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Quote of the Day: A Gift?
I just think COVID is God’s gift to the left. That’s a terrible thing to say. I think it was a very difficult thing to send down to us, but it has ripped the Band-Aid off who [Trump] is and what he stands for and what is being done to average people and working people in this country. — Jane Fonda
At first, it seemed that Hanoi Jane was right. The left didn’t let the crisis go to waste and used it as a weapon against free people. They even tried to curtail free speech.
The George Floyd incident added even more fuel to the fire — literally speaking.
The Left was on a roll … and then it wasn’t. What happened?
The crisis gave the exasperatingly inattentive suburban voters a chance to see the Left up close. It wasn’t a pretty sight. That inattentive group included parents, who finally saw what the Left was doing to their children.
Then there was crime and inflation, and a very stupid and nasty-dispositioned, leftist administration that appears to be deliberately harming the country.
The list goes on.
Hanoi Jane’s gift backfired. The “Band-Aid” got ripped off of the Left, and people can see who they really are.
Even large corporations are backing away from wokery.
I hope the backlash is just beginning and that it will be wide and deep.
May it continue.
Published in Group Writing
May it continue, indeed.
I’ll keep the rest to myself.
“The rest”? I hope you don’t keep it to yourself. Would like to hear it.
Speaking of Hanoi Jane, it’s been exactly 50 years since her famous photo sitting on the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. You gotta admit; she has been remarkably consistent.
She isn’t any smarter now than she was 50 years ago.
One word: Barbarella.
Twelve years ago I had a work trip to Nellis AFB. One night we went to the club on base. At least one urinal had a Hanoi Jane sticker in it. It wasn’t an ancient sticker either. I’m sure someone replaces them as needed.
But would they piss on Barbarella?
Just doing an image search on Hanoi Jane for this post, I came across some urinal targets. Don’t know if they were new or not.
I just love how the Left (and some unfortunates on the Right) make Trump out to be the evilest evil that ever beset America. Ultra MAGA authoritarian fascist Pootin stooge with his “erratic foreign policy” etc, etc.
Just one question. Are you and your neighbors better off than you were four years ago?
I didn’t think so.
If it weren’t for projection, the Left would cease to exist.
So. Much. This.
But projection only works if there is someone to receive and believe it.
For believers on the Left is it the ‘useful idiots’ syndrome? Or cognitive dissonance, since they’ve bought into an ideology and refuse to admit their errors? Or are they just hateful and evil (this one I don’t want to accept)?
On the Right, is it because they lack courage of conviction in the truth? Are they simply gullible? Are they so shallow to just want to be included in the zeitgeist?
Jane Fonda is totally irrelevant, and has been for years. The fact that she chose to make that inane comment is simply proof of her irrelevance, and her never ending need for attention. Ignore her. That is the best response.
That’s different from projection, which is all about internal mistakes of the person doing the projecting. Still trying to come up with a word for what, uh, I think you’re talking about.
Basic Projection: If I am an untrusting person, then I expect others to behave as untrusting people. In projection, I have an excessive amount of “me” mixed into my mental models of others, which colors the way I treat them.
Preemptive strike.
On the Left, I think it’s a mix. There are definitely the incurious and low-information who become the useful idiots. They don’t tend to get as far as cognitive dissonance because they’re not thoughtful enough to notice the dissonance and just lazily parrot the narrative — CO2 is pollution and we’re all gonna die from climate change (while breathing out CO2)!! Overturning Roe is going to outlaw abortion and cause women to be sexually exploited for breeding purposes (unlike just sexually exploited as they are now), just like conservative Christians have been aiming for for years!! Donald Trump was going to start a nuclear war if he had a second term, unlike Joe Biden with his steady hand on the tiller of diplomacy. Right-wingers are so racist that they don’t see that blacks need saving by Big Government run by the expert class who happen to be mostly white and Left (just watched a fascinating documentary on how poor whites have gotten the shaft from SSI as a result of systemic corruption: The Great Conn).
It’s these latter lefties with the white savior god complex who are evil. Most of them know this BS doesn’t produce good results, but they’re so taken up with their awesomeness and power, they don’t care how much death and destruction they cause.
In the middle are those conditioned to live with cognitive dissonance. The “next time, socialism will get it right” people.
On the Right we have some who are so proud of their moral superiority that they mistake Donald Trump for the enemy, while the real enemy (the Left) lays waste to our country. Only humble reconsideration of the facts and serious repentance will change that.
Interesting description…this seems to crossover into narcissistic personality traits, maybe even diagnosable NPD.
The narcissist doesn’t necessarily realize what they are doing…does the ‘projector’ realize their projection?
i seem to consider projection as a self-defense mechanism…maybe even self-soothing. Subconsciously unable to take ownership of flaws so I make my antagonist conceptually absorb my worst characteristics. Like you said tho, I may be describing a different phenomenon.
This post is part of the Quote of the Day (QOTD) Series, which is one of the group writing projects here on Ricochet. The other is the monthly group writing theme organized by @ cliffordbrown, currently open for volunteers to riff on the theme “Mother of —.” The QOTD signup sheet for May is here. There are still lots of open spots!
Some psychobabble:
projection, the mental process by which people attribute to others what is in their own minds. For example, individuals who are in a self-critical state, consciously or unconsciously, may think that other people are critical of them. The concept was introduced to psychology by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who borrowed the word projection from neurology, where it referred to the inherent capacity of neurons to transmit stimuli from one level of the nervous system to another (e.g., the retina “projects” to the occipital cortex, where raw sensory input is rendered into visual images). In contemporary psychological science the term continues to have the meaning of seeing the self in the other. This presumably universal tendency of the human social animal has both positive and negative effects. Depending on what qualities are projected and whether or not they are denied in the self, projection can be the basis of both warm empathy and cold hatred.
https://www.britannica.com/science/projection-psychology
Rule: When Democrats accuse Republicans of some illegal behavior, that is sufficient cause for prosecutors to convene grand juries to investigate the Democrats.
For example, from today’s WSJ: Who Rigged the Census? Under-counts may have cost Florida and Texas another House seat.
Lying and stealing is largely common to humanity. And what people today call “projection” may be simply a tactic. If what is perceived as projection is a functional and fundamental means progressives use to attain their ends, it is far less likely to be a mental illness.
What we commonly regard as projection may be simple distraction and misdirection. A bank employee always warning that employee John Doe may be an embezzler, may be simply laying the ground work for his own embezzlement. When he finally does it, and it is discovered, many people will automatically remember that someone had warned that John Doe would do such a thing, and it would be natural to suspect him first. And even if Doe is exonerated, there is now still general confusion as to who did what. And the embezzler could say, “It’s not me, in fact I’ve been warning against this for years”.
It’s hard to imagine that this would entirely succeed as a tactic of the Left, but when you’re already intent on lying and stealing, what would stop you from doing it?