This post is based on a talk by Evan Sayet some years ago called “Understanding How Modern Liberals Think.” After giving his talk, Sayet received numerous comments that he had discovered the grand unified theory of liberalism. The talk is good, although he goes off on a few too many Team Red tangents for my taste. So this is my modified version of his idea.
When hearing prog opinions, the natural reaction of everyone else is to think that progs must be evil or stupid to believe such things. True, some of them are. But there is a problem here. For example, whatever you think about Michael Moore, he is definitely not stupid. Stupid people don’t make millions of dollars with documentaries. And whatever else you think about Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, they are not evil. They make ice cream with silly names.
Alright, so if they aren’t evil and they aren’t stupid, what is going on? As it turns out, the heart of it is an extremely convoluted thought process that goes like this: of all the different systems people have tried over history, none have created a society devoid of crime, poverty, war, and so on. So, the modern prog concludes from this that the desire to be right is the source of evil. For if no one thought they were right, no one would argue or fight or go to war and so on. If people gave up the search for truth and right, we could all join hands and live happily ever after in the Kindergarten of Eden.
So if no one is better than anyone else, if someone *is* better than someone else, it must be because that they cheated somehow. Therefore, the prog will always side with what is evil, failed, and wrong over what is good, right, and successful. It’s like life is a big roulette wheel, and if the same number comes up over and over, it must be that the wheel is biased.
And the more successful a person or group is, then the greater they must have cheated to get there. This is explains the great hatred most progs have for the US. Only a prog could look at the US, the most prosperous society in history, and see nothing but poverty. Only a prog could look at the US, the least racist society in history, and see nothing but bigotry. Only a prog could look at the US, the most technologically advanced society in history, and see nothing but ignorance. Only a prog could look at the US, the least sexist society in history, and see nothing but misogyny.
How did such an idiotic idea gain widespread adherence? Well, for most of history, you had to be smart and/or lucky to avoid hunger, disease, and poverty. After WW2, these things were largely banished. An entire generation in the US grew up under the illusion that the near paradise they were born into was a fallen world instead of the result of thousands of years of intense effort and numerous setbacks. And even more incredibly, they thought that this state of affairs was so bad that it had to be demolished. That generation has been in charge of the the US government, media, and academia for about 30 years now.
There is hope however. Since progs will inevitably make a mess of things wherever they have control (Sweden, California, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Detroit, Greece…), it is only a matter of time before their rule crumbles.
So take heart, my friends. For though the progs may seem mighty now, they planted the seeds of their own destruction long ago. And those seeds are beginning to sprout.
But is there an example of some place properply recovering from a terminal prog infestation?
Chile?
Argentina and Brazil seems to be turning around. I think it requires really hitting rock bottom without any kind of safety net like Greece had from the EU, or income from non-commie policies and market forces carrying the place to even start recovering. Zimbabwe would not have abandoned its own inflationary currency had it not experienced the full force of their own consequences.
Interestingly, I just came across this ad that directs to PragerU, an educational site, directed at the Americans so enamored by socialism from Brazil:
How Socialism Ruined My Country
Brazil is not to the turning around point. The economy, once booming, has been completely ruined by the far left labor party of Dilma. And there is massive corruption to the point that it seems about 80% or more of their federal government, including the new president, are under indictment for money laundering and other things of that sort. The problem with countries like Brazil and Argentina is that the left has ravaged the economy so thoroughly that most of the population are poor and there are no jobs. And those poor see government as their only salvation. For that to change, they need a far right capitalist to just come in and tear down all of the bureaucracy and let the free market loose. Trump and his crew of wreckers can barely make a dent in the bureaucracy here, so I think our comrades to the south are going to have quite a long slog at it.
That’s unfortunate to hear. I was hoping Dilma’s impeachment was the start of a turning point.
PragerU has some excellent material on basic economics, however it’s frequently polluted by Dennis Prager inserting his snowcone opinions as if people care.
“Interestingly, I just came across this ad that directs to PragerU, an educational site, directed at the Americans so enamored by socialism from Brazil:
How Socialism Ruined My Country”
There are quite a few free market and even libertarian folks down there, but they are outnumbered 5 to 1 at least, by uneducated out of work people who will vote leftists right back in. Also, the labor unions are very powerful there, like they used to be here. And all of those folks are lefties.
I think it was Switzerland that was able to reverse it’s insanity and make pro market reforms.
Or maybe it was Sweden.
I should probably look it up before I post so I don’t come off as a dumbass.
Nah.
its*
New Zealand in the 80s. But they turned back.
Sweden.
The Nordic “socialist” countries are market economies with heavy government spending, largely as a result of scaling back state ownership in order to sustain high levels spending thanks to maintaining a taxable economic base.
There was actually a fun article recently on Denmark scaling back it’s safety net somewhat just so that people could have more say over their own economic lives. Not that they’re imploding their safety net or anything, but they are pushing out market reforms so it’s less all encompassing.
Watch to see what happens in Germany. They have very generous government benefits for all. Merkel has let in millions of unskilled 3rd world people over a very short span of time. And almost all of them have no skills and are on complete government assistance, including free housing, free healthcare, and food. Looks unsustainable to me, but their dear leader is sure it’s gonna just fine. IOW she’ll be long gone before they run of out money.
Germany also just recently imposed a minimum wage (they had none up until 2015).
Yeah, the result of a progressive regime crumbling seems to be a slightly less stupid version of the same regime.
Russia and China got on that road but couldn’t quite stay the course. With the right guidance Cuba could….
Good grief. It is only 10:30 and I am drunk. I better take a nap before I comment anymore. That goddamned story about the FGM Doc really got to me.
Moore not being stupid still leaves the possibility of evil. Ben and Jerry not being evil still leaves the possibility of being stupid.
I take issue with the assumption that intellect is uniformly distributed across all fields. It is very clear that brains can be very good at certain tasks and lousy at others. Ben and Jerry might have a nack for making ice cream, but not all that bright when it comes to anything outside their forte. Also, a high degree of capability in one field often gives a false sense of mastery in unrelated fields (see Bill Nye)
Moore is definitely evil. He has made millions selling stupid people on the idiotic socialist ideas. According to progs that is the exact thing a capitalist would do. By their own logic hence, Moore must be evil…
And Ben and Jerry are idiots that were lucky to capitalize on a bigger crowd of idiots….
To be a prog you must be a combination of evil and stupid. No exceptions.
Just because Michael Moore knows how to make his shitty “documentaries” doesn’t make him brilliant in all things. Just because a couple of hippies make good ice cream doesn’t mean there isn’t evil in their hearts when they want to destroy my liberties.
I think much of the stupidity is purposeful. They want to believe their prog faith so hard, they intentionally shut off the part of their brains that would normally point out all the errors in reasoning they are making, That’s why they are working so hard to destroy free-speech on college campuses. And why pointing out current (Valenzuela, North Korea) and former (100 million deaths in the 20th Century) prog disasters just makes them angry.
Fernando wasn’t a disaster. You just hate the Dodgers.
Ha! Damn spellcheck.
I do hate the Dodgers although that pudgy little guy was fun to watch.
The Mexican Hulk?
Awesome.
We just have our latest Glibertarian meme.
Whenever we talk prog and use example and analogies you MUST include Valenzuela.
Ie. Evidence is mounting that decrepit progressive policies like public education, EPA, minimum wage, Valenzuela….
It’s called confirmation bias, and everyone does it.
I wouldn’t call them evil, because I define evil as having intent to do harm. The trouble is, marxists truly believe their own bullshit. They believe their preferred economic organization would usher in an era of post scarcity where all animals are equal and we will have “freedom” from want. They rationalize the failures by calling it “state capitalism”, so that their fantasy can remain plausible.
And they will remain impenetrable to facts that contradict their worldview as long as their social acceptance hinges on accepting the faith.
The smartest ones of them, the ones that are going to wind up in high leadership positions, don’t believe a fucking word of it. But they’re going to make out like bandits. The rest are useless idiots who will be disposed of or not according to their usefulness.
Envy and jealousy are powerful emotions, and people suffering from those tend to be easily swayed by charlatans claiming to want to right the world’s wrongs.
Well, if evil is the intent to do harm, I think they do qualify. In order to justify income redistribution, for example, you have to hold the position that there’s an acceptable amount of theft and/or coercion in the service of a greater social good. In fact, to sell it, you have to justify it with moral cover by claiming that it’s simply people paying their “fair share”, or that it’s forcing the rich to return ill-gotten gains. Because otherwise it’s just bog standard robbery.
There’s no way to square the circle unless you either convince yourself that the people being taxed are guilty of some moral failing or simply wall that incongruity off in your mind, because people seem to have an innate sense of justice and fairness. The alternative to willful ignorance or self-deception is to just not care that what you’re doing causes harm, and that would be evil.
the people being taxed are guilty of some moral failing
That’s exactly what they believe. If justice means everything in its right place, they believe all inequality resulting from capitalism (or bastardizations thereof) is an inherent injustice because they believe in zero-sum economics. If one person becomes wealthy, it must be because they took from someone less fortunate.
So they think redistributing it would not be causing harm, but relief of an injustice.
This is the importance of understanding economics. Because those who don’t end up believing marxist fantasies. Naturally, public education deserve some blame for not teaching any of this.
“I wouldn’t call them evil, because I define evil as having intent to do harm.”
I certainly don’t call an obsession with virtue signaling and demanding others pay for your pipe dreams so you can keep signaling anything but criminal. Stealing from others, especially while you make the claim that there is some moral justification that makes what you are doing not stealing and you virous for doing so and those that oppose you evil for doing that, all so you can preen about how great of a Mensh you are, makes you both evil and stupid, IMHO.
This isn’t a good thing. The problem is, when they obtain their just rewards for their failed policies they blame everyone else but themselves. The marxist systems break down and it’s always those dastardly capitalists from other nations that brought them to ruin. Then the ones that don’t starve turn extremely violent. Their states eventually lyse open and out spill a bunch of angry morons whose political views destroy the other societies they infest.
Wreckers, hoarders, and Kulaks.
There’s also an issue of all those people caught in the collateral damage of those countries’ economies.
And the problem that progs almost always look at those and instead of learning conclude the problem is that the wrong TOP MEN were in charge, and this time they can get it right.
Vomnegut was a goofy bastard, especially in later life, but Harrison Bergeron should be required reading for school children in every grade. Of course, the lesson these days would be that they should have been brutally punished for having dared to escape the bonds imposed on them by the Handicapper General.
I seem to recall a shotgun being employed at the end…
I was meeting with an assistant principal at an area middle school a few months ago. On a wall in her office was a cartoon depiction of “Equity vs Equality” which tried to explain why it makes sense to bring all students down to the same level of mediocrity in the name of “justice.” All I could think about was that story and is one of the biggest reasons I home school my son.
Was it the side-by-side involving a fence, boxes, and boys of different heights?
I like that one. It’s so flagrant in its base-stealing that it makes me smile. I remember being very fair-minded as a child. Growing up with siblings teaches kids a certain respect for personal property, but having friends teaches them to share. So that cutesy example serves to demonstrate the benefits of voluntary cooperation between parties, but the takeaway it tries to instill is: voluntary cooperation works, so involuntary distribution works even better.
No. It leads to its own raft of inefficiencies and non-market transaction costs that impede rather than abet an appropriate distribution of resources. Now you have boys who will jealously guard their boxes, because to do otherwise is to invite the heavy hand of the state to come in and take his box away.
Wow I stepped in the derp looking for that one. She doesn’t think that graphic goes far enough.
it’s deep
I would like to know why they all think people who clearly did not pay to see the game should be allowed to see it.
The fence needs to be taller.
+37′ green monster
I like how the turgid little thing is predicated on boys freeriding on the backs of ticket-payers.
And justice is ensuring nobody gets to enjoy the game, seat holders or freeloaders.
Justice is destruction, apparently.
Justice is theft and vandalism.
Apparently, justice means there are no home runs. All along I was taught that strikeouts were fascist.
I love how much effort she puts into avoiding learning anything from her thought exercise.
She gets to the point where she wants to include a short person who makes a hole in the fence to represent the innovative ways that some people find to solve their problems.
My immediate thought was, “why isn’t your next idea to add another short person who didn’t think of making a hole in the fence?”
Answer: Because that wouldn’t make the point we’re looking to make here.
Likewise, she gets to the point where her “equality” graphic is people of different heights in front of fences of different heights with different amounts of boxes to stand on. The takeaway there should have been “my whole analogy just completely broke down.”
And I would also have included a little guy just sitting on the ground playing a guitar because he’s not particularly interested in baseball.
Equity!
is there an example of some place properply recovering from a terminal prog infestation?
New Zealand, in the ’80s, maybe; but I think they have relapsed.
Damn, you beat me by 2 minutes.
However, I hadn’t got down that far, so it was still original in the proper threading.
The marxist systems break down and it’s always those dastardly capitalists from other nations that brought them to ruin.
Fracking was a plot by the Koch brothers to drive down the price of oil to destabilize the Bolivarian Paradise in Venezuela!
It is amazing how socialism, allegedly the superior system, is so easily brought down by alleged capitalist interference, but the converse is much rarer.
I honestly think this is why the proggies despise pipelines and local oil production. They want the middle east to be propped up and for our country not to attain energy independence. If it did, it would take their strategy of “multicultural” invasion off the table when the country can close the borders more thoroughly. That means fewer voters for them and a permanent loss of power. Also, keeping the Middle East in perpetual turmoil serves authoritarians well – the more terrorists are created, the better able they are to demand greater “sacrifice” in the form of ceding rights to government control and the faster they can accelerate the process of creeping socialism.
They’re really fucking stupid if they think Islamo-socialism is going to be better than secular-ish sorta-capitalism, though. I’d rather be wished a Merry Christmas while I’m walking out of CVS with a box of condoms then have to live in fear every goddamn day that if I express an outre thought, I’m going to be lynched in the square.
…
energy independence is a canard. The US will never be ‘energy independent’, nor would some self-reliant strategy which tried to isolate itself from global energy markets even be a better outcome were it possible. its a retarded fantasy that throws out everything we otherwise know to be true about the economic resiliency of greater-market-participation. having a more-diverse energy-supply and trade is far more ‘secure’ than some isolationist dream of producing all of our petrochemicals from 100% North American fossil fuels.
that said, i’m pretty sure proggy distaste for pipelines has nothing to do with that at all.
and i don’t think its part of “their strategy of multicultural invasion” either. The US was far more ‘multicultural’ than the rest of the world long before you were born. change your diaper. if it were some insidious strategy for undermining america, its not working .
While I agree with the gist of what you’re saying, being less beholden to Saudi Aramco and the dysfunctional petrostates of OPEC is much of what is often meant by “energy independence” even if the idea taken to its logical extreme is both unattainble and undesirable.
I appreciate that.
I’d still ask why they think that the 10% of oil we get from Saudi Arabia means we’re “beholden” to them.
*in fairness, total OPEC is probably more like 20%; but the point is that we don’t buy their oil because we HAVE to, we buy their oil mainly because we want to, and because it helps us maintain political influence over THEM more than they wield it over us. The OPEC nations had a stranglehold on global oil supply back in the 1970s. Since then, that has basically vanished. People who pretend that OPEC is some mysterious evil cabal manipulating world affairs seem to have failed to update their oil-market data since the Reagan years.
*also = useful information in context – that 40% domestic production shown in that chart? Isn’t some new and magical “independence”
the split between domestic/important is roughly the same as what we had in 1970; it dipped in the 1980s-2000s, and then came back with the shale-oil boom. but the point here is that the degree of “independence” we now enjoy isn’t some very new scenario. its basically ‘bringing things back to where they were for a very very long time’ in the 20th century.
I think the accurate observation here is that that was a “the US is dependent on foreign oil!“-panic that happened between the 1970s and the 2000s… based on a slight change in direction in the relative balance of supply.
Its probably little different than the similar “The US is losing its place as economic leader of the world!!”-panic that has come with the rise of China + the east.
Both are mostly fictions that don’t really say anything significant about REAL changes in America, so much they do ‘changes in our self-perceptions’.
“”important” = imports
()#*)@#@* spellcheck
The mid-2000s look like an aberration in hindsight but at the time it looked like a worrisome trend. There’s a lesson in there about extrapolation.
In 2005, the U.S. was importing 75% of its oil and 40% of those imports came from OPEC.
I failed to mention in my above response that we’ve also already mostly achieved the goals of “energy independence” vis-a-vis a decade ago.
In 2005, the U.S. was importing 75% of its oil a
that’s only if you call “Canada and Mexico” ‘imports’.
it sounds like a scary number until you realize that North America was a huge chunk of that 75%; and most of those North America sources are basically American companies looking for cheaper areas to exploit even tho we have huge untapped reserves at home.
i just think there was never much rational basis for the “energy independence panic” to begin with…. much less perpetuating that idea now. especially given how that fake-idea was used as the basis for about $1-trillion in diverted capital into stupid-fucking-green-energy boondoggles
The US will never be ‘energy independent’, nor would some self-reliant strategy which tried to isolate itself from global energy markets even be a better outcome were it possible.
Its not hard to imagine an energy economy where we were totally self-sufficient – nuclear, fusion, that kind of thing. If we were energy self-sufficient because our energy source was better than anything we could import, I think that would be a better outcome – what’s better about importing an inferior energy source when we have a better one we don’t need to import?
But at this point its all speculation. However, even if by some miracle we could get all the oil, gas, coal, etc we need at a better price than we could import it, then I don’t see how that make us worse off.
I seem to recall a shotgun being employed at the end…
It’s been a long long time since I actually read it. Maybe I blotted that part out. I have a memory like a sieve. Only the good stuff gets captured, usually.
Just because a couple of hippies make good ice cream doesn’t mean there isn’t evil in their hearts when they want to destroy my liberties.
It’s for your own good.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
Greetings from Moffitt Cancer Center. I hate appointment days.
Being smart about making documentaries or branding ice cream doesn’t preclude a person from being a complete idiot when it comes to everything else and creating dependency, which is what both progressives and “compassionate” conservatives do, is evil. The welfare state may be premised, at least on the surface, on helping those who cannot help themselves but in practice it creates victims who are unable to even conceive of liberty let alone achieve it. The thought that someone is a good person because they favor taking my money that I work very hard for in order to enslave a voting bloc is repugnant. Ben and Jerry and Mr. Moore are very much evil and whether or not they are stupid is irrelevant.
I hope all is well
My appointment time was an hour and a half ago and I still haven’t seen the doctor. I am not in a good mood. I hate these appointments. When you have cancer you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. But thank you for the kind thoughts.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
My appointment time was an hour and a half ago and I still haven’t seen the doctor.
The health care system has the worst customer service of any major industry. And I include cable and internet when I say that.
You are overthinking it Derp.
“We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
It is about raw power. It isnt anymore complicated than that. Every time they get what they want principles are out the window, replaced with clubs and rifles. The true believers are up against the wall and everyone else is looted and made to grovel.
It is about raw power.
I agree. What’s interesting, though, is the rationalizations that these people go through to convince themselves that they are good people even while they seek power to harm others.
..which is ironic, because they sure as hell believe with all their hearts they are right. It’s like thinking themselves tolerant. Except for not tolerating those who don’t fall in line with them.
Some of them have to spend 4 years in college unlearning common sense and majoring in Resentment Studies to become stupid and evil enough to get their wings as fully formed progs.
Y’all are trying to slowly drive me insane by having posted that odd Weird Wednesday and then removing it, aren’t you?
But progressivism means never having to say “It’s my fault”, doesn’t it? Zimbabwe is the fault of white colonial oppressors. Venezuela is the fault of capitalism. Detroit is the fault of unrestrained capitalism and the failure of the federal government to step in. Greece is the fault of the monsters who demand that borrowed money be repaid. And so on.
One of the most interesting things about progressive ideology is that, when sincerely applied, it always results in the problems allegedly caused by the designated out-group becoming more severe the farther from actual power that out-group is. Apparently, the power of white colonialist oppression is a function that axiomatically approaches infinity as the number of white colonialist oppresses approaches zero.
Y’all are trying to slowly drive me insane
Yes.
Your average progressive doesn’t put anywhere near this kind of thought into things. He hasn’t weighed the outcomes of several political theories, and certainly hasn’t reached any conclusions. Your average progressive is a lazy thinker who prefers the easy way out of nearly every decision: what feels right? “Logic” is then used to rationalize his feelings.
Ace had a somewhat astute observation the other day. The problem with a lot of celebs and internet millionaires is that they essentially won the lottery, and so they need to try to prove themselves worthy of all that money, while at the same time thinking every other rich person just lucked into it like they did.
They could replace Shia Lebeouf with a rapping granny in the Transformers movies, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference to the Chinese box office, because nobody goes to watch the Transformers for Shia Lebeouf. So Shia has to go out and make increasingly bizarre demonstrations that he’s relevant damn I. Rather than just staying at home and snorting coke off a hooker’s ass like us plebs would do with that money.
I think this is true of a lot of them, but it doesn’t explain e.g. Bill Gates. That man was a ruthless titan of industry who reigned like he was living in the 1890s instead of the 1980s. He definitely did not luck into that money. But today, he’s just another “billionaire philanthropist” who seems to adopt political positions just for popularity sake (and maybe the approval of his wife).
Two words: Impostor Syndrome. While the article has been hevily fem-editied, it is not a gendered condition.
I run into these exact types of feelings all the time and recognized it as imposter syndrome. I’m surprised that article is so focused on women – I know more than a few men my age that struggle with this stuff.
Gates, like Buffett, are ruthless realists. They know they can never beat the system or government so they align their interests with it working it in their favor.
Whenever Buffett says something progs applaud, you can bet it’s by design on his part. Al Gore is another, albeit different, example. He’s an actual left-winger who cynically figured out how to score coin off bull shit con games. The worst offender, and I’m quite comfortable in asserting the most evil, is by far George Soros. That guy is just mean ass trouble. A progressive warrior mercenary on a war path to destroy and profit.
Money makers gonna money make.
Agreed Rufus. These are people that have hitched their wagon to the progs so they can ride along and avoid the guillotine when that time comes. Understanding that you can use the progs to make good money and only needing to do some basic virtue signaling to stay in their graces makes is what drives these types.
But today, he’s just another “billionaire philanthropist” who seems to adopt political positions just for popularity sake (and maybe the approval of his wife).
And why not? I refer below to people who think that prosperity is just the natural order of things. Well, at this point, for a guy like Gates, it pretty much is. This is a guy who can easily afford to outfit his life for any eventuality on a year or two’s worth of dividends.
So, why not buy the popularity of the crowd? It’s essentially not a particularly worrisome proposition for him.
I remember saying when I was young, and the older I get the more right I realize I was, “I’m not rich enough to be a Democrat.”
Yeah, it’s his money to spend how he wants. I just find the 180-degree turn in his attitude not well explained by him having metaphorically “won the lottery”, although I suppose from his perspective at this point in his life, maybe it seems that way.
Don’t sell Lebeouf short, Transformers would only be half as obnoxious without him.
I’m assuming that’s what they were going for, given that the first movie gave me a migraine.
I actually liked him in the first movie, on the grounds that the movie was obviously supposed to be stupid AF, and he fit the part like a glove.
I don’t know, Mark Wahlberg managed to be measurably worse in his go at Trans Farmers.
Generally speaking I think that celebrities fall into the “stupid” category. Most are either uneducated or undereducated. Their only claim to fame is their ability to look good while regurgitating what someone else has written. They get away from the camera or the stage and they are still regurgitating. It is all they know. Beyond that, I, like most people, can make a living without being liked. But celebrities can’t. So everything they say and do and think must conform within their peer group. They really are the most self-oppressed people in the world.
Well, in part, it’s because they’re respected and valued for regurgitating (sometimes with many takes) a set of words and behaviors in front of their audience, or a film crew as a proxy for that audience. I had an extended network of friends in the late 80’s theater scene, and got to meet a number of (now) famous names who you see in movies from time to time.
The problem was that while some of them really were relatively smart, they were awfully caught up in virtue signalling when ‘taking a rest’. I imagine that it’s worse in Hollywood, and also when you can lose visibility so quickly unless you’re constantly creating news about yourself.
The real tell was Sally Field with the “You love me! You REALLY love me!”, a cri du coeur if ever there was one.
I think progressives suffer from a crypto-religious messianic delusion.
They have been brought upon the earth to saved our pig-ignorant filthy souls from damnation. Just look at Hillary’s goddam thousand yard Joan-of-Arc stare when she’s up in front of her faithful followers.
“Just look at Hillary….”
Jeez, do I have to?
Obama has one of those smug, holier-than-thou stares too:
http://media1.santabanta.com/full1/Politicians%20and%20Statesmen/Barack%20Obama/barack-obama-1a.jpg
Me, too, P.
Maybe not stupid but incapable of thinking straight when it comes to economics and politics. They just cannot take logical step. If thinking is what they do… it’s mostly feel really. The thing is having capacity of though is not enough, you have to also use it. And people simply do not apply the same thought process in their job lets say and politics or economics. The thoughts stop the feels begin. I often talk to lefties and I see glimmers of understanding certain things – not libertarians overall but a logical step from A to B. But it ends up often in “that does not feel right”.
In a job people see they don’t know something, they try to learn it. Many I time I talk to a lefty about something they had no idea about, and next week if I brought it up, they still didn’t have any knowledge. When someone gives me an argument I know nothing about, I try to research it. Learn more. My left friends do not. They don’t feel a need to research. They feel they are right. And that is enough for them.
Very few grasp a simple idea like if you concentrate power in a spot, the power hungry will go after it. And someone who is well meaning but not power hungry wont get there. If wanting power is not your primary motivation, rarely will you get it.Those for whom it is the primary motivation will beat you to it.
This is the source of the wrong top men stuff. It’s not concentration of power that’s the problem, the wrong people had it. Well the wrong people will always have it (not that the right people exists, everyone is corruptible and even if they were not, no economic calculation, to much complexity and all that. it would still fail, but maybe less bad than when the current crop of incompetent sociopaths fail)
I credit a professor of mine in college for imparting that wisdom onto me. It was a US Congress class, and that day we were discussion campaign finance. The prof asked us if we believed that political donations should be restricted. Of course, we all said! And I mean ALL – whatever political stripe, everyone agreed that money is a Very Bad Thing in politics and must be tightly regulated. He then had a simple response – money has played a role in elections since antiquity. Powerful Romans poured money into elections for positions such as quaestor. Money will always follow power, he said.
Well, yeah, I suppose it will. So then he asked the class whether we’d prefer the money to change hands in secret, or out in the open where the voters would at least know if Senator Bluto was getting massive donations from the liquor industry. As he put it, it makes more sense to admit the inextricable link between money and politics than to engage in a fruitless attempt at stopping a flood with your bare hands. But what, we brayed, about those dreaded Special Interests? Won’t they just buy everything then? But, he said, what is a special interest? What if you and a friend want to petition your representative to address an issue that is important to you? Isn’t that a laudable act of representative government? Isn’t restricting our ability to do so limiting our speech?
Looking back, I can’t believe that man was actually employed by a major university. How fortunate for those of us in the class.
Money will always follow power, he said.
Indeed. Smart fella. He was halfway there.
Money and power will always find each other.
Not only does money follow power, power seeks money.
I’ve long thought that one of the things a republic does is to inoculate us from people who would gain and hold power by any means, by replacing them with a less virile version of power seeker. It’s a win-win, because the power seekers can get power without the high likelihood of being killed. In exchange, power is passed around, shared, and must be competed for by other than violent means.
I had a discussion with a lefty coworker once about university endowments. He was saying they should be taxed because the universities were just sitting on those hoards and not investing them into education (subsidizing tuition, improving programs and facilities, etc.). I pointed out that most universities actually do use their endowments for those things, but that they spend the interest earned from them and never touch the principal (as any sound investor would), and also that they are, you know, investments and even if the principal never gets touched by the university itself, it is being given out as loans to other people who find creative ways to spend it. I was a bit surprised (pleasantly so) when, the next day, he was not only (mostly) agreeing with my argument, but in fact added more nuance to it based upon what he had found out, e.g. that most “endowments” are really made up of many different funds, with the initial contributions made by different people with different goals, but that most of the uses go back to helping the university and its students.
I think one of the key differences between left and right in a modern American context, ideologically, is an understanding of what wealth is and how it matters. The left thinks it is a fetishization of money, but that is just projection. A university with a $1 billion endowment makes $50 million a year just by investing halfway intelligently. That lasts. If you instead tax that endowment to the tune of $50 million a year, then in 20 years it’s gone.
Here’s the thing. A progressive, on average, is largely ignorant about investments. I say this with a reasonable amount of confidence based on years of reading their material, interacting with them etc. Investment ‘strategies’ and theories and all that means squat to them. What matters is how they interpret or view what ‘investments’ are. Hence, all this crap about hoarding and other excuses that amount to wanting to steal other people’s money by other means.
Yet, when you sit them down – those who worked and saved money and want to rationally protect/grow the money that’s turning into wealth – and explain to them exactly what you said on what’s needed to be done; that is live off the interest and protect the principal they’re the first to accept this and say, ‘fuck yeah.’
What’s needed to be done, then, is to have them connect the dots and have them recognize whenever someone says something reactionary like ‘tax capital gains’ they should NEVER agree to it. And this extends to their fellow patriots for when we all are given the chance to grow our wealth the better off we collectively will be. Voluntary action through simple investments = stronger collective.
Anything else (top down coerced action) is pure bull shit.
To be fair I seen the same in some rightwing friends.
Oh you want to decriminalize drugs. Are you insane? You want to destroy the world !!!
Well alcohol prohibition was a disaster.
Oh I fully agree. But drugs are bad. Name one country where drugs are being decriminalized.
What about Portugal drug policy?
Well I don’t know anything about that, but drugs bad.
One week later: so about Portugal’s drug policy?
I don’t know anything about that.
See, me, in a week, I would have had the simple intellectual curiosity to get an basic idea about Portugal.
What’s funny about rightwingers and conservatives is their selective ignorance of history.
True fact: for a long stretch of this country’s history drugs were perfectly legal. And that’s the same long stretch of history that rightwingers and conservatives usually hold up as being a golden age of sorts. But they seem to believe that drugs were always illegal, and not outlawed by the very administrations that they have the most disdain for.
Most progressives just reflexively think everything can be solved. Not all of them have inflated views of their own intelligence, but the dearly believe that there are people out there smart enough to fix the problems of the world.
I’d say 90% of progressives can be classified as members of TOP MEN think, 5% are outright power grabbers who desperately want to control others with that as their stated and preferred goal, and 5% are true believer Marxists (slightly different than the previous classification)
Well if they thought they would realize that not everything can be solved. They feel.
True, they appeal to authority (scienticians) more than religious people.
“Actually this study I just read about in the Atlantic proves that raising the minimum wage has no affect on employment”
“What kind of testing did they do?”
*blank state*
If you don’t get a blank stare, sometimes they’ll mention some podunk locality that raised the minimum wage by 50 cents or so and did not experience a drop in employment. Obviously, the prevailing market wage rate in many localities is already above the legal minimum.
It’s like if they imposed a minimum price of $1000 on new production automobiles. Well, there aren’t any new production cars that cost less than $1000, so that wouldn’t have any effect, good, bad, or otherwise. The “progressive” would say, “well, we raised the price of cars before and nothing happened, therefore we can jack the minimum price up to $100,000 and nothing will happen!”
The Card-Krueger study is a fine example of missing the fucking point, and it’s bound to come up in any defense of minimum wage hikes. What matters are things like total employment, i.e. the number of people who have paying jobs, household income, i.e. how much people have to spend, participation in the workforce, i.e. whether people feel like they can get jobs in the market, etc., but not the laughably gameable metric of “unemployment”.
Those are the ones who go into politics. The 90% reflexively vote for them. The true believers wind up at HuffPo or Everyday Feminism.
*headdesk*
At my place of employment, there is training available to develop supervisory skills – which is restricted to people who are already supervisors. So either you have people who don’t need the training, or you have supervisors who don’t know how to supervise.
I recall listening to that Sayet talk a while back based on your suggestion. I can’t remember the thrust of it.
i’m not sure i agree with the idea that progressivism is a consequence of some convoluted “player hating*”-ethos.
(*that’s just my term for your “anti-success”-characterized rationale)
I think its more to do with their failure to understand decentralized systems.
they think all order in systems comes from design.
that if the ‘wrong people’ keep being successful, why, its because the system was designed to make them so! not because of any shared qualities or behaviors those people had.
they think solving the problems of a designed system means coming up with a different design. All that needs doing is some tinkering with Capitalism and voila! we can magically fix “inequality” without killing the goose that lays golden eggs…
….because in their minds, the “goose” (read: economy) lays eggs because its *told to*, not as a consequence of complex incentives and self-interested actors each inadvertently contributing to that result
Basically, they have a huge gap in their brains where ‘economic thinking’ should belong. And the rest of their brain is designed to reject any attempt to insert economic-logic as a foreign-substance..
Frankly, very few people easily accomplish any economic-reasoning. Its not something that comes naturally to people. Its a form of higher-order thinking that CAN be trained into people, but sadly our education system is designed to basically do the opposite.
This makes more sense to me. But, I’m having a hard time visualizing what kind of data I’d need to see before I was 99% sure that your don’t-get-complex-systems conjecture is better than the player-hating conjecture.
So perhaps, I’m kinda guilty of feeling this instead of thinking it.
Which makes me sort of want to think about the difference between feelz and intuition. But I gotta some real work done today.
Rawlsian Original-Position exercises.
progs would always design a system which they think “guaranteed fairness” rather than maximized opportunity /incentivized productivity
they place far more confidence in the presumed-beneficial results of “centralized/imposed order” than incentives which merely lead to an accidental-order.
in fact i think most people would end up falling heavily on the “fairness” side, which is basically Rawls’ justification for its superiority;
i think you could simplify it more and simply give people multiple choice questions, where the options are between
– “finite resources divided equally, where all get less than they need”
– “finite resources employed in a competitive effort to maximize their value, which produces great wealth for some, but far less for others”
the former sorts of options would seem more appealing to some because they think its “fair”, even if the net value it produces is less.
My girlfriend is a self-described bleeding heart liberal, and she is neither stupid nor evil. At least in her case, her prog beliefs stem from not understanding economics, and thinking with the emotional part of her brain rather than the logical part when it comes to politics.
And back when I was the chair of the Hawaii LP, my vice-chair was a former leftist who learned about economics and became a libertarian.
Basically, the problem is this: the family unit we grew up in is a tiny socialist system which works most of the time because the people involved know each other well and have a genetic predisposition to cooperate for the group benefit. But, try to scale that up even a little to aggregations of strangers, and the mutual group interest quits applying and the socialism fails hard. But people keep trying to scale it up anyway, because it worked during their formative years.
I seem to recall the family unit being an autocracy with the resources, rules and punishments distributed at the discretion of the tiny ruling class (the parents).
That’s what he said: Socialism.
Exactly.
Socialism can work (to an extent) if two things are present: 1) a highly cohesive group with an unwillingness to screw each other over, and 2) a means of expelling those who don’t pull their weight. You simply cannot replicate these things on a nation-state level.
And at the first hint of disunion in the executive ranks, someone gets the icepick.
thinking with the emotional part of her brain rather than the logical part…
Spite, envy, jealousy, rage, hate… All emotions that the Left appeals to in order to support their evil ideas.
No offense, prole, but the combination of “not understanding” and “thinking emotionally only” can be really hard to distinguish from “stupid”.
No offense taken. She’s not smart about economic theory, she’s really smart about, say, marketing and interior design.
Intelligence is not uniform over a broad swath of abilities in a given person. For example, I’m kind of stupid about the usual things an aspie doesn’t get well, smart about math and writing.
I think there are a lot of thought errors at the root of “progressivism”.
I think a big one is a failure or unwillingness to understand naturally emergent orders. They think that everything in society is the way it is because some top man planned it out that way. They don’t understand that many things come about because of consumer preferences. Primitive people ascribe every single detail of reality to the will of gods (“the crops died because the gods were angry at us!) whereas “progressives” ascribe everything to top men (“there are fewer women in STEM because of a sexist conspiracy!”). Want to see this in action? Ask them about the NRA and gun culture. You’re likely to get a rant on how the NRA is “fearmongering” in order to boost profits for the gun industry. They can’t conceive of the idea that people just like the freedom, fun, heritage, and protection of firearms, subsequently purchase a lot of them, and join groups that protect that right. If you understand this mindset, it’s easy to see why they think that betterment of society can only come about from top-down diktats.
They also seem to have great faith in their own emotions as indicators of right and wrong. We see this all the time when they argue that a certain price is “unfair”, but can’t elaborate at all. All they do is ponder a given situation, see what their emotions say, and proclaim it to be fair or unfair. This is also their basis for determining legitimate government authority. If some program makes them feel good, they’ll approve of it no matter what freedoms it infringes upon. It’s not that they believe in infinite government authority; they just don’t have any basis for their political positions whatsoever. They have no first principle; just their feelings.
I had a fun night. Just questions for my run of the mill lefty friend from Australia. “The Chinese have amassed 150.000 troops on the border with North Korea.” My Response? “Really, how do you know that?”. Or his assertion that the Nork’s missle launch failed. “How do you know it failed?”. Point isn’t that any of the things he asserted weren’t true, I just wanted him to cite his sources and explain why I have to believe his sources. I’m going to go with this “prove it” tactic until I have no friends left.
I’m way ahead of ya.
I skipped the intermediate steps – I already have no friends.
That would make me your bestest friend. Whoo hoo!
My friend is a bleeding heart and he quipped one time unsolicited since he lived in cali for a while “you arent allowed to sneeze without permission”
I was shocked and glad to see
I think we’re over thinking the progressive mindset. It’s really a cemented, non-nuanced, stagnant, cynical world view laced with misplaced arrogance when you think of it. They project and presume so much their conclusions are often preposterous. Think their obsession with ‘share of the pie’.
For all their claims to be ‘compassionate’ the solutions they concoct and design tend to be, well, anti-humanist.
I agree that we are overthinking. They are simply under-thinking. But they do have a variety of views, you won’t find a one size fits all explanation – there are plenty of opinions in this very thread. The common denominator is lack of rational thought
That is my grand unifying theory, short and sweet.
BTW. I’m with Alex Jones against the MSM. It’s wild that CNN is trying to take down Jones for putting out hyperbolic bullshit.
And the best raised kid in the world.
Here’s just one more example of how dumb leftists are. Whenever they get into power, they vow to redistribute wealth. This seems to be their number 1 goal. Then they set out in a great effort to make sure there is no wealth to redistribute. And they never learn from this. Right now, we have the leftist candidate in France vowing to levy a 90% tax on anyone making over 400,000 Euro. That is about 360,000 tax. Is there something about leftists that make them completely unable to understand math and human nature? Because when I do that math, I only see one possible outcome and it’s not the one they’re thinking of.
I don’t know what the French communist actually wants, but usually an income tax rate only applies to income over the designated threshold. So someone making €450,000 would only pay 90% tax on €50,000, while the rest of their income would be taxed at presumably lower rates.
An entire generation in the US grew up under the illusion that the near paradise they were born into was a fallen world instead of the result of thousands of years of intense effort and numerous setbacks.
I’m not sure this is right. It strikes me that most of them see this state of things, not as a fallen world, but as the natural order of things. They might be able to recite the words that things might have, at one time, been different. But, it’s not something they can ever relate to or imagine being the case again.
And there is where I think a large part of the problem lies. They don’t see it as something to be destroyed, but simply the default condition to which the world will revert to if their schemes for utopia don’t pan out.
I have to leave soon, but I’ll toss this in the pot on my way out:
The other day, I clicked on some news link, don’t remember what, and was treated to a heart-wrenching video of a bald eagle (Symbol of
Our Nation! for pete’s sake) dead or dying of lead poisoning. Whose fault do you suppose *that* was?
Stop Trump and his evil minion Zinke from poisoning our waterways (and symbology) with lead shot, America! Act now! Your donations are, naturlich, tax deductible.
*Paid for by Good People Who Care, not some pack of murderous Nazis.
Semi OT: Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore on CO2.
One of my disappointments in life – among many! – is seeing my childhood best friend become a progressive. He was/is incredibly smart, funny, and completely chaotic. Think early Burning Man, Captain Beefheart, and an acid trip all rolled into one goofy persona.
But as time went by – especially during W’s and O’s term – a bunch of “redneck” and “hillbilly” bashing, along with some anti-Republican and anti-Libertarian screeching. (Did you know, for example, that libertarians are to blame for everything wrong with Obamacare?)
When I called him out on some of these things – his arguments just don’t make any sense – like he’s talking around the points I brought up. And this is from a guy who went to several top tier schools and was waaay ahead of everyone else intellectually.
I think some of this comes from the bullying he received when he was young – I was the kid who would go in swinging, even if I knew I was going to take a beating. If you’re going to lose, it’s better to go down fighting. On the other hand, he would cower from a fight looking visibly scared. His intellect (I actually heard him say to woman he liked: “I’m smarter than you’ll ever be!”) was the one thing he could safely cling to. And as he got older – armchair psychologist time – the idea that if only the right top men (like him, of course) were in charge started dominate his political thinking.
How this applies to every progressive, I don’t know. But (really broad general brush) the right wing seems to have more masculine traits than the left, which considers itself more cerebral.
Libertarians, to my eyes, are an amalgamation of the two – standing outside the group dynamics.
I lost contact with a friend from the States since Trump. He completely lost his fucken mind from letting his mask slip about how much he hated rednecks and how much smarter he was than them to saying stupid things like ‘what do I tell my daughters’?
I told him, in so many words, to chill, man up and stop being an idiot. You had to see the email. It was incredible the stuff he wrote. It’s like someone else took over his body.
And that was that. Obviously, him being progressive I no longer have place in his realm.
Like I give a shit. If this is how they react fuck them.
So, the modern prog concludes from this that the desire to be right is the source of evil. For if no one thought they were right, no one would argue or fight or go to war and so on. If people gave up the search for truth and right, we could all join hands and live happily ever after in the Kindergarten of Eden.
Sounds pretty self-refuting to me. Aren’t the progs saying that they are right in their conclusion that the desire to be right is the source of evil? Isn’t their pushing this conclusion as the solution to all our problems just them “desiring to be right” and thus being just as evil as everyone else?
Proggism is intensely if inconsistently subjective. You see it all the time in advanced cases of proggism, where one hears on our campuses that there is no such thing as truth and even pretending otherwise is “oppressive”. You also see it in relativistic moral or ethical systems, like multiculturalism. Of course, its only the other guy’s belief system that can be disregarded as subjective – the proggist belief system is the Right and True one. They are fanatics, in the old sense of the term – their belief system is hermetically sealed, and justifies any action that they want to take.
Are they stupid? Yes. I don’t know what else can call holding to a belief system that is not only self-falsifying but has been empirically falsified time and again.
Are they evil? Well, that has to do with how much harm they knowingly and willingly inflict on others. The proggists show quite the appetite for inflicting harm on others; they seem mostly limited by their capability to do so, at least in this country.
I can sum it up in one proggie sentence – “Don’t be so judgmental, chauvinist pig.”
“…
chauvinist pigshitlord”FTFY