Winds of Change has an interesting article on public policy functions that don’t behave in the expected way. They don’t return a “true” or “false” but return an item from a list, like the old oriental game of scissor, paper, stone. The rule is hard to explain, but if you read the Winds of Change example, it is simple to understand.
The Atlantic can run a hyperventilating piece on how the Koch Brothers are funding groups, implying it’s a Bad Thing – because the Koch Brothers have views that The Atlantic wants its readers to oppose. But inquire into the sorts of things Imam Rauf has supported, and it’s off-limits, despicable even.
Or let’s try another one.Bill Press says Glenn Beck is despicable because you can’t talk about God on sacred ground.
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
Now as HotAir points out, Martin Luther King talked about God on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, so what gives? In 1963, MLK said:
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Winds of Change believes that the problem is that the bar is set at inconsistent height. What’s the right height to set the bar? Why is it almost impossible to conclude that the Fort Hood shooter acted from an ideological motivation and why is it so easy to believe that the prevalence of guns, of all things, in the Army, is the root cause of the Fort Hood shooting?
Enforced ignorance is the order of the day from our governing class/Progressives, even while they decry the ignorance of a majority of the American people. They will not allow proper conclusions to be drawn from, for example, the Fort Hood Shooting. Instead the official report, released this week, speaks of generic “workplace violence,” and without a hint of irony the need to hire “additional health care providers, particularly in the mental health field.” The “solutions” being imposed should be ones to make Armed Liberal(s) cringe: Fort Riley has prohibited soldiers who have firearm-carrying permits from carrying firearms for protection off-base and authorized unit commanders to set arbitrary limits on the caliber of firearms and ammunition their troops may privately own. The DoD is working on a regulation that would extend much of this Army-wide: all in response to Maj. Hasan bringing firearms onto the base in violation of base regulations, in a situation where if any of the other soldiers there had been armed, many lives might have been saved.
But the problem isn’t the height of the bar. There is no function that will tell you, for any given height of bar, whether it is appropriate or inappropriate. The key to understanding this conundrum is that modern public policy logic doesn’t return a Boolean. It returns an item in a list. In considering whether it is appropriate to talk about God on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, or inquiring into the connections of the Koch Brothers or Imam Rauf nothing is ‘true’ or ‘false’. It all depends on the elements of the list.
Glenn Beck or Martin Luther King returns Martin Luther King.
Imam Rauf or Koch Brothers returns Imam Rauf.
Some things are never OK if you’re Glenn Beck. Some things are always OK if you’re the Imam Rauf. It’s just like certain programming languages, which have rules like: x or y if x is false, then y, else x. In this case ‘conservative’=false. Also, anyone who the Left doesn’t like =’conservative’. From this all else follows. This is especially important when it comes to identifying evil or potentially evil people. Just recently two men traveling from Chicago to Amsterdam were arrested because they had suspicious items in their luggage.
A search of one of the men by airport security screeners in Birmingham, Ala., as he waited to board a flight to Chicago earlier on Sunday found that he was carrying $7,000 in cash and that his luggage contained a cellphone taped to a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, three cellphones taped together and several watches taped together, a senior law enforcement official said.
Because no evidence of explosives was found, the man, 48, was permitted to fly to O’Hare Airport in Chicago. He was joined there by the second man, a 37-year-old, and they both boarded United Airlines Flight 908 to Amsterdam.
Therefore it comes as no surprise that “American law enforcement officials cautioned on Monday night that the men had not been charged with any crime and that the episode might be a misunderstanding. ‘There’s nothing at all confirmed at this point that’s associated with terrorism,’ one official said.”But don’t take that as a cue to start taping watches and cell phones together in your suitcase, because you will probably wind up in a world of trouble. To say, as the NYT says about the two suspects that the practice of taping stuff up is “our culture” will probably get you into bigger trouble. And in case you didn’t get the point, the NYT describes a case in which Pakistani officers as a suggestion of American paranoia.
A delegation of Pakistani military officers, traveling to the United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., was removed from a flight at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, a Pakistani official said Monday night.
The nine passengers were removed before takeoff from United Airlines Flight 727 after one of them made what a flight attendant considered to be an “inappropriate remark,” a spokesman for the airline said. (An American military official confirmed the accounts.)
Members of the delegation, led by a two-star general, were offended by their treatment and canceled the Central Command meeting, the official said. He said Defense Department officials had apologized for the incident.
So don’t imagine you’ll get a Boolean back on the question of whether it is OK to talk about God on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, or tape watches and cellphones together or make remarks at a flight attendant. The answer is neither True or False, Right or Wrong, Legal or Illegal. No. It return an item from a list. It all depends on who you are. The Winds of Change article shouldn’t have written about “setting the bar high, setting the bar low”. The bar is never set on a consistent basis. The whole purpose of the gate is to let only certain persons through. It returns an item from a list. That’s the definition of an aristocracy, though I say it as shouldn’t.
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Looking at that clip of Bill Press, I’m reminded of something I once heard at moonbattery.com: “Liberals are so absurd that you can’t spoof them without people thinking you’re a liberal, yourself, and on the level.”
Where the double standard fails is when something terrible happens. Should another major terrorist attack occur not only will the perps be blamed but so will their prior defenders.
As with the former Soviet Union the internal inconsistencies, hypocrisy, hubris and simple insatiability of the Left will ensure (at least in it’s current incarnation) it’s doom.
To accelerate the Left’s demise not only do we need to regularly state the emperor has no clothes, but point out he’s flabby and has some sort of disturbing rash.
We will have won when the inattentive middle experiences a physical revulsion to the ideas, tactics and pretensions of the Left.
This clip reminded me of this classic scene from Dr. Strangelove:
I can see Bill Press standing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial saying:
Beyond parody.
L3
I think I know what you’re trying to say, but I’m not sure I understand what you said. Does it really come down to anything other than conservative bad, liberal good?
As always, Wretchard has a fascinating take. What to make of our current crop of Leftoid elites who are so determined to honor and elevate anything alien or against our culture, while displaying vicious contempt for anything from our culture or in favor of our culture? This has never been in more stark relief than during the first 18 months under the Obama monster.
I know the argument is often boiled down to a form of self-hatred – loathing for oneself and nation of origin — I have made this link myself. But is that really accurate? What makes these hideous people loathe their culture of origin so completely? There must be something more. Saturday Chris Matthews interviewed a NAACP race monger who predicted the Beck event would be akin to a Nazi rally or a KKK convention. At the conclusion Chris Matthews positively gushed something like “It is always a great honor to speak to anyone from the NAACP”. He fawned like some inferior mammal for the attention of this bigoted black jackass – but does anybody really believe that Chris Matthews so desperately craves something from such a guest? Street cred? To be forgiven for being white? Is it Stokholm syndromw? It was grotesque.
There’s something about it all that seems like Kabuki theater. All the motions mean something, but I’m not sure what.
Finally, watching the embedded clip – we see a truly unhinged Diatribe by Bill Press about the horribleness of mentioning God in a sacred place like the Lincoln monument. Does anyone doubt that the same man would be singing the praises of Imam Rauf if he’d been there in the exact same spot chastising America and invoking his Allah? We’d be hearing what a grand place America is, and learning that those against Rauf are worse than Hitler. It is insane.
It is true that the answer to a question is now selected from a list, rather than being True or False. But the contents of the answer list change depending on who you are. For liberals, it’s Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, or as Kathy Shaidle puts it, “It’s Different When We Do It”.
The deep dark secret of political correctness is that there are no consistent rules. Rules depend on who you are. It is a status driven system. The key to advancement within this system is to change your place within the order. a > hello > 37x > d > burble is one day’s order. The next it could be hello > a > 37x > d > burble
It’s not a system of laws. It’s a system of men. Once you grasp this, then you know the right buttons to push. The trick is to position yourself as a high status person then you can reap the rewards of the ordering system. It is perfectly ludicrous. But never let yourself burst out laughing. Carry it off with a straight face.
BREAKING: Pair on Chicago Flight Arrested for TerrorismA pair of Yemeni men who boarded a Chicago-Amsterdam flight despite security concerns have been taken into custody by Dutch authorities.
Two men taken off a Chicago-to-Amsterdam United Airlines flight in the Netherlands have been charged by Dutch police with “preparation of a terrorist attack,” U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.
A spokesman for the Dutch public prosecutor, Ernst Koelman, confirmed the two men were arrested this morning and said “the investigation is ongoing.” He said the arrests were made “at the request of American authorities.”
—
In addition, officials said, al Soofi was found to be carrying $7,000 in cash and a check of his luggage found a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle, three cell phones taped together, several watches taped together, a box cutter and three large knives. Officials said there was no indication of explosives and he and his luggage were cleared for the flight from Birmingham to Chicago O’Hare.
Silly me, somehow I was under the impression that box cutters and knives were a no-no.
My daughter is 3 1/2 years older than my son and constantly bamboozled him in every game they played with arbitrary rule changes–that inevitably benefited her of course. Naturally, we never got the call to intercede until tears were shed–invariably by my son. The first time he was strong enough to pin her ears back, the rules became quite consistent.
Liberals get away with their petulance, ignorance, and illogical ways only because they have wielded out-sized influence for their numbers. The solution is raw P-O-W-E-R. When we strip them of their power–and pound the living sh*t out of them every once in a while to remind them who’s boss–bar heights and return values to function calls will be equalized.
It’s an endless cycle. A new generation of would-be aristocrats always convinces itself of its virtue and seeks to impose that vision on everyone else. It’s like “the poor you will always have with you”.
Today Glenn Beck mentioned a new DOJ directive to its investigators which listed among “terrorist groups” both Al Qaida and something called “Constitutionalists.” With the Patriot Act and scatter x-ray vans roaming the streets unreasonably searching every house and car and person in its path, and unreasonable searches conducted on every airline passenger. . . well, I guess we’re all just about as safe as we can be from everything except our “public servants.”
Imagine someone having the frightening propensity to think that the Constitution has some meaning or validity! Of course, when it comes to mosques, the rules are different, as you say. Then, that scary old thing is the only thing that matters, and not only does it matter, but there is absolutely no other issue to discuss.
Silly me. I thought the Left was in favor of protecting the right to practice religion on sacred ground — ground zero.
And silly me. I thought the Left was in favor of freedom of speech — such as when the NY Times publishes state secrets or Bush is equated with you know who.
I wish someone would have asked Bill Press about ground zero and invoking Allah — but maybe he would understand that this would not really be invoking God at all. Silly me.
The following words are inscribed upon the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. Perhaps the talking head should pay a visit if he can read; then again maybe not, for he might become a pillar of salt at seing all the references to God:
“… Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether”
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
and
“… that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
ON HOLLOWED GROUND
Why is it that my hallowed ground
Is yours to give or spread around
But only to your confrerees
Who do to others as they please
And since The Other swings from trees
And uses words like dem and dese
That gives you license to berate
And sneer at our benighted state
One day an Imam sought to build
A mosque on land gullied and hilled
Beneath the land were limestone caves
Above a sign said Jesus Saves
He built his mosque but sadly found
You should not build on hollowed ground
Slightly OT, but pertinent nonetheless, is a major development that should not go un-noted: Thanks to the Ground Zero mosque debate, at least one MSM outlet apparently now feels compelled to weigh in on concerns about the Islamization of America – a topic the MSM used to be able to completely ignore, or at least keep out of their news coverage. Yes, Newsweek‘s take on the matter is as predictable as ever – they even telegraph it in the piece’s title, “‘Stealth Jihad’ Conveys Paranoia” – but the very fact that an MSM outlet now sees fit to give it any significant exposure at all, much less while trying to cover for a President whom many fear is part and parcel of that Islamization process, speaks volumes. It also gives me a distinct “opening of the floodgates” vibe.
The liberals must really be getting desperate when they grandly proclaim that prayer at the Lincoln Memorial should be outlawed. And anyway who put the left in charge of deciding what was “hallowed” ground and what was not? If they are in charge of that will they then make all the golf courses that Barry has been frequenting into “hallowed” ground as well? Just askin.
Bill Press is an idiot. Not only did MLK make a profound speech that invoked God on numerous occasions, but the Lincoln Memorial itself is filled with references to God.
Or maybe Bill Press didn’t bother to read the text on both sides of the Memorial? The Gettysburg Address and the 2nd Inaugural are deeply religious and rooted in the Christian tradition.
There are no liberals. Liberalism does not exist. The leftists ate it whole.
Leftism is something that cannot be defined, because we keep misinterpreting it. We want to apply Boolean logic to it, but there is no logic that can be formed or followed from any known syllogism. Ground Zero doesn’t exist, because zero doesn’t exist in their anti-Boolean system. There is only the one. The One. The ones they have been waiting for.
Unless and until all non-leftists begin to understand and operate from a wholly different starting point, they will never, ever be able to grasp what has befallen them. All of us, those who see leftism and do not process it properly, applying rules of logic,fairness, decency, …we are lost in a game not of our choosing, with rules we do not comprehend that are meant to beat us repeatedly. This is Quantum Politics, where very strange behaviors are the norm and if a news item starts spinning in one direction at CNN, it will simultaneously begin spinning that very same direction immediately at ABC, NBC, WaPo, NYTimes, and everywhere there is leftist dark matter.
In Quantum Politics leftists never make a mistake, they only fail to explain it to you dummies in small enough words and simplistic enough phrases, so that you remedial voters can stop drooling long enough to finally appreciate the wisdom and sheer brilliance of their acts. You are zeroes, they are the Ones. They don’t allow for zeroes.
By the way, moderates are zeroes. Independents are zeroes. LIBERALS are zeroes. Only a leftist can be a One. Make that a hard leftist.
There is no Ground Zero, there is only a “one world”. In One World, all religions are equal, except when Christianity isn’t. One World governance seeks to eliminate “exceptionalism”, it doesn’t fit the narrative. The “wrong kind” of patriotism is defined by love of your country, you must love One World instead.
Global Warming was not a broad hoax, an international leftist canard that sought redistribution through fraud and deceit, it was morphed into Climate Change…because cold is as good as warm for obtaining the result. Redistribution. Your wealth is not yours. Property is theft. Haves are zeroes, have nots are Ones.
You need to be reeducated to begin to worship The One. And the leftists will meet in secret, (you are not invited) to check whether you have been naughty or nice. They have their JournoList and they are checking it twice. There are no divergent opinions or principled dissenters within the Dark Matter halls. There is The One opinion.
If you dare to disagree, all of your personal ones are immediately shut off. You take on every property of evil. You are immediately a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a …horrors…”conservative”, “right winger”, non-nuanced, easily “stirred up”, bitter clinger, homegrown terrorist…”teabagger”.
Always thought you were a moderate, middle of the road, fact and issue type who disliked extremism? Welcome to Quantum Politics, you are now “the enemy”.
And the lying, arrogant bastards have control over the narrative. They have absolute control over the government. They have absolute control over pop culture in entertainment. They have control of academia. They have absolute control over mass communications, the manner in which you obtain your facts on the ground, all legislative processes, the manner in which torts are litigated, banking, auto, energy, insurance, real estate, inheritance, unions, our borders, our military, immigration and Homeland Security and the entirety of the Democratic party.
You…are left with the historically hapless and feckless Republican Party. Or yourselves. Oh, and by the way…try to form any grassroots opposition to The Ones…and you will be slurred and slandered on a daily basis. Their Dark Matter machine will berate you, slander you, and treat you like dirt.
Welcome to One World. Where there is no truth, only truthiness. Where there is no hope, but there is plenty of change. Where there is no God, there is only The One.
Now kneel before them, cower in a corner and behave. Otherwise, don’t stand near any plate glass windows. And, if you know what’s good for you, don’t dare voice any opinion you didn’t get from MSNBC first. Soon they will be broadcasting from the only channel allowed under the Fairness Doctrine. Channel One.
18. cfbleachers
Or in other, concise words “There is no god but the One World, and The One is its prophet!”
Convert or die. Or be taxed until your back is broken and you convert or die. You will not be permitted to renounce faith in the One World–you will immediately be slain. Physical, economic, social death… all at once, preferably, with you erased from memory.
There is only submission before the One World. Within the One World there is progress–and peace. Outside is the realm of fear–and war.
Come to The One. Welcome… to CNN.
–JC
PS. Personally, I’ll be fleeing to the wilderness and expecting through faith to be sustained through the remaining 3.5 years. Physical things are overrated–ask any Holocaust survivor.
A business in Bremerton has a sign board, and like most such businesses, frequently changes the message in order to attract attention. On December a few years ago the message was “Jesus: the Reason for the Season.”
An irate passerby actually came in to complain to the owner about “trying to shove religion into everything.”
Political correctness is Enemy No.1 – no other thing gets close to being as damaging to our society.
They don’t return a “true” or “false” but return an item from a list, like the old oriental game of scissor, paper, stone.
Press and Crook would do well to consider that TV commercial where this mega-jerk in a suit keeps treating kids in unequal ways. As the commercial intones, “Even a kid recognizes when they’re being treated unfairly.”
The “kids” are the majority of American voters. The jerks are Press and Crook. Like you suggested, wretchard, they just need to look in the mirror if they want to understand what’s happening on the political scene.
All leftists are Stalinists. What I mean by Stalinism here is the idea that anyone who is not 100% in agreement, with no possibility of dissent, must be considered to be a secret enemy. It’s by this mechanism that orthodox communist George Orwell, who objected *only* to the Stalinist regime’s mistreatment of other leftists, is thought of as the ultimate anti-communist and a conservative hero.
Of course in the USSR conformity was enforced by the GULAG, in the social democratic West only by social ostracism. It still works pretty well though. People know what you can and can’t say, and speak correctly, unless in select company. Such real dissent as we have now is based on internet anonymity, or the perception of it, and who knows if that will last?
It’s not strictly true that what you can say depends on who you are. A black person has no more right to be a conservative than a white person, he just won’t be regarded with suspicion for not saying the right things. The loyalty of a black person to the regime is assumed; the loyalty of a white person must be proved. How deviation is perceived varies; being against gay marriage is always wrong, but a black person against gay marriage will be forgiven as a victim of a benighted upbringing, while a white person will just be regarded as a rotten, cruel, hateful homophobe.
It’s true MLK talked about God but that part was dropped by the civil rights movement after 1965, and he was regarded as irrelevant at the time of his death. Only his murder assured his place in history.
Orwell is laughing at us right now.
Perhaps this goes to explain why Lefties all seem so humorless and angry all the time, the effort of fighting the cognitive dissonance (as represented in the objection to speaking of God on sacred ground) is exhausting and gives them a headache.
Although, they may well have a different perspective as to why the ground is “sacred”, it is a monument on Federal ground to one of the men that made the Federal government very much more powerful. The Religion of State has it’s own interpetation of the symbols before it. Perhaps that is why they are so hard to talk to, everything has a secrect coded message and, if you aren’t a member of the Leftist Cabal, you don’t have a clue. “Elites” are all about secrect culbs.
Meanwhile, the “counterprotest”, which clearly had no ties whatsoever to God or any other Divine Entity, was being led by a guy who uses the title “Reverend”.
But the Media was all over how Beck said “God”.
Right, cause, you know, a Reverend would never be so audacious as to claim that God should mean anything.
What ever you do or say must be on the approved list. The approved list may not be violated. Every group has a different approved list and the list changes for no rational reason. But if you violate the approved list you will be punished. No you can’t see the approved list in advance and the list may change without notice or reason. Just don’t violate the list of approved language and actions or you will be punished.
About twenty years ago, I worked with a mathematician who was originally from Brazil. English was not her first language, and the expression, “jack squat,” confounded her.
One day she asked me about it. She could not infer from context that “doing jack squat” and “not doing jack squat” means the same thing. After unsuccessfully trying to explain that this isn’t even a case of bad idiomatic translation since it doesn’t make sense even in English, I stumbled across an description that satisfied her: “Jack squat” signals taking the absolute value of the predicate and then negating it.
The system is still governed by laws. That’s how the enemy keep themselves on the same page without extensive coordination. But with a nod to Orwell, under these so-called laws, some animals are more equal than others.
Wretchard @ 7: “The deep dark secret of political correctness is that there are no consistent rules. Rules depend on who you are.”
Au contraire, Wretchard. The rules are totally consistent. We might not like them, but that does not change the fact of their iron consistency.
To paraphrase Josh @ 4 — Leftie = Good.
Just look at the treatment afforded to William Jefferson Clinton when he gave a taxpayer-funded job to the unpaid intern who demonstrated willingness to get down on her knees. If certain other people had done that, it would have been workplace sexual harrassment of a vulnerable young woman. But not when the Big Man does it.
Commentator Brit Hume once remarked that ‘all politics is junior high’.
Spot on! The leaders of the in-crowd will be praised for doing things that would have caused anyone else to be reviled. But it is consistent. And it is totally predictable.
Mr. Fernandez is right. At heart the leftist model is an
aristocracy. Those at the top define the belief system and those
lower down, always hoping to rise to that top tier, kowtow to
the “truth sayers” and ply them with flattery while leaping to
defame and destroy their enemies. It is all about climbing the
ladder.
The legislative and judicial decisions made by the left are
arrived at long before they are ever committed to written form. The
whole legislative process and the act of issuing judicial fiats
is concerned with framing these in such a way as to seem to be
justified by the old Law of the Land by torturing texts, twisting
meaning and employing the gradual process of precedent to ultimately
render obsolete or obscure the original meaning of the law.(though
these days they hardly bother to make the effort, so used have we
become to simply accepting these declarations from on high).
Certainly the most impactful aspect of the Judeo-Christian ethic
is that there is LAW that comes from God to man and before which all are
truly equal. This flies in the face of those who impose their
rule under the guise of being gods themselves or of somehow
possessing a special right to dominate others based on qualities
others simply did not have or had to an inferior degree. What we
see on the left is nothing new. It is the imposition of
privilege defined by their own preferences and terms and reserved
by themselves for themselves with others allowed to join under
the grant of noblesse oblige upon demonstrating proper obeisance
and fealty to the ruler(s).
I think that finding a man with a cell phone taped to a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in his bag is really a rather ambigious situation under the law.
I think the next time a security screener finds this situation, the screen should hold up the line and bring the man to the front of the crowd.
“Can I have everyone’s attention. You all know that we security screeners make your life unpleasant, making you take off your shoes, make you wait in line, scold you, and confiscate tiny amounts of toiletries from your bag.
Thing is, this man was found with this, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol with a cell phone taped to it. He doesn’t have anything dangerous on him. I just thought I would ask all of you what we should do with this man. Should we give him a good scolding and let him join you on your flight? Or do you have some other suggestions.”
Isn’t this called the Wisdom of Crowds or some such thing?
Wretchard: “The whole purpose of the gate is to let only certain persons through. It returns an item from a list. That’s the definition of an aristocracy, though I say it as shouldn’t.”
While at lunch together on Sunday out here in Flyover Country, I was trying to tell my brother-in-law Sam about Angelo Codevilla’s essay concerning our Ruling Class. To condense it down for him, I said “the Ruling Class basically hates all of us.” He understood instantly what I meant. I added that Codevilla basically put into words what we’ve all been subconsciously thinking for a long time now.
But yes, they are an “aristocracy,” so to speak, but minus the nobleness of character. And of course the bar is set to exclude anyone the “Our Betters” despise.
In using the advice of Wretchard and others that mockery is the best
weapon, I have found that using phrases such as “No, you really don’t
understand” and “I’m sorry, but you have the facts all wrong” are the
equivalent of sticking an incendiary device down their pants. They
generally have the opinion that they are the smartest in the room
and can’t take the challenge that maybe it isn’t so.
I have to chime in to say that I admire Charles and David Koch even
more for tolerating these attacks. Charles speaks about the crony
capitalism that has been one of the major reasons for the decline
of American competitiveness over the past few decades. When Jeff
Immelt at GE and others grovel over governmental support for
uneconomic spending that would support their green energy businesses,
it is clear that these guys are more about sucking the govt teat than
creating value for society.
The Kochs choose not to take that approach and they are amongst the
few with the courage to stand up and be heard. How many other
corporate leaders in this country feel the same way about this
administration, but don’t have the spine to say or doing anything
about it?
L3, beautiful pull from one of my favorite flicks. Wonder where it
rates on the Bogie Wheel scale.
Bill Press has always been an enigma to me. He has admitted several times to being seminary trained, but so often, his views seem to be at variance with his training. Even allowing for extreme liberal points of view, I fail to understand how those views would lead one to say that “you cannot mention God on sacred ground.” Good grief!
O’neal did a piece on the climate gate where he showed a lot of the graphs we looked at this time last year including the infamous hockey stick graph and how it was achieved by eliminating the medieval warm.
He also talked about Gore’s book Inconvenient Truth. After that book came out the green hysteria really took off.
How did that happen. While Gore has long been an object of derision on the right — on the left he achieved iconic status. And that drove the mainstream culture.
That kind of clout is impressive. The guy has fallen from grace but not before he cashed in.
The Yemenis were an Advance Team.
Never forget that 15 of the 19 were Yemenis traveling of Saudi documents.
Were these perps traveling on Saudi documents?
They smell like they are ‘retired’ members of the Black Guard.
After OBL died, the Black Guard disbanded and most went back home to Yemen.
( There is no way I’m buying OBL still lives, just his voice double. )
Mr. Fernandez is right. At heart the leftist model is an aristocracy. Those at the top define the belief system and those lower down, always hoping to rise to that top tier, kowtow to the “truth sayers” and ply them with flattery while leaping to defame and destroy their enemies. It is all about climbing the ladder.
Wannabe aristocracy. Social climbers should never be confused with those who feel no need to climb. Seek to become an aristocrat, and you will never become one. Impersonate an aristocrat, and other people will assume you are one. Be true to yourself, and aristocrats will gravitate toward you.
I think political correctness functions as a trap to fool wannabe aristocrats into revealing themselves to those who run the system.
The treament of Beck and GZM are two more examples of one-way street multi-culturalism. It’s interesting to watch progressives morph in and out of first amendment absolutism as the players change. During the Motoons controversy, they told us free speech rights had to take back seat when it came to protecting the sensibilities of others from ‘unecessary and demeaning provocations’. No yammering this time ’round about yelling ‘fire’ in a theatre. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Footnote: The default mode of human organization is feudal, with aristocrats emerging to exempt themselves from sanctions they impose on others, surrounded by courtiers currying favor. Just look at any schoolyard, high school pecking order, fraternity, quite a few boardrooms, social organizations, the entourage surrounding a superstar, even neighborhoods.
I want to cross pollinate some musings from the Chicago Boys blog – I think Lex nails something we all see but haven’t expressed this concisely.
“The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.
Why?
He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.
Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral
Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.
Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.
Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.
Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But for millions of people this vision is obviously alive and kicking.”
RTWT at http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/15295.html
“Bill Press has always been an enigma to me. He has admitted several times to being seminary trained,”
Once you realize that quite a few mainstream seminaries are hotbeds of practical atheism, it all makes perfect sense. They’ve been perverted and co-opted just like every other educational institution over the last 50 years.
Wretchard, you miss the most practical application of the imposition of these rules on society. People stay in the game because they keep thinking there is a realistic chance that they can win a round once in a while. But once they become wise to the reality of the situation, that the rules say that They Will Lose Every Time just because of Who They Are, then the only rational response becomes one which would be irrational in most other circumstances: Burn the System to the Ground. And count on whatever replaces it being better than what was destroyed, simply because in any new system the previous losers would have some chance as opposed to having no chance before.
This is why regimes that adopt rules like this are always destroyed from within, eventually. The losers eventually become a large enough group to either take over or to at least pull down everything on everyone’s heads – and when you’ve been defined as the permanent loser, taking everyone down with you doesn’t look like that bad of an option.
Irrational rules make an irrational response the only rational option.
Here’s an interesting read:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Why-Wall-St-Is-Deserting-nytimes-4185397057.html
wtf did these gentlemen *think* they were getting with Obambus? I suppose they thought they were getting a cabana boy. ruh-roh.
LLIII @ 3: top 10 posts of the year. But Bill Press is just another senile remnant of what was once a reasonable guy. What’s up with that, btw? I thought the senile were supposed to get conservative, not radical, but the trend these days seems leftwards-ho.
Jeez, is it just Tuesday…I’m loosing track of time. Of course age and being torn between working the streets, trying to save the future of our great Republic and taking care of two healthy, vibrant, multifaceted, mischievous little girls will make you forget or confuse more than just what dang day it is.
I’ve finished a lunch of leftovers and wanted to leave this link:
“Uncommon Knowledge”
Forgive me if I have already left it, but it is worth repeating. At this link you will find interviews with none other than Thomas Sowell but with others you should take the time to listen to when you have time. I use these interviews in my continued education and search for information. Not so much for answers because that is my personal responsibility to come up with.
Have a good week, sorry I can’t partake of the excellence here, but there is just not the time, at this time in our Nation’s struggle against our enemies.
Take care, take charge and get on the line.
Papa Ray
I see neocon Trotskyist hero Christopher Hitchens is also having a go at the “white self-pity” of Beck supporters. Funny how he always gets a pass from so-called conservatives. I guess the Iraq war is everything to them.
This is a very interesting thread. My own take on the Progressive model is as follows:
There are some fast and rigid rules which are irrefutable. The primary one is that the notion of equality must always be pursued, but paradoxically equality can only be achieved by a rigid enforcement of inequality. Thus we have Affirmative Action, “progressive” taxation, and “the rules don’t really apply to us” attitude on the part of government officials.
The notion is the bastard offspring of Marx’s “dictatorship of the Proletariat.” It does not know, but at times dimly suspects who its father might be.
The second great axiom is that the purpose of law is to give the Wise the power to inflict pain upon those who resist their will. There can be no absolutes in the law, otherwise it puts limits upon the Wise. That’s why they insist upon a “living constitution” which actually means no constitution at all.
The third great axiom is that the conclusion is preordained. The equation needed to arrive there can be altered as needed when inconvenient facts arise that show that you used division by zero to arrive at your results. We know the result. An infinite number of equations can be devised to yield that result; try X + Y = 3.14159. So it was that AGW morphed into “climate change.” And stripped of its ribbons and wrapping the contents of the package is always the same: To the extent we have failed it is due to the fact that we just didn’t have enough power to direct your lives and your property. We need more power. Its your fault that you didn’t give us enough to solve the problem.
The Fourth great axiom is that the merits of any idea should be judged only on the basis of who originates the idea based upon their position in the social-ideological pyramid. If George Bush was quoted as saying “the sun rises in the east” the reaction would be along the lines of “yes, you moron, everybody knows that.” If Barrack Obama was to say the same thing it would be lauded as showing his deep knowledge of astronomy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
But now we have the question as to how the hierarchy must be structured.
There are categories of orthodoxy. You get a rating depending upon your standing in each category and they are all multiplied together to get your score, sort of. Unlike conventional mathematics two negative numbers multiplied together does not result in a positive number. Once negative, always negative.
This is not an exhaustive list but the lists which determine your value and position in the “Progressive” pyramid include: (1) ethnic/gender (2) hostility toward free markets (3) hostility towards capitalism (and no, do not think that factors 2 and 3 are the same–they are not)(4) the notion that the rule of law is objective rather than a matter of convenience based upon the whim of the moment.
Consider the example of Clarence Thomas. He gets a huge multiplier for being black. The problem is that down the equation he encounters a negative rating which throws the number way down on the left hand of zero. The Progressives despise him, but I doubt that they would hate him anywhere near as much if he was white.
Hitchens would annoy me, but he’s going to be dead soon, and in the grand scheme of thing that’s a shame.
dick #13 quotes Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Gettysburg Addresses. Moreover, the First Inaugural Address mentions Christianity explicitly.
After spending some years reading, writing, and sometimes even thinking about this stuff, it does makes sense to me.
It’s a dance. If the conservative moves forward the leftist moves backwards. Sometimes a thinking leftist will make an unexpected move (such as Hitchens) but it is usually limited, and it as a rule we need to make sure we do not get too excited, Joe Liebermann is another example, doctrinaire lefty through and through except for one or two areas.
The notion the left should defend Islamists from prosecution for even quite obvious offense is something we should understand. In fact, I find it hilarious to see Lefties stake a position and when they find out the position is also claimed by Beck, Malkin, Palin, et al to see them spin themselves into utter dizziness trying to change their position or explain how the other is doing it for evil and disingenuous motives, too bad we can’t hook ‘em up to generators.
In this case it is all so much flying pasta monster, one side believes in the flying spaghetti monster the other the flying lasagna monster, since those guys who believe in the spaghetti monster stuff have real political clout here it is those that are the evils ones.
The ‘rules’ are made of the ruling elite, by the ruling elite, and to keep those in power, in power. The mainstream media have been the enforcers of the ‘rules’ and they get a seat under the table as long as they obey.
The internet has opened many more doors and the dogs can’t guard them all.
When one is a secularist one is blinded to the hidden factors behind the scenes, and one has to resort to “epicycles” and “deferents” to explain the strange actions of people which “don’t make sense”. A set of simplifying axioms provides illumination. These are:
(1) The Judeo-Christian God exists
(2) Satan exists
(3) Satan has an organized network of minions (C.S. Lewis “Lowerarchy” — the bureaucracy of Hell)
(4) Satan is hostile to humans
(5) The minions of the Lowerarchy can plant thoughts into peoples’ minds
How do these five simple axioms provide clarity? When looking at history, politics, sociology, and psychology they provide clear lenses to help understanding why things occur the way they do.
Why do “Leftists” prefer totalitarian political models? Because the Lowerarchy finds it easier to control human society when they only have to work on the controlling political class in a hierarchical system. They are subject to resource limitations and it is easier to steer a society in negative ways when that society is both hierarchical and totalitarian.
Why do “Leftists” seem unable to think rationally and instead appear driven by emotion and rationalize their actions? Because they are running “thought programs” built up by the Lowerarchy which have no rational basis. They are uncomfortable when it is pointed out to them the limitations of their world view and thus become angry and fearful.
Why is the USA a prime target of the Lowerarchy? Because the entire structure of the Constitutional Republic is opposed by design to a totalitarian hierarchical state.
Why do the “Leftists” get along so well with Islam and hate Christianity? Because the Lowerarchy hates Christianity and ESTABLISHED ISLAM as a counter to it.
Why do “Leftists” focus on name calling (racist, sexist, bigot) rather than rational argument? Because they don’t think for themselves — literally. They just run their programs, and have emotional responses. Because they don’t think for themselves, they CANNOT argue rationally, only respond emotionally.
Why do “Leftists” have such strong “insane” emotional responses to polarizing figures such as Sarah Palin? Because her very existence (and that of figures like her) stands against the plans of the Lowerarchy, which then stimulate the emotional responses in their puppets.
You can continue this list by exploring more implications. For example, what does this perspective say about Islam? What does it say about the Islamic treatment of women and blind eye that Lefist/feminist organizations turn to that treatment? Etcetera.
Thrasymachus at #23,
The phrase that comes leaping to mind is “politically unreliable.”
Sounds so benign. Innocuous.
Turns out to be extremely ocuous — Stalin didn’t merely liquidate people in ton lots. If they’d previously been any sort of prominent person, Stalin had his media folks scrub the image of that person from all published photographs.
As you say, all it took was for the suspicion to enter Stalin’s fevered brain, and merely showing insufficient enthusiasm for some idle chatting point was sufficient grounds. By Stalin’s reckoning, the frequent slaughter of some perfectly loyal ally was not just tolerable. It served to keep all the troops at a high state of eagerness to please.
Definitely a reminder of just who the boss is, eh?
Ya gotta wonder if they actually went around confiscating old books and magazines… Except, when you think of it, I don’t believe the Soviet Union under Stalin had anything like the volume of printed publications that we take for granted in the “West.”
Most issues of Pravda probably were used right away for various essential functions: fuel for heating, wrapping for fish, catchments for bird cages, additional insulation for the boots and jacket, cheery wallpaper for the drab apartment, fiber for the casserole.
Any detectable volume of former loyal politburo members consigned to oblivion was probably never much of a problem.
In the case of the current crop of imitators, they seem to have picked up the routine a little in advance of actually possessing the brute power to pull it off. The shudders now reverberating through the Statist camp are seismic indicators — pre-cursors — of a pending major realignment of a fault system. The Progressives, Leftists, Marxist Libs understand that this system artificially has been prevented from resolving itself by small survivable increments. they understand because THEY are who has devoted so much effort to the distortion.
Remember the Yosemite Park forest fires of about a decade back? They were described later by experts who examined the burned areas as having incinerated the soil to a depth of several feet in places, sterilizing the subsoil of critters, seeds, and nutrients. the result was that new growth to replace the carbonized forest took substantially longer than for other fires.
The reason for the ferocity of the blaze is supposed to be that for a full century the policy of the forest service was to STOP any blaze it could, prevent them from spreading. This resulted in a CENTURY’s accumulation of deadwood — the greatest heap of fuel for the flames in recorded history.
We have a similar unnatural accumulation of deadwood cluttering the national landscape.
Draw your own conclusions.
It’s only a double standard if you make the mistake of thinking there is some principle like “truth” or “fairness” involved.
The real question is “Is it liberal/progressive/socialist enough?” Yes = OK, No = Not OK.
Which is Boolean, you just have to ask the right question.
People on the right, in the center, and who don’t pay enough attention, think the Left is on the up and up; at least that is their default setting until proven otherwise in a particular instance. THAT is the problem.
Read Alinsky, but better, read Lenin.