Social Ignorance Warriors- Bill Reader

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Social Ignorance Warriors- Bill Reader

In most real-world conflicts, the key to victory lies not on a battlefield, or in any one special strategy or tactic, but inside your opponent’s head. This can be argued for a variety of historical conflicts and, in my experience, holds up pretty well in day-to-day experience. The key to beating back superior British forces in the American revolution wasn’t besting them at their own game. It was, in some sense, making mostly-inevitable losses too painful for the enemy to continue inflicting (that and, as in virtually every battle involving a European county up through at least WWI, leveraging Europe’s constant in-fighting against whatever portion you were currently fighting). The United States never needed to win. It just needed to become too difficult to keep. Likewise, the slum revolts and regional uprisings that, in aggregate, put paid to the Roman Empire, were certainly not the result of masterful tactics. Rather, those revolting recognized that Rome had lost sufficient belief in its own culture to fight to uphold it; had in any case mostly lost the capacity to impose culture in its wholesale importation of anybody and everybody; and probably was afraid of said anybody and everybody because it spent so much bread-and-circus money trying to appease them. Rome had an unparalleled army, but no clear target, only the most bare-bones idea of when to use it, and increasingly limited resources to maintain it.
Such a key exists to the SJWs. And to find it, we must simply look in the mirror, through their eyes. What does an SJW see when they look in the mirror?
What they see is a member of the redeemed. They see a person who has been touched by an enlightenment, a piece of knowledge so great it no longer matters that they have a non-existent knowledge of history, that they avoid considering any subject long enough to have a deeper grasp than “an important person says”, that their day-to-day dealings are superficial, instantaneous and overwhelmingly emotional.

That piece of knowledge is that they are good people.

The wonderful thing about defining yourself as a good person is that, unlike the rest of us unfortunates, you no longer have to act up to it. It’s why the Democratic party as a whole gets knee deep in corruption, intrigue, petty vendettas and sometimes (Ted Kennedy for sure, the Clintons almost certainly) outright murder. Yet those same people will step to the camera on the turning of the sun and say, with that practiced smile, that they want what is best, are doing what is best, are only trying to help. Because they are good people. And good people never have to prove it.

One problem of being a self-defined good person is relative definitions of good. A synonym for the good person might be the ideal, or the model. SJWs have a peculiar flaw in their ideal, however. Due to influence from postmodernism, a liberal cannot take reality as it is. They take reality as they would like it to be. In fact, they pride themselves on this. They believe it makes them capable of envisioning and creating technological and civil revolutions while stodgy conservatives just try to kick through the problems of not having them without aspiring to something better.

In practicality, a person who sees things as they truly are is the person most likely to see through social dogma standing in the way of bettering mankind, for the same reason that successful automotive engineers are unlikely to round pi to 3. A person who lives in a persistent fantasy world is, however, still more likely to feel that they see through social dogma standing in the way of bettering mankind.
For similar reasons, an SJW’s view of themselves as a good person depends, partially, on literally willing the world to be other than it is. This is because the way the world actually is makes them uncomfortable, and the discomfort would require tinkering with or changing certain basic tenets of their worldview. This would seriously affect the Social Justice Warriors’ work of making other people uncomfortable in order to change other people’s worldview (Hi, Starbucks!). Ironically, as with all systems predicated on postmodernism, this is what makes their view of the world a serious threat to itself.

What Social Justice Warriors haven’t quite realized is that, in their eagerness to think the best of everyone, they have acted more like the ignorant strawmen Americans they are committed to fighting than any other actual American ever has. To demonstrate the point, let us lift the veil on some examples in turn.

Possibly the largest cultural example of outright barbarism in the modern world is Islam as it is practiced in most of the Middle East. That is, cliterectomies for young girls, hanging of gays, stoning of “adulterers”, including women who are raped, legal systems based entirely on the Qu’ran, taxation on infidels, and all the rest. Conservatives have asked, repeatedly, why it is that the left is so silent about this issue. After all, feminists here have become so sensitive to slights against women that the signals they respond to are below the noise threshold. The only sure way not to annoy a modern feminist is not to encounter her. Gay groups are less in-your-face, partially because they have proportionally much smaller representation, but certainly just as vocal. Yet the Middle East warrants no more than a yawn?

Metaphorically, the self-proclaimed fellowship of the ring, rather than journeying to mount Doom, decided to go on a witch-hunt for people wearing rings, any rings at all, and has now gotten to the point of attacking on sight anyone seen wearing jewelry. Why?

In a very real way, SJWs do not believe in the Middle East. I don’t mean that they don’t believe in the people of the middle east. Au contraire, they believe they can do anything! Provided it doesn’t require, you know, support or anything, which is why Obama slept through the Green Revolution in Iran— especially incompetent of him, since the Green Revolution offered an opportunity to make a peace with Iran he’s now paying dearly for (I suppose that would have robbed us a chance for our modern Neville Chamberlain to hold aloft a worthless agreement with an untrustworthy scoundrel for a cheering crowd, as I doubt he’ll be able to resist doing. Or, then again, perhaps the key to this repetition of history as farce is that Mr. Chamberlain was merely naive. Mr. Obama might well have been praying the Green Revolution would falter and leave him a chance to make a “historic” deal.).

The problem is that their response to being read accounts of the horrors of Muslim countries, to being shown videos of gays being hanged or pictures of mutilated genitals and broken faces, is to side step, to pretend, to sink further into the fantasy. “It’s not happening”, or “it’s all fake” may quickly be brushed aside by preponderance of videos and accounts. Then comes “it’s just the leaders, not the people”, and so you show the assuredly lowly middle-eastern citizens dancing in the streets and burning the American flag after 9/11. High spirits, eh? And the leaders of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and their respective sympathizers, must be very busy people, what with having to run all over their countries personally committing these atrocities every day. At the point you tell them this, you become “racist” and they dismiss you, which Sarah dealt with in detail a few days ago.

We’ve all seen this behavior, but it’s not immediately clear why. Why such resistance to the existence of a problem so obvious, especially from people who live on the opportunity to complain about societal problems?

Fundamentally, they don’t see you as presenting them with reality. They see you as challenging their internal view of the world. But it’s worse than that. It says something about their view of the world that they literally cannot believe these are tenets of another culture. Because, to them, what people in the Middle East mostly believe is what Americans mostly believe. They just believe it in a very wise way available only to those who tan or take Women’s Studies degrees. They don’t actually believe in horrible cultural beliefs because those cultural beliefs are horrible, and that would mean that when they support multiculturalism they support doing horrible things.

But they are good people. And therefore people abroad don’t believe horrible things. They believe all the things that the SJWs believe, except for the parts which don’t really, in a nuts-and-bolts way, matter, like linguistic arrangement and cosmetology.

What. Supreme. Arrogance.

I am not merely taking the piss. This is the fundamental issue with the SJW ideology. They don’t just disagree with people who have an actual different view on life from them. They don’t even acknowledge that these people exist.

They are more disgustingly culturally arrogant than the staunchest supporter of the British Empire. That person may not have agreed with what Indians did as parts of various traditions; may have looked down on them as childlike; may have imposed his own customs on them in the process. He at least had the decency to acknowledge that such beliefs could, in fact, exist.

For an SJW, a world truly outside their own is so alien that it must be disavowed if ever it is claimed to exist, and the person claiming it must be put to shame. And they will help you get outside your comfort zone, so you can discover the only true way of living.

Which brings us to their attitude towards conservatives. It struck me, for a long time, as strange that the vilified concepts of conservatives were fundamentally at odds. The complete picture is a small elite group constituting a vast legion of poor uneducated hick wealthy stockbrokers who care for no moral system at all and are unthinking fundamentalist Christians, obsessed with remaking the whole world in their image and totally disinterested by affairs over the border. For years I wondered what blender of a mind could conceive of this hopeless kludge.

The key is understanding it, however, is the SJW inability to believe in anyone except themselves. You might think that this would make it impossible to even visualize an opponent, but in fact that is not the case. As I said, that is entirely beyond their very limited world. Asked to conjure a conservative, they imagine what you would come up with if I told you to conceptualize your evil twin. That is, they imagine people with all of their basic skills and tastes, but with a deliberate desire to do the wrong thing.

To be clear, this person is still, in all ways, them. It’s just a “them” that makes all the choices they consider to be bad. And this figment, consequently, also believes the choices to be bad while making them.

If an SJW finds themselves very rich, it’s most often by the Al Gore approach of trading on the same disaster or phobia you happen to be the prophet of. It is not, however, usually within their means. It takes exceptional charisma and a skill for politics. Most SJWs, like most people, have a certain range of skills they know how to trade on and believe they are using them as best they can. Is this belief true? Usually it’s almost certainly not. I’ve witnessed the amazing malleability of people over the years. Most internal limitations people believe they have are self-imposed habits of mind, and most extraordinary achievements of any kind come from people changing those mental habits. This, however, does not enter into the reflection of an SJW. They see no way of vectoring for the extreme fortunes that they hear about without cheating on an extraordinary scale.

They know nothing of how companies are run and hence do not believe a CEO’s work could be worth a multi-million dollar salary. They have no idea that value can be created, and try to avoid selling anything solid or doing anything productive, preferring regulation as the “purer” career. Hence, they see the wealthy merchant or manufacturer as a large-scale con-artist. They equate conservatism with these things because they don’t know how they could achieve wealth through any of these means except by “cheating” in some vaguely defined way. But they are good, mostly upper-middle class people, or the close relatives thereof.

Consequently, by weight of numbers alone, the “correct” mode of life has become that of the upper middle class, with the very wealthy automatically becoming bad by right of being something besides what most SJWs are.

On the other hand, if they were poor and living in a trailer park, they’d try to fix it. The only way they wouldn’t is if they couldn’t. Obviously, then, the poor aren’t truly poor. They’re people who ought to be upper middle class. That they aren’t and presumably want to be can only be attributed to some outside force preventing their income from changing. What outside force precisely, they cannot agree on. Certainly it can’t be giving people enough free money not to have to actually escape poverty. They love being given free money, but are pretty sure, in themselves, that if you gave them free money they’d still try to escape poverty.

They’ve almost never actually had to do this experiment, you understand, but they’ve thought about it and it would make lots of sense. The only exception to this logic is poor conservatives. Poor conservatives are poor because they’re so stupid they’d believe what conservatives say. And let us recall the SJW view of conservatives as, essentially, evil demons.

A person incapable of seeing the superiority of the liberal worldview is literally a person incapable of differentiating right and wrong to them, a creature barely above the level of an animal. What could anyone hope to do for someone like that? Their circumstances cannot be what they are because they do not aspire to or make any movement to achieve a normal middle class lifestyle. It cannot be because they bet big, or are betting big, on a plan to become very rich, and it has not yet panned out. Everyone wants to get a normal dayjob and live a normal, upper-middle class lifestyle. Because that’s what they want, and they’re good people.

The belief about the world makes their world. Their judgments about others proceed from it. Even the fact that they never actually see anything they do as being wrong is extended onto those they consider on their side. That’s largely why they reflexively defend any person from one of their protected interest groups, treating the actual facts of the case as background noise. If they were accused of a crime, why, they are good people. Obviously they would be innocent.

Obviously, therefore, when their distant allies are accused of any crime, they are reflections of good people and must be innocent. Anyone saying otherwise must have a personal vendetta, because only evil (syn. conservative) people go after good people. And any facts to the contrary must be lies, half truths, or distortions, and are under no circumstances to be trusted, since they are the tools evil conservatives use to go after good people. That there could genuinely be information on a case they do not immediately know is laughable. That would imply there is something outside themselves.

These are your Social Justice Warriors. But I take umbrage with the name. “Social” is a minx and will associate herself with any ratbag movement or product. “Warriors” is undoubtedly accurate, as they have reduced society to a cultural war. But it is unfair to associate “Justice” with a cause motivated by such supreme narcissism.

Justice is what women oppressed under Islam deserve, but no liberal will fight for them. Justice is what perpetrators of crimes deserve whether that means a pardon or a sentence, but SJWs will plead for clemency for a protected group even if that means unjustly dragging a person from a non-protected group through the mud. Justice is what the people of the United States deserve, meaning the removal of unjust laws established by narcissistic control freaks who see no personal consequences in the laws and hence can conceive of no consequences happening. Justice is what people willing to study, work, and improve themselves to exceptional degrees deserve, in the form of not being unfairly punished by an ever-increasing slope of taxation and regulation. But they are being stuck with these things by people unwilling to work, study, and improve themselves to exceptional degrees, who can imagine no way of getting rich except by doing things that would deserve being punished— say, by taxation and regulation.

They do not fight for Social Justice. They fight for the only thing they truly know. Themselves, hampered by all their limitations, but most especially of all these, their ignorance. And on that basis, they will presume to educate you.

I said this was the key to understanding them and implied it was the key to beating them. Now I turn to the recent and unprecedented success of Sad Puppies, and I ask you to consider something in closing, as a hint to how this myopic narcissism will, in time, tear them apart.

These people attacked, reflexively, the slate of authors suggested for the Hugos as being white, male, and conservative. They are none of these things, of course, but the evil twin of the SJWs would have intentionally filtered along all these axis and therefore that must have been what was done.

The idea of independent artistic merit as a litmus literally never crossed their mind, a telling thing in itself. But more to the point, several authors and editors have therefore been caught in the crossfire who were, right up until this, loyal party members. So sad, to be caught up in one of their side’s own little fits. What do they do? They are, let us all recall, good people, but all the other good people are saying, suddenly, and for quite literally no reason at all, that they are bad people because people they’ve quite possibly never met and certainly never associated with said they liked their writing.

It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? This, you see, is how witch-hunts inevitably play out, but the good people could never have admitted they had devolved to a series of witchhunts. Yet in hundreds of such incidents, you might see how the tendency to accuse people because of association will cause collateral damage to their own side.

Some, perhaps all of those caught in the crossfire this time will say their appropriate contrition and try to lay low. Whether it will work in a field still pining for Jimmy Carter’s second term will be interesting to watch. And friends, this is a spectacularly easy and rewarding weapon to wield.

Continue to uphold merit, rather than politics, as a standard for success in all our respective fields, and it is inevitable that yet more of the good people will be caught with bad friends and just as summarily disowned. For a person with enough drive and enough mental resources to become successful, in a host of possible specialties, the fickleness of the crowd will most assuredly become a source of unbearable annoyance. People begin to wonder about the value of friends who will turn on them not because of what they say, but because of what utterly unrelated people say about them. And by just such a mechanic does an ideology eat itself.

So take heart, my friends, and do not be afraid to say art, music, literature and science are good when they actually are so. Though it may seem, in the moment, to be counterproductive, in the end, we win, they lose.

369 thoughts on “Social Ignorance Warriors- Bill Reader”

  1. To be clear, this person is still, in all ways, them. It’s just a “them” that makes all the choices they consider to be bad. And this figment, consequently, also believes the choices to be bad while making them.

    Such a great explanation of why they often make no sense at all. They are thinking like them, not us.

  2. I cannot ermember if it was Poul Anderson or Jerry Pournelle who once had a line in a story, “Social Justice is a code word for ‘no justice for the taxpayers’.”

    1. I’d guess Poul Anderson– I don’t know if he was Catholic, but he was obviously familiar with the theology, and that raises the probability of being painfully aware of the abuses.

      OTOH, it also sounds like some of Pournelle’s humor….

      1. To the best of my knowledge, he was atheist.

        I suspect that Steve Matuchek speaks for his creator when he says “We might as well have called ourselves Unitarians.”

        1. Anderson could understand a fair amount of Catholic thinking because he was a good researcher; he also dealt with other religions pretty fairly and accurately. He wasn’t personally religious as I understand it; but I think his family background included some kind of Scandahoovian Lutheranism, or similar. (He lived in pre-WWII Denmark as a kid.)

        2. The interesting thing is that Unitarians started out as Primitive Christians, Arians (not Aryans). It’s a long way from there to being the respectable end of the New Age Religion of the Month Club.

  3. “[Conservative] crimes are not being plotted in public, so it stands to reason that they must be plotted in private. There is indeed a third remote and theoretical alternative; that they are not being plotted anywhere; but it is unreasonable to expect our fellow-countrymen to suggest anything so fanciful as that.” — Chesterton, “Who Are the Conspirators?”

    1. The ‘conspiracy theorist’ explanation for SJW thought also works as an alternative to completely describe their worldview. If you don’t believe in a conspiracy, it’s possible to be presented with evidence that a conspiracy exists, but if you believe in a powerful enough conspiracy, any evidence that the conspiracy doesn’t exist could have been faked by the conspiracy.

      The SJWs believe that there is a massive white patriarchy that is the source of all evil in the world. It is impossible to talk them out of this belief because there is no evidence that is inconsistent with this worldview; any evidence that would be at odds with this worldview is a product, possibly subconsciously, of the worldview itself. It’s a massive kafkatrap; attempts to disprove the worldview are what would be expected if the worldview is correct.

      The subtle difference between this theory and Mr. Reader’s theory (which is also logically consistent) is that in the original theory, the SJW’s don’t believe that Islamists could commit atrocities because they wouldn’t commit atrocities like that themselves and project their mindset onto others, where in the ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ explanation, reports of Islamist atrocities are discounted as fake or exaggerated in order to justify a further expansion of power by the conspiracy. Upon further reflection, it’s likely that SJWs have a mix of both issues, with some having different balances between the two than others.

      1. “SJW’s don’t believe that Islamists could commit atrocities because they wouldn’t commit atrocities like that themselves and project their mindset onto others”

        The thing is, the SJWs do commit atrocities like those committed by the Islamists. They are entirely capable of committing rape, of beating their women into submission (or the grave), of treating women like slaves. Look at Ira Einhorn. Given a tiny shift on the politics the SJWs practice, and they will turn on the Gay community with a viciousness that would make the most doctrinaire Islamic Radical say “Hold on, that’s a bit much!”. This goes back to their self-anointed status as “Good People”. They extend that status to groups they have allied with, and don’t withdraw it until it serves their purposes. They allied with the Islamic Radicals because they like to play Radical Chic games, and there weren’t enough Communist Revolutionaries left to go around.

        (aside; If you have not read RADICAL CHIC AND MAU MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS by Tom Wolfe, do so. It explains so much.)

        So the Islamists are Good People. And removing that Good People label can only come from within the SJW camp, so any attempt to show that they are NOT Good People is a lie, and must be attacked.

          2. It depends on who is pulling the strings. The Labor socialists wanted more workers for their worker’s paradise (so they could produce more guns/soldiers). As such, you want the strong male workers producing strong children with strong women. Being attracted to the same sex is therefore as much a eugenic flaw as anything else is.

            The green socialists want less filthy humans polluting the place. Being attracted to someone that won’t create more filthy humans to polluting the place is therefore an advantage…

                  1. I used to have a sign on my dorm room door reading “different is dead.” nowadays, I’d be sent to the Uni Reeducation Ctr., but in those days it didn’t take long to figure out I was offering a helpful warning. And it wasn’t the squares I was worried about.

              2. All the communist countries have been labor-socialist types. The green-socialists are purely a western phenomenon so far. You may be right in that any country that went green-socialist would be almost certain to go full labor-socialist when their standard of living collapsed (if it’s possible for the greens to ever get enough power).

              3. And of course they won’t admit that right now, because gays are being used as tools of divisiveness and stirring the pot of emotion, driving those who are susceptible closer and closer to the breaking point.

                They do the same thing with the “Poor”, illegal immigrants, and any other marginalized group they can find or manufacture.

                  1. If predominantly (as opposed to opportunistic sex attraction rEally is strongly, rather than weakly genetically transmitted there may actually be very few gays in China outside of Hong Kong. Remember how the Maoists “solved” venereal disease?

            2. No, no, no, it’s a product of capitalism. Obviously. A socialist state would not produce such unproductive people. Therefore they are obviously kulaks and wreckers.

          3. That is because your friends not only read history, but actually, you know… reason. They can see what happened to the gays in Germany after they had outlived their usefulness.

            2. Then there’s the unwisdom of putting oneself into one or another tribal box, and declaring that one’s whole identity. I understand being stuck in one by tyrants and bigots. But I watch with horrified bemusement when people do it to themselves. If I liked kissing the ladies, I’ll be, ah lacking the salvific grace of our Lord before i called myself “gay”

              When in doubt, check the ticky box “Other”.

        2. The question, though, is how can there be such cognitive dissonance between what they say they believe on one side, and who they ally with and their own past. At the top one can argue that there is (in a sense) an organized attempt to play group politics and form alliances of convenience with the enemies of their enemies, but I don’t see this applying to the rank and file foot soldiers of the SJW movement.

          I think that on an organizational level, the Islamists are their enemies enemies, either in a “If the vast White Patriarchy is opposed to them, they can’t be all bad” or in a “If they oppose the White Patriarchy, they must really be on our side” sense. They realize the Islamists aren’t strictly good, but it’s politically expedient to not worry too much about it now. It’s like the Katyn Forest Massacre as seen from the western allied perspective during the war. The thinking at the time (simplified): the Soviets probably did it, but we’re at war with the Nazis, so for political reasons we’re going to overlook this. (I think, like WW2, both are playing each other, convinced that when the dust settles they’ll have the upper hand).

          I think much of what can be said about their allies of convenience (the Islamists) can also be said about their own history, and their poor knowledge thereof. “It was for a good cause, and what actually happened wasn’t as bad as what those mean conservatives are complaining about.”

          1. “how can there be such cognitive dissonance between what they say they believe on one side, and who they ally with and their own past.”

            That assumes that they have any goals other than simple thirst for power, and I’m not sure I believe that. Oh, there are LIRPs who are deep in cognitive dissonance, avoiding the logic of their positions, but a lot of them simply have no morals whatsoever. They will lie, cheat, steal, and murder so long as they believe they can get away with it. This is why they hate Christians; they hate the idea that they won’t get away with it. They deeply resent the notion that there are objective standards of right and wrong, because ether know damn well it would cramp their style.

            1. I would argue that many SJWs have morals; this whole debate is based around their definition of themselves as good, which by definition requires a morality to exist. Once again, it’s necessary to distinguish between the morality of the group, of the individual rank and file members, and of the leaders. Like a cult, the leadership may have mere power as a goal hidden behind the moral code they broadcast to the followers and which drives the actions of the group, but ultimately the desires of the rank and file (based on the false morals of the leadership) will come into play, especially with as fickle a rank and file as the SJWs have and as weak a leadership.

              Their morality is based on an ‘ends justify the means’ logic which breaks down when the ends they desire aren’t reached by the means they have chosen, and rather than admit they were wrong in choosing means or in choosing impossible to achieve ends, they find a scapegoat. They perceive objective morality as wrong because they believe that if they can achieve a desired end by a means that is viewed as wrong by others, the means is obviously right and the others that view it as wrong are themselves evil.

              1. As Harry Reid said when challenged about his lie that Romney didn’t pay income taxes: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

                Also:

                “Oh, I have no repentance,” the Nevada Democrat said. “Because it was an issue that was important.”

                1. He and Candy Crowley should get together, they seem to have the same view of what’s important to say at the time.

                    2. Wayne, how can anyone call them on it? Reid’s quote was in response to someone attempting to call him on it. Mind over matter: He didn’t mind because it didn’t matter.

                      Nothing more than words was ever going to happen to him, and words can be ignored.

        3. When you give people a chance to buy “green” products, they are more likely to lie and cheat (for money!) in a subsequent game. By standing for feminism, a leftist acquires all the necessary moral egoboo, and can freely indulge in sexual exploitation or beating of women.

          2. Relatives and friends of Jackson Browne and Daryl Hannah, leftists all, took sides on whether Browne abused Hannah when they were together. I am deliberately remaining neutral, you don’t know what these people might read. Though she’s an actress, Hannah is Aspergers with a sky high IQ and might as well be wearing a giant “kick me” sign when she’s around left wing types like the late John Kennedy Jr.

        4. One other factor in the “Islamists are good people” argument is that when Islamists are NOT good people it is because they have been traumatized by the legacy of Colonialism. They are never to be held responsible for their reactions to such trauma because that constitutes blaming the victim.

          Israel, as a living colonialist cancer in their midst deserves the unprovoked launching of thousands of missiles into its residential neighborhoods because as an occupying power it is aggravating the trauma experienced by those dispossessed by their Islamist/Arabic allies who encouraged them to open lines of invasion for the attacking armies in 1948 and who have been forced to live in concentration camps by their putative supporters refusal to accept them into their own lands and a UN agency whose pay is predicated on such internment evil Jooz.

          2. I was composing something like this in my head, then ran across your comment. If the people doing evil things are in fact doing them, it’s only because of the way “we” treated them, silly. They will be fine in a generation or so once good SJW’s rule them and bring justice. And their food is so cool, so, so multicultural.
            I recommend to you CS Lewis’s “The Dangers of National Repentance.” In part, here: https://joederbes.wordpress.com/2007/05/29/c-s-lewis-on-the-dangers-of-national-repentance/

            1. Kind of makes sense…

              Good people don’t do bad things; if I do something, then, it’s either not bad, or I didn’t have a choice.

              So if those other Good people do bad things, and I must say they’re bad things, then they didn’t have a choice— they were forced.

          3. If they are that traumatized, re-colonization is the only way to go. Those who can not control themselves and pose a risk to themselves or others must be under the control of those who can.

      2. It’s a massive kafkatrap; attempts to disprove the worldview are what would be expected if the worldview is correct.

        *nod*

        And this is what really, really scares me.

        People have been wrong– horribly wrong– before, and they will be again.

        But if a system is wrong about how the world works is taught, with all evidence that it’s false being proof that the Enemy is more powerful than previously suspected, then there’s no way to correct it that isn’t horribly ugly.

  4. “But there are some people, nevertheless—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. ” G. K. Chesterton

  5. I forgot which Stalinist leader it was who said: “we are like the Jesuits: we want the whole person”. SJWs only fight for “social” “justice” in the sense that the DDR or North Korea call themselves “democratic republics”. “Socialist Jesuit Wannabes” comes closer to the truth.

    2. The differnce being that the Jesuits tie themselves into Theological knots out of deviousness. The Liberal Intellectual Radical Progressives do so out of mental flatulence.

    3. “Social justice” is the “justice” meted out by “society” when they think that the laws and the courts have not sufficiently punished an offender.

      In another age, they called that “lynching”.

      1. Vigilantism, lynching is just one method of applying justice, tarring and feathering, stoning, guillotining, there are many other methods that have been applied over the years.

        1. Vigilantism is not lynching, though they can overlap. Vigilantism is banding together in a non-state sposored group to enforce some kind of minimal order in a situation where the State aithority is overmatched, corrupt, or absent. Lynching is usually an interruption of more official (and slower) proceedings.

    4. I’ve read the German SS and other Nazi bodies being quoted as wanting the whole person. could just be a common sentiment among monsters.

      1. Who doesn’t want the whole person? Who among us would be happy that someone wanted only a little totalitarianism?

        The question is what you are willing to do to get it.

  6. Eh, I’ve got a great big long thought about the concepts of Adam’s Fall and Original Sin and their role in society and in a republic, and how the Anointed don’t like those ideas . . . and I’ll just put them up at my place later on. Bill’s given us more than enough to chew on.

    1. Is just me that is locked out of comments on your place, or did the door lock itself as it swung closed behind you, the last time you came home?

      2. I had to riff some things yesterday and apparently the “allow comments’ switch got turned off. It is now back on. WordPress Delenda Est!

    2. I see them as rejecting the idea that perfection is impossible. They see an imperfect world and assume it is so because someone wants it to be that way. If they had total power, why, perfection would be achieved!

      That perfection violates causality doesn’t matter.

        1. For the “party of Science!”, they don’t seem to have a handle on the whole entropy concept.

      2. Well, by definition, if the world could be perfect and isn’t — the problem must be something changeable. And therefore human in origin.

    3. Yes, please! I think that also explains the cognitive dissonance mentioned up-thread..

      1. It will be a day or two. I’m trying to get a bunch of stuff done before a conference. I’ll post a link on the active thread when I get it written, promise.

  7. “This would seriously affect the Social Justice Warriors’ work of making other people uncomfortable in order to change other people’s worldview (Hi, Starbucks!). ”

    Change other people’s worldview? Then who would they feel superior to? They’d rather sabotage it in a way that makes them feel like they are trying to change it.

    1. It is not without good reason that an SJW statement that “we need to have a conversation” translates the same way in which an aggrieved spouse’s similar statement does: a conversation that will consist of you lecturing me and in which my role is to acknowledge your correctness and agree to “straighten out” my thinking.

      Their conversations and dialogues are about them talking and us listening. Because they are good people and we aren’t.

      1. Very similar to constant political calls for “compromise”, which according to their definition means, us only giving them part of what they want right now, instead of all of what they want.

      2. This is why my answer to “We need to have a conversation” is “If I wanted you to correct my every though, I would have married you.”

        1. I reached the point that someone earnestly affirming that they are “just starting the conversation about (fill in the blank)”, or they are just “raising awareness of (fill in the blank)” makes me reach for my wallet and slowly back away. It’s as much a tell for a scam as is “for the children!”

            1. Lecture moi without responding? Oh, yeah, fat chance there. Brisk repartee was our dinner table amusement at Chez Hayes, when I was but a child, and strongly encouraged by my parents.
              It was a talent which probably saved me from being physically beaten up in jr high and HS numerous times.
              Don’t mess with me, kids – ’cause I can flay you verbally in some interesting and amusing ways.

  8. I think that one of the most maddening things for a person such as you describe is to shine a light on something, tell the truth in a useful way, and raise the standards of knowledge necessary to be a good citizen and not an ignorant rube. They cannot admit that this is their attitude but when their thoughts of how the world works are exposed as not consistent with reality in a way that socially and economically disadvantages them, they are caught in the communist’s classic dilemma, choose reality and cease to be the person you thought you were or choose ideology and enter into a terminal downward spiral. In such a circumstance, most people hedge, taking the hit to their finances and social position that they can afford and silently accommodating what they must.

    1. Or face facts, re-examine one’s beliefs, and be prepared to overthrow one’s current paradigm. This is how, ideally, science progresses: in fact, what often happens (Thomas Kuhn was probably the first to seriously discuss this), is that even in science people who are deeply personally invested in some dogma (e.g., because it is their baby, or because they cannot bring themselves to say a few dozen papers they published were based on premises that are in hindsight wrong) hang on to them for dear life — and the “paradigm shift” (term introduced by Kuhn in the context of philosophy of science, later becoming a buzzword in management etc. literature) happens when the older generation gradually is replaced by a new generation already familiar with the new theory.

      So even in the hard sciences — where “question everything, take nothing on authority, show-me-don’t-tell-me” is the platonic ideal — you have people clinging to bankrupt theories because of personal investment. It is obvious what will happen in areas of human endeavor where people are less conditioned/self-selected for openness to new ideas…

      And yes, for all the “progressive” bluster, the central dogmas of the Regressive Illiberals are old as the Golden Calf.

      1. At this stage of the game, everybody who is capable of that much self examination has already bailed out of this section of the left. I view it as a possible, but most likely empty set.

      2. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself- and you are the easiest person to fool”- Richard Feynman “Cargo Cult Science”

        1. This right her is why I’m so hard on the right. How do we think the McCains an Graham came to be. Let’s not pretend that the “Right” isn’t susceptible to the same conceits.

          1. Of course, it’s hard to get that speck out of somebody’s eye when you got that log in your eye. [Evil Grin]

            Sorry Josh, but sometimes you appears to have “fooled yourself”. [Grin]

  9. A good rational, and conservatives and libertarians would never take the first step on the same road of drinking the kook-aid of I’m a good person with the moral duty to fix the world.

    And I can be just as guilty of this conceit as anyone.

    1. IMO “trying to fix the world” isn’t evil in itself.

      The “evil” comes into play when you start with a point of view that is not reality based and/or when you are willing to force people into having the “correct views”.

      Too many people who dream of a utopia are willing to consider mind control as a way of getting to that utopia.

      1. At some level, assuming you are ‘good’ and smart enough to know what the solution is to fix the world (a necessary prerequisite for trying) is delusional. Wanting to fix the world isn’t evil, but trying to fix it may very well be.

        1. IMO “trying to fix the world” isn’t necessarily evil. What’s evil is *how* you attempt it.

          IE “actions” not “motives”.

          1. Oh, there are motives that make it evil, too. A good action is the right action for the right motive in the right circumstances.

            Where they fail most spectacularly is their refusal to review their actions and learn from them. It’s not evil if a doctor gives a patient medicine that, it turns out, makes the patient worse off; it’s evil to keep on doing it.

        2. I think scale has a large input here. If I try to improve my little corner of the world, with little or no effect on anyone else, I don’t see how that is evil. If I try to impose my half-baked ideas on other people, that gets evil in a hurry.

          1. Eh, depends how you try and whether you have done due diligence in what you try, and whether you revise as needed.

            1. On the larger scale, I would agree. On the individual scale, freedom consists of being able to do stupid things as you see fit. My definition of stupid probably doesn’t line up with yours, and certainly doesn’t line up with an SJW’s.

                1. No, I suppose not, but if no one else is harmed by what I do, how can that be evil? Stupid, certainly, less than optimum, almost assuredly, but evil?

                  1. At least in a religious sense it can be. As a Christian I view suicide as evil, but if the only one you are truly harming is yourself, you should have the freedom to commit that evil.

                    1. Okay, I see your point. I hadn’t thought to take it to its logical extreme. At one point, suicide was on my mind a lot, I suppose these days I overcompensate by failing to think about it.

                    1. Isn’t the definition of “good” in the eye of Eric Holder the beholder?

                      What greater good can there be than making an SJW feel like a good guy?

                    2. I fear our own arrogance and belief in our own rightness might lead us into making the same mistake of trying to fix the world.

                      The road to hell is paved with good intensions, and all that.

                    3. Yes, but we can also twiddle our thumbs while Rome burns when we could be fighting fire. It’s not like refraining from action is a guarantee of doing no wrong.

          2. A personal choice to live a greener life is one I would support and applaud. Actively attempting to gut the economy of a country to force a green agenda on its unwilling citizens, not so much. Particularly when the entire premise is based on faulty logic and constantly supported with fictional data and outright lies.

          3. Yeah, I was talking about scale. Trying to improve things isn’t bad, I was taking the word world literally, a common failing. It is possible for one person to make the world a better place, but mentally I define ‘trying to fix the world’ as ‘trying to fix all the problems in the world’.

            1. Trying to solve all the problems in the world is a non-starter. Either you think you’ve found the key to everything, that nobody before you was smart enough to try, or you try to fix all the problems at the same time. No one is that well informed, or has enough time to accomplish such a thing before things come apart somewhere else.

              1. “Either you think you’ve found the key to everything, that nobody before you was smart enough to try,”

                Or that obvious key is being thwarted by a evil cabal intent on maintaining their own power. Thus all the hatred from the Left towards white male capitalist conservatives. We are quite literally Satan in their eyes.

                1. They really think a conspiracy that large and involved could be sustained for any length of time?

                  1. Yes, because the obvious solution that would make everything better has never been successfully implemented. Since it’s impossible that this obvious solution is nothing of the sort, there must be some outside interference preventing or corrupting the implementation.

                    This mode of thinking isn’t confined to the left. Ask an anarcho-capitalist why we’ve never seen stable anarchy in all of human history (better yet, point out that the OWS camps were deliberately instituted as anarchic gatherings, they were largely shielded from outside attack, and still they started evolving governmental structures in a matter of weeks) and you’ll get some variant of “the powers that be sabotage every attempt.”

                    1. So everything anyone ever found out about human nature just doesn’t matter? Doing the same thing and expecting different results, that’s still the definition of crazy, right?

                    2. What in all of your experience, direct and indirect, with Progressives leads you to think that they are sane?

                    3. Guess I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, silly as that sounds in this instance.

                    4. Jeff,

                      http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/has-a-libertarian-society-ever-existed/

                      Please do not conflate the predominantly Social Anarchist of OWS with Anarcho-Capitalism. Especially as they were calling for more state control and regulation of Capitalism.

                      Another thing Anarcho-Capitalism is not against government (organizing into groups voluntarily), leaders or law, but of the States claim of a monopoly on the use of force.

                      “Anarchists [Anorcho-Capitalists] are not opposed to leaders and leadership, nor to law and laws – What anarchists oppose is that certain leaders should have a special privilege to use force, a privilege to coerce, to compel others to submit to their leadership, to use force in ways that would be impermissible for other people to use force. Anarchists favor there being more leaders, not no leaders – as many leaders as can find followers. Similarly, anarchists do not oppose law, but rather oppose the existence of any body of men with the power to make law by merely decreeing it to be law.”

                      – jim.com/anarchy/

                      I do not mind people arguing against the AC position if they arguing against the AC position, but most of the time people are arguing against positions that no Anarcho-Capitalist would make.

                  2. Yup. Indeed the radical feminist view is often that in fact ALL men are involved in a conscious conspiracy to oppress women.

        3. Fixing the wold is simple. All you have to do is go to bed having left things slightly nicer than when you woke up. Rinse, repeat, and then have more people doing that than the opposite.

          Of course, simple doesn’t mean *easy.*

      2. As the great philosopher T. Pratchett said, “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”

        And the SJWs really don’t think of “foreigners” (the class of everybody who isn’t them) as people. They aren’t really real. They are an idealized concept. When they actually encounter The Other, they think of them as a kind of large, unformed child, who would be just like them if only… Or, if they actively disagree with the SJW (such as by using facts and logic), then The Other is evil and must be destroyed or banished from their reality.

        1. Like the nice New Yorker I met and roommated with at the Boston Worldcon, She’d never knowingly met a Republican before.

          The only other time that has happened in our family history, it was in small-town Florida during WWII, when the head of the local Democrats came to meet my grandparents, just to see what a Republican looks like.

          So yeah, some of these folks just have lived very isolated, insular lives of ignorance, and strive to know you once they meet you. Others… not so much.

          1. My wife is from Brooklyn. When she married me, she went to Montgomery AL.

            1. Several of her friends and family were worried the Klan would be meeting her plane. Seriously.

            2. Her best friend and maid of honor was worried for her safety marrying an NRA member. After all, she had never knowingly met one.

            1. oh! I got one!!!
              About ten years ago I’m sitting in a Mall in Oregon with a group of people (only a few of whom I knew) and one of them (who was new to the area) made a comment about how he felt so ‘safe’ here in Oregon because he didn’t have to worry about any guns being around.

              Where upon I almost fell out of my chair I was laughing so hard.

              When I finally stopped laughing I told him that Oregon had one of the highest concealed carry rates (at the time) and that probably half the people in the mall were armed – which was why it was so ‘safe’!
              Several people in the group even admitted at that point that they were carrying.

              Talk about a ‘welcome to reality’ moment! Oh that was funny.

              1. *looks sweetly innocent* People carry who don’t look like they’re armed?

                Wow.

                I’ll have to tell the gals a the Mommy Group who feel moved to explain how they’d just be terrified at the thought of guns being around….

        2. You do not love the Bourgeoisie. Of course: for they
          Begot you, bore you, paid for you, and punched your head;
          You work with them; they’re intimate as board and bed;
          How could you love them, meeting them thus every day?

          You love the Proletariat, the thin, far-away
          Abstraction which resembles any workman fed
          On mortal food as closely as the shiny red
          Chessknight resembles stallions when they stamp and neigh.
          — C, S, Lewis, “The Genuine Article”

          1. “lesser good” or “lesser god”? Of course, either works. [Smile]

        4. I agree with Pratchett on something? 🙂 But yes, people blather a lot about “objectification” in the context of erotica and pornography, but that is only one aspect of that more general evil. John Hawkins wrote a great piece for PJMedia a while ago, “Five moral boundaries you should not cross”, and objectification was #1.

      3. Ah, but “Trying to fix the world” instead of “Trying to improve the world” IS evil; the mortal (if the Gods catch you) sin of hubris.

      4. The eeviil comes in with the initiation of force. IOF is the big difference between the sides.

        1. A little oversimplified. Where does the initiation of force begin? When somebody pulls the trigger to execute the left-handed person? Points the weapon? Presents the weapon? Shows up at your house because you’ve been outed as left handed? When your data is entered in the database? When somebody informs on you? When the law forbidding left-handed people is passed? When the law is proposed? When the petitions are circulated? When the news campaign against left-handed people begins? When the protests against Lefties begin? When left-handed people lose their jobs? When left-handed people can’t get hired? When businesses owned by the left-handed are boycotted? When the whispering campaign begins? When the small group of like-minded people with influence decide to marginalize all those weird left-handers? Where does the evil begin?

              2. But my problem with the State is it only has one level of response; do this or face the possibility of death.

                2. By the same reasoning, an individual has only the one “or die” response. It’s just harder to see because interpersonal reactions usually come with commonly agreed on but unstated assumptions, like “if I object, you won’t press the issue.”

                  When the assumptions are violated, you end up with situations like the infamous demand on someone who had to shoot a home invader: “he was just stealing a ten dollar radio, was that worth his life?” (As if they were the ones that decided that yes, it was worth risking his life to steal a radio.)

                  1. Between individuals force is an option it’s not the only option.

                    With the State it’s do this or face imprisonment or death. There is no middle ground.

                    2. RES,

                      Yep!

                      I know need to choice to live with in walking, biking or bussing it to work. (Or I could practice a little civil disobedience and drive without a license.)

                      You have tried restricted my ability to move freely as I see fit.

                    3. Of course you would have to recognize the right of the state to issue a drivers license, before you can recognize their right to punish you by suspending it. 🙂

                      Which they now do for practically everything, I fail to see how suspending their drivers license for unpaid child support is rationalized.

                    4. One action the government could rationally take would be denial of benefits … which is probably why they never do that.

                      I expect none of us here can imagine a rational government. Which does not constitute an argument for something as irrational as anarchy.

                    5. “Which does not constitute an argument for something as irrational as anarchy.”

                      Yep.

                    6. We are incapable of governing ourselves, so we need a body of these same individuals that can’t be trusted to govern themselves the power to govern us all.

                      And it’s Anarchy that is irrational?

                    7. As usual, you completely misunderstand the positions of others. [Frown]

                    8. Hard to argue with that, but people seem to be getting a little defensive (snide), so I don’t think it will make a dent.

                    9. Talking to people who utterly ignore the points made, refuse to apply the standards they’re using on the current system against their own and misrepresent what people have actually said tend to annoy people.

                    10. And they do nothing to change my opinion of their type. [Frown]

                    11. If you mean me, I apologize. I wasn’t actually ignoring your points, I still have them all in a row, undeleted. Just trying to figure them out.
                      I’m a little foggy with a head cold and they were a little opaque to me.

                    12. Nah, mostly Josh, although you’re going to get some of the heat from it.

                      A lot of the stuff is going to be complicated because there’s a lot of background, and patterns of behavior going on.

                      Plus, we’re all trying to not upset Sarah, since she’s supposed to be resting….

                    13. Yep, we don’t want Sarah to “carp bomb” everybody here. [Nervous Smile]

                    14. “Plus, we’re all trying to not upset Sarah, since she’s supposed to be resting….”

                      yes

                    15. Some of such points were “long ago” when we had major “discussions” with Josh on this subject.

                      So it’s not just a matter of Foxfier’s recent posts but posts of several of us “trying to knock sense” into Josh’s hard head. [Smile]

                      Oh, if we get a “little testy” with on this subject, it isn’t just your posts that cause us to get testy. It’s the result of posts by Josh (at his worse). [Polite Smile]

                    16. RES,

                      The central question, I’m not going to say libertarians or even Anarcho-Capitalists, that I’m trying to answer is are we humans capable of “Self”-Government or are we doomed to need some form of State to try to control our base impulses? In other words…

                      “Are we “Adults” and masters of our selves or are we “Children” that need to be lead?”

                      This is a question that we as humans have struggling with since we formed our first tribes.

                      I’m really starting to dislike the word anarchy; as, anarchy has connotations placed on it of Chaos and Lawlessness. Would we be having this disagreement RES if in the discussion we used Personal Autonomy contrasted against Collectivist Fraternity vs framing the debate State or no State?

                      Irrational? Why because you, RES can’t imagine a Stateless society, or that what you imagine is to scary without the perceived safety nets on control of a State? As a child could you imagine what it would be like to live as an Adult not under the control of your parents; to me it was scary what if I made the wrong choices or someone did something I didn’t like?

                      But have we as adults really become the masters of our own fate, or have we just turned over that responsibility, that our parents had over us, to the State as living free and being responsible for ourselves is just to scary.

                    17. Nicely put!

                      Anarchist is problematic and frustrating as you say. I’m thinking no overlord and they’re thinking chaos. My mother, an avowed “social democrat but not a communist,” said “but I don’t want to live in the wild west.” oh boy…

                    18. Josh, we can *envision* it, we just know it wouldn’t work if there were, you know, actual human beings involved.

                    19. *nod* The same think that makes the theoretical horrible cop possible applies to those who have *any* power over you, even temporary– and no, as the line goes, laws of England to stand between you and the devil when he turns around.

                      There’s a reason that folks have preferred even really, really bad gov’ts over none at all, and it’s not a variation on “they were all idiots.”

                    23. Especially when the speaker is talking about his/her “near perfect society” that doesn’t need government. [Evil Grin]

                    24. I’m against a State not government. Actually I advocate Self-Government as the means to do away with State government.

                    25. Misunderstanding or just misstating, who said anything about perfect? There is no perfect.

                    26. Why do you think I said “near perfect”? [Evil Grin]

                      Serious, I’m tired of hearing about this “lovely little world” you can built without government or the State.

                      Until we get perfect people, some government is a necessary evil.

                      Oh, I’m being polite so I won’t give my very blunt opinion of people who think a “lovely little world without government or the State is possible”.

                    27. Government can, and does, employ reason– as an extension of the people it represents, usually via the agency of those who are acting for it.

                      A lot of the bad situations are from people acting for the government exercising their reasoning poorly– if gov’t can be blamed for that, it must also be given credit for those exercising it properly.

                      So the question becomes more along the lines of “do people lose their right to act because they are doing so with another person”?

                    28. According to the State the answer to that last is, Yes.

                      I need to go do RL stuff finish this thought in a bit.

                    30. Try reasoning with a cop sometime as time why you don’t feel what you did was wrong.

                      With your neighbors you can come to a compromise.

                      The final option if an agreement could not be reached might be the same, but government claim it has the right where as I would need to justify my actions to the community at large.

                    31. Well, used to you could “reason” with a cop about whether what you did was wrong, often settling the matter in cash.

                      For some reason that has gone out of fashion in most jurisdictions.

                      OTOH, I have on several occasions reasoned a police officer out of doing more than warning me; perhaps the problem, Josh, is in your reasoning and argumentation?

                    32. Problem with Josh’s reasoning and argumentation?

                      Of course not, just look at how well everybody here falls in line with his thoughts. [Very Very Very Big Grin]

                    33. Beg better? The problem is you are at the cops mercy whether you did anything or no.

                    34. Beg? Not hardly. It involves understanding the law, the police officer’s psychology and the fact that the officer wants to shoot me even less than I want to be shot. It is a technique known as applied intelligence (in both common senses of the word.)

                      Here’s a tip: do not make the officer have to assert authority.

                      Further tip: telling the officer it is a stupid law and you are damned if you will adhere to it is a significantly ineffective argument. It tends to provoke the officer’s curiosity about what other laws you might be intent on ignoring.

                      And here is the final point: y’all’s failure to grasp the officer’s psychology is why there is such disagreement over the role of government.

                    35. If you believe that, then it logically follows that those are the only end-result options of interpersonal differences.

                      The State has a plethora of options, but if the person they are trying to use them against absolutely will not accept any of them, then it becomes, “Do this or die.” Likewise, individuals have a plethora of options (though they actually have fewer than the State does, but ultimately, if the one person will not back down, it becomes, “Do it or I’ll kill you.”

                    36. The government might have those options but you must first submits to it’s authority or die first. Just the act of resisting to if is grounds for death.

                    37. Except that you REACH that conclusion about the state by constant “and if they don’t stop, then what”s– so you have to apply the same metric to individuals. So anything people object to– because saying something is responding, and if you say something against it you’re acting against them– could escalate to deadly force, especially since the equation when applied to the state removes any question about what the person being responded to is doing.

          1. I don’t get that. Incorrectly defining it to suit your own ends, sure. People excel. That doesn’t change the definition.

            1. I’ve seen too many folks who are definitely not knowingly twisting the definition to their ends that cannot agree on what “counts” as initiating force, largely due to lack of perfect knowledge or an issue with other aspects of their philosophy.

              1. well..yeah, but the delusion that punching someone in the nose for fun is acceptable doesn’t make it so.

                1. Truth is true even if nobody says it’s true– but it’s awful hard to do anything about “punching folks in the nose for fun isn’t acceptable” if you’re the only one who believes that.

                  The stuff that’s less objectively observable is even harder.

                  1. Everyone knows that by the time they are 3. “He started it!” Doing something about it when everyone else wants to pretend ‘knockout’ is okay, is indeed difficult. Doesn’t mean they don’t know better.

                    1. *points to the middle east*
                      No, they don’t. They should, perhaps, but frequently, they don’t. (Is good for illustrating the wide range of what “starting it” can be– up to and including “has something that I want.”)

                      I think it’s possible to reach via reason (mostly), but without the leg up of our culture it is far less obvious; our three year olds do the “he started it” thing because they’ve managed to wig on to the idea of fault, as defined in our culture, so “Baby brother didn’t give me the toy that I wanted as soon as I noticed he was playing with it!” won’t cut any ice. Neither will “he hit me back!”

                    2. I find it hard to believe they don’t know better, but rather have permission from on high to disregard it. {shrugs}
                      Too bad I missed the previous discussion.

            2. Something which varies with every instance is neither a definition nor a standard. It is, at best, a guiding principle. Of course, principles are important. Personal behavior is guided by principles. But laws that we can all live by and agree to are guided by standards and definitions.

              1. Granted, but the only variation in your examples is the intensity of the attack (and of the appropriate response.)

            3. I get beat up around here for asking where are we drawing this line again. Because if you believe that we need a state all that is left is arguing over where to draw the line if when is it ok for the state to initiate force.

              1. Because if you believe that we need a state all that is left is arguing over where to draw the line if when is it ok for the state to initiate force.

                Only if you assume as a starting point that a group cannot choose to have representative respond to force on their behalf– in which case it’s back around to “what is defined as initiating force.” I think we’ve beaten to death the “actual harm” argument this month, already. (Summary: there’s a lot of disagreement, especially on practical grounds. [ie, if threat has to be personal and immediate and overwhelmingly obvious, all you need to do is make sure that nobody sees your massive overkill coming{whoot, nesting!}])

    2. This is where the Christian (and Conservative and Libertarian) view of the self in the world matters: it is inherent in those philosophies that individuals are innately flawed and incapable of “fixing” the world. The consequence of that “tragic view” of human nature is such people are more concerned with a just process than a just result. They recognize the risks of hubris in a way in which SJWs are incapable.

      1. As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
        I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
        Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

        We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
        That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
        But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
        So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

        We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
        Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
        But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
        That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

        With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
        They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
        They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
        So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

        When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
        They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
        But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

        On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
        (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
        Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

        In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
        By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
        But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

        Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
        And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
        That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

        As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
        There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
        That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
        And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

        And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
        When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
        As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
        The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

        1. There’s always room for Kipling. *grin*

          Sadly, that one grows more fell and more likely with each passing law, each executive order. The self discipline that they scorn so is quite literally the chain that restrains the ruthless nature that took a relatively weak ape and turned it into the unquestioned top predator in the food chain, bent the world to his will, and even pierced the veil into space where everything will kill us if it can.

          The laws of the land were made for a people who can and will practice moral self-restraint along with the curiosity and inventiveness endemic to the American soul. When the laws no longer matter, when tyranny throttles liberty, when fear throttles freedom… The whole world is in bad trouble, then.

          1. He actually has a pretty good answer to Josh, too:

            All we have of freedom, all we use or know–
            This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

            Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw–
            Leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the Law.

            Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing
            Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the king.

            Till our fathers ‘stablished,, after bloody years,
            How our King is one with us, first among his peers.

            So they bought us freedom-not at little cost–
            Wherefore must we watch the King, lest our gain be lost.

            Over all things certain, this is sure indeed,
            Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed.

            Eternal vigilance…..

  10. You can see how this works in an issue like Gun Control. Liberals do not own guns, so they assume that step 1 of committing a crime is to buy a gun. After all, that’s what they would have to do. So they propose the Brady Bill, etc, because that stops that initial purchase (but does nothing about the five other guns laying about the house). And whoa, all us evil conservatives who own guns, we’re horrible people because we’ve ALREADY committed Step 1 of committing a crime. We’re just one bad parking job away from committing murder, donchaknow!

    2. I think it is also a case of projection. They know that if they had easy access to a gun 24/7 then it would be just a matter of time until they flew off the handle and shot someone. Since surely WE bitter hicks couldn’t be more mature and self-disciplined than THEY sophisticated intellectuals, then all people everywhere must be to emotional or immature to handle guns (or item X) responsibly too.

      2. This is the liberal / leftist pattern in all things. ‘They’ know that ‘they’ can’t do something, or that ‘they’ do it badly. Therefore everyone ELSE needs to be banned from doing it, because ‘they’ know it to be bad.
        HOWEVER, because ‘they’ know it’s bad, if anyone is to be allowed to do it, it can only be ‘them’.
        Which is why, for example, we see anti-gunners illegally carrying guns fairly often.

    3. Well, can I tell ’em: a nontrivial part of my life was spent in a European capital that, despite strict gun control laws, is a major hub for the illegal trade in small arms — and has been for so long that it became a plot device in Frederick Forsyth’s “The Day of the Jackal” (still the best assassination thriller ever written, IMHO).

    4. That’s an interesting point: Traffic accidents kill and injure far, far more people per year than die or get injured from being shot.

      So, they’re all for banning cars, right?

      What’s that? They only care what kind of fuel the car uses?!?

      ….heartless bastards.

      1. They sure do want to ban cars, or at least make them too expensive for most people. They know better than to admit it, but the laws and regulations they’ve backed since the sixties have invariably raised the cost of owning and operating an automobile. Emissions regulations, cash-for-clunkers, and safety standards continually being raised have continuously increased cost. CAFE standards also contribute. The EPA and OSHA have been on a campaign for quite some time to put salvage yards out of business, driving up the cost of used parts. All these things put together add up to quite the program to put cars out of the reach of average people. So far it’s almost as effective as gun control.

  11. I have strong feelings in several directions here.

    1) I am always leery of explanations that are “simplistic” as Jimmah Cahtah used to say. In the real world, people do things for lots of different reasons.

    2) That said, I’ve also always thought that the Left-Right scale of describing political positions was somewhat congruent to a Nice – Mean scale. Eg Left = Nice, Right = Mean. That’s how you get the notion that the Nazi’s were right wingers because they were mean people when the name “Nazi” had socialism in it, they nationalized businesses and had Government Health Care.

    As a side note, I think this narcissistic idea of “I’m a Nice Guy!’ is why when it comes to discussions of Radical Islam and War on Terror, you always get the idea that the left doesn’t think war exists until us Murkans say it does.

    Despite the fact that AQ / Taliban / Radical Islam obviously considers itself to be using force to get us to do things we otherwise wouldn’t – which is, I think a good definition of asymmetric warfare – in the left’s mind, we ain’t at war ’til we say we are.

    1. I ised to get – indeed still get, though rarely – the. Ost peculiar looks when I said that I had beenexpecting so,ething like 9/11 for twenty years. I knew we were at war. The LIRPs didn’t. THAT makes sense now.

    2. “, you always get the idea that the left doesn’t think war exists until us Murkans say it does. ”
      Exactly. That is why withdrawing American troops from ______ is equated with “ending the war”, since no war can exist without US participation.

    3. Apropos Nazi socialism, “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi welfare state” by Götz Aly (recently translated into English, available on Kindle) is a must-read. For “Aryans” only, Nazi Germany may well have been the most thoroughgoing nanny state the world had seen by 1940 — paid for by a combination of deficit spending, “soaking the rich”, expropriating Jews, and later wholesale plunder of conquered territories.

    4. It doesn’t take two sides to make a war – just one to start.

      What distresses me is that a lot of the left seems to look on war (and politics, for that matter) as something akin to a game. They insist that we follow rules (Geneva Accords) that our enemy doesn’t have to, they insist that we ‘respect’ the other team, and that we have predefined goals (‘winning’ isn’t a goal, apparently) with definitive play duration. (As in ‘we’ll leave the country in 18 months’, or something equally foolish.)

      In politics, any tactic they use is fair, any attempt to use that same tactic against them is unfair. And they seem to have no concept of either ‘unanticipated consequences’ (look at how the Cash for Clunkers deal affected the auto industry) or long-term consequences for short-sighted actions. (Yeah, the ACA was a real big ego boost to Obama. But for pretty much everyone it’s been… problematic.)

      They have a child’s view of the world, where it’ll be as they want it because that’s as they want it. Reality doesn’t much matter to the equation – they’re sure they can have their cake and eat it too…

      1. It does take two sides to make a war: one to infringe, one to defend the sad puppies. Without the second side there can be no war, merely massacre, co-option and/or absorption.

  12. SJW doesn’t stand for Social Justice Warrior but for Social Justice Whiner.

    Urban Dictionary
    A little unmasculine feminine bitch who whines about everything and anyone and cant just let things lie. They will go on for years and act like a total pussy over nothing. They create drama.

      1. Drama, certainly, but queen? Most of what I’ve doesn’t rise to the level of princess, much less queen. Drama countess, perhaps?

        1. Drama scullery maid, I’d say, except that’s the job that princesses take when they are down on their luck. Also, it’s useful work.

                    2. Some of us view them more as monkey bars, suspended rungs allowing us to swing wildly about.

                      Although I s’pose in today’s more correct environment we must revise our terminology and abandon those terms for “rain forest gyms” and “simian saloons.”

                      Now I am stuck with a vision of a Callaghan’s customed by hairy apes. As are you, as i detest suffering such things alone.

          1. Compare the “drama queen” character in WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, which was so stereotyped it offended ME (but I have not heard anything from the “gay activists” objecting to it, probably because the movie came from Good People.)

          2. I thought it was in the “pregnant or nursing cat” sense?

            Trust me, it elevates the inherent drama level of said cat.

  13. Glenn Reynolds highlighted an excellent example of the SJW focus on narrative over details in this Elizabeth Bruenig piece at TNR:

    The right, on the other hand, tends to understand politics on the individual level, which fits in neatly with a general obsession with the capital-i Individual. Thus, the right tends to pore over the specific details of high-profile cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, concluding that if those particular situations were embattled by complications or mitigating factors, then the phenomena they’re meant to represent must not be real either. And if a few highly publicized rapes turn out to be murkier than first represented, then rape itself is not a crisis, just a regrettable and rare anomaly. The positive version of this approach is the elevation of people like Joe the Plumber, individual cases that purportedly show the value and effectiveness of conservative politics. It isn’t great reasoning, but it is very appealing on a sub-intellectual level.
    http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/204710/

    The SJW mind sees the forest while sub-intellectual conservatives focus on the trees. What is important to the SJW is teh Narrative, inconvenient truths be damned.

    Thus their narrative as “good people” permits SJWs to run roughshod over individuals, sublimating the needs of the few for the needs of the many. If a few eggs must be broken to provide their wonderful omelet of love, peace and safe spaces for all.

    1. So…she’s saying that paying attention to what the trees actually are, rather than known false impressions of those trees which are close enough to be visible that are then extrapolated to the entire visible group, is the super-intellectual level? And “good reasoning”?

      Is it just me, or did she utterly fail to show how weighing a case on the actual merits was “not good reasoning”?

  14. The crowd really hates those who are “their core people” who point out their fallacious stances.
    Take this example:
    POC – check
    atheist – check
    Female – check
    women’s rights fighter – check
    Well spoken – check
    Ergo this female must be one of their favorite people, right?
    well add her name – Ayaan Hirsi Ali
    She shows them to be just what they are, so they hate her with a passion.
    But I’m sure Joe Biden can tell her some things about islam.
    She should have genitally mutilated him when that came out of his mouth.

    1. She doesn’t count – she married a white guy, so she’s under the thumb of the patriarchy.

  15. Upper-middle class? Yup. That’s why in my latest book I insist that leftism deserves to be called Rich People’s Leftism:

    It is leftism that is by and primarily for the rich. It is nothing but theater that makes rich people feel good about themselves while doing little or nothing for the poor. With this sound bite, we can defeat the left’s ideas on political economy. Communism? It’s nothing but Rich People’s Leftism. Socialism? Rich People’s Leftism. Socialized medicine? Rich People’s Leftism. Minimum-wage laws? Rich People’s Leftism. Etc.

    As for the left and Islam, the trouble began about 1980 when both sides had managed to evict the Shah from Iran. What happened next? The Muslims took over and butchered tens of thousands of leftists. At that point, Western leftists should have concluded that Muslims were their worst enemies. The trouble was that they had just spent a lot of effort denouncing the imperialism of the U.S. in the Vietnam War. To conclude that Muslims were the left’s worst enemy would mean, at the very least, admitting that people in the Third World could end up as worse rulers than any Western imperialist power had ever been. That would negate much of their rhetoric, and so they couldn’t do it.

    Presumably at some point the feminist and gay wings of the left are going to rebel and say, “Stop dissing the U.S. America is far less sexist and homophobic than any Muslim country, so why are we supporting Muslims?” It will be interesting to see how the mainstream of the left reacts when that happens.

        1. Ditto what Mary said; the greater problem around here tends to be stuff that was meant to produce an image falling flat and offering just a link.

    2. I really dunno about the feminists rebelling, because of Clinton. If they’ll do that kind of willing compliance with such a rapist, I don’t see why Islam should be a sticking point.

      1. Naomi Wolf says that she finds the Islamic chador sexy and supports its institutionalization throughout the Islamic world.

        Behind the veil lives a thriving Muslim sexuality
        Naomi Wolf
        August 30, 2008

        For too many on the Left anything that rejects Western bourgeois values is automatically good. Biting the hand that fed them is prima facie proof of their intellectual independence.

        1. Anyone who says “The Western Christian tradition portrays all sexuality, even married sexuality, as sinful.” is woefully uneducated.

          I don’t know how to fix Western Education, but that’s what has to happen, if we’re going to fix anything else. I mean, I’ve got my kids taken care of, but there are so very many people who don’t even know how ignorant they are, I don’t know how we reach out to them and show them there is something to learn and that they can learn it.

          1. . I mean, I’ve got my kids taken care of, but there are so very many people who don’t even know how ignorant they are, I don’t know how we reach out to them and show them there is something to learn and that they can learn it.

            And if you accidentally show them, they’ll viciously attack you.

          2. According to my LDS upbringing, married sexuality is so, so NOT sinful, it’s part of the Lord’s plan

            1. LIRP atheists should not preach, and especially should not preach about theology, a subject on which they are militantly ignorant.

              Not that that ever stops them. There are just so MANY subjects on which they are ostentatiously uninformed.

              1. Not just “LIRP atheists”. Plenty of Liberal Christians are ignorant of theology even the theology of the church that they claim to be members of. [Sad Smile]

                1. I find there’s two flavors of the “ignorant but won’t stop talking about it” thing– and two false flavors.

                  First, the false: disagreement on basic assumptions, and disagreement about the value sources.

                  Second: ignorant but don’t know they’re ignorant and want to change your mind, and ignorant but feel attacked so they’re defending even though they know their ‘weapons’ are lacking.

                  Then there’s plain old misunderstandings of various flavors.

                  1. The case that I was thinking was of this leading Democrat from California who is Catholic.

                    She seemed to believe that the Catholic Church’s position on abortion was a “new thing”. [Sad Smile]

                    1. *sad* Yeah, like that. Really makes me wonder where and when things went wrong, and suspect it may be like how my husband wasn’t ever taught a lot of basic around-the-house stuff. (They could afford to have someone come do that, and what time anybody could spend with the kids was sure not going to be spent doing home repairs. Plus, it’s hard to do stuff with “help” like that– my mom wasn’t joking when she said she couldn’t afford to let someone help her, she needed it done quickly.)

                    2. Some years ago the National Review printed a letter from an someone who claimed to be Catholic, and who was opposed to one Papal doctrine or another. He asserted that he didn’t have to obey the Pope. The editors’ reply? “congratulations, you are a Protestant”

                    4. Pelosi received a good Catholic education — as defined by the nuttiest groups of California Catholics, from the nuttiest parts of pre- and post-Vatican II dissent. Of course, plenty of people got past that by looking to outside traditional sources as counterpoint; but she apparently swallowed all the stupidest talking points, and never checked a one. She has no intellectual formation to speak of, and her parents paid for that.

              2. However, as one Catholic blogger sagely observed, “Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.” It is amazing how definitively they can interpret scripture under the guidance of a Holy Ghost they don’t believe in.

                1. And furthermore they think the questions they have about scripture or belief have never been considered. It apparently never occurs to them that for centuries the best minds in Europe were theologians.

                  Truely adolescent, the bunch of ’em.

                  2. “Discussions of this kind never go very far before some smart alec with a GCSE Religious Studies says: ‘Hang on. The Bible says men bonking men is wrong; but doesn’t it also say that you mustn’t eat a light switch kindled in its mother’s milk? Ha-ha, caught you out!’
                    ‘Do you know’ the Christian almost never replies ‘That hadn’t occurred to me. And do you know what? In 2000 years of church history, no-one else had spotted it either.”

                    Andrew Rilstone, “Where Dawkins Went Wrong”

                    1. Sometimes the only available response to an allegation is:
                      Sir, you have achieved an ignorance of such magnitude that it warps reality itself, having formed a black hole of such denseness that no knowledge can escape.

                  3. In fairness, I think that may be a side-effect of– to borrow a famous but maligned quote– whose God they don’t believe in. It can be really hard to spot in the US, because there aren’t a lot of well educated Catholic Atheists* here in the last few generations, but their (local) church probably didn’t have an answer for the problem they had.

                    The issue comes in when they won’t accept an answer and insist that all the other churches they want to oppose must fit their impression of the church they left.

                    *or normal ones, either– I’m rather peeved at all the cool stuff I not only wasn’t taught, I didn’t have a way to know it EXISTED, and y’all know my hobby horse about folk-theology like “Catholics can’t play D&D.” It’s like growing up lacking basic tools, and then finding out they were right there in the tool box that nobody had bothered to mention, in a room you didn’t know existed.

                    1. “ It’s like growing up lacking basic tools, and then finding out they were right there in the tool box that nobody had bothered to mention, in a room you didn’t know existed.”

                      I remember searching for years for a copy of Bester’s The Demolished Man (yes, my children, there once was a world where not every SF story ever published was virtually at your fingertips) and finally, having found a copy and read it, discovering that it was in one of the first anthologies of SF I had ever bought and which I had (wrongly) believed I had read every story.

                    2. Worked hard with the son to make sure he knows the tools are there… at least as much as I know about them.

                      And I wonder sometimes if I haven’t stuffed his toolbox full of useless items… but only time will tell.

                    8. Long ago in the forgotten when, Beloved Spouse & I watched a number of shows on PBS: Once Upon A Classic, Masterpiece Theatre, Mystery, This Old House (with Bob Vila and Norm Abram) Siskel & Ebert’s Sneak Previews and Roy Underhill’s The Woodwright’s Shop. The very first episode of Underhill’s program focused on the making of the tools needed by a woodwright, a lesson, a process, I’ve never forgotten.

                      It’s like the old joke about three economists who fell down a well: First, assume a ladder.

                    9. A useless tool. Isn’t that the one you keep around in case you need something to weld a couple of pieces to for a special job?

                    12. Useless tool: The one you know you have three of, somewhere or other, but you’re not sure where and cleaning out the garage is much too big a chore when the odds are just as good the tools are in the basement, and vice versa.
                      In other words, nearly every tool we own.

                    14. And you have three or so of them because every time you need it, the same situation arises, and you just go out and buy a new one instead of turning everything upside down to find the ones you have.

              3. It is better be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt of it.

            2. In the Orthodox Jewish tradition married sex is part of the enjoyment of the Sabbath.

              What makes something evil isn’t necessarily its intentions but its effects.

              1. Nuptial theology is a big part of both Judaism and Christianity, whether or not people notice. And every denomination’s Bible includes the Song of Songs.

      2. From a historical perspective, we HAVE ended poverty in or own cuture. Hell, the primary dietary problem our “poor” have is that they are too fat,

        1. You point that out to people, and they will literally say it doesn’t matter, what matters is people richer than them.

          1. Thus demonstrating that, as has been said, “The poor you shall always have with you.”

            Much to the discomfort of Judas, who said the money should be given to “the poor.” The fact that Judas had been skimming from the poorbox is not relevant to the matter, it is a distraction from the real problem of society’s underprivileged.

            1. It’s irrelevant to whether Judas was a thief or embezzler. People should be judged on their actions. Of course tempered with mercy appropriate to the case.

  16. I think I learned everything I needed to know about SJWs (or their 1960s predecessors) after the fall of Saigon to the North in 1975. I went to work as a volunteer, helping to resettle Vietnamese refugees – just about all of those who came out in that year were middle-class, fairly well-educated people, with some kind of association, however remote with Americans, or the French. Among the American volunteers I worked with – there were no college kids besides myself. Any number of veterans, parents of veterans of the war, a whole bunch of ordinary, middle-class and working-class people, who put in hours and hours of time, finding homes for refugees, and helping them to adjust and adapt. It was eye-opening for me.

    1. Yep, we even got a few of them for a while in good ol’ Garden City TX in 1976. I met one family with a son who was a senior in high school who spent several hours one evening quizzing me about college engineering programs (I was a sophomore mech eng student at UT Austin) and translating for his parents. They stayed in Garden City for about 8 months before moving off to Midland.

      Good people, hard working folks.

    2. Thank you.

      Our head priest is one of the “boat people”– he mentioned it in last year’s Independence Day Mass, he was on one of the boats as a small child. Several of our nuns, too, and probably a lot of the other folks in our parish.

      So, thank you for helping some really good folks.

      1. You are welcome … and yes, they were good and decent people, many of them fearing for their lives and with good reason. They’ve become good citizens, American citizens, an ornament to our country.

        I still get spitting mad, when I think of how certain anti-Vietnam war protesters like Hanoi Jane and John F**king Kerry contributed to their plight in the first place, though.

        1. Around my hometown of Sacramento, there are a lot of “Boat People.” The immigrant generation bought a lot of strawberry farms. Their kids are dentists. (I’m not kidding—HUGE number of Vietnamese names in the dental industry around here.) It’s an interesting situation. (Incidentally, refugee status has repercussions through the next several generations. One variant is in encouraging kids to take up high-status but very portable professions—like dentistry.)

        2. I think the people who are mad at Jane Fonda overdo it slightly. She’s an actress and the daughter of same. She grew up in an atmosphere of melodrama and he talents do not run to clear thinking. I don’t watch here films, but not because she’s a political idiot. I don’t like her acting. I don’t expect actors to be politically smart and am somewhat surprised when they are.

          Kerry, OTOH, has no excuse. He’s a Political class Statesman wannabe. He should be more on top of it. He should, at a very minimum, have had the smarts to know that his grandstanding “protesting” when he got back – in the company of known frauds, no less – was going to be a problem. If he’d had a press conference early and said something like “When I came back from Vietnam I was a very angry young man and did some things I’m not proud of.” he’d have been in the clear, mostly. Instead he tried to have it both ways and it crashed in on him. And he STILL thinks he has a political future.

          Dolt.

          1. Kerry’s an entitled idiot, convinced of his own superior moral standing. He has, in the vernacular, drunk his own kool-aid to the point he believes his own fabrications.

            I wonder if he’ll try running for President again?

              1. They only sent him to Chiat because they recognized he lacked the skills and brains to enter a useful trade.

  17. Bravo Bill.

    I would quibble some on the evil twin explanation. I have had some hard looks at myself from a fairly early age. I see things more in the direction of what you mention earlier, of goodness taking effort.

  18. Because they are Good People ™ anything they want must by definition be for the greater good. And since the end always justifies the means, all’s fair in love and war, and if you’re not cheating you’re not trying, there is naturally no shame in whatever they must do to achieve their goals. And when those goals fail to materialize (bitch slapped by reality) it must be because someone else messed up their perfect plan. We on the evil right didn’t care enough, didn’t give enough even though we obviously have more than we deserve, or actively scuttled what otherwise would have carried us upward and onward to a glorious social utopia.
    What truly galls me is how they expect and demand full credit even when their pitiful schemes crash and burn. They meant well, their intentions were good. The fact that they caused suffering and even death to countless innocents is totally beside the fact. Failures are never their fault. The damage they cause is always laid off on some evil right winger. Or if one isn’t available they will eagerly pick off one of their fringe groups for wrong think or failure to believe hard enough in the party line.
    An amusing aspect of all this is their compulsion to always say whatever supports the narrative of the moment, even when that might be the complete opposite of statements made days or even hours previously. The current grand and glorious leader appears especially wont to do this, and the response when called out is “you just misunderstood his first statement. The fault is yours.”

    1. This was amply demonstrated when they justified their initial support for the invasion of Iraq on the grounds of political necessity, or when we discover Obama has always supported same sex marriage but lied to protect his political viability in a repressive America.

      Their lies are always mandated by the flaws in the American people (“everybody lies about sex”) and wouldn’t be necessary if only Americans were standing with one foot in the past.

    2. I know a blog where the right-wingers tend to announce that kulaks and wreckers are the cause of the problems.

        2. If it’s like some of the groups in Seattle and Portland, they’re the “right wingers” only compared to everybody else in the area.

          The first Facebook Unfriend and Block I got was from a guy who was totally sure that he was on the far right because he thought Obama was a centrist, while everyone in his current face-to-face social group considered Obama far right.

    1. Thanks for the link. I enjoyed reading it. I couldn’t help but notice that none of your critics (I admit I didn’t read all the comments) had anything to say regarding what you said about slaves in modern-day Saudi Arabia.

      1. Yes. Thank you for the article. I have no experience of Arabs, but I have experienced other countries. The most perceptive part is “they do not think like us.” Even I am still a little alien.
        Also, you might want to read down to multiculturalism is racism.”

    2. Mr Browne, thank you for this article. The thing that struck me is how closely the mindset of the modern day American SJW resembles the mindset of the traditional Arab.

  20. While I had not posted a comment, I am already applying the insights from this post. I offered this reply comment to a SJW over at the Hoover Institution:
    Notice the progressive worldview in these comments. The progressive gay couple (if it feels good do it), only quietly ‘curses under their breath’. Never the vindictive couple, outraged that everyone does not conform and approve of their lifestyle, goes off and starts a lawsuit.
    Unquestioned in this dialogue is that the progressive view is the one, only and ultimate true belief, and no one is allowed to oppose that belief. The encapsulation is the final sentence. Clearly these RFRA supporters know they hate gays. No consideration is given that perhaps, this person truly believes differently than the progressive. Indeed no. The ‘right’ clearly ‘knows’ it is hate, but they hatefully want to remain in power, to further their hateful souls. No consideration is given for having a different belief than the progressive. If you don’t conform, you must be evil and you must hate, because nothing else could justify (in their little progressive minds) their actions.

  21. The key take-away from this is that they are narcissists. A narcissist is a bottomless empty hole that relies on other people’s approbation to fill it. They rely on other people’s notice to tell them that they exist at all.

    The worst thing that you can do to them is to ignore them and/or shun them because they internalize this as meaning that they worthless. This is an existence threatening occurence to them.

    This explains much about the progs in general and the SJW’s in particular.

    1. It makes them very susceptible to certain kinds of scams and leads them to sympathize unduly with bad people doing “good” things, e.g., the Occupy Wall Street [your descriptive term here]. They see gross misbehaviour as distraction from the essential truth of the action and therefore kick sand over it.

      With the TEA Party the opposite effect occurs: because they see the protest as fundamentally invalid any evidence of misbehaviour, no matter how trivial or unrepresentative of the group as a whole (even when performed by false flag activists to deliberately discredit a cause) as revelatory of the hidden truth of the cause.

      1. Even more simply: “We have the right to do it because we’re the Good Guys, and you have no rights whatever because you’re the Bad Guys.”

  22. These are your Social Justice Warriors. But I take umbrage with the name. “Social” is a minx and will associate herself with any ratbag movement or product. “Warriors” is undoubtedly accurate, as they have reduced society to a cultural war. But it is unfair to associate “Justice” with a cause motivated by such supreme narcissism.

    I concur, and have said something similar on occasion.

    Hence my preference for calling them the ‘Butthurt Brigade.’ It’ll piss them off no end, and every time that happens, an angel gets their wings. 😉

    1. Noting your icon:
      New Republic: Carly Fiorina Is the Next Sarah Palin
      By Andrew Johnson — April 8, 2015

      No matter how distinctly different their backgrounds, experiences, and ambitions are, Republican women are all the same, according to the New Republic’s Naomi Shavin.

      In an article on the magazine’s website, Shavin characterizes potential presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as “Sarah Palin 2.0.”

      “It seems the GOP has finally found a new Queen,” she writes, referring to a title given to Palin in 2008 by the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd. But other than the fact that Palin and Fiorina are both women, Shavin offers little to support her argument.
      RTWT: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416644/new-republic-carly-fiorina-next-sarah-palin-andrew-johnson

      1. Well, they do believe that people are interchangeable widgets, after all.

        Of course, we could take another, more humane (human?) view, that “Men are not potatoes!”

      2. Battlespace preparation: They want the meme that any republican woman must be either ignorant or evil. Which after all precisely fits their worldview. That her background is corporate rather than political doesn’t matter. Calling her ‘Queen’ attempts to clothe her in the same ‘entitled’ cloth that the Obama’s have draped themselves with.

  23. Another exhibit demonstrating the flexible values of the SJWs:

    Not until Monday did the UN Security Council convene to discuss the ongoing tragedy at Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, Syria, just a few miles from President Bashar al-Assad’s palace.

    Set up decades ago, Yarmouk is now home to 18,000 Palestinians. They’ve been besieged throughout the long Syrian civil war — but now they’ve become virtual prisoners since ISIS entered the camp last week.

    In that brief time, reports say, more than 1,000 have been killed.

    Those who remain are shut off without water and medical supplies, forced to live on a “bare survival” 400 calories a day.

    One UN relief official calls the situation “beyond inhumane” and “completely catastrophic.”

    But the Security Council — which routinely convenes in a matter of hours to harangue Israel over what it perceives as the slightest infraction — has done little more than receive a video briefing.
    http://nypost.com/2015/04/07/palestinian-lives-matter/

    Gee, why would such horrible treatment of internees (in an UNRWA managed camp) be of so little interest to folks who denounce Israel for the slightest infringement on Palestinian lives?

    1. Because to do otherwise means that they’d have to *do something real*.

      Screaming at Israel is safe because nobody expects the UN to be able to “do something” about Israel (ie due to the US veto).

  24. Compare & Contrast: the SJW expectations of journalists:

    “A swarm of bloggers and more than a few fellow print journalists accused [Judith Miller] of “hyping” the threat of WMD posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, thus helping President George W. Bush and his team sell a misbegotten war to the American public. At best, Miller was blamed for lacking the requisite skepticism any serious reporter must have, for ignoring facts, and distorting information.
    Peter Berkowitz, Judith Miller’s “Story”: Setting the Record Straight at RCP

    Emphasis added.

    The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism released a report, saying the [Rolling Stone]’s shortcomings ‘encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.’”

    “Nonetheless, the article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama. The University of Virginia had already been on the Department of Education’s list of 55 colleges under investigation for their handling of sex assault violations.”

    Emphasis added.

    1. BTW, there is this interesting element at the end of the book review:

      In addition to finding injustice to Libby she also revealed that Fitzgerald’s three-and-half year pursuit of him damaged American national security.

      In a 2013 interview, former Vice President Cheney told Miller that but for Fitzgerald’s sidelining of Libby, the Iraq War might have turned out differently. In 2003, Libby was the principal figure in the White House arguing for the counterinsurgency strategy that President Bush only embraced in late 2006 after many wrong turns and much carnage, and which Gen. David Petraeus successfully implemented in 2007. It is painful to contemplate how many lives—American and Iraqi—might have been spared had Libby, the foremost champion within the White House in 2003 of stabilizing Iraq through counterinsurgency operations, not been hindered by, and eventually forced to resign because of, Fitzgerald’s overwrought federal investigation and prosecution.

      Serendipity, a biased press, and a fanatical prosecutor combined to yoke together the fates of Scooter Libby and Judith Miller. Elite left-wing opinion demanded that the Bush administration pay for its supposed lies about Iraqi WMD. The left wanted to take down Bush or Cheney and when they couldn’t destroy either, they settled for Libby
      http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/04/08/judith_millers_story_setting_the_record_straight_126181.html

      One of the hallmarks of the SJWs is an indifference to the real world effects of their agendas. Yet they condemn conservatives as ideologues.

      1. One of the hallmarks of the SJWs is implementation of the Big Lie Strategy. Tell a big enough lie, often enough, and people will believe it. Just look at the “No WMDs in Iraq” lie; there are literally tons of evidence to the contrary; actual physical evidence, but that is all ignored like it doesn’t exist while they continue to parrot the absence of WMDs.

      2. “The left wanted to take down Bush or Cheney and when they couldn’t destroy either, they settled for Libby”

        And at least one of the jurors admitted exactly that after the trial was over.

  25. Rather long but …

    The Hugo Awards: How to Fight Back in the Culture War
    By Robert Tracinski
    This is the era in which we are all being drafted in the Culture War. It doesn’t matter if you’re secular or religious, political or apolitical, frat boys or geeks, hipsters or bros. Nobody gets to be neutral or sit on the sidelines, because we’ll all be expected to make our obeisance to the latest politically correct opinion handed down to us by a Twitter mob.

    By now, we know the basic ingredients of a typical skirmish in Culture War 4.0. It goes something like this: a) a leftist claque starts loudly pushing the “correct” Culture War position onto b) a field previously considered fun, innocuous, apolitical, purely personal, or recreational, and c) accusing anyone who opposes them of being a racist, sexist, bigot who relies on oppressive “privilege” to push everyone else down, while these claims are d) backed up by a biased press that swallows the line of attack uncritically and repeats it.

    [SNIP]

    Which explains the latest, wide new front of the Great Social Justice War: Gamergate and its latest outgrowth, the battle over the Hugo Awards, a prestigious annual fiction award for science fiction and fantasy writers.

    Hugo nominations are not made by a cloistered group of experts. They are voted on by anyone who becomes a “supporting or attending member” of the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon. This has usually meant that the voting is limited to a small pool of a few thousand die-hard science fiction fans. But in practice it means that anyone willing to shell out $40 can cast a ballot.

    Science fiction has always been a fertile arena for exploration of big ideas—much more so, these days, than highbrow “literary” fiction. The use of fantastical science fiction premises allows authors to project a future in which everything is done differently, or in which human nature itself has been altered, and this leads them to ask questions about what is really natural, necessary, or essential to human life and what is merely conventional, artificial, and unnecessary. It has been remarked that “big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.”

    Clearly, all of this freewheeling exploration of ideas has got to stop.

    So in marched the Social Justice Warriors, a term adopted in the Gamergate controversy to describe the kind of politically correct busybodies who decide that the output of every field has to be remade to promote the proper, “progressive” social agenda—or else.

    A few years back, conservative science-fiction author Larry Correia noticed that left-leaning participants at Worldcon were engaged in a whispering campaign against one of his nominated books because of his political views. Many of them had not even read his novels. They opposed him, not because of the quality of his work, but because of who he was. In effect, the Left was enforcing a blacklist in which no right-leaning science fiction writer can be allowed to win awards.

    [SNIP]

    This year, the Sad Puppies campaign (and a related slate of recommendations called Rabid Puppies) swept the field. The response was a total meltdown among the leftist elites who had assumed, in previous years, that they (and their favorite publisher, Tor) basically owned the Hugos. So they did what the Left always does: they smeared everyone who disagrees with them as racists.

    Correia notes that on April 6, eight different news sites, from Entertainment Weekly to The Guardian, all published suspiciously similar hit pieces describing the Sad Puppies campaign and its organizers as racist and misogynist. Clearly, someone was feeding these sites the new official narrative, and they all swallowed it without any attempt at basic research.

    [SNIP]

    The other thing we’ve come to expect from the Social Justice Warriors is a bitter, dismissive hatred for the fans of their own field, who stubbornly refuse to be reformed by their betters. A rant from “progressive” writer Philip Sandifer, echoing last year’s proclamation that “Gamers Are Dead,” declared “The Day Fandom Ended.”

    Sandifer argued for “the moral duty of progressive voices to form a blocking majority, and to loudly admit that fandom as it stands is broken, and that any work proclaimed to be the best of the year by a fandom this broken is demeaned by the association.” So he advocates that “progressives” should buy their way into the final ballot and vote for “No Award Given” in every category. “The 2015 Hugos should simply be blank.”

    In other news, he’s going to take his ball and go home.

    Not to be outdone, “Jeopardy Jerk“ Arthur Chu decided to live down to his epithet by denouncing “democracy” as such. It’s like Stalin said: the problem with elections is that you never know ahead of time who’s going to win.

    To be sure, it is possible some of the Sad Puppies nominees won because of their right-leaning politics rather than their quality. And it also appears that the proprietor of the competing slate, Rabid Puppies, has said a few genuinely objectionable things. But the science-fiction establishment might want to take a moment to ask how they have so alienated their core audience as to provoke this kind of mass protest vote. Than again, forget I said that. “Progressives” never ask that question. Inherent in leftism is the notion that we all must be guided by a small elite, a revolutionary vanguard, and that if we resist our indoctrination, it is necessary to dissolve the people and elect another.

    From our perspective as draftees in the new Culture War, the 2015 Hugo Awards lay out the pattern for a successful counter-attack. Sad Puppies and its sympathizers have discovered how to use the Internet effectively as a tool to mobilize the “silent majority.” They have managed to wrest control of an existing institutions from an entrenched establishment—roughly the equivalent, say, of getting Binyamin Netanyahu nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Above all else, both Gamergate and Sad Puppies are managing to mobilize people who were previously unengaged with politics, or who come from the center-left but are disillusioned after being hectored by a holier-than-thou claque of super-radicals.

    In short, this is the one area where our side is winning the Culture War and making some headway at beating back the left’s politicization of every aspect of life.

  26. Recently a Hun put up a link to what i wr-wr-wro-wroongly deemed a My Little Pony parody link and I skipped the comment. In penance, I proffer:

    My Little Pony To Children: Marxism Is Not Magic
    Yes, My Little Pony is really brave enough to tell kids about the dangers of enforced equality.
    By Brandon Morse
    April 8, 2015
    [SNIP]
    One of the most telling moments of the show is when the main characters are imprisoned for social reconditioning. After a night in prison, Starlight Glimmer leads the gang out to the gathered villagers to pressure them into giving up their old life. The gang resists, and one pony, Applejack, says, “You can’t force no pony to be friends. It don’t work like that.”

    This prompts the villain to tell the crowd, “It’s alright, everypony. This is a perfectly normal part of the equalization process for those who haven’t…quite seen the light yet.” She then has the ponies escorted back into jail after saying, “We’ll try again tomorrow once you”—at this point the camera switches to first-person perspective, as if Starlight Glimmer is talking directly to the viewer—“have had a bit more time to consider our philosophy.”

    Starlight Glimmer is a controlling idealist who employs strict rules but follows none of them herself. This is very reminiscent of many of today’s radical feminists, who preach equality while they practice dominance. Her tactics go so far as to include forcing celebrities to promote her cause, organizing marches, and singling out for ridicule anyone who drifts too far out of bounds. She and her village live in a utopia, but it is her utopia.

    1. I did make a rather opaque link, because I didn’t want the episode copy to disappear off the site.

      Amusingly enough, some leftist fans claim that it’s an anti-capitalist episode, because capitalism makes everyone the same. The more common strategy is to reference Harrison Bergeron, because Vonnegut is still sacred enough to protect one. 🙂 Everybody else is making jokes about Cutey Marx.

      1. Yes. Yes, it is. 🙂

        While women are welcome, it’s still hilarious how male-oriented the new-school fandom is. More than Transformers or GI Joe fandoms, So many projects, so much guy stuff.

        The secret is that guys like well-made comedies and adventures with heroics and virtue; and that they like cute, heartwarming stuff more as they grow older (which is part of why daddies get along so well with their little girls). 🙂 It’s also not surprising that a fair number of fannish marriages are coming out of this fandom.

  27. You know, this makes me all the more grateful for the upbringing I received. Between my Father, (who has been places no tour guide has ever been), and my religion, I understand that there are different cultures, modes of thought and people in the world. Some of them are bad people.
    It seems like the SJW’s have bought into the “Everyone is the same!” and “You can’t judge others!” and “No one is better than anyone else!”.
    You know what, I’m better than a lot of people! (There’s also a lot of people who are better than me. My wife for instance.) And I’m okay with that.
    I just find myself shaking my head so much at the idiocy of some people. I seriously wish some of these SJW’s could experience the harsh conditions found in this world. They would either wither and die, or toughen up and learn the truth.

      1. Thank you. I rewrote it several times, paring it down repeatedly. I hope I got my point across.

  28. I’m late to the party, as usual. The mention of narcissism above is very close; the true believer in identity politics is shoring up a weak sense of self by joining a Cause and basking in group recognition of their shared piety. Empathy is reserved for those deemed oppressed by abstract class standards, so when you point out disadvantaged Asians are being kept out of pretisigious schools to reserve space for relatively advantaged PoC (now that Asians have been defined out of that category — they are now super-white!), they sputter and ignore that, because questioning any of the received wisdom means questioning all of it.

    This is the new version of religious wars. The SJW religion will have no other gods, and so attacks and demeans the belief system that it has been actively working to destroy. Islamists are far away and can be romanticized as victims, so they get a pass — note last month’s gay pizza denial frenzy, in which something that had never happened (a gay couple asking a pizzeria to cater their wedding) became a crisis requiring vicious personal attacks and a corresponding defense. Meanwhile, 150 Christians were picked out and murdered by Boko Haram, but there was far less media coverage of the horror. Real murders versus purely hypothetical feelings of rejection!

    Why is it that SJWs can attack harmless people without feeling any empathy for them? Most well-adjusted people realized that the poor Chick-Fil-A driveup girl was a sweet person being browbeaten for political reasons, and similarly the pizza parlor owners were unsophisticated enough to tell the truth about their desire not to be involved in a ceremony they thought improper. But SJWs see evil to be stamped out. And their viciousness is reserved for their closest cultural cousins, the Red Tribe. (See Scott Alexander’s terrific essay on the phenomenon here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)

    I grew up Southern Baptist. I refused to be baptised at 8 because I did not wish to enter the church per se, but I retain all the moral lessons and the understanding of the Golden Rule. The SJWs have dropped all that needless baggage and identified the evil that prevents Paradise on Earth, and they see it in those closest to them who resist their party line thinking. They come from the same place as the gulags and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the worst of them would commit genocide as necessary to reach their goals.

  29. Pingback: Links for 4-8-2015 | Karl Heubaum

    1. I can’t log into her site but please pass on my sympathies.

      2. I attempted to express mine (poorly) but the site quit working on me, so I’m not sure if it will go through or not. Please express that our thoughts and prayers are with her.

        1. Hi guys. Did a lot of running around today, since there’s paperwork and such, so I haven’t been around all day. There’s been some comments that go through and need approving; I’ve seen those. I saw bearcat’s registration.

          I passed on the problem to Aff and he is asking if the folks with problems logging to the site / commenting please let us know what browser and OS you are using so he can try figure out what might be the problem as he just checked server-side and there’s nothing wrong.

          I’ve been dealing, all the way up to yesterday, with spam email signups too, but I’ve been careful about deleting the ones I’ve gotten since yesterday because I don’t know what are the spam and what aren’t. The very obvious ones though I get nuked, so if that’s done in error send me an email.

          If you’re having problems or want to just email me, or both, my email address is shadowdancer.duskstar at affsdiary dot com. Aff wants to find out what’s wrong. It’ll give him something to work on, so don’t worry about intruding on our grief. We’re all the same types of folk… need to work, need to keep moving, because you don’t stop when you’re going through hell.

          I wish I lived near you guys. I’ve been wanting to hug you all. I wish I had my mother with me too but she’s in the Philippines. I’ve seen the comments on the blog, and on Brad’s blog. I haven’t had the chance to see if there’ve been any on MHN.

          I’ve been asked by so many of you wonderful people if there’s something that you can do to help out but my mind is blank. I can’t think of anything that folks from overseas could do to help, or how to ask.

          Any ideas? ^^;

          2. I don’t know if it’d be any help at all: I have a friend who lost her husband to cancer a couple years ago (early thirties), and for a couple months there she’d call me when she didn’t want to think any more and have me tell her about whatever, anything that didn’t bring back memories of him, for an hour or two–chicken shenanigans and that sort of stuff. Between the lot of us we could probably yarn for a couple weeks straight if that would help.
            We can also listen.
            I wish I could give you a hug.

          4. I wish I lived near you guys. I’ve been wanting to hug you all.

            If you can find a 6-foot teddy bear, that’s a reasonably good substitute for me, I’ve been told. Take care of yourself, sweetheart.

          6. Amanda told me early morning before I checked my email. I told you all I could in email. I have no words, and that’s bad for someone like me. Hugs.

            1. When my friend Amy Sterling Cassil lost her son she started a fund to help dress/name/bury babies found dead. You know the ones still born or killed at birth and abandoned. She started it in his name. And it assuaged a little our pain at her loss.
              I’m not suggesting anything like that, but if you wanted to do something like that, I’m sure you’d not lack for contributions.

              1. A friend of mine who lost her boy a few years back has a diaper drive in his name.

              2. That’s something I’d contribute to; even before we lost either Damien or Brandon (Who we named for Brandon Webb, separately, I found out today.) That sort of cruelty has always hurt me.

                I hear Kate the Impaler Paulk has A Plan, so I guess we’ll talk to her.

                I’ll be writing a post that folks can pass around as an update.

                1. I am so sorry for your loss.

                  What you have written so far about Brandon on your blog alternately makes me want to laugh for the joy of him and cry at the loss of him. Your love of him, and the love of the family comes through.

    3. Oh, gosh… :,(

      Words just fail. Something like that makes everything else we’re fussing about superfluous.

      Send my hugs her way, would you please?

    4. Sadly, such as that is never a tangent.

      My sympathies and condolences to Shadow & her immediate family, from a portion of her virtual family.

    5. Oh no. That’s… I have another friend who lost a child to SIDS on this day. I can only hope that they’re playing in heaven.

    7. Oh!!! My deepest Condolences this breaks my heart my thoughts and love poor out to her and her family.

    11. I’m so sorry. That was a beautiful post, a tribute to both Damien and Branden. Praying, Shadowdancer, that you and your family can find your way to a good new normal. I wish I could give you a hug.

  31. Great analysis Bill. Wouldn’t this explain all tribal “othering” to some extent?

  32. Pingback: The Architecture of Fear | According To Hoyt
  33. Pingback: News of the Week (April 12th, 2015) | The Political Hat

Comments are closed.