real lawyer, that Hillary Clinton would be a street-smart fighter in my corner and Barack Obama would be some head-in-the-clouds smarty-pants high-credentuled attorney who would give away the store. Hillary Clinton seemed like a “real lawyer”, the kind of person who studied for the bar exam from a correspondence course and learned how the law really works at the elbow of an experienced uncle. Barack Obama seemed like the kind of lawyer from Harvard who would charge too much and then lose the case/wreck the deal/mess up the contract.
“You don’t agree to meet with someone without getting something up front in return” was not just a difference in opinion about foreign relations, it was her “inner lawyer” talking. You don’t just waltz into a settlement meeting without having gotten concessions before setting foot in the room. You don’t get voted in as President and act like a dumb mark waiting to be had.
Maybe Hillary Clinton is the lawyer you would hire if your back was against the wall, but what is that saying about criminals and criminal defense attorneys? I mean talk about ethical issues. And Bill. And that cackle. And that Ur-feminist self-pity.
Go ahead, blame me for the outcome of the Wisconsin primary. I didn’t have any illusions about Mr. Obama. His main attribute was that the country was war weary and was going to elect a Democrat, and Mr. Obama was not Hillary Clinton, but I had reservations — maybe Ms. Clinton was much more street-smart, or maybe that was just P.R.? But that was the choice at hand.
Lifeofthemind:
Are you seriously asserting that Yon can’t tell the difference betwen TSA and CBP? Or that CBP has any power of arrest over returning US citizens barring possession of contraband?
How do we solve the problem of politicians pursuing their own interests instead ours? Go back to the beginning- our representatives were not professional politicians (whores says I) they only met for short periods to do the people’s business. Additionally, the federal government should only be responsible for those items specifically enumerated. If you gave your teenager a credit card just for emergencies and he/she violated the agreement, would you take it away or raise the spending limit?
George Son: @ 49
1 – You are not indentured unless you sell yourself.
2 – The original Bill or Rights described the negative rights given to us by our creator – freedom FROM force. These describe our natural state of liberty.
3 – Positive rights make slaves in that if you have a right to something (i.e., “Health Care”), that something must be provided. Whoever has to provide that thing is a slave.
(Hillary tried to make me a slave in 1993)
4 – Canada did this by making it illegal to purchase medical treatment outside of its government monopoly. The slaves fled the country.
“The New York Times will not only distort, but it will make a story disappear or never exist… This is a throwback to the old Pravda days where unfortunate people were dodged out of pictures and became un-persons.”
“Who controls the past (Pravda,Izvestia,NBC,CBS,ABC,CNN) controls the future; Who controls the present (The Inner Party) controls the past.” George Orwell – 1984
When government controls mass media (the present), it controls the past and therefore the future; and thereby government controls our destiny – not we ourselves. We are inching toward totalitarianism and it will continue as long as there are enough Americans brainwashed in the sanity of stupidity, or intelligently insane with doublethink.
BTW, what is totalitarianism? It is when the law becomes so complex as to mean everything or nothing at pleasure, i.e.: in effect when there is no law – when law is arbitrary and in the hands of an elite minority, i.e.: when one has a government of men, not a government of law.
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.” Thomas Jefferson
“The very definition of a republic is “an empire of laws, and not of men”… a single assembly, possessed of all the powers of government, would make arbitrary laws for their own interest, execute all laws arbitrarily for their own interest, and adjudge all controversies in their own favor.” John Adams
http://www.liberty1.org/thoughts.htm
Bohemond,
You would have to ask Yon if he can’t tell the difference. He initially put out the wrong story on his Facebook page and Twitter feed and corrected it later. It always struck me as a bad idea to put TSA in uniforms that look like CBP uniforms and issue them badges and change their job title to “Officer.” TSA are not LEOs. That change was a pure political ego sop to the Screener constituency. Some years ago in NYC the Traffic Enforcement Agents were changed from an old State Trooper type khaki uniform to what looks like a police blue uniform. They claimed that in the old uniform they were called “Brownies” and that was raaaacist. It surprises me that we have not had hundreds of stories of TSA personnel getting arrested for flashing their badges.
CBP are real LEOs and they enforce hundreds of laws. The fact is that until they release you they can conduct a warrantless search of almost everything. You are at either the border or “the functional equivalent of the border” so you are not in America until after you clear CBP. Once citizenship is established they will admit you but they can arrest or detain you. If you have any outstanding warrants, for example for unpaid child support of for 8 forgotten parking tickets or, I am just playing here, that library book from 1964, you can be detained until they hear if the issuing jurisdiction wants to bother to pick you up.
The officers at Sea-Tac may have acted improperly. They certainly did not act with enough skill to get cooperation without resorting to coercion. They probably should have called for a nice Supervisor or Public Affairs Officer to talk to Mr Yon but is it possible to think of a scenario in which they might legitimately ask what your income in your stated job that takes you overseas is? Yes there is and can failure to cooperate get you handcuffed? Yes it can. If you want to learn more ask them first. Be honest say you have a problem and may want to write a letter of complaint after and ask them to be sure you have their names and badge numbers but don’t say “No” unless you have a lawyer advising you.
When I read it I wondered if they had gotten Yon to mention the off the beaten path places he has visited around the world. I bet the Agriculture people would be very interested in his shoes.
W @11
How? Show them who’s boss. Obey the law. File your income tax return as required on 15 April. In hard copy. By certified mail return receipt requested.
I dont think the IRS is equipped to deal with an increase of 20% in hard copy returns. Most of what they get now is electronic filing; into the computer untouched by human hands.
Obey but disrupt.
Tonite’s Movie goes (like ham with eggs), with this thread.
Please watch it and the short trailer that comes directly after it.
You won’t regret it.
They Stole Our Future, But They Cannot Break Our Will
Papa Ray
wretchard said @ 9:
It has become painfully obvious that the current GoP leadership (and I use the term loosely) has made a deal either officially or unofficially to become the party of the 2nd tier. They have made their deal with Cthulhu to be eaten 2nd to last. So, no, it will not get any better.
Talk about synchronicity. I was reading Brussels Journal and the latest from Takuan Seiyo.
From Meccania to Atlantis – Part 13 (2): Harpo, Gekko, Barko, Sarko
Money quote:
Listening to the pure condescension of Gibbs to the pet media shows how little the new masters regard their serfs.
And then the time for truth:
Langley@54
The old canard of negative rights….
“Positive rights make slaves…”
Right to liberty therefore creates slaves?
60. George Son:
Rubbish!
You really do not understand the difference between negetive and positive rights do you?
Liberty is a natural state. It is not a product or service provided by another.
You are born with the right to not be prevented from speaking (negetive right).
You are NOT born with the right to a megaphone (positive “right” or entitelment given by someone or thing).
My liberty imposes no burden on anyone but myself.
Who lied to you about this? Did you like it?
Read something.
Teresita — No, the Twilight series like Buffy is an extended treatise on Female Hypergamy unrestrained by custom, culture, and critically, parents-relatives. [None of the girls is from an intact nuclear family with relatives including aunts and uncles who would disapprove of stupid bad-boy chasing.] The male vampires in both series are moody, friendless, intimidating, treat the girl like dirt (particularly initially). Both Edward Cullen and Angel (to a lesser extent Spike) are cited by Pick Up Artists for “demonstrating higher value” i.e. suggesting that the girl would be lucky if they even glanced her way. All the vampires kill people, are older than the boyish peers around the girls, and so on.
The scene in which the girl, Bella, describes the boyish, immature, gawky male adolescents around her, paying her attention (which she hates because she loathes them) and the instant sexual attraction she has to the moody and dangerous, “older” boy vampire is straight out of female hypergamy (i.e. desire for a man of higher status and power) 101.
Men HAVE read them, extensively, mostly Pick Up Artists. The books are cited frequently by them on how to basically resemble a bad-boy moody A-hole.
Women can have bad boys, or they can have faithful boyfriends/husbands. They cannot have both in the same package, men just are not built that way. The fantasy is that women can have two irreconcilable and mutually exclusive qualities in their men.
[Women generally do not like "nice" men: Women divorcing husband for being "too Nice" ala cooking and telling her that he loves her here.]
Men believe that being “nice” or decent (what women say they want, as opposed to what they do) will appeal to women, when in reality women don’t care one way or the other about character or decency or faithfulness. What women want is hard to acquire, particularly for most men for whom being an a-hole is difficult and achieving high status in a very complex, hierarchical society penalizing (in particular ordinary men) who try to achieve it. Men don’t like to accept that being successful with women boils down to being the most dominant and intimidating man in the room, and nothing more (or less). So the fantasy.
In private life, so in public life. The same fantasies: massive government expansion without crushing taxes. Safety and government everywhere and growth not horrible stagnation. Pretending real hard Jihad is not real because then we have to profile, intimidate, and make poor (to the point of starvation) most of the world’s Muslims. The fantasy that the globalization that brings us cheap sneakers and laptops does not also bring Jihadis enabled by cheap commodity technology with the ability to kill great masses of us at our doorsteps.
The fantasy exists because it is too easy to ignore reality. Like the “herbivore men” in Japan who have basically opted-out of society, or those “marrying” “2-D” anime characters because they lack the means and the will to make themselves into dominant A-holes that women will like.
No Mo Uro You are quite right. Perpetual adolescence and avoidance of responsibility are a huge part of it. Instead of the willingness to accept limits and the hard work needed to achieve success with serious limits and constraints, and the choices required along the way.
It’s the perfect storm of women having the vote, and the news media business model being soap opera women, a minority of women (40%) but a big one.
#20 Teresita: I’ve come late to the party, but I completely agree with your comment re Twilight. Whiskey can be amusing, but his theories are morphing into a Blob, suffocating reality that lies at the core of his thinking.
“14 Whiskey: Buffy was in many ways the precursor of the Twilight Vampire phenomena. Which is basically female hypergamy gone wild.
Are we reading the same Twilight Saga, Whiskey? If men read all four books and put their precepts into practice, they would have women falling at their feet, because it is an example for men on how to be nice to women…starting with the idea of NOT having sex with them until the third book.”
And, by the way, the very first Dracula character, of 1819, was based on the very sexy beautiful, bad, Byron. Not that that has anything to do with either Twilight or even the Blob…
Langley@61
I’ve read enough, thank you, to know it’s an idea on very shaky ground, a false dichotomy if you will.
Read even the positive poster boy Locke closely:
“to be at liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others”. Aha! But don’t get over-excited. He then proceeds to add that liberty should not be conflated or confused with “license”: “ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices” (Second Treatise)
Even if Locke is not your thing, he is illustrative of the point that scholars such as MaCCallum make (something I read besides t.v. guide, you will be happy to know): you cannot even divide theorists into negative and positive camps.
65. George Son:
You have used the fallacy of Argument to Authority.
You have also quoted Locke in a non-sequitur to my position.
You HAVE NOT said why my points are wrong – only that they are wrong.
This suggests that you can not refute them.
W – I apologize for taking up space in your blog.
The first national convention for Tea Party will be next month in Nashville, TN.
While lies will no doubt be told, inconvienient truths will likely carry the day.
Teresita and heathermc: having not read the Twilight books, I can’t speak for their content, nor how the books relate to whiskey’s theory. However, his observations about what modern women want are accurate in my experience. I am an unmarried female soldier in my late twenties and completely agree with whiskey’s comment:
Women are bound by modern life — they would prefer a dominant, a-hole type of jerk, but modern life produces basically Jim from the “the Office” or the Steve Carrel character. Only a few a-holes get produced in modern, middle class White America.
In my own life, I sometimes find myself resenting the fact that there are men out there in America, living their safe little lives while I am out here in Afghanistan in their place. The men described above are, in my experience, the kind of feminized man-boys that make up the majority of the dating pool. I suppose that’s why women will always fantasize about firefighters, special forces-types, and vampires. There don’t seem to be a lot of alpha males out there these days.
Robinsolana wrote:
“Obama’s ‘gift’ is that he can convince two people of diametrically opposed views that he agrees with each of them.”
I would refer you to the character Ellsworth Toohey in Rand’s Fountainhead.
Truly one of the most evil characters in the history of literature, one of his signature evil traits was the ability to argue both sides of a debate equally well without regard to morality or what was right or wrong.
We now have the Ellsworth Toohey president.
Teresita and HeatherC-
You can argue the details and defend your pet books all you want. The phenomenon of wanting “the guy with the bad-boy looks and words with the ‘heart of gold’ but no bad boy behavior towards me” is the defining feature of the lives of the bulk of young women today, particularly urban women.
I can’t remember the product, but a year or two ago there was actually a women’s magazine ad running in several monthly publications whose tag line was precisely “Like getting the bad boy looks without the bad boy behavior” picturing a beaming young urban slut in a tony apartment with her scruffy, smelly looking, unshaven hoodlum “catch”. A similar ad ran on the various cable ovary networks. I’m sure a quick search could turn it up.
Deny it if you feel the need, but this phenomenon Whiskey describes is real and widespread.
getting the bad boy looks without the bad boy behavior
Sarah Palin might advise, although she apparently couldn’t teach the “how to” to Bristol.
Well of course they all lie. And why shouldn’t they. They’re all but guaranteed reelection despite what they may say or do. And even should they lose an election there will be a lucrative position as a lobbyist; analyst for the MSM; or with some university waiting for them.
So long as they don’t try to do something truly obscene such as limiting access to sporting events or banning reality TV they are safe to do virtually anything they want. And none of this will change until a few of these gentle people are dragged from their comfortable offices and attached to very tall lamppost with some very short rope.
My father told me five decades ago that we as a people tend to get the kind of government that we deserve. And to quote Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
“Negative rights” is Orwellian (Marxist) newspeak for natural, God-given, unalienable, individual human rights – rights which do not come from government – rights which are the prime mandate for government to secure.
“Positive rights” is Orwellian (Marxist) newspeak for reversible government-derived privileges – often based on class designation rather than for the individual.
We should stop using the terminology of Marxists at Belmont Club; except to expose it as tyranny.
“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s.” John Locke
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111locke1.html
“Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.” Samuel Adams
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/print_documents/amendIXs3.html
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm
We were fooled once again and we will continue to be fooled if we accept that the changes we want will come from our leadership. They will not. Our leaders are, and have always been driven by self-serving motives and have learned to spin their plans to look like they do what they do for us. Real and lasting change can only come from the people as we demand that our representatives be honest and values-driven. When the followers begin to lead, the leaders will begin to follow.
The Value of Values
http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/thevalueofvalues.html
An individual’s values are established in childhood and serve as filters when determining right from wrong throughout the person’s life. In today’s society, the process of establishing values within children is given little concern. People place greater emphasis on day to day activities and personal ambitions, than they do on the establishment of values within their children. By default, parents are teaching their children that values such as integrity, respect for life, courage of conviction, a purposeful life and generosity, are secondary to making a living.
In truth, it does not have to be this way. It is a matter of choice.
The “The Value of Values” teaches us why a values-conscious society is important. You will learn the actions that are needed. You will learn how to sustain the drive.
“The Value of Values” is a must read for every parent concerned about the direction of our society and the challenges our children will be facing.
Ed states: “we have three possible choices”.
1) “Do nothing different than that which we have been doing. Complacently accept things as they are and will be.”
2) “Hope that our leaders will guide society in the proper direction despite the fact that they place values second to ambitions.”
3) “Accept our personal responsibility to our children. Accept that real change is not passed down from leaders, but rather, it is driven up from the people. Accept the fact that we each have within us the ability to make things different for generations to come.”
“The choice we make today will determine the society of tomorrow.”
“read my lips – no more taxes! “
E2: I suppose that’s why women will always fantasize about firefighters, special forces-types, and vampires. There don’t seem to be a lot of alpha males out there these days.
Vampires are about as far away from the blue-collar, first-responder “alpha male” as you can get. They have the unhealthy complexion of a man who spends all his time indoors. They wear the emo black clothing, black eyeliner, and black lipstick of shoe-gazing “mope” rockers. The ultimate urban metrosexual, they specialize in the verbal seduction of both sexes in order to gain access to the blood on which they feed.
Teresita: My point was that women are attracted to men with power, whether it’s the power to take life (special forces types, vampires), save it (firefighters, doctors), or significantly influence it (politicians, CEO’s). Vampires, regardless of how current popular culture chooses to portray them, are powerful beings.
The vampire meme is just thinly disguised sexual s/m fantasy – the mysterious, intense looking man who will look deep into the eyes of the willing young maiden, flatter her with her importance, and then change her life forever by penetrating her flesh violently – I mean, think about it. I’m just shooting from the hip here, but I suspect you’ll find the vampire genre is far more popular among gay men than among straights for the same reason.
There’s a reason teen girls love this stuff – it’s a great way to hide from themselves what they’re really thinking about. And once it’s outed as just a bizarre sexual fantasy, then all the rest of the imagery follows. And I’m not trying to be tacky, really I’m not, but the feeling that the price of sex is the effusion of blood is built into every woman’s physiology. That’s one of those things that “nice people” never talk about, but it still slips into our psychology and into our popular literature. Since it can’t be talked about openly, it has to disguised in fantasy.
Btw, even Buffy who represented “grrrl power!!” eventually succumbed to the charms of the most beautiful of the Vampires, Angel. Although at least Joss Whedon kept them as rough equals, which was quite an innovation in the vampire genre.
Mongoose #23: Bravo! Very well said.
And on the subject of voting our way out of this mess, has everyone seen this http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/what_the_dems_know_universal_v.html? I was amazed to see the picture of Clinton signing the Motor Voter Act with Cloward and Piven standing right behind him. Guess this photo should be checked for authenticity; hard to believe they would be so brazen about it.
#29 Walt spoke truth.
What is dangerous about Obama is not lies, but disengagement.
That is why the populace tolerated Billy Jeff Clinton, and found him ‘charming, likable’ (at the time). Not until we found out what the consequences of Bill’s disengagement cost us.
What is truly dangerous about Obama’s disengagement is the current populace, not only not learn the lesseon and let him get away with it, but in a sense crave for more outrageous fantasies.
Craigicus:
Thanks, fool, for helping to put Obama over the top. I know many people like you, who are not natural constituents for the likes of Obama, but who voted for him for what they thought were very narrow “pragmatic” or “philosophycal” reasons that turned out to be shallow and bogus. Your decision process is a perfect example of what I mentioned above as not paying attention to your instinctive BS meter. I’m sure that you, like my other friends who voted for Obama, are a good and intelligent person, but, frankly, you are a perfect illusration of the phenomenon Wretchard is talking about in this blog post.
George Son:
I believe “Positive Rights” are insidious nonsense in the context of real human freedom.
I don’t know the bulk of women anywhere so am unable to comment on what they prefer in a mate. But I do know that responsible, manly, loving, independent, competent, righteous, decent men can be found in America. It does require that those seeking them look for them where they are most likely to be found however. Bars and high-rise office buildings may not be the best places to look. I have never attended a political convention but suspect it may be possible to find such men at these events though it may take considerable time and effort.
Don Rodrigo,
“Positive Rights” are insidious nonsense
There is one caveat on your position that I would consider. There is a distinction between the political and the familial in human affairs that sometimes becomes indistinct. Within the family unit there are positive rights. A child has a positive right to the support of their parents. The problem becomes one of where to draw the boundary. All meaningful problems in science are boundary problems. A 6 year old has a positive right. Does an 18 year old or a 30 year old? The point is simply that the line is 1. arbitrary and 2. cultural. Also does the definition of family extend to nephews and aunts, cousins or 2nd cousins? In a tribal culture the boundary gets pushed out very far and in contemporary culture there may not even be an intact nuclear family to rely on.
To be blogged under the title “Positive Rights.”
Langley @66
Not worth debating with an ideologue who has swallowed without water the libertarian handbook.
You have no proof that liberty is a natural state. No one can prove that.
And I gave you an example of how even the most positivist thinker could be seen to be in error.
No offense, but Locke has a little more intellectual heft that you.
by Martin L. Gore http://www.depechemode.com/lyrics/lietome.html
Come on and lay with me
Come on and lie to me
Tell me you love me
Say I’m the only one
Experiences have a lasting impression
But words once spoken
Don’t mean a lot now
Belief is the way
The way of the innocent
And when I say innocent
I should say naive
So lie to me
But do it with sincerity
Make me listen
Just for a minute
Make me think
There’s some truth in it
Promises made for convenience
Aren’t necessarily
What we need
Truth is a word
That’s lost its meaning
The truth has become
Merely half-truth
So lie to me
Like they do it in the factory
Make me think
That at the end of the day
Some great reward
Will be coming my way
“Positive Rights” is Orwellian newspeak for reversible government-derived “rights” – and should therefore be called government-derived privileges.
“Negative Rights” is Orwellian newspeak for irreversible (unalienable) God-given rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness (private property honestly earned through labor).
Even within a family the child has an unalienable right to life (which trumps the mother’s right to privacy); however the child’s rights to liberty and property are rightly managed by the parents. Government however is not our parent (Paternal government is tyranny – Monarchy, Fascism, Marxism, Islamism, etc.) and has no authority to abridge our equal individual rights to life, liberty and property – except to defend the life, liberty and property of others.
Federal Government does have a right to tax our labor, but I believe it should not exceed 10% since, as Jesus said, “render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar, and render unto God that which is God’s.” The individual has a God-given natural, unalienable right to keep 80% of the fruits of his/her labor – with 10% for State government, State roads, charity, social programs, health, and education (to be administered by the States with private opt-outs as per the tenth amendment) and with 10% for Federal Government (for the innumerated powers such as national defense, post office, post roads, etc). If every person realized he/she could keep 80% of their labor (80% of their self – self ownership) there would be little need for social programs. Creative human labor is the best of all social programs – including providing for one’s own healthcare and retirement.
regarding “positive rights” and their relation to the family: Recall that in the family context, a grant of positive rights to one (for example a child) is balanced by the grant of authority to the one who will be obligated. The child has assurances of support, but the parent has complete authority to dictate where the child stays, who the child sees, and what tasks the child will perform. (ie, going to school) This is also true with extended family – the poor relations who require assistance must give deference and respect to those who support them, even in primitive cultures.
You can make the same analogy to employment situations: the right to be paid a salary comes with the obligation to perform services which one may not voluntarily choose, the nature of both rights and obligations to be determined by contract.
Therefore, in a family and cultural setting, the one who is granted positive rights is always required to accept some condition of servitude as the price of those rights, and the one who is obligated is granted authority as compensation.
That is the only context in which positive rights have even been acceptable over the long term in any family or cultural setting. Failing that they simply become involuntary servitude and break down when those who are obligated simply quit providing, aka go “john galt”.
George Son/85: “You have no proof that liberty is a natural state.”
Human liberty doesn’t require “proof;” it is a self-evident truth as per John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. Monarchy, Fascism and Marxism all depend on the idea that the individual does not have self-evident natural, God-given rights to life, liberty and private property – they all operate on the premise that Statist Government possesses those rights – not the individual.
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation… that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual… The day of individual happiness has passed.” Adolph Hitler
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
Whiskey wrote: Men don’t like to accept that being successful with women boils down to being the most dominant and intimidating man in the room, and nothing more (or less). So the fantasy.
Whiskey, you’ve been on this kick for some time; but with all due respect, I think you need to tone it down somewhat. If reality actually worked the way you describe, then the world would be something very different than what it is. All human life, human history, human societies, would be quite other than what we know them to be. The world as it is given to us refutes your thesis.
While what you say may have some application amongst some particularly immature and malformed subsets of the population, these subsets are exactly what they appear to be – abberations. As Aristotle said, if we wish to understand the nature of a being we must study specimens that have retained their nature, not those that are degraded. A great many people still live in the world of reality, are guided by universal norms, and eschew sexual perversity. The precepts of the natural law, imprinted on the human heart and nearly universally expressed across time and culture, have not been abbrogated simply because the late twentieth century decided to take a plunge into the abyss. Therefore, if you are asserting that the sexual mores of men and women invaribly skew toward brutality, then your worldview is no less a fantasy than the fantasies you ascribe to others, and is probably derived from the same sources.
Those sources are, firstly, a good strong residue of poorly assimilated Darwinism and evolutionary psychology, both of which are wrong and ridiculous; secondly, an implicit materialism which denies the primacy of any supervenient spiritual principles; and thirdly, a chronic exposure to the very same hedonistic impulses which inform the subcultures you deride. In theological terms, this is nothing but idolatry and unbelief.
A man cannot think as you do, day after day, and retain any sense of charity toward his fellow creatures; nor can he attain that sense of hope and clarity of vision which alone are capable of grappling with our societal problems. Reading through your comments, what is there for anyone to hope for? What positive remedy do you offer? Nothing, perhaps, save the prospect of some grim coalition of beta-males vs. peacocks. You have accepted Nietzsche’s distinction between slave-morals and hero-morals and, in an impressive feat of existentialist rebound, decided to champion the slave – a double error. When you fight with monsters you must take care not to become a monster; and when you look long into the abyss, the abyss looks also into thee.
You give your enemy too much credit, sir. You are too willing to accede his terms and definitions. You have practically handed him the victory. The ultimate answer to both the perversities of our culture and the morbidity of your own mindset is the recognition that they are both fantasies, that life doesn’t work that way. They are power fantasies, yes; they will not go away on their own, but must be fought and exterminated. But in the end, reality is our friend not our prison.
Storm-Rider, you said “Federal Government does have a right to tax our labor…” I respectfully disagree in principle. The Federal Government has a right to expect those receiving services provided by the government be paid for by the citizen. The perversion of this principle is the government expecting the citizen to pay for services rendered to others by claiming they benefit indirectly by another’s happiness. A simple case in point: I once worked bagging groceries where a woman tried to buy dog food with food stamps. When the clerk pointed out food stamps could not be used for luxury items, she sent her daughter back to buy the dog steak for his supper. True story, and I’m sure it is even more prevalent today. How do I, as a taxpayer, benefit from that lady’s dog eating on my dime? Answer, I do not but I still bear the burden of her choice- without my having a choice.
This is the result of taking charity out of the individual’s control and plcing it in the Federal Government’s control. What one may see as a choice, another insists is a right. Just like health care. How many people who “can’t afford health insurance,” truly can not as opposed to those who can’t- after they have purchased a big screen TV, an SUV and a vacation to Hawaii? The current system takes away personal responsibility and substitutes instant gratification.
“Words have meaning” such as “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, “there is no abortion funding in my bill”, “I will not raise taxes for those making less than $250,000/year”, “mission accomplished”, “I will not sign any bill that increases the deficit”, “isolated extremist” and NO ACCOUNTABILITY. It seems as though we are fed more lies daily by politicians and the media than truths. It will continue and get worse until they are held accountable for their words and actions. We invite and allow their lies and subterfuge with our passive detachment.
SpeakEasy/91,
I agree with you. Notice that I said Federal Government has a right to tax us only for support of those Federal powers innumerated by the Constitution – national defense, post office, post roads, etc. Federal taxation for social programs (Education, Social Security, Food Stamps, Medicare, Fannie, Freddie, etc.) are not authorized by the Constitution – and by the tenth amendment must go to the states with opt-outs (tax-breaks) for individuals.
90/Matt. Thank you.
38/w. Interesting bit about the warping of memories. My daughter and I have photographic memories. Makes self-deception difficult. We can file a memory in a less often reviewed folder, but it’s always there and nearly impossible to distort.
And you are, of course, spot on about the additive nature of telling lies. Shame *should* restrain such behavior, but we learn through observation and experience. There seems to be a mechanism whereby a person grants himself permission to tell the first few white lies and soon dispenses even with that small gate. My guess is that seeing a role model/parent/friend/teacher succeed in lying begins the downward cycle. Validation…
My daughter is very upset because friend A’s friend B is in a coma and is on life support. Friend A was in the hospital room when friend B regained consciousness for a moment. Friend B’s parents do not believe friend A and are going to remove life support this weekend. The teens are mad that B’s parents assumed A was lying. The teens are learning a very hard lesson — they are finding out that they are a small subset, that their practice of being [painfully] honest is not universal.
Storm-Rider, roger that. However, not to nit pick too much and having done an obviously poor job at identifying my exception to your post, it is your verbage I find problematic. I do not think the government has a right to tax our labor. (and 10% for both state and federal seems much too high and somewhat arbitrary). My labor should be considered a natural resource and therefore not taxable. I am okay with paying for services I receive from government on whatever level but our system has been perverted to include things that benefit others, and specifically NOT ME, in the belief I somehow benefit from their well being. In the natural state of man, I do not (necessarily) benefit directly from another’s well being, unless I am dependent on that person. (e.g. if there is only one doctor in town and he is ill, it benefits me to help in any way I can to aid his recovery). We could get into a discussion about the morality of helping others but it would surely suffer a difference of opinion- and that is the key: What someone else values is not necessarily of value to me and I can not be made to value except by force. And who has the authority to force values upon us? I say no one.
There has been much accusation thrown around by the supporters of Obama-care that detractors would happily let people die in the streets. What most are afraid to say for fear of being considered heartless is, Yes, if you value an SUV rather than health insurance and you become sick- why shouldn’t I respect your values (or lack thereof) and allow you to reap what you have sown? Heartless? maybe, but in this country, if you go to an emergency room, you will be treated so it is a disingenuous charge. You might go deep in debt to save your own life? So be it if you chose not to buy insurance instead of the iPhone. You should at least die happy, tweeting away on your decline.
Anyway, I don’t think we disagree much other than symantics. Have a nice day.
How Twilight Works
http://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight
“First off, the author creates a main character which is an empty shell. Her appearance isn’t described in detail; that way, any female can slip into it and easily fantasize about being this person. I read 400 pages of that book and barely had any idea of what the main character looked like; as far as I was concerned she was a giant Lego brick. Appearance aside, her personality is portrayed as insecure, fumbling, and awkward – a combination anyone who ever went through puberty can relate to. By creating this ‘empty shell,’ the character becomes less of a person and more of something a female reader can put on and wear. Because I forgot her name (I think it was Barbara or Brando or something like that), I’m going to refer to her as ‘Pants’ from here on out.”
Read the whole thing.
28. Sylvia:
4/RWE. Yes. I have to check the spines of new romances at the library — if it says “Paranormal” I put it back on the shelf. Ick!
I dabble in writing romance fiction. I tried my hand at paranormal but couldn’t continue once I found that increasingly, the bad guys are today’s heroes. Actual demons from hell are now cast as merely misunderstood and highly sympathetic hero figures.
There is one caveat on your position that I would consider. There is a distinction between the political and the familial in human affairs that sometimes becomes indistinct. Within the family unit there are positive rights.
LOTM:
Good points. I of course was referring to positive rights in the context of governance. Your putting positive rights in the context of a family makes for an interesting parallel to what sort of governance the purveyors of positive rights want. The family unit is not a democracy or republic of equals, but, ideally, is a benevolent autocracy. It is no accident that positive rights advocates see themselves as governing like parents over the rest of us.
“Nancy Pelosi isn’t Tinkerbell.”
As proof, let’s see how many people would clap for her.
Matt Beck #90
I’ll repeat what I said to the ladies.
Deny it if you feel the need, but this phenomenon Whiskey describes is real and widespread.
So much so that describing it as aberration just isn’t accurate. It’s no aberration, and no fantasy.
I’ll grant that I don’t see it in my rural setting very much (we have other problems out here in terms of those who have swallowed the Obama Koolaid). But I also realize that most people don’t live in my setting, they live in cities and close suburbs.
Where the Whiskey thing IS rampant, amongst women of all races, in the under 40 age group especially.
It may not buttress your narrative to believe it is so, but even a quick perusal of the facts on the ground permits no other conclusion. I personally wish it were not so – I wish that these women were more redeemable and find the situation as far as possible from ideal. But unless something changes, I fear they will continue to pursue that “bad boy that can be made faithful only to them”, much to the detriment of our country.
97/annk. Have I read any of your books? About the only paranormals that appeal are Krentz’s lucid dream series and some of her AQ’s, but even then the reader has to settle for the fact that her hero/heroine sets differ only by setting, not characteristics.
I want to read Wretchard’s book…
98/Don. Thank you for adding a much-needed note of clarity. I was adrift.
100/nmo. I just got home from a jaunt to the knitting store. Two guys in the back of the bus were talking about whether police can search their pockets in certain situations and how much longer they were going to be on parole. They were definitely bad boys and I doubt they could spell fidelity, let alone practice it. Their life view is, “What’s in it for me?!” My guess is that the women in their circle probably do fit into the class you and Whiskey have described, at least in terms of attitude. I pray that it is a small subset. I cannot think of any situation that would reform them.
Most of the people who frequent the knitting store are in their 20′s and 30′s, nerdy (it’s Silicon Valley), ultra-liberal (I simply stayed away during the whole prop 8 thing), and devoted to their spouses, who are sometimes of the same gender. The few times I’ve voiced my opinions on social issues, they acted as if I were joking. It’s like the old Kinky Friedman song, they hear what they want to hear. Fidelity is the norm, parole violations are not. These are contributing members of society, but one of the things they’ve given us is the current president and a blanket approval of his administration. The whole I hate Bush weirdness is shifting over to I hate Palin. I wonder if they’ll ever be able to shift that hatred to a real demon or whether that would be too strong a dose of reality?
Sylvia 101
They CANNOT shift to a real demon. It would be too terrifying. It is much less stressful and easier to deal with some smaller, often largely imaginary, construct that their brains know on some level is not an existential threat and focus on that instead of the real problem.
I forget the actual term for people who, when faced with a true and dangerous evil, will search for and find a much smaller one that they can wrap their brains around, and focus upon, that will not cause as much fear and anxiety. Perhaps a BCer can help me there.
A leftist former friend is the perfect example of this. He would go out of his way and follow ANY bit of information, no matter how arcane and irrelevant, to support his thesis that the real threat to America was not monolithic, indoctrination-driven, leftist control of the education industry, or radical Islam, but rather neo-Nazis and born-again Christians. When I asked him about this, he was adamant that a bunch of ignorant skinheads living in the mountains of Idaho were an existential threat to the nation who had far more influence than the education industry on the population at large and on the political process. And that devoutly Christian Americans were a bigger danger to his life and liberty than al-Qaeda and their fellow travellers.
This guy had a doctoral degree and graduated near the top of his class from one of the best and most well-regarded schools in his field.
It fit his narrative. The narrative, to people like him and your knitting store clients, must not be questioned by looking at all the facts, it must only be supported by cherry-picking the facts which fit the narrative. This is one of the pillars of postmodernism, which is one of the pillars of current leftist thought. This is how an otherwise intelligent person can have such a large log in their eye.
Couple this with the fact that leftists literally NEVER admit it when they’ve made a mistake, and I’d have to say your knitters won’t change. If a radical Muslim were cutting their throat, their last dying thought would be that it was the fault of patriarchy, slavery, the Pope, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Beck, no mo uro, (fill in this space with the name of any white male Christian heterosexual non-marxist), and not the fault of the terrorist doing the slicing.
I honestly believe that they would rather die like that than admit they were wrong, ever, about anything.
First things first -
E2 – thank you for your service.
Okay, on with the show:
Whiskey has *some* valid points with *some* evidence, but where I have problems with his argument is the repeated sloppy language wherein he lumps all women together. “Women hate Sarah Palin.” “Women are hard-wired to be leftists.” “Women” blah blah blah.
Even if you wanted to take at face value a liberal women’s group’s account of the percentage of single women who voted for Obama (and GEE, they wouldn’t have any motive whatsoever to plug the number, would they?), the 29 percent who did not vote for Obama still amounts to, what, millions upon millions? Add in the millions upon millions of married women who did not vote for Obama and you have, what, the equivalent of the population of New York State or something like that. And since virtually all the women who hang out at Belmont Club (more than most think, I’d wager) are among those milions upon millions upon millions who did not vote for Obama, the diatribes about how all women supposedly really want Muslim-ish men who will harem & beat them is, frankly, a pretty ludicrous picture of womanhood to the female BC readers who know it doesn’t remotely describe them, and likely know personally several other women whom it doesn’t remotely describe either.
Please note that the vast, vast majority if whiskey’s “evidence” comes from the media, with an emphasis on women themselves who are in the media — The View, Sandra Tsing-Loh, Gossip Girl, Desperate Housewives, etc etc, and now Buffy. To which I say, well, DUH. ***Of course*** the media is going to promote a certain view of women, a certain view that will be liberal-left since that is the worldview of the great majority of the people who produce media. And ***of course*** the heaviest consumers of media, young people, are going to be the most influenced by the media’s portrayals of women.
I’m not saying the media examples aren’t there, and I’m not saying the real-life examples aren’t there. I’m just saying that I think whiskey’s conclusions about the extent of how many women are actually like this are overdrawn.
Plenty of women love Sarah Palin.
Count all the women in this crowd that turned out in Washington, PA for Palin’s book tour.
If women are hard-wired to be leftists, how do we explain (a) the existence of Palin herself, and (b) her legions of female admirers?
Something else I have observed, not in the media portrayals of women but in real life: Girls who grow up with healthy relationships with their fathers (and I’m not talking spoiled princesses, just good old-fashioned affection and praise and doing things together) do not grow up into women who resent men or try to flatten them into doormats. Dad-strong girls grow up into women who like guys and, in particular, guys’ guys. I went to school with several of these Dad-strong types of young ladies, and they are all now in first marriages of 15+ years’ duration with at least two kids each.
My observation is that what they saw in their own homes, and the parental relationships especially, had far more influence on the development of their attitudes towards men than did anything the media was trying to push on them.
But what happens in a culture in which fatherlessness is commonplace? Kids take their cues from their peers and from popular entertainment. Which doesn’t exactly brim with sound examples of intelligent and mature long-term relationships (let alone marriages) between the sexes.
I would agree with the observation that women do seem to be hard-wired to desire strength in men. Again, DUH. It’s called strategic alliances, and for millenia it spelled the difference between life and death for females of the species. What I dispute is that this hard-wiring includes a desire for brutishness as well as strength. I think that’s more cultural and familial, not innate. A woman who respects herself, who thinks she is worthy of love and respect from others, and who experienced a healthy relationship with the number one male figure in her life growing up, is generally not going to be the type who puts up with bullsh*t from a guy, let alone be the type who seeks it out.
The “wants a bad boy” syndrome is, IMO, almost always the result of one of three things: (1) rebellion against an overly strict but emotionally distant father, (2) subconcious repeating of a pattern of abuse suffered in previous relationship (parental or otherwise), or (3) a neglected girl’s cry for attention, which will be gotten a lot faster in the company of a bad boy than a nice boy.
Women who actually like guys and who are in satisfying marriages (yes, they do exist) are NOT the type of women who are going to turn up time and again as characters in movies & TV. Because happily married women are not fashionable or dramatic, by the standards of current popular culture. Because non-male-hating women are not pulling with the sisters, and the sisters are the ones who control the political-cultural zeitgeist. Because practical-minded women who aren’t screaming about their victimhood or demanding more nanny state, but instead live their lives by getting on with things and getting them done themselves with their family, friends, and church organizations, do not make good poster girls for the zillion-dollar cup rattlers in Washington.
The culture has effectively erased these women from national consciousness. (How many people are aware, for instance, that Concerned Women for America has more members than NOW?) But that doesn’t mean these women don’t exist. Hell no. They exist but are largely invisible on the front pages and screens. And yet these invisibles have come out of the woodwork for Palin precisely because she embodies the type of woman the media and the popular culture have denied and ignored for years.
I lived in the Los Angeles area for 15 years. It didn’t take me but a couple months after moving out there to realize that L.A. was not America and the neighborhoods where entertainment people hung out were, in particular, fun-house mirrors and freak shows. Unless a boob job on a 95-pound anorexic waif is your idea of the real, average American woman. I used to work with a guy who drove a Volvo with a vanity plate that read, “U2CANB1″ — which I thought was about as good a summary of the hustler-wannabe culture of Los Angeles as anything. This is the sea in which the most powerful media producers and personalities swim. Their world is the freak show but they think they are the normal ones. They insist that we, ordinary Americans, are the freaks.
Why oh why would we ever trust anything they say about who women are or who men are? They don’t live in reality and wouldn’t know it if it carjacked them.
Sorry for such a long post.
Wretchard, the underlying question is, “Why don’t voters punish politicians for lying?” The answer is that elections are more about social status than about policy preferences.
Robin Hanson explained this in his post, “Politics isn’t about policy.” http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html
If a jock wins the election for student council president, from the voters’ standpoint, the most important effect that this has is that it increases the social status of jocks at the expense of other groups. Hanson claims that this is basically true for all elections.
The purpose of political promises is not to cut a deal over policies, but to establish which political factions will gain or lose status if a particular politician wins. Voters generally don’t care about promises being broken because they never really cared about the promises in the first place except as symbols of group membership.
BW #103
You make some valid points. Yes, there are millions of women who don’t behave like that.
But how many millions do?
And how many millions softly support that behavior, while not actually participating (think “moderate” Muslims giving soft support to al Qaeda etc.).
Also, how much of the bad-boy seeker is nature, and how much is nurture? I think that this is a major bone of contention on this forum. You fall down on one side, Whiskey on another. Time will tell who has it right, but right now he seems to have the upper hand in that debate, at least in terms of the sociological direction in which this country is traveling.
It’s tough for people who aren’t crass materialists (that would describe most BCers, I think) to believe that behaviors can be genetically hardwired, particularly complex ones. Matt Beck articulates his discomfort with this upthread in an eloquent way.
But it is certainly plausible and supported by a lot of plain evidence that much of this is nature, not nurture. The extent to which having a bad relationship with a father and being socialized by a seamy pop culture are responsible for this, versus genetic hardwiring, may not be as much a what we WANT to believe that it is. We must believe what ALL the facts tell us, not try to cherry-pick only the facts which support a desired narrative, or we are no better than or different from the left we try to resist.
Bogie wheel, extremely good observations in post 103! And the most spot-on comment of all is that women’s future relationships with men are so heavily determined by their relationships with their fathers. It’s isn’t just leftist’s who fail at this; our society is full of fathers who may have good conservative credentials and yet left their children behind for whatever reason – money, new relationship, new city, whatever. I’m sure everyone reading this knows someone personally who’s done this – I know several. And then they wonder why their children have no use for them. Don’t they see that they’ve just set a lifetime pattern for their daughters of loving a man who has treated them like crap? Every father who’s ever left a daughter behind has done that to her.
And this isn’t a gender specific thing; a recent study showed that by far the great majority of young men sentenced to prison are those who grow up in homes without a father. Yes, you can make the argument that our society has devalued fatherhood and has celebrated a mindless feminist viewpoint, since in many ways it has; but this does not remove the culpability of the millions of fathers who walked away from their responsibilities because it was the easy thing to do. They are the ones responsible for the damage done, and they can’t put the blame off on society for making it easier for them to shirk their responsibilities.
If many women have lost their moral bearings, it is because the men they depended on lost theirs first.
NMU,
I appreciate your responses, and I just wish to clarify a few points. I certainly don’t deny that large segments of our culture are in bad shape. I come from a broken home in a blighted neighborhood; I belong to the demographic which Whiskey criticizes, and I know – personally know – many young girls whose lives are an absolute mess. In fact, I myself would qualify as one of Whiskey’s “bad boys” if the description were at all accurate, only it isn’t.
Bogie wheel and wws have a much better bead on the problem. Although it is always difficult to ascibe a complex sociological situation to any unique factor or set of factors, the main difficulties afflicting today’s young people are hopelessness, lack of any familial support structure, and lack of any direction or spiritual formation. The girls in question hook up with these guys because, basically, they have nothing else to look forward to and they can’t imagine life being any different anyway. The guys in question are not especially dominant or intimidating; they lack the intelligence, social skills, and wherewithal to intimidate anybody with even a modicum of self-respect. They are, in a word, losers. They are the exact compliment of the girls. There is a sad sense in which we can say they “belong” together, although no human being truly belongs in that situation. Why any of this is held to say something about “human nature” is beyond me.
Whiskey’s essays don’t even begin to touch these real problems. He busies himself instead with the analysis of media-generated fantasies and pop-cultural sludge. Not that this is a an utterly useless activity, but we must keep in mind the fact that it doesn’t have much of a relationship to anybody’s actual life. The women Whiskey criticizes are stereotypes drawn from this fantasy domain – overindulged suburbanite sluts spreading their legs for token black guys, cougars getting down and dirty with the pool boy, etc. Let’s be clear about one thing: this is pornography not reality. The vast majority of people have neither the ability nor the inclination to live this way. Life for most of us is a daily grind of work, chores, bills, family obligations, social obligations, medical problems, and endless hassles large and small. We are conservative by nature, even when we have little worth conserving. The rest is nothing but an empty and increasingly transparent hoax.
While it is true there have been throughout history certain men who were wealthy and powerful enough to do as they pleased with women, they do not seem to have benefitted from it and they almost invariably came to a bad end. Does anyone remember Henry VIII or Herod Antipas as anything but a buffoon? Looking back, does anybody really want to be like them? That should tell us all we need to know about what happens to those who try to live the fantasy.
Finally, we should remember that no generation tops the babyboomers when it comes to testing the boundaries of illicit sex, pornography, pederasty, homosexuality, and perversions of every kind. The under-40 crowd is a product of the sins of their fathers and mothers. We have not freely chosen the culture of death and many of us bravely resist it with our heart’s blood.
You guys have it all backwards…It’s Nancy Pelosi as Peter Pan. The lost girls are the forty year old soccer moms seeing the twilight movie for the seventh time.
With president Obama as tinkerbell and either Joe the (name your occupation as anti hero here) plumber as or Sara Palin as Captain Hook. What is really bad about this epic is it stars Eric “don’t” Holder cast as John darling and Timmy Geithener as Michael Darling.
Now Uncle Ted in the role of Nana has been replaced by Barney Frank. With the rest of the Senate and house of reps filling in as members of hooks crew.
Wendy, they hope, is of course, your daughter.
In this particular version Bush is the croc, but that is fleeting depending on the city, neighborhood penitentiary or airline flight you are watching the flick on.
Amazing, Gibb really insists he answered something. Okay maybe the question should be, our readers (viewers) ah your constituents believed Obama when he said we could watch the closed door wrangling on C Spam. But it is not happening. Why has Obama gone back on his pledge and does he feel comfortable with over half of the electorate thinking him a liar?
Wonder how he would “answer” that.