A Night at the Los Angeles Public Library
We live in times when the different sides in our country speak languages as far apart as Chinese and Italian.
Witness what happened to me earlier this week when I was a panelist at the Los Angeles Public Library’s ALOUD Program on the subject of “Hollywood — Left and Right.” With me on the panel were Mike Farrell — actor and left-wing activist — and Steven Ross — a USC history professor who had just published a book on the topic.
I imagined I had been drafted to play the reverse of liberal Bob Beckel on Fox’s The Five and approached the evening with trepidation. I didn’t know the half of it.
The moderator, film critic Ella Taylor, kicked things off by asking Ross about one of the main theses of his book — that although the movie business was dominated creatively by liberals, it was the Hollywood conservatives that ran for office and exercised political power. Ross cited Louis B. Mayer, George Murphy, Reagan and Schwarzenegger as examples.
Taylor then turned to me — as “house rightie” — and asked if I agreed. Ignoring the reference to mogul Mayer who never, to my knowledge, ran for office, I responded that I largely did, but noted that without Ronald Reagan it didn’t mean that much. Only Reagan had had a genuinely influential political career – after all, I added casually, he “tore down that wall.”
Suddenly, the audience erupted in boos.
I stared out nonplussed. Naive me — I had assumed that regardless of political stripe most people in the US of A regarded the downfall of the Soviet Union as a plus. Not so evidently the near full house at the LA Public Library, many of whom were apparently still unfazed by the Stalin-Hitler pact. And that wasn’t an idle reference, since, a quick perusal of the audience revealed, many sitting there were in their eighties and up. I even recognized a few of them, old CP fellow travelers, from my left-wing days.
I feel like I’m in that situation everyday. The fact is that, when put into that situation, there is nothing you can say that will convince anyone that they may be wrong. The first name that came to my mind when they said conservatives lacked empathy was Jackie Gleason, followed by John Ford and Frank Capra. Still, liberal logic would never accept such facts. I had a professor call me racist because I believed that government assistance programs made people comfortably dependent – since a large percentage of blacks are on g.a., that made me a racist. I never said anything to prove otherwise, but their decision was made before I spoke. It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually stopped to hear out the views of others; but they would never do that.
I must admit, Mr. Simon, what you did took guts.
I would say that it is not guts but patriotism. It probably is difficult to realize that many former friends are now deadly enemies.
While you were involved in the civil rights movement, the Protestant establishment was redefining themselves as the truly aristocratic class and identifying Republicans as racist and reactionary. Today’s left-wingers and their associates see themselves as the only compassionate element in the society,and Digby Baltzell spelled this out for them in 1964. See http://clarespark.com/2011/10/15/baltzell-on-the-good-jews/. I retitled it The Protestant Establishment taps the Good Jew. You have defected, Roger, and are now in the same despised class as David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh. Stalinism was far more widespread than most leftist professors will admit.
To: TheBigBadGman
“I had a professor call me racist because I believed that government assistance programs made people comfortably dependent – since a large percentage of blacks are on g.a., that made me a racist.”
I think it’s because it’s the way they think. They believe, i.e., if it was white protestants who were on g.a., then you’d approve of it. That’s because, as far as I can see — they pick a group they like (or believe is “worthy”), and then everything that they see as beneficial that group, they’re ‘for’ — whether it makes sense or not — whether it hurts others or not (or even actually hurts the very group they claim to care about). That’s their bottom line. Choose your group — logic, or a thought process — or a set of values and beliefs — has nothing to do with it. It’s they who are the true racists.
It’s also got something to do with “post-modern” thinking (if you can call it that). Where nothing is trusted — least of all logic and facts. The belief is that — as I mentioned in the paragraph above — they choose some group or something they “like” — and then “logical” arguments are twisted to support that “like.” That’s the way they non-think. They project it on you (and the rest of us) because that’s all they know. It’s right out of Orwell (and Rand).
Aqua; Close but NO cigar. They Do think. They just think like Stalin and Hitler that they know better than the people what is good for all.
Aqua, Ivan,
I think it is both. It most certainly seems like they’re wearing blinders. They criticize capitalism without seeing the irony of doing so, wearing name-brand clothing and carrying cellphones and laptops. They criticize Christianity without once admitting its prevailing positive influences on Western culture. What this is is a culture of victimization.
In that sense, it is not what you have but what you don’t have. Christianity stresses monogamous relationships and the sanctity of life. Capitalism stresses success only as a result of hard work and dedication, and doing so for the individual rather than the group. These are not convenient ideals. It means that practically, most will come up short one way or another. Nevermind that free sex increases the rate of STDs and abortions, and at that, nevermind that fetuses can make sounds and feel pain. Nevermind that government assistance encourages economic dependence and that, in a capitalist society, some people will succeed more than others. It is for reasons like this that communism is so attractive to these people. (If I had a dime for every time that Marx was brought up as a positive example, I would be rich.)
Worse yet, they will not hesitate to attempt to use your own beliefs against you. Matthew Modine has a movie out now called “Jesus Was a Communist,” but I don’t recall Jesus calling for workers to murder their captains of industry and distribute goods accordingly. And for all the calls upon the Declaration of Independence, it is not that ‘all men are equal,’ but “all men are created equal;” big difference. For all the criticisms of Christianity – and more recently, a disturbing increase in criticisms of Judaism – I still haven’t heard an answer as to where their concepts of morality are based. (After all, it is always easier to criticize others for problems that you have not dealt with before yourself – be it a pregnant daughter or buying a gun after being robbed.)
Instead, you focus not on the long-term solution, but the immediate victimization. Remember the analogy? Black people are like a tree that was tied down, and as such, must now be pulled back up. Hell, for all the accusations of racism against conservatives, I have yet to see an overt example. (If you want to read something truly infuriating, read Dan T. Carter, who traces conservative racism back to George Wallace up through today. It’s bogus, and it’s required reading.) And, for all the talk about how businesses exploit their workers, people still flock to them when they move; such as Boeing’s recent move. But I think I’ve written enough – too much – and I am sorry. It’s been somewhat cathartic. But as I said, it’s both. They’re wearing blinders, seeing only what is convenient to see: ‘Successful man vs. Unsuccessful man; must have been foul play.’ Communism is founded on that very idea, hence its attractiveness. Farther down this post someone compared talking to liberals akin to playing tennis with a wall. I’ve never played tennis, but that is a pretty good analogy.
These people are hard-core religious. You can no more change them than you could convert the Pope to Judaism. It ain’t happening. It is why Progressives don’t like comparisons of themselves with zombies or vampires. The solution to the problem is not pleasant.
Converting the pope would be easier than convincing most leftists. Logic is not in them nor are they fazed by facts.
At the core of it, Roger touched upon it with a glancing blow. The left-liberal actors and people in the creative arts are (perhaps) more in touch with the emotional. Thus they can cry on camera and have their feelings very close to the surface. Conservatives know that to be so is a bad way to go through life. Witness the “marriage” of Madonna, the crazed outbursts of Janet Jackson, Woody Allen’s “affectations”…all excused due to liberal empathy.
Although it may be said that no one person is better than another, it can also be said that one person’s behavior is certainly better (or worse) than another’s.
Thus, we arrive at moral relativism. It’s not ok for a conservative to have an extra-marital affair but it’s perfectly acceptable for a flaming liberal. After all, they are seeking their emotional center, or “soul-mate” or some such silliness. Terms that actually mean nothing except to the emotionally driven.
And, to me, growing up always meant working at and becoming victorious over ones emotions. Personally, I suck at it. But at least I know that. My Scots-Irish heritage (an excuse) seems to have awarded me the ability to become furious at the least little thing. However, knowing this, I make sure not to react inappropriately when the waiter gives me the wrong check or people don’t start moving when the light turns green.
Thus, intellect over emotion. So to me, it’s just the age-old argument that the liberals like to lay on people in authority. That of, “Don’t you even FEEL anything? Why are you arresting him? He didn’t do anything wrong”..and all the wahhhh that goes with that. By contrast the emotional liberal cannot exercise the empathy necessary to understand why laws are enforced. And their absolute hatred of all things biblical distances them from such notions as “be unto others as you would have others be unto you”.
Actually, much of what lefties espouse can be found in many a biblical reference, but also in context so as to make the point more pertinent rather than lacking in context, as they like to do.
Take for instance, “Universal Love”. Well, by definition, love is conditional. The only exception may be that love which a mother feels toward her own child but even that has been dismissed a time or two. The left thinks that enforcing “universal love” they will eradicate hate in all forms whereas I have learned that it actually foments the opposite and causes hate to grow.
But trying to reach an “artist” this way is impossible because the moment you bring in an empirical thought balloon, you lose with them. All they hear is “So, you hate everyone then, is that it?”
Trying to reason with a liberal is like trying to herd cats. Can’t be done. One should not even try. We may have reached a phase in humanity where we’re at an impasse because you cannot argue with them and win, even though they lose. They cannot be reasoned with…cannot be appealed to on logical grounds. They build their own foundations on the sands of emotion and because they cannot recognize that, they cannot build anything of any great lasting structure.
Yes, I too am annoyed when the leftist, progressives, or whatever else they call themselves, use their feelings to excuse their incoherent beliefs or horrible actions.
I fortunately have 1 consolation that all this progressive nonsense will become irrelevant & harmless in the not-too-distant future, (although they will leave a legacy of damage that can be reversed). They’re not having children at replacement rates.
@ Jeannine: I’m less optimistic – their birthrate is irrelevant – their control of the schools allows them to indoctrinate our children while we’re busy working and paying the taxes that provide their salaries.
You make many biblical references, so I’ll make one of my own.
.
I used to read the Old Testement with a ‘grain of salt.’ I mean, come on, after seeing the Seven Plagues, after seeing the Red Sea parted and escaping, after seeing the Pillar of Fire – How could they turn to Calf Worship? It just didn’t add up to me.
.
Then I dealt with Liberals. Tried to show them how Reaganomics worked for everyone. How welfare isn’t love, it’s contempt. etc. etc.
.
I no longer take the Old Testement with a grain of salt. I see the Golden Climate Change Calf being polished every day and I believe it all.
If you permit me to say so I think you yourself are indeed on to something but have struck a glancing blow a glancing blow.
Of course what I am going to express is a huge generality but I don’t think Conservatives lack empathy – that’s ridiculous.
I do think, generally speaking, that the creative imperative as opposed to plain common sense goes to the ol’ right/left brain stereotype.
For example, actors Sean Penn and Danny Glover have often displayed brilliant instincts at their craft and have an artistic slant that despises repetition. However, when they write about politics, they come off as nearly complete idiots.
Conservatives by contrast, seem to generally have a lot of common sense and pragmatism attached to their creative imperatives. This results in fundamentally sound writing but a lack of improvisation or true understanding of humor.
Here at PJM, Lovely Earth and Buzzsawmonkey have no problem repeating an endless schtick ad nauseum and thinking themselves and other commenters also thinking them clever and creative. Conservatives are not funny generally speaking and liberals are; liberals don’t have a lick of common sense and conservatives will deliver sound screenplays.
People who have creative insights are notorious for lacking attention to pragmatic detail and those with a more mundane view of the world good at crossing the T and dotting the I. Is the story about Einstein having a closet full of the same suits true?
I think I’m stretching a generality about as far as it can go but it’s interesting to think about and does answer some questions; the other question is whether it does so consistently and can therefore be something that can be predicted.
Lovely Earth can be predicted like the sun coming up but so can adherents of political correctness as permanently offended racially conscious morons obsessed with ‘social justice’ where no lack exists – twin problems on two sides of the same coin.
Solutions are what’s needed in America and I think a combination of the two is in order but not on the horizon.
“Conservatives by contrast, seem to generally have a lot of common sense and pragmatism attached to their creative imperatives. This results in fundamentally sound writing but a lack of improvisation or true understanding of humor.”
I will stack Mort Sahl vs. Lenny Bruce or Dennis Miller vs. Bill Mahr any day.
The stuff Mort said in 1965 was funny then and is funny today. The stuff Lenny said back then was funny then, but is Boring today.
Dennis was funny while Bill was funny, Dennis’s old rants are still funny, Bill’s old stuff is Silly and tired today.
Personally Bill today comes of as spiteful and ignorant, while Dennis is still funny and insightful.
The point is that whild Liberals tend to understand Topical Humor, Conservatives understand the underlying truth that makes their humor last long.
AS to the PJM contributors, this is not a site for humor, it is a site for serious discussion. Sometimes that will include sarcasm, but humor is not the intent, and therefore your judgement based on commentors is Non-Sequetur.
If the intent of a specific post is humor then it is entirely relevant. I am not talking about whether one considers a thing funny or not but repetition as opposed to forms of humor that are not dependent on endlessly repeating oneself.
To a large extent it is a matter of taste; some people like “Monty Python” and others “Are You Being Served.” To me, one is cutting edge and creative and the other tiresome and predictable. Some people like predictability.
” It’s not ok for a conservative to have an extra-marital affair but it’s perfectly acceptable for a flaming liberal. ”
According to that same logic it would not be ok for a liberal to be intolerant and hateful toward his or her conservative neighbors. But they are not. They demonise us.
Yet they feel free to do so. Nobody calls them out on their intolerance and their closed minded ness.
You’re so right.Isuggest that you avoid them if possible
You make a good point. What leftists refer to as empathy is in reality a fuzzy emotionalism that lacks reason, logic, or accountability. And then they call conservatives stupid. Truly caring about others doesn’t mean you constantly give them stuff and foster dependence, it means you try to make them stand on their own 2 feet so they no longer need your help. Religious charities know this distinction, and know how to help people help themselves, leftist ones do not.
Why modern liberals are 100% wrong about everything
Converting the Pope would, in fact, be much easier, as he’s already basically sympathetic to Jews and their worldview, and supports contemporary Church doctrine that Judaism is the bedrock of Christianity. The same cannot be said for the way leftists regard conservatives (i.e. as essentially subhuman.)
“This all reached its nadir when Ross offered his professorial explanation of why liberals were more creatively successful in Hollywood — and to him the better artists. Conservatives, he said, lacked empathy. Liberals were the ones able to get into the skins of others and create their characters.”
I can see the audience in my head right now, bobbing their heads in agreement with Ross as he passive-aggressively chides you with this pathetic opinion. It’s almost as if he’s saying, “See how well I can blow smoke up [the audience's] ass? That proves you’re wrong!” Never mind numerous contradictory examples you are able to quickly reference!
Symposiums like this (with this sort of setup) are never about being informed. They are about self-affirmation. In the late nineties, I attended a “free thought” symposium at UC Irvine featuring Edward Tabash as keynote and Paul Kurtz as guest speaker. I, as a young and naive pseudo-intellectual (a Marines stationed at MCAS Tustin at the time), enthusiastically attended to get my copy of “The Courage to Become” signed by Kurtz. Anyone familiar with Kurtz and Tabash can likely guess the type of audience that would attend a lecture featuring discussions about how to ensure that, as a non-believer, you can get an atheist funeral when you die. This lecture was really a turning point for me because there was one dissenting audience member there who politely questioned Kurtz about how it harms anyone else for a believer to say a quick prayer over a non-believer’s casket. I don’t remember the entirety of Kurtz’s response but I clearly remember his first words were, “What are you, like, six years old or something?” Applause and laughter broke out in the audience.
I continued my secular-humanist liberal tendencies for a few more years but I never forgot how viciously Kurtz lashed out that that guy. There was something wrong about it that I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that my real problem with the audience’s pleasure at seeing this single individual get his comeuppance for daring to skip a stone across our pods glassy surface. That’s when I realized I wasn’t at the symposium because I was sure of my belief. I was there because I needed consensus to affirm what I *wanted* to believe and that my intellectual pursuits were more about gathering only the answers that reinforced my subjective worldview.
You know Roger, heroes really are the people who change lives for the better with seemingly mundane actions. I wish I could find that guy from the symposium and thank him. Now, I had to wiki this because though I had heard it before, I didn’t know the source but, Maria Tatar a Harvard professor and children’s literature scholar said of the story “The Princess and the Pea” that sensitivity is enough to validate the identity (ie nobility) of the princess in the story. That night in the library, you were the pea under the 20 mattresses and your only purpose there was to help those people convince themselves that they are the “noble” ones.
Still, I have to believe that you reached one of them that night. That person just doesn’t know it yet.
We have our bigots, no doubt. But they have them, too. But they would be appalled if you suggested this (which is another characteristic of the bigot). Suggesting that someone is childish because they “believe” is a classic example of the “smartest-person-in-the-room” disease that plagues all bigots. They have all the answers. which, of course, is the most foolish thing a person can think.
A conclusion I came to about 40 years ago – the smartest person in the room usually isn’t.
Liberals are too foolish to realize their own weakness; they are too busy pretending to feel for others in their feigned goodness. They will never
see the truth, only their truth. To waste time frustrating yourself with
their pompous attitude is to no avail. Enjoy something worthwhile.
Thank you, James Green. You made me feel good. Maybe I did.
Yes, there’s always the hope that afterwards, something may seep into someone. It makes putting yourself on the line acceptable — or even worthwhile.
But I’m really sorry to hear that you went through that, Roger. I find it … heartbreaking.
Some of the people I love most in this world … I can’t speak to them anymore … and mostly, I try to keep my beliefs a secret from them … try to comment neutrally or pretend I’m just not interested in the topic … or I know I’ll be forced to give them up totally. Like you, I have already lost several, because I spoke up.
It’s so ugly … and always winds up with personal attacks. I guess it’s the professors who’ve influenced the journalists and other popular writers — and the movies depicting the ever evil corporations, etc., etc. — so it’s become considered normal to believe those who you disagree with are either crazy or evil … and never to give an inch of space to even consider, much less debate, the ideas.
It’s so cult-ish. I think so much is emotionally invested in being “part of the ‘good’ people — the ‘In’ people. It’s a kind of psychological “projection” — working so hard to believe themselves and their group are — “pure” — they reject their own dark “shadow” by projecting it on the “others” and “outsiders.” Something like the way anti-semitism works in the mind. It — that — IS a kind of madness.
I remember, back in the 60′s and 70′s — having all kinds of lively discussions … arguments of ideas, if you will … and no one in my crowd — in, of all places, Greenwich Village — and it’s cafes and bars, no one rejected anyone personally because of their political beliefs … and there were every kind and flavor you could possibly imagine in that ultra-creative group.
(I lived abroad during the 80′s & 90′s — and came back to find t-h-i-s!!)
Can’t help but to keep seeking an answer to the question, “What the hell has happened?”
You have some of the most intelligent comments from your readers that I’ve read on any blog. They show you a lot of love too. And as far as you lacking empathy for your fellow humans…..hogwash. I’ve read you for years and you’re almost…hormonal. Warm regards, TD
“I was there because I needed consensus to affirm what I *wanted* to believe and that my intellectual pursuits were more about gathering only the answers that reinforced my subjective worldview.”
An excellent explaination of why my liberal family members rush to the TV each night to watch “Brian Williams and the News” and continue their subscriptions to Newsweek.
In my political science class (30 years ago) the teacher gave us this leftist drivel that I along with the class eagerly accepted.
But one older gentleman would speak up and disagree with the professor. Even though I was on the teacher’s side, I couldn’t help but think that his points made sense. Perhaps the moral of the story is, along with what James’ says, is that no opinion may be changed at that moment, but a seed is planted. Perhaps that’s all we can hope for.
I know when I see this, I’m largely frustrated and keep my mouth shut. I should learn to share my thoughts, even though realizing they won’t be accepted.
It seems to me that it is situations like this that are often responsible for conservatives losing. When faced with people of this stripe, we clam up, mumble and avoid the fight while at the same time the liberals are itching for one and let us have it.
What is this reaction? Why are we as conservatives so seemingly ashamed? I say ashamed because when we react in this way we feed the beast. The liberal automatically associates these reactions with the ‘fact’ in their minds that we know we are wrong and feel guilty about it. No wonder this is what they think, it is what we tell them with these actions every time. Weakness emboldens them. Why do we not strike back? Why do we sit and let them win? And I ask this having had the same reaction to my liberal co-workers who easily blurt out terribly insulting things about conservatives knowing full well I am one. Each time I mumbled something or simply didn’t respond or at best managed the same kind of half way responses.
I think Breibart is so successful because he lets them have it, right to their face and leaves them mumbling and looking down at the ground. They look weak, they look ashamed and then conservatives win.
I have read you stuff a lot and have a great deal of respect for your work so this is not meant to be an attack upon your actions (hell I know I would have done the same damn thing. Just frustrates the hell out of me.
We’re right, they are wrong. We just never seem to really win. Electing Repubs certainly doesn’t do it.
It’s a catch-22 situation. Bold conservatives are viewed by lefties as rabid and nonsensical. You mentioned Breitbart, but Limbaugh and O’Rielly also come to mind. Whether you like these guys or not, they are admittedly ballsy, which only hurts their reputations more – deserved or not.
This is all about how to win an argument. Stay on the offensive, don’t get defensive. If someone accuses you of something, turn it back on them — with both barrels. That’s why I found it foolish for Condy Rice to advise Cain not to play the race card. Bee Ess! Back at ‘em, in their face. He did. He won.
Speaking only for myself, the reason I quickly stop arguing when confronted with leftist thinking – forgive the oxymoron – is their complete intransigence. They seem to be immune to logic and reasoning and very VERY fast to label you a fascist or racist or whatever when they detect (or suspect) that you aren’t one of them. Their minds seem completely closed. It just seems pointless to proceed.
Mind you, I have sometimes thought I detected a sense of desperation when I made certain remarks that challenged their world view. It’s as if my point struck them and really made them think, at least for a second. But they seemed to immediately see the risk to their whole way of thinking if they gave my remark any more thought and went into panic mode. That made them respond with some kind of cheap shot or glib remark. It felt a bit like the kid who covers his ears and starts singing to keep from hearing you. Of course, I may have just imagined those moments; they may just be wishful thinking on my part.
I don’t like the idea that any halfways intelligent person could really be so closeminded. I simply don’t want to believe it. But I’m darned if I can figure out how to make them acknowledge the truth in things that I say. They all seem so invested in their ideology that their entire identity would change if they actually admitted to being wrong about anything at all. Instead, they spout reflexive retorts. For instance, if you point out that Obama has accumulated more debt in three years than all the previous presidents in the history of the United States, they don’t stop to think about that for even a millisecond, they just say that Obama was responding to Bush’s mess so it couldn’t be helped.
You are so correct. Libs use the same tactic when you mention how high the unemployment rate is, despite Obama’s stimulus. They just reply, “The rate would’ve been higher if he had not applied the stimulus!”
I am proposing an additional factor in the clannish behavior you describe: If you don’t find it in yourself to think independently, you will yield to the peer pressure and quickly fall in the trap of finding validity in consensus. In this mode of “thinking”, it does not matter whether the “reasoning” is consistent with the facts or not, in only matters that it is shared, and that your acquiescence earns you acceptance in the collective, which is one of their favorite pursuits.
Whenever someone relying on his own counsel accidentally “blunders” into this warm and fuzzy environment, he must be condemned, presto, lest his train of thought become an authentic subject of discourse instead of merely a subject of discomfort. So, they do recognize intellectual autonomy when they see it, and it triggers a reflex of collective defense, in which they immediately dispense whatever kind of opprobrium is “appropriate” in their bag of tricks, in a simple error of projection, because they do fear, in some unvisited corner of their mind, what would happen to them if they dared deviate from their amorphous kind of orthodoxy-by-consensus.
So, the right thing to do is turn yourself into a mirror, in which they will be shamed to see the fallacy of their “argument”. Not easy to do, but we must learn and practice the art, as brilliantly demonstrated by virtuosi like Andrew Breitbart, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, and probably other talented practitioners of verbal combat. Just don’t be afraid to be accused of insensitivity, because it is in fact a compliment, it means your point was sufficiently disconcerting to have planted some seed of reason.
I tried a couple times to argue with liberals. It’s like punching at air. It gets boring very quickly, and sours civil relations. They end up thinking I’m a hard-nosed jerk, I think they are fuzzy-brained sloths. Kind of pointless.
“Why do we not strike back?”
Conservatives, generally speaking, prefer to play fair. They must emerge from their comfort zone in order to get down & dirty with the typical liberal mindset. For many as well, it’s a not-worth-it category that’s illustrated pretty well by the ol’ saying: “Never argue with an idiot; you’ll be dragged down & beaten with experience.”
There are several factors involved.
Firstly the liberals are often there with their supporters/cohorts, and they often initate the insults which can seem to give them a stance of superiority.
Insults can intimidate or catch an opponent off guard, and in a way that’s really all it is. unless you’re in a room or street full of them in an orchestrated demonstration.
After all, when you’re off guard, and someone attacks you for no reason you’re surpised. the shame, comes from the sudden attention focused on you, especially if you’re shy or not prepared for the onslaught.
Don’t foegt these characters are ALWAYS prepared to insult their opponents, like the bitchy aunt who comments oh so sweetly on your poverty or weight or the horrible uncle who gooses you despite your dislike of it.
These people also love seeming morally superior in public. Many of them are simply bullies – how do you react when bullied? Some react with shame, others with anger.
In the case of organised Leftists, like those in the Socialist groups, they often attend workshops on “direct action” and civil disobedience, which involves conflict and they look for chances to provoke it, especially in groups and at symposia etc. that’s why they are intimidating – it’s because they INTEND to be intimidating, otherwise they wouldn’t be bullies in the first place.
They love conflict, it gives them a chance to perform and is emotionally satisfying as it is dramatic and triumphant, and bullying.
The best way to combat it one on one is pretend you[re an aggressive spolied teenager and give it right back to them. In groups just ask quiet persistent questions. Or talk to the unconverted.
This is something that every nonleftists zombie has to contend with and we all have our moments of victory and times of retreat.
Don’t feel embarrassed, they are experts at this stuff.
Roger, I seem to remember that you like tennis (and I like golf, go figure)…so, I am going to recommend a drill for you.
On a day when your partner is unavailable but you want to get some practice, go to one of the tennis walls or any will do…just draw a line net height with a piece of chalk.
Practice serving by bringing a basket of balls and a bucket of water. Dip the ball in the water and try to hit just above the line in each corner, first service in deuce court, second service in ad court. Upon two consecutive successful corner serves from each court, practice approaching the net at full speed…first dunk your head in the bucket of cold water…race as fast as you can toward the “net” and slam your head into the wall.
Do this for a couple of hours.
Here is what you will learn:
1)Every time you are doing what is successful and correct, you are just setting yourself up to slam your head against the wall.
2)Being successful and right followed by negative reinforcement is a poor way to spend your time.
3)It may help your game to put yourself in unpleasant situations, but you will always walk away holding your head and asking yourself why you just did that.
4)Hitting your head against some walls just isn’t worth the pain.
5)Walls have no empathy.
You wasted an evening. They have wasted a lifetime.
Wow!
Can I take this away with me as a teaching moment for some I know?
Are these people you like?
I happen to like Roger quite a bit…
I wouldn’t waste time with them if there were no bonds of friendship worth the pain of seeing them fail.
I’ve given up trying to discuss anything of substance with my leftwing acquaintances. Silly waste of time. Pointless. As for the more aggressive ones, I let them vent, and when they are finished, I simply point out what total schmucks they are. (Intestingly, I had always believed that schmuck was the worst thing that you could be called. According to Jackie Mason, however, putz is even worse. But I still prefer schmuck. It is curious that schmuck has been sanitized and can now be uttered in respectable company; witness the recent Hollywood offering ‘Dinner for Schmucks’. I wonder when other popular obscenities, e.g. f..k, pr..k, c..t, etc will hit the bigtime? I suppose the creative, empathetic gang is mulling that over.)
When I’m in such situations in my lefty family,I always remember Ayn Rand’s advice: never argue with a self-confessed irrationalist.
I agree completely with carla and SiouxLady. In the era of Obama, the lefties think overheated rhetoric is mainstream politic discourse. After sitting throught a dinner with work colleagues who nodded approvingly at a) all native people of Hawaii are superior to white people; b) all people in Wisconsin and Texas are narrowminded, evil, and stupid; and c) Perry and Bachman should be running the halls of an asylum instead of running for office. When I did not show the proper amount of enthusiasm and remained quiet, one of them shouted, “What the he|| is wrong with you? Why are you so angry?”
Maybe these coworkers were always this intolerant of different points of view. I’ll have to rely on the reports from others, suddenly my free nights don’t line up with theirs.
“Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.”
- William Ewart Gladstone
Sums it up pretty well, doesn’t it?
Whenever I am forced by circumstance to suffer a liberal’s opinion, or ire, I have to remind myself that what they are essentially emoting is: “How dare your existence threaten my worldview”.
…It’s why all their machinations end in poverty and tears, and if allowed free reign over others, bleached bones.
All the liberal people I know are rich and secure and wouldn’t be caught dead serving breakfast to people at the Salvation Army. Maybe being intolerant, rigidly leftist and self-serving is a viable survival tactic.
Gotta think about this.
Forgive me for being slow, Roger, but why did the crowd “boo” when you mentioned Reagan being responsible for “tearing down the wall”? They were against this? (If so, why didn’t you ask them?) Or is it the point of your article: Republicans = Evil (in which case, these people are bigots, and this fact should have been pointed out to them)?
Roger recognized some of them as former fellow travelers. They lament the end of the Soviet Union. I remember reading an article in my college library, around 1985 or so, in the Secular Humanist magazine, that recounted a trip some of them took to the USSR, and how wonderful that society was. That was one of the first major points that steered me away from the left.
These are people who believe in communism. They doubt it less than the Pope doubts God. I’m not a religious person, but from where I sit I think that God wants you to doubt and test Him, because He’s going to wind up being vindicated. America, and our Constitution are set up the same way, which is why we have the First Amendment. Communism can’t abide any testing of itself.
Mr. Simon, did you ever meet Jimmy Stewart? It seems to me that today he’d be on the right, and he seemed very empathetic.
Jimmy Stewart? Thanks, rbj, but I’m not quite that old… But, yes, Stewart was a man of the right.
So to the moderator, Henry Fonda, John ford, Howard Hawks and John Wayne were unsuccessful and lacked empathy?
Sadly, Henry Fonda was a “man of empathy”. The apple didn’t fall *that* far from the tree.
Fellow travelers? Really, Roger?
Roger, for any of your friends who lament the fall of the USSR, might I recommend the book “MiG Pilot” by John Barron, as told by Viktor Belenko. It outlines day-to-day life of one of the Soviet Union’s best-treated pilots; An elite in the Soviet Air Force and yet he craved freedom.
I read it when I was a young man and it left a huge impact on me.
“These are people who believe in communism. They doubt it less than the Pope doubts God.”
.
I have often said that Christians should be Ashamed in the presence of liberals.
.
Jesus admonished the Christian to have the Faith of a Mustard Seed.
On a Daily Basis you will see Liberals displaying the Faith of an Avacaco Pit.
.
P.S. I second that recomendation of Mig Pilot by SG-1. I think it should be Required Reading in High School.
What?
So many wonderful thoughts on this thread – yours, rbj, prompted me to respond.
Yes – doubt surely is the emotion that validates faith. John Irving (a progressive to the core) explored this notion at length is his excellent _A Prayer for Owen Meany_. So many on the left are taught to doubt nothing in the pursuit of their “beliefs” i.e. that which is handed to them by their professors. Yet doubt, and the constant – rational – questioning of our beliefs and institutions is the only way in which we can strengthen ourselves.
Unfortunately, our education establishment from K-Graduate School and into the board room excel at teaching the masses that they have nothing to doubt.
Roger, liberals do not embrace logic. They resist any point of view other than their own, and “free speech” is theirs alone. Why would you attend this ambush? Your points are solid – particularly the nonsense about empathy (amazing the Left actually believe that drivel) – but they have no traction since everything on the Lefty cheat sheet is “settled science” which is liberal code for STFU.
They believe in empathy because their entire philosophy is based on emotion; remember, the question they ask each other is always “what do you feel about…”, never “what do you think…”.
“It was pointless. Although they are obviously more violent about it, Muslims aren’t the only ones with a distaste for apostates. I was only succeeding in getting the audience, and my fellow panelists, more angry with me, digging a deeper grave for me or what I might believe.”
Unfortunately, I see this country getting more and more polarized. Mr. “Hope and Change” has only made the matter worse, even though that was one of the major themes he ran on in 2008, “Bringing this country closer together.” Even worse, he did everything in his power to further exploit the wide gulf between right and left these days. “Tax the Rich,” “Fat cat businessmen,” and “Wealth Redistribution,” all did more to stoke the fires of class warfare in this country than it did to end it. I think most of America knows now that everything Obama said in 2008 was a lie, and a bad one at that. He was, is, and always will be a far left liberal who hates conservatives. Look at the way he’s acted towards Republicans ever since he got into office (with the “I won, you lost” mentality). And look at what he and his minions did as soon as Congresswoman Gabby Giffords did after she was shot, trying to blame conservatives for her near death. Obama made a big speech after the shooting (which ended up being more of a campaign speech) and then went right back attacking the Republicans. So much for “healing” the nation.
And now the country is even more polarized than before. The hatred between right and left is even worse than when Obama came into office and all these calls for “bipartisanship” and “cooperation” from snotty-nosed independents has turned into just another campaign slogan, meaning nothing since the people in Congress hate each other even more today.
No, I fear for this country. Not as much because of our huge debt and budget deficits (even though they are terrible), but because I fear that we are headed for something really, really, bad in America. With all the social unrest you are seeing in the Occupy Wall Street riots, and then the radical union occupation of the Wisconsin capital, to the “flash mobs” that have been attacking stores around the country, society is beginning to break down in this country. All we’ll need is another major economic collapse, such as the one we had in 2008, and we WILL have major social unrest in this country. And I don’t mean protests. I mean supermarkets being raided and department stores being looted. The mobs have found out that we can’t put everyone in jail and that there certainly is strength in numbers, so they take advantage of that. The worst example being what happened in the state capital of Wisconsin during those union votes. The unions literally took over a state capital and the police just stood by and watched it happen.
So much for “Hope and Change.” There is something really, really, bad headed for America, where the far left and the far right are literally going to come to blows with each other. And we have a president who has made this situation much, much, worse.
Not saying it’s necessarily going to happen, but if our country did sink down into another cival war, I would not at all be surprised.
Oops (lamenting the missing edit mode here), I meant civil….
Yes, Libertyship, there will be a civil war, and it will come in Obama’s second term if he is elected – a combination of cheating to win the election, rule by decree (executive order), and packing Communists on the Supreme Court will tilt the balance until Governors Perry and Jindal have decided that enough is enough, and they take the south and the Great Plains out of the Union.
Most of the Army will be on the side of the rebels this time.
When a conservative expresses his viewpoint at a leftist gathering and experiences rejection, he should simply say, “Please excuse me for f##ting in church.”
I agree that there is a serious problem, when Senator Feinstein and Representative Cummings can make the kind of public statements they have been making with respect to the Fast & Furious investigation. F & F should not be a partisan issue. Various leftists have made it one, buy pretending that the Republicans are simply playing politics. Of course, some of the Republicans who aren’t informed of the facts of F & F and are running off at the mouth about it are playing politics, but the ones who are actually conducting the hearings are not, and this is obvious to any reasonable observer. Feinstein rambling about gun control and Cummings pretending the Republicans are attacking law enforcement or whatever is so completely absurd that it really should merit its own, separate political scandal (certainly not comparable to thousands of weapons being walked to the cartels, but still, shocking and disgusting). The absurd coverage and lack of reporting of relevant facts in MSM stories, when they actually do bother to talk about F & F, should also be its own scandal. It’s not just the political appointees at the DOJ who have absolutely no regard for the rule of law.
I would rather have gnats buzzing in my ears than listen to liberals.
sorry oldguy but I fail to see the difference–they’re both irritating and are just noise.
Mr. Simon — I am amazed at you! It took me 50 years to learn not to argue with liars and fools. What has taken you so long? I have an older brother, a retired school teacher, that I have not talked to in over 5 years, What is the point of my waisting my time with him? He is brain dead for all practical purposes.
Liberals will be with us for as long as there is a surplus of food.
If that abundance were to quickly vanish, Liberals would be gone in one generation. Maybe two.
Next time you are at such a meeting, Roger, mention Cuba has just recently legalized owning private property; or ask the audience and panel members how their investment portfolios are doing; or have they heard of any new cool tax shelters; or do they have a Droid or an iPhone.
I have liberal and conservative friends in Hollywood, and I feel fine. I don’t know why things always must be drawn in such harsh back or white lines, and why people feel compelled to hate — and I mean HATE — the people they disagree with. It doesn’t make much sense to me. To quote one of the biggest losers in L.A., “can’t we all get along?”. I love my conservative friends as much as I love my liberal pals. They are all good people with loving families and stable jobs. But politics seems to make them go temporarily loony and they feel compelled to hate –and I do mean HATE — the other side. Let’s listen to our opponents and agree to disagree but keep an open mind. And, Roger, next time you feel like you want to say something, do so instead of seething inside and keeping quiet while claiming the other side doesn’t want to hear you. I am listening to you, even if I don’t always agree with you.
Oh, I tried, Jerry, but the more I did, the more I got that hate back. BTW, if you’re so open to discussion, why do you choose to hide behind anonymity here? I don’t.
Thank you for replying to “Jerry,” for us, Mr Simon. I was going to but his being in Denial and Projecting all of that Hate, reminded me the Borg does mind – if one pisses it off.
Brian Richard Allen
Lost Angels – Caliobamacated 90028
And The Very Far Abroad
Note to PJM: writing under my real name got me progressively banned like a virus that slowly takes over a computer. No one said anything but one and he banned me because it turned out I wasn’t lying about what I was doing and where I was and he didn’t like being embarrassed: my posts simply didn’t take anymore and it was very gradual.
I do not use this name by choice.
Jerry, it’s all well and good to keep an open mind about contentious issues and I applaud you for it. But eventually the rubber meets the road and you have to form an actual opinion about which approach is the correct one. I hope you’ll be capable of climbing off that fence when that times come and make a stand with the side that seems to make more sense.
I live in Austin, Tx. I do not argue anymore with liberals. I just tell them the truth(you’re making your own chains) and laugh in their faces. You cannot be afraid or let them affect your outlook period. Oh yeah another favorite “nice outfit, didn’t know The Gap had ‘poor revolutionary” in stock”. Or “How much is irony these days, guess only Visa knows for sure”.
Roger would benefit from a study of the debating style of Nigel Farage. He does his homework, lays out facts forcefully and concisely, and doesn’t waste time playing defense.
Think Tyson. Think Patton. This is a fight, a war.
Attempting to reason with an envy-incited, hatred-fueled and rage-driven lock-step lizard-brain Leftard makes less sense than would talking to a brick wall.
Neither brick wall nor Leftard is capable of forming ideas — but at least the brick wall won’t become all-over froth and foam-flecked and/or try and kill your children!
Lefties believe they were ordained to transmit and not receive. Note their efforts to shut down opposing voices. They have a tool on the FCC who’s doing his best to restore the ‘Fairness Doctrine’, in order to get Fox News off the air. They think PC trumps the First Amendment, and that certain concepts must never be expressed. Note their shouting down of college speakers with whom they disagree.
Thomas Sowell was right. It aint much use.
“Fairness Doctrine.” Ha ha. Fox News won’t have to change much, it’s already closer to “fair and balanced” than six other networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS. A few challenges to an FCC enforcing a resurrected “Fairness Doctrine” and the American public will be getting 300% more exposure to conservative and libertarian points of view. Give public radio, Pacifica Radio, and that far-left “Democracy Now!” some genuine “Fairness Doctrine” enforcement and there will no dissonance-free zone anywhere for the committed liberal to tune in.
Bring it on. If they strike us down, we will become more powerful than they can even imagine. Conservatives won’t roll over as they did the last time there was a so-called “Fairness Doctrine.” The non-left has media watchdog groups that we didn’t have in the Age of Cronkite and its phony “fairness”. There will be litigation. Years of it. And I expect to see the liberal networks run away from news and commentary, wiping show after show off the schedule because they’d rather have bland than “fair”. Fox News may well be one of the few survivors. Heh, wouldn’t that be rich?
But that’s the whole problem. The fairness doctrine is about anything but fairness. Their goal is to silence any conservative output. They can get away with it because the enforcers themselves are flaming liberals.
We are a divided nation due to the statists being successful at owning the message. Their playbook doesn’t say only “If you don’t like the rules of the game, change them.” , it also says, “Gain ownership of the playing field, the game itself and all the players.”.
Thus, in large part they own the message as is the common phrase and they have done so for a couple of decades at least. But with the advent of new media, especially the internet, their utter anger at anyone espousing a non-statist point of view is obvious and stimulates their desires all the more to silence it.
BHO has done more in his short tenure to divide the country than anyone…ever! I am afraid that we’re heading for a period of lawlessness (think LA riots), all based on BHO and his ‘reformation’ of America.
This is who he is, this is what he does. No surprise to us. So how does he get 45%? Unless they want this.
Most of his supporters don’t “want” division and conflict and would certainly never recognize him as the cause of division and conflict. The useful idiots really think he’s a moderate who has gone out of his way to work with the Republicans but the “teabaggers’” intransigence and racism ha made it impossible to bring about the world of hope ‘n chance that they fantasize about.
The hardcore lefties that surround him and put him in office are another matter altogether; they’d love dead kids at an OWS demonstration. What they’d really like is for some tubby bearded guy with Glock in a thigh holster and an AK slung on his back to show up and open fire on some gathering. So far we on the right have been well behaved and kept our crazies, and we do have them, in check. My great fear is they’ll astroturf a counterdemonstration that results in violence which will of course be blamed on the extremist right. They really want a “Kent State Moment” though they may not want it just yet. Part of me thinks that a lot of this is just tune up for next summer and fall and if they can make the US look like Greece, and make it look like the right is on the verge of insurrection, maybe they can do a “workaround” on the Congress and the Constitution. These are truly evil people.
I am convinced that the main problem with conservatives, and particularly those who were liberals and have seen the light, is they are too empathetic. Conservatives are too forgiving of the outrageously bad behavior of liberals, which seems to be their normal mode. Conservatives believe that, “The Truth Set you Free!” In truth, The Truth, binds you to it and you either come into the light or you become an angry bitter troll! Old liberals know the truth and are therefore angry bitter trolls. Conservatives, because of their empathy, are unwilling to return bad behavior, received from liberals. Roger I applaud your effort. Keep the faith.
I would like to follow your post. We should think of liberals as not-yet-civilized children. Because they look like adults, we tend to accord respect to their comments, because of our abiding by the first amendment.
When they behave shamefully and irrationally, they themselves have no shame. Like victims of child rape, we supply the shame that the perpetrators of the outrageous behavior ought to have, but do not have. We know that it is an occasion for shame, but we need to place the shame correctly.
Roger was brave to be in that situation, actually holding out the possibility to the other attendees that they might be able to engage in a meaningful exchange. They failed completely to listen to anything that did not reinforce their views. Is it any wonder why they hurl the insult “bigot” so often? It is projection.
In the future, we need to choose our battlegrounds more carefully, and keep insisting on their response to inescapable facts of economic life. My favorite: You can’t get a job from a poor man. This tends to silence them, because all of their experience tells them it is so, and maybe gets the rational part of their brain working.
Well over 20 years ago I remember watching Thomas Sowell one Sunday night on “Booknotes” with Brian Lamb on C-Span. When asked why he never appeared in the sort of panels Simon describes, he replied much in the same vein as cfbleachers–that he didn’t feel like taking all the inevitable abuse from people who weren’t going to listen to him anyway. Upon hearing that my heart sunk to my stomach, as I, (obviously along with Luh3417) had/have always belonged to the Hunter S. Thompson “…you’ve got to challenge the bastards on their own turf..” school of thought. and thought “how can I keep fighting the good fight if my ‘main man’ and inspiration has given up?” Fortuitously the very next day I had to stay home all day waiting for some contractors to give bids and caught a day-long 2-part panel on race relations, “progressive thought” etc., on C-Span which included the likes of Cornell West and the rest of the “usual suspects” in the black “progressive” community. I actually watched BOTH sessions sober. (That, after viewing the am session I still refrained from hitting the sauce for the pm session should make me eligible for some sort of medal for heroism.) My conclusion (already arrived at half-way thru the am session) was that I had horribly misjudged Sowell and owed him an abject apology for ever doubting his judgement. Were he to have availed himself of Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and transported himself back to Hitler’s famed 400,000-strong 1936 Nurernberg night-time rally, and placed in the very center of the stadium field surrounded by not only those shouting in the stands but those packing the field massed shoulder-to-shoulder and hoarsely cheering, he would have had a better chance, shouting at the top of his voice over the cacophony created by the 400, 000 of a) being heard and b) being understood, than he would have had he attended that panel session I witnessed.
You should avoid taking gigs where your fellow “speakers” and audience are composed of autofellators. Unless, of course, you are permitted to kick chins.
“Do not argue with them. Never try to convince them of anything. Only smile, and mock them in a round-about way. But be sure that when they come for you, you are prepared to punish them.”
My uncle once said this to me. He was a smart man.
Too bad he didn’t say to do it once.
Just a thought: They may not have been booing at the idea that the Berlin Wall had come down so much as the idea that Reagan brought it down. They also won’t boo a free (or at least freer or at the very least Saddam-free) Iraq, but of course they’ll lustily boo any mention of Bush.
I’ve often thought it hopeless to argue with liberals, including many close friends, but last week I laid a massive dose of fact on a snarky Obama fan and got him to admit that maybe I was right, as in “correct.” That felt incredibly good. Also, I note that of all my friends who voted for O, most have now uttered regrets. One has said several times that O won’t get his vote next year. So maybe there is hope for change.
Fun thought: Now that the Castro brothers have decided to allow private property transactions on their prison isle after 50 years, will Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Ollie Stone et al still love them?
Hi Roger,
I’m not a seasoned politico or debater, but I’ll take a stab…
Crowd: BOOOOOO!!
Roger: I see. So we have some in the audience who lament the fall of the Soviet Union? We have some “humanists” here? Some warriors for “social justice”? 20 million. 20 million people, many shot in the head and buried in mass graves. Or locked away in Siberian gulags for “reeducation”. Murder, misery, fear, intimidation, sadness. Those who survived – were they better off? If you have an empty life would you perhaps rather be dead.
20 million! How dare you lament the machine that killed 20 million people and stole the souls from those “fortunate” enough to have survived. Social justice?! If social justice is murder and misery then I will stand and proudly do my damnedest to condemn social justice to the trash heap of history.
You people sit here smug in the confidence that your ideology is loving and empathetic while you spit on the graves of the millions that same ideology has murdered. When you go home tonight in your hybrid cars and rest your head on your natural down pillows; when you close your eyes I want you to see the faces of the dead, hear the sound of the gunshots, smell the rotting flesh. That nightmare is your legacy. It should be reserved for the past, but you wish it to be the future?! Open your eyes! Open your minds! Open your hearts!
You are assuming that he wouldn’t have been shouted down.
If I had my way, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago would be required reading for everyone. I have yet to read another book that was more powerful in demonstrating how awful people could be to one another in the name of the irredeemably flawed ideology that is Marxism. I have trouble picturing anyone with even an ounce of humanity in them that could conceivably defend Marxism after reading that book.
Unfortunately, the book is three volumes long and close to 2000 pages long so this would be an impossible challenge for too many people whose literacy just isn’t up to the task.
That book was the probably the most important step on my road to realizing that Marxism is completely unthinkable to any decent person.
Living in the Bronx, I became a registered Conservative in 1976. I think it’s me and another guy, and he’s getting really old.
Over the years, I have listened liberals denigrate my conservative beliefs in terms that would have made Jeremiah Wright blush. I never became angry, often stating my position and ignoring the vitriol.
In the last 10 years, I have become much more vocal. Now, my liberal friends become apoplectic when I express my opinions, worse than ever, almost to the point of becoming violent.
Recently I began publishing articles in American Thinker Magazine. A black woman, who has been my friend for 37 years, a woman I have called family and introduced to people as my sister, objected to my calling Barack Obama the worst President ever.
She called me a racist and I haven’t spoken to her since.
Liberalism is not an ideology, it’s a religion, maybe even a cult.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/racism_injustice_and_the_left.html
I’ve spent the past six years as part of an effort to shut down the pervert-worshipping LC cult, and helping ex-members recover. I see many similarities, and the lessons I learned in my debates with cult members has helped me greatly when talking to my liberal family members. First suggestion: don’t “debate”. As several people pointed out above, your best hope is that your words sink in somewhere, so I have “conversations”. Most of the discussions are about me being a pro-life Catholic, so I’m afraid that’s what my examples look like rather than the other issues:
“Gosh, it’s not the way that I want to get there, but it’s like Democrats want to completely ill themselves off; you know, in addition to the Roe Effect, you keep pushing euthanasia, birth control, gay marriage, and here you just have one grandson out of your four children. (Mom’s up to 17 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren).”
“It’s funny; my astronomy professor at Purdue told me 25 years ago, that global temperatures have been increasing or decreasing right along with sunspot activity for the past several million years, every 12,000 years or so (I am old and can’t remember the cycle: was it maybe 11 or 14 thousand?). and he showed us charts going back that many years. But your chart only shows the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last heating cycle. Are AGW proponents Creationists??”
“Yes, eight is a lot of children. Most people are pretty nice about it, but if they hassle me, I just tell them they’re being intolerant of my alternative lifestyle, or that we’re making a desperate attempt to save Social Security, or that we’re in charge of making the Right Wing Conspiracy a Vast one”.
It’s hilariously entertaining when I do these with my best Dumbblonde face and voice. Your mileage may vary.
Sorry, that’s “kill themselves off”.
It’s hilariously entertaining when I do these with my best Dumbblonde face and voice.-Jeannette
I’m sure it is. There was a guy in college who, lacking blonde-itude, pulled off something similar by giving off a Columbo “can you help me understand this?” sort of vibe. Amazing how that roped in the liberal students – must’a been their know-it-all attitude that made ‘em so vulnerable to someone who could appear to be so much the dummy.
A philosophy major in our our little group of conservative students, he said his inspration was the Socratic dialogues, probably something like this one. Some of us struggled to keep quiet while watching him work his stuff on a lib – hilarious indeed.
In all my years I have not met an intelligent lifelong Socialist or a lifelong
Communist. Facts are not a consideration. I’ve decided a long time ago that intelligence and Leftism cannot exist in the same space. Also, remember when
banging your head against a wall, it feels good when you stop.
In all my years I have not met an intelligent lifelong Socialist or a lifelong Communist.
I’ve never lived in a Communist country but I have spoken to several people who did. I have asked a few of them if they knew anyone in their former country who truly believed in communism as a valid ideology that really would lead to the betterment of their country. You’d think that in a country that was formally Marxist, such people would be all around. But I only ever had one person admit to knowing someone who really believed in Communism – his own father.
It is my very strong impression from many conversations and books that the vast majority of those residing in Communist countries – including actual members of the Communist Party – had no more enthusiasm for Communism (the ideology) than the average PJM reader. My sense is that people joined the Communist Party the way people join a service club (like Kiwanis) or a golf club: simply to meet the right people for career advancement, not for any real interest in the club itself or what it did. They knew that the Communist Party would be a way to have a better life for themselves – and that’s all they really cared about. One of the dirty secrets of life in Communist countries was that Party members inevitably had more comfortable lives, often MUCH more comfortable. This started in the very first days after Lenin seized power in 1917 and was, in my opinion, a key foundation of the Party, more so than ideology itself.
I think the problem is, you can BE a communist without UNDERSTANDING communism. I’ve always had the impression that the real, hardcore commies were extremely intelligent. You have to be extremely intelligent to understand Marxist theory and all the exegesis that followed. It’s goddamn complicated. That’s why so many intellectuals are attracted to it. One, it’s hard to understand. Two, it offers a single, comprehensive explanation for why things are the way they are. An intellectual who truly understands communism can feel good about himself because he knows everything anyone needs to know.
The people who ARE communists without UNDERSTANDING communism are usually idealists or thugs. They might be more dangerous than the intellectuals.
Not just anyone in the Soviet Union was allowed to join the Party, according to a good friend who grew up there and now lives in Israel. He said you had to join the Young Pioneers, or suffer ostracism by your peers, or worse. But not every Young Pioneer could join the Party even if they wanted to.
You’re absolutely correct. As I understand, all children were expected to join the Young Pioneers but, since the Communist Party was seen as an elite group, you couldn’t simply join the Party itself because you wanted to. In fact, there was an intermediate stage before you could join the Communist Party, the Komsomol, which is a Russian acronym for the Young Communist Movement. If I’m not mistaken, the maximum age for the Komsomol was something like forty; at least the leaders of the Komsomol were often that age. I don’t really know much about the progression from Young Pioneers to Komsomol to Communist Party though and what hoops someone had to jump through to qualify to go to the next level.
I have heard though that the percentage of the population of the Soviet Union that were actual Party members was only 2-3%.
Of course this doesn’t mean that the rest of the population was openly hostile to the Communist Party! The Communist Party was the ONLY legal party and no others could exist until well into Gorbachev’s era. The state had a large array of tools used to prevent dissent, including near total control of the media, an extensive and powerful secret police, many informers, etc. to make sure that no one got too far out of line. The large majority of people simply shut up and lived within the absurdities of the Soviet system as best they could.
I have always insisted that the meanest of the Marx Brothers, in terms of the humor that he inflicted on everyone else, was Karl. The joke he played on humanity, Communism, continues to try to wreck the world long after his own passing.
And I’ve had this discussion too, about conservatism, empathy, and agreeing with people. You can never get these guys to admit that diversity of opinion means including those who disagree with *them*. They fervently believe that they’re the dissenters, and people who disagree with them are the “establishment” as if that makes their opponents evil.
That’s the part that has been bothering me for years. Liberals ARE the establishment. They have their hands in everything and control most things that affect ordinary peoples lives. All this mess can be laid at their door yet they are masters of deflection.
Your experience makes me wonder why Republicans ever agree to debates run by liberal news organizations. Maybe PJTV should host a debate!
I once had the “you have no feelings, you have no empathy” thing thrown at me. I looked the person straight in the eye and replied, “You are full of empathy, yet you say this to me, not caring about _my_ feelings, showing no empathy to _my_ position? Does this make you a better person than the one you think I am, or worse?”
It was amusing. I had no idea human beings could go through so many color changes in close succession.
Thank you for having been there, Roger. But I think you were the “kids, don’t grow up to be like this” object lesson. I don’t think there was anything you could have said which that crowd would have agreed with. It must have been horrid for you, since in many ways these were your friends and neighbors dragging you through the flames. Showing, every moment, their great empathy and heightened regard for your feelings, of course. /sarc
I spent most of my working life dealing with useful idiots and communists for a living. I’m a mostly retired public sector labor relations hand on the employer side. As a child of the ’60s when I was young and dumb I was your basic long-haired, dope-smoking, FM radio-listening Liberal, so I know the vocabulary of the Left well enough to have read Saul Alinsky when it came out, not just as a reaction to Comrade Obama. I cut my teeth in LR as a working class hero on the union side, but the more I rose up out of the rank and file the more cynical I became as it became obvious that nobody around me beleived the crap that fell from their mouths and they were contemptuous of the rank and file they purported to represent. Reading Alinsky much later and with much more experienced eyes I was amazed at how “Rules,” for example, fairly seethes with contempt for the proletarians he is “organizing.” I left organized labor in ’81 and armed with the courage of my connections spent some years in the private sector.
A combination of a divorce and the oil price crash of the mid to late ’80s threw me into the tender mercies of state government as a labor relations hand representing my state. While we had a Democrat governor, we also had a multi-billion dollar shortfall in projected revenue vs. budget requests and even under Democrats, we did something no other unionized state government has done until recently; we sought serious concessions from our unions. Hell, nobody even knew how to do it! Labor policy in the public sector is really just a matter of asking the union what it wants since all the union states were deeply Blue until recently. As late as the mid-90s the guy from CA and I were the only Republican appointed directors of labor relations in the Country.
Only our trades and crafts and maritime employees were in AFL-CIO affiliated unions and in those days, the trade union dominated AFL-CIO were the conservatives of organized labor. After Taft-Hartley in ’48, the trade unions drove the communists out or underground. The inheritors of the old CIO’s communist dominated industrial unions were the big wall to wall public employee unions like AFSCME, SEIU, and the teachers’ unions AFT and NEA. Our concessionary bargaining and the unions’ inability to resist it broke the local independent employee association that represented the vast majority of our employees and that group affiliated with AFSCME. We could easily have stopped the decertification of the local group and prevented AFSCME from acquiring the union and the political power in the state that entailed, but here we found the limits of a Democrat administration’s ability to confront organized labor. We handed AFSCME the unit and they immediately became the most powerful single entity in the state. The fact that we’d stood by and let them take the unit didn’t mean we had any money we were willing to give them, so we and they went at it teeth and claws for a year and a half as they tried to get their first contract. We were like two school boys meeting after school to fight; one was scared and the other was glad of it. They wouldn’t strike, and we wouldn’t lock them out. That is a good illustration of the limits on public employers in Democrat, and most Republican, administrations: They can’t do the right thing economically because of the poltical consequences.
In any event, and to the point of the OP, this was my re-introduction to radical lefties. And these radical lefties were wearing $500 suits and making a lot more than I was. If you were wondering what happened to the old SDS of the ’60s look no further than the leadership and apparachnik level of the unions, especially the public employee unions. I was used to the haughtiness and low-level thuggery of the old-time union guys and pretty much innured to the “can I settle this with you or do I have to talk to the Governor” style. But you could fight with them in arbitration or at the bargaining table and go have a drink with them afterwards and grade each other’s work. But not with the new guys!
They sent their DC apparatchniks to deal with us and we, our government, our state were beneath their contempt. The communists learned well from the Germans; their adversaries were sub-human, some Weberian “other,” not to be dealt with in human terms. We learned quickly that Mao and Alinsky were far more important to doing our jobs than all the labor relations hornbooks. They simply viewed collective bargaining as politics by other means. I knew my Marx, Mao, and Alinsky pretty well from my younger days; for dealing with these guys, I became a serious student of von Clauswitz.
They actually weren’t very good at labor relations. We beat them up badly in arbitrations, before the labor board, in court, and at the bargaining table. It only slowly dawned on us that they didn’t care whether they won or lost, they viewed conflict as a part of their organizing process and they wanted intense conflict. If you’re an LR hand you run to fights that most people in politics and government run from. It took a long time for us to truly grasp the reciprocal of Alinsky’s rules. Everything about Alinsky is about provoking sane, rational, calm people into doing something insane. The OWS types really do want a “Kent State Moment.” The organizers of that mess would just love good video of a bunch of dead kids.
It took a long time and in the interim while we won most LR battles they won the political war and bought themselves a governor. But even Democrats eventually learn that they simply cannot live with true nihilistic lefties; you can’t give them enough to make them shut up and go away. With the old boys, you could just throw money at them and buy peace, at least until the next election. The last thing lefties want is peace. They want a fight and they want to make you look bad. Slowly you learn to resist the temptation to smash them just because you can. Unless you can destroy them, you leave them alone as much as you can and still protect your interests. There’s no reason to try to be nice to them, to do things for your employees to make them happy; they won’t let you. The last thing they want is well-paid, well-treated employees. As one of the AFSCME organizers once griped to me: “It’s hard to find a sense of social justice in State employees making a hundred thousand a year.”
The one rule for dealing with nihilistic hardcore Lefties is NEVER GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT! If you don’t give them what they want; being arrested, getting beat up, tear gas, police violence, a lock out, some draconian action, they keep doing ever crazier things to try to get you to do something stupid. As they do crazier and crazier things they lose more and more support and at some point they do something crazy enough that nobody can defend them and then you make smoke and noise and break things. If you’re an employer, you fire a bunch of people. You have to do it at the rank and file level even though it is easy to feel sorry for the useful idiots who are being thrown to the wolves. You have to show that following the lefties has a price. You can’t really hurt the organizers any more than we on the right can hurt radicals in government. Van Jones didn’t miss a day’s pay; they just moved him into a communist front organization and he just kept on doing what he did. Public employers are stupid when unions misbehave and do illegal strikes and such; you don’t put the union leadership and staff in jail; you put rank and file members in jail. If they want to do one of their fake strikes, lock them all out; make the single mother clerks wonder how they’re going to feed their brats, they’ll think twice about following the union again. Oh, and be prepared to spend your life with a laser dot on your forehead because somebody will drop a dime on you for anything you do, and if you don’t do anything, they’ll make something up.
Shortly before I retired my Republican principals wouldn’t listen to me and tried to put on an “employee appreciation” event. I told them the unions would never let them do it, but we in the Stupid Party keep thinking that if we’re just nice, we can get along with them. So, the unions announced that they were going to do a counter event and protest our “appreciation” event and show “the people” that we were lying and didn’t appreciate them at all. Republicans are all into rules and laws and limiting stuff like that so we dutifully told them that their contract prohibited them from concerted activity and a demonstration in our building would be trespassing and we were prepared to have them removed. Well, they showed up en masse carrying signs and singing songs and I confronted the union leaders and told them they were violating their contracts and were trespassing. I got the two word speech. Of course they had their media friends marching in with them and the reporterette asked me if I was going to have the cops remove them. My last public words as a government officer were on the TV that night when I said, “I’m not giving them their Saul Alinsky moment.”
TMI.
It sounds like we need laws to ban public sector unions.
I don’t go quite that far; large public employers are lousy employers in terms of the work culture. Supervision is spotty even in non-union environments and almost nonexistent in a Democrat run unionized environment. Political level managers are agenda driven hacks or tokens in Democrat administrations and “captains of industry” who ran a real estate office and gave the mayor/governor $1000 and don’t know a damned thing about the agency they’re appointed to run. The biggest problem Republican officeholders at any level have is that they have to be shown to their office by a Democrat.
In any event, the scope of bargaining needs to be strictly circumscribed, legislatures MUST have approval authority over labor agreements, and political activity by public employees and their unions MUST be prohibited. If they won’t do that without war in the streets, then ban them.
No. we need to prohibit public sector unions and prohibit public sector collective bargaining, They have civil service protection and that’s all they should have. No unionized cops no unionized firemen no unionized teachers. Nothing. Its to abusive of the tax base, and a gravy train of corruption. No Public Sector unions.
I don’t think there is a legislature in the Country nor is there any likelihood of electing one in the foreseeable future that would repeal a state collective bargaining law. If one wanted to see that happen if would have to be done by a campaign for the legislature and the governor where repeal of the bargaining law was the primary objective in the election. And even then the entire wrath of organized labor nationwide would be turned on those legislators who voted to repeal and many would not survive, so anyone planning to run on such a program would be doing so purely as a singular mission to be accomplished and have no expectation of re-election.
I am not optimistic for the future of even the incremental reforms in WI and OH principally because both Walker and Kasich, like Swartzeneger before them, violated what I think is the first rule of taking on public sector unions: cut off their dues stream before you fight them. Contrary to the CW, it is easy to do when their contracts are expired and not that hard even under contract if you have the Governor and the AG. I’ve done it several times and credibly threatened it many more; when you have them by the wallet, their hearts and minds follow.
“It’s hard to find a sense of social justice in State employees making a hundred thousand a year.”
Great quote.
Nancy got her Saul Alinsky moment.
Wow, that was well written, thank you.
Nancy’s “Too Much Information” is an all too typical conservative/Republican response to anything about how a government actually works. You can get fine philosophical arguments about “big things” in conservative blogs and debates but you won’t find much discussion of nuts and bolts government. I’m willing to bet that the poster above who just wants to ban public employee bargaining hasn’t a clue as to how one would actually do that and make it stick longer than one election cycle. The biggest problem Republican mayors, governors, even Presidents have is that they simply can run governments that were built to be run by Democrats and few Republicans know enough about how governments actually work to have a clue how to reorganize one so that it could be run by Republicans. No Republican executive at any level could find enough competent, loyal Republicans to staff all the appointed positions in a government so they apply a thin veneer of friends and contributors and leave the government largely in the hands of holdover Democrats then they spend their term wondering why they’re constantly leaked, thwarted, and sabotaged.
Not TMI!
Thank you for sharing your life experience with public unions. I was a public employee in the days when we had Employee Associations. Then SEIU bullied its way in and tripled the contribution.
A nastier group of people does not exist.
“…although the movie business was dominated creatively by liberals, it was the Hollywood conservatives that ran for office and exercised political power” – and therefore…what exactly ? Independent wealth or the name recognition that comes from successful movies are helpful for a national campaign.
So the leftist Hollywood liberals don’t run for office as much ? Why ?
Are they too greedy to give up their lucrative careers for public service ? Are they afraid to damage their “brand” by being forced to defend their positions in the public square ?
Roger, you provided the most apt rationale in Blacklisting Myself.
BTW, I view empathy as all feeling and a sense of identifying with someone else’s pain, but as usual for the everyday liberal, it’s intention that matters – not outcome. A self-centered view that is all about how the liberal feels – not the supposed beneficiaries of their pity.
I don’t agree that both liberals and conservatives hate each other. I don’t think that conservatives view themselves as intellectually superior to liberals; they just believe that liberals are profoundly, irrevocably wrong about issues that are important to conservatives. And to the extent that the liberals have influence or power, that they are a danger to the survival of a country founded on the principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and constitutional integrity. I do think that liberals view themselves as intellectually superior to conservatives, and that they hate conservatives for refusing to acknowledge it. For example, . . . . .Sarah Palin!
My sympathies, Mr. Simon, for an unpleasant evening; but what did you expect from a room full of unrepentant lefties? These people are very unhappy right now and it’s bound to get worse for them next year when the Vanguard of the Proletariat (the dems) get thrown out of the White House and from Congress in depressing numbers. All their lives lefties have held religious-like convictions about a social-political system that has been proven over and over to be an Earthly disaster; this is not a prescription for a happy and balanced life. By going to that libraray and citing facts and being objective you were being very mean to them; you were also insinuating that their lives have been a complete waste of time, food, and tuition money. Next time you get an invitation to go and speak at a conclave of lefties my advice is to stay home and watch an old movie, like “Mission to Moscow,” and have a good laugh.
My favorite moment in Mission to Moscow is when one of the top diplomats tells Ambassador Davies that he suspects the Soviets have bugged the American Embassy (in Moscow). The Ambassador dismisses that as preposterous, saying the Soviets would never presume do something so ungentlemanly as eavesdrop on a foreign embassy. The naivete of that utterance always makes me bust a gut laughing.
Even long after Stalin was gone, the Soviets continued to monitor US Embassy to a staggering extent. I remember a 60 Minutes piece that revealed that the new American Embassy, built by the Soviets since Americans couldn’t bring in their own contractors, was absolutely crawling with (electronic) bugs to the point where the Americans refused to take the new building at all….
Of course Lefties are better actors.
What is acting, after all, other than lying?
And lefties have always been the best liars.
I genuinely struggle with the rhetoric of the left and right, looking for what’s right not who…
I find it sad for lack of a colorful word that people have to associate their politics with the success in their field, it reminds me of the pathetic dopers who are convinced all creative people get their productions from the same poison they imbibe.
I appreciate your courage and willingness to stand up for moral principles in a hostile meeting, I woke up from drinking faux conservative koolaid about 6 years ago, BHO in 2008 accelerated the awakening. I am no re-educating myself on the real history of the USA and our political leaders. Thanks for the resource of PJM.
Sounds like you had a bad evening there, Mr. Simon. But then, as my grandmother used to say, what can you expect from a pig but a grunt? I gave up trying to explain to my friends here in San Francisco (yes, the belly of the beast) about my politics. When they ask me, I just tell them I’m a conservative who hates people and the environment, loves war and drowns puppies every morning before breakfast, just like they fantasize.
What difference does it make? It’s what they’ll think anyway.
The truth is, though, that the liberals in America have hitched their wagon to a falling star. They’re going to get nastier and nastier as time goes on, too. People that invested in their hatred aren’t going to let it go that easily.
Be careful out there, Mr. Simon, and thanks for all your great work on PJ Media!
Roger, your praise of Robert Duvall as one of Hollywood’s foremost conservatives was spot-on.
In particular, Duvall’s wonderful role in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (clip referenced below) has encouraged foresighted sober-minded folks from across the political spectrum—from George Monbiot to Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP)—to think seriously about the long-term moral consequences of climate change:
According to Mortensen, this entire scene was ad-libbed by Duvall. Stunned by its power, the film-makers retained the above scene in the movie, verbatim. Because at the end of the say, The Road is a movie about the courage that is required, in order to grasp the sobering truth.
Aye … America needs plenty more foresighted, sober-minded, conservative artists like Robert Duvall.
Recommended.
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Trailor: The man (Viggo Mortensen) discusses sons with an old man (Robert Duvall) he meets on the road. The old man is happy to see a child still exists. From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
URL: http://www.traileraddict.com/clip/the-road/hes-a-god
You. Are. A. Clown.
You worked your AGW religion into event THIS comment thread?!
Rob, do you really imagine that environment-related issues aren’t in-play?
Thank goodness *foresighted* conservatives know different.
Quite a few science-respecting conservatives foresee that IBM’s Sam Palmisano will emerge as the standard-bearer for thoughtful American conservatism in 2012.
For one plain common-sense reason: the GOP is suffering mightily from a bad crop of poor candidates—someone like Palmisano could beat any of the GOP candidates with ease.
It’s surprising that this (very likely) eventuality is never mentioned at PJMedia.
——————————————————
Palmisano’s Highway to the Presidency
URL: http://www.americanselect.org/who-we-are
Rob, check-out last month’s stump-speech by Sam Palmisano.
Tell us honestly, Rob (and everyone)—has *any* GOP candidate said it better?
Breaking News: Palmisano will (voluntarily) step down as IBM CEO on January 1.
Hmmmm … so Newt, Rick, Herman, and Mitt had better step up their game.
——————————————–
Sam Palmisano Discusses Thoughts on the Future of Leadership
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLjVEmXV-_Y
“Tell us honestly, Rob (and everyone)—has *any* GOP candidate said it better?”
You left out ” or Democrat” between GOP and candidate. No doubt inadvertently.
…“the new normal” of recession – increased protectionism or lowered expectation
California’s Gov. Jerry Brown 1.0 was doing that “lower your expectations” lefty shtick back in the 1970s – pre-Prop. 13 and ante-Carter.
Doesn’t seem so daring and cutting-edge-of-societal evolution these days, does it? The next time some pinko wannabees start whining their claim that worker incomes haven’t budged much – after inflation adjustments – since the 1970s I think I’ll remind them of what their guru was saying back in those same ’70s and ask ‘em what are they griping about, the Left got its wish.
Right. Hope the climate doesn’t change like it has a number of times over the centuries. No doubt caused by cavemen driving SUVs. I think we should have a world wide election and decide the optimum average temp and then notify Earth. Problem solved.
Buzz … Palmisano runs (very successfully!) one of the world’s largest (and most profitable) high-tech companies.
In doing so, Palmisano/IBM have come to understand what too many ideology-first politicians *don’t* understand: that AGW is an accelerating reality — and therefore, it’s an accelerating enterprise opportunity.
So Palmisano’s strategy is obvious: run as an immensely strong third-party candidate via America Selects… an on-line medium that Palmisano understands far better than any candidate in either party. Split the electoral college. Broker a deal with Palmisano as VP in 2012-2016, then president in 2016-2024.
In this scenario, the 2012 Presidency goes to whichever party can accommodate Palmisano’s three-plank platform: (1) AGW is real, (2) the world economy is irretrievably globalized, and (3) America presently has *no* health-care system (and urgently needs one).
Any brand of conservatism that can’t accommodate realities (1-3) won’t survive … and won’t deserve to survive.
Hey Einstein, are you saying that the “apocalypse” of The Road is man-made global warming? Alrighty then. And that Americans Elect thing you link to…had never heard of it, did some digging, what a joke!
sAmerican Elect has a viable strategy if and only if:
(1) Obama/Dems are vulnerable on the economy, and
(2) The GOP nominates a weak candidate and/or runs a divisive campaign.
Right now, don’t (1) and (2) both look like pretty safe bets?
Hmmmm.
And what can the GOP do to block the Americans Elect strategy?
Nothing, right?
As for the sobering reality of AGW, isn’t it true that pretty much every CEO in the world respects that reality?
Hmmmm.
————————————
IBM’s 40-year Track Record on the Environment
URL: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/environment/climate/
The “apocalypse” of “The Road” is that it was trite decades ago.
Science fiction fans are laughing at that upgunned, politically correct junk with literary pretensions. Within the genre, it might’ve made it as a story at the back of Startling Stories.
It doesn’t have zombies so it’s art. Well done.
You are making an inference that the change Duval’s old man is referring to is climate change. While watching that film with friends, we all had different speculations as to what had caused that catastrophe.
None ascribed it to “climate change” as the primary cause.
The only thing worse than that movie was the book.
“I knew this was coming [the climate change]. This or something like it.”
Poppycock!
Your remark in square brackets is your wishful thinking, not something that is clearly and explicitly stated in the book or film. Having both read the book and seen the film, I can say that with certainty.
Both the book and the film are clearly set in a post-apocalyptic United States but the cause of that apocalypse is NEVER clearly stated anywhere. We know that USA – at least – is in an advanced state of decay with only a tiny handful of people trying to survive by looting whatever food still exists since virtually nothing edible grows any more. But we do NOT know how that state of affairs came about.
Was there a plague? A nuclear, biological, or chemical war? An invasion by aliens? We simply don’t know. The author never reveals what caused the devastation that forms the story’s setting.
For you to claim that climate change caused the catastrophe is simply not borne out by the book.
In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the catastrophe was NOT the result of climate change. Climate change would seem to be a slow process at best but we learn through the story about a sudden event that happened when the Road-Father’s wife was pregnant with their son that seemed to mark the turning point between a normal world like our own and the catastrophe that confronts the few survivors through the bulk of the story. The big change seemed to happen literally overnight. It’s hard to picture a climate change that would be that sudden.
How pathetic of you to take a single extremely vague line out of a movie, and then embellish it with a parenthetical remark that is NOT supported by the book or film to try to score political points!
It’s real simple, Sparky…
So Sparky, just what *is* “Plan B” for PJMedia’s brand of conservatism …
In the event that AGW *is* real, serious, and accelerating?
`Cuz “that can’t be true” ain’t no kind of answer, yah know.
—————————————————-
That’s NOT TRUE! THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbOjS0Ah7_o
Repeating a lie doesn’t make it true.
When you “transcribed” Duvall’s words from the video clip in your post, you inserted “[the climate change]“. Duvall did not say that. The character in the book that the movie was based on did not say that. You made it up!
There is absolutely NO strong evidence in either the book or the movie that climate change was the cause of the calamity that had befallen the earth. None at all!
You apparently want to believe that climate change spurred the situation depicted in the book and movie but you have no proof whatever that this was the author’s intent. You’re simply putting words in the mouth of a character, a character that isn’t yours, to support your own talking points.
For someone who purports to share facts with people, you utterly undermine any credibility you might have had by making up bald-faced lies. Have I made myself clear yet? Or are you just going to repost your original lies as if doing so makes them true?
What’s “Plan B” in case Mother Nature says you’re wrong, Sparky?
Because that’s what she *is* saying, you know.
Like Richard Feynman said, “Nature cannot be fooled.”
Well then Mr. A Physicist mother nature better lay off the volcanoes, solar flares and asteroid strikes.
And Sparky’s right: whatever caused the catastrophe in “The Road”, climate change is about the only thing it definitely wasn’t.
Looks like “a physicist” is receiving apparitions from Mother Earth. The Catholic Church has a procedure to follow, in order to determine whether a supposed Marian apparition is plausible or not. Is there a qualifying agency in your religion for proving/disproving Mother Earth apparitions?
I understand why liberals say this about the empathy thing; they feel they hold the high ground when it comes to compassion. Archie Bunker used to call them “bleeding hearts” because he felt their compassion was misplaced and nonsensical.
After all, why would a world of European racists dislike one half of an island, Haiti, and leave the other alone? Liberal conclusion: Haitians are unlucky and exploited rocket scientists. Conservative conclusion: The Haitian value system is not successful to be polite.
If true, are people without empathy more liable to be Conservative or are we really talking about pragmatic rationalists. I love to see the reaction if a liberal said the value system of black Americans lacked empathy. Such a statement would come from the same intellectual space and yet I feel the applause would be somewhat muted.
Then again, liberals are experts in double standards: just look at MSNBC, the channel that hates racism and Fox yet employs racist Sharpton and Melissa Harris-Perry while Fox has not one person who advocates by race on their channel.
I’m just grateful LA still has a public library.
Louis B. Meyer never ran for office, but a Republican State Chairman of California he had plenty of power. I’ll bet he carried the State Republican Party on his books the was August Bedlmont carried the national Democ-rat Party during the Civil War. He exercised POWER in many ways and did so openly.
And empathy for the hundred million or so dead at the hands of the communists of the 20th century is nothing next to the empathy for someone going through the angst of adolescence? Give me a break.
This column and the panel which prompted it serve to illustrate a common weakness on the right, trusting a liberal. Perhaps since Buckley the only conservative worth the label in a debate has been Ann Coulter. I can’t count the number of times I have read post-mortem columns from conservatives licking their wounds after being suckered into an interview or panel…”If only I had said this or that last night”. The first rule of war is to know your enemy. As long as the right expects decorum and fairness from a pack of dogs, liberals will prevail.
To bad we didn’t know in advance; might have passed along the four jesuitical questions that would have had Mike, et al., taking the elevator to the lowest reaches of the library there instead of your departure. Then again, all our focus this week was on contributing to or commenting on the PJM story on Cain.
I’m intrigued. What are the four jesuitical questions? (I Googled it but nothing came up)
Pretty ironic, Roger.
Reading the web entry for this event http://www.lfla.org/event-detail/661/Hollywood-Left-and-Right they say “join us for a conversation.”
But, as usual, these extremists don’t want a free exchange of ideas. Rather, they wish to exist in an echo chamber, where they all agree then go for a cup of free range coffee while wearing their Che t-shirts.
Circular-logic was a major component of the early Norse/Pagan legal-system too. It allowed them to do whatever they felt like doing with impunity, since might made right – and they were a strongly communalistic tribal society where the majority of whomever shouted-down the minority until consensus was achieved – and then they enslaved the losers…
Conservatives lack empathy? Really?
Did the New York Times have empathy for the starving Ukrainians, victims of Stalin’s genocide, when they published Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning essays covering it up?
Did the fellow traveler left have empathy for Solzhenitzyn and millions of other political prisoners in the gulags?
Did liberals have empathy for the dozens of people who were shot dead by East German border guards trying to flee from the “Workers’ Paradise” that was East Berlin?
Did liberals have empathy for those killed in Prague in ’68 or Hungary in ’56 when they were trying to demonstrate for more independence from Moscow/Cominform?
Did liberals have empathy for those who burned themselves to death to protest the Soviet occupation of the Baltics?
Do liberals have empathy for the Christians of the Middle East who are being ethnically cleansed from the region (90% have fled the West Bank, close to that have fled Iraq and they are being attacked in Egypt), the largest ethnic cleansing since WWII?
Do liberals have empathy for those who play by the rules, work hard and make the right choices only to see others who didn’t do these things get rewarded with special privileges and money, while their efforts are punished with high taxation and ridicule?
Do liberals have empathy for citizens of Detroit, DC, Oakland and many other places that are blighted, dangerous and poor and run exclusively by Democrats for the past 50 years?
Do liberals have empathy for school children stuck in underperforming public schools who could benefit from school choice, such as the DC Opportunity Scholarships?
Do liberals have empathy for victims of rape, robbery or murder who could have defended themselves with lethal force except the laws didn’t permit them to do so because they can’t exercise their 2nd Amendment rights?
Do liberals have empathy for the millions of pre born people, in wombs right now, who will be terminated this year, even though they can feel pain?
Empathetic? Right.
EXCELLENT point!
Any time I’ve raised the examples you cite, all I get is a brief embarassed silence then someone tries to change the subject. Maybe occasionally there is a vague general acceptance that those acts were wrong. Then the lefties immediately go back on the offensive with remarks like “but that doesn’t change the fact that Bush is evil!” or whatever.
The difference between the Leftists and normal human beings is that normal human beings have empathy for ALL people who have wrong done to them. The Leftists practice SELECTIVE empathy: all their empathy is reserved for the “cause du jour”, which seems to always be a clearly-leftist cause. For example, I remember Leftists expressing sympathy for the Viet Cong who were being horribly victimized by racist American bombing. Empathy for the South Vietnamese whose murders by the Viet Cong provoked the bombing was absolutely absent; they were “lackeys of the imperialist war mongers” and clearly deserved the “justice” being meted out by the viet Cong.
If conservatives lack empathy how do you explain the fact that they’re more charitable? They donate more of their money, volunteer more, give more blood…
I knew at that point it was time to go — and I did.
One more thing: Never let yourself be put into a similar situation again.
It isnt that liberals hate conservatives or what conservatives believe in. They hate the caricature of what a conservative is. A conservative pushes for a tax rate to support maximum possible growth the liberal KNOWS what he REALLY means is to give all money to the poor. When a conservative pushes for the removal of the death tax the liberal KNOWS what he REALLY means is to take money from poor people and give it to the super rich. When a conservative says everyone should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin the liberal KNOWS what they REALLY mean is they hate black people. And so on. To actually listen and try to understand conservative policies they run the risk of finding out everything they believe in is wrong and that their policies have not worked in the past because they are bad policies, not because they just haven been tried correctly. It’s a defense mechanism. Ferrell is one of those sanctimonious liberals. He is so much smarter and more correct than any conservative. I much prefer a Ed Begley JR who at least lives his life according to his viewpoint and has so for the past 40 years or so.
That attitude is partly why Hollywood is dying. They’ve lost complete touch with their audience.
If you will permit, Roger, a verse from the New Testament comes to mind… something about pearls and the other white meat, I think… Mt. 7:6. ‘Round these parts, we call it being educated beyond one’s intelligence.
It’s not so much that conservatives lack empathy, it’s just that we empathize with all the wrong things. Like the tens of millions who suffered and died under the communist yoke. Or the survivors of the Jewish genocide who gathered to reclaim their homeland with a message to the world of “Never Again.” Or human beings in gestation. Or the ordinary joe who just wants to be able to pursue his piece of the American dream, whatever it may be, free from a corrosive government that seems hellbent on throwing as many obstacles as possible in his path. At one time, Hollywood would have considered such people worthy of getting “into the skins of,” but today our betters understand they are not deserving of empathy.
Roger, you should get a few tips from David Horowitz with whom you have much in common. I’d be surprised if David’s ever been struck silent in the face of liberal intransigence. I’ve only seen him give as good as he gets, usually better. Of course, he’s been at it a lot longer. And he’s not a screenwriter who might like to work in Hollywood again someday.
It’s my experience among the left that you’re not allowed to give Reagan credit for bringing down the wall or ending the cold war. He was a dunce, you see, so he couldn’t have done it.
Anyway, I think the boos were for daring to give Reagan credit, not necessarily because they regret the end of the USSR.
Quite so, the Left’s party line is that the wall coming down and the Cold War ending was all to Gorbachev’s credit.
I, sadly, know some in academia who still believe Soviet communism was fine and dandy, or just a not-great implementation of a good idea. There apparently is such a thing as political necrophilia.
The give away to the tenor of the crowd is Greek fisherman hats and brightly colored socks inside sensible shoes. Run away, run away!
Mike Farrell is a pussy
I don’t argue with liberals much anymore, because it seems that we’ve passed the financial “tipping point” (unlike the global-warming “tipping point”, which is always 5-10 years away). The institutions that nurture liberals and insulate them from reality will soon collapse, and these hothouse flowers will have to adapt quickly or die. I won’t care; I’ll be too busy trying to stay alive, protect my family, and meet other people with useful skills.
I’m sure it’s very hard, but after all that has passed you must understand what Whittaker Chambers understood–to them you are an apostate and they all wish you dead.
You may think that you and they can disagree like reasonable people. Not so, on their side.
Empathy? Like a dancer who has to understand subtle movements in a partner? And make art from the dancing? Like…Ginger Rogers? Good thing she wasn’t a conserva…oh, wait!
And backwards and in heels, too.
Roger, you have a winning laugh. I am sure that you won over a small percentage of the audience.
The left knows they perish if they yeild. The pressure is upon them to maintain the lie 24 hours per day, 7 days per week,…
It makes them mean as hell.
It’s hard to talk to liberals. You have to be cunning. You have to stick to a certain vantage. You have to isolate their error, and not go forward in the discussion until it is made clear.
I did this recently. It is very strange when you talk to someone you think is relatively smart and find out they are liberal. My discussion was about the 2nd amendment. My liberal interlocutor agreed that the 2nd was established, at least in part, to give people a means to resist an oppressive government. When I asked him if this was relevant today, he tried, cheekily, to imply that I was advocating anarchy. Perhaps, he thought this was zeroing in on what is in my heart, while not realizing his own reflection, and therefore responsibility, in the accusation.
Almost all standard conservative postiions are automatically wrong in their thinking. They simply begin with certain axioms, such as, “the world would be better if there were no guns”, and anything defiated from that axiom is by degrees more and more wrong. It is absolutely presumptuous and naive. They may even concede that the police should have guns, but in their eyes this is still missing the mark of purity. My liberal friend probably was just making a goof as a means to copout, because he could understand the point that I was making, but couldn’t reconcile the FACT that I, in my position, am automatically in breach of a pure axiom: “the world would be better if there were no guns”.
It’s funny. It’s as if they want to argue from a standpoint based on the Garden of Eden (new age, of course), while typically, not believing the Garden of Eden ever really existed. I happen to believe in the Garden of Eden, but I am able to make an argument based on what is tangible, nevertheless.
My conclusion: Liberals are hypocritically ideological.
The purpose of the Democrat party has always been to justify their avarice, contempt, and bloodlust. It cannot live without a hierarchy of race, of sex, of class in which its position at the best of the best is affirmed. To that end it has instituted and defended slavery and Jim Crow, affirmative action and gay marriage, and thousand laws to stratify society, compel obeisance, and offend nature. The union of the Communist party and Democrat party that began with Lamont and Hiss is complete: the Democrat party now affirms the Soviet Union and the Gulag were the proper method of governance. They are the nomenklatura, the intelligentsia, the avante-garde who will achieve social justice by perfecting the methods which have failed in the past.
They are no longer American. They are the enemies, foreign and domestic, of the Constitution. And the penalty for treason is…?
Nobody said it better than Yeats in “The Second Coming”
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats’ poem The Second Coming was written in 1919,
And so from history we see clearly what Yeats’ poem foreshadows:
… FDR’s “New Deal”
… and Gen. Marshall’s “Marshall Plan.”
————————————
Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790
If error and ignorance have forged the chains of peoples …
if prejudice perpetuates them …
then science, reason and truth will one day break them.
URL: http://books.google.com/books?id=6NE8gZ2FIU0C&pg=PA35
When I got the email announcing this panel, I thought…Brave Roger! I knew it would be bad, so I didn’t go. I should have gone to support you!
One surely needs empathy to “feel” the pain of the less unfortunate, the “victims”. But then on the same token, you need even more of it to figure out who truly and deservingly are so and who aren’t. And that’s the difference between these folks and late President Reagan.
There’s a new paper that links cyber-smearing to psychological traits common to leftists.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/06/eggheads_peer_into_trolls/
Online smearers also tested strongly positive for impulsiveness, academics at the Florida Institute of Technology concluded in their study. Their paper, Rash impulsivity, vengefulness, virtual-self and amplification of ethical relativism on cyber-smearing against corporations, focused on flames and smears against corporations, rather than trolling individuals.
In view of the general tenor of these comments, how does one explain the (successful) Carville-Matalee (sic?) marriage?
Carville isn’t really a lefty, more of an old-fashioned liberal Democrat much like Pat Caddel. Mattalin isn’t much of a conservative either. Like most consultants, they’re more skilled mercenaries than ideologues of any stripe.
In other words, Mr. Simon illustrated he was outnumbered by the juveniles who would either shout or hold their breath ’til they get their way.
Are We a great nation or what?
Dear Mr Simon, are you okay? you haven’t written anything since this piece. It sounds like you had a terrible evening at the hands of your former colleagues.
I hope that you are well. I tend to get colds and aches after a particularly bruising encounter. Soup and good bread seem to make things better. and watching a film that I’ve seen with friends before- we can email about it, to share the happiness. My kids like being wrapped in blankets and cuddled. I don’t know your particular circumstances, but I do hope people are being kind to you.