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Thoughts on Joy Reid and the Vibe Shift: Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), “Sower with Setting Sun,” 1888.
So I have always disagreed with the Randian libertarians who think that all collectivism and all moves towards socialism are an attempt to take power over the masses. I’ve always sided with Milton Friedman who famously believed that leftists were well-meaning people.
Joy Reid and the anti-Doge campaign have made me rethink that noble sentiment. Gad Saad has made the argument that ties together these two contradictory ideas. His explanation is that humans are constantly evolving to take advantage of each other and they are evolving to resist being taken advantage of. Eventually tricksters evolved the ability to believe in their compassionate ideology to hide their psychopathic will to power.
Islam is a good example of this. When they kill or enslave Jews or Christians, it’s in the name of a kind and loving Allah. By forcing them into Islam, they are helping them. Sort of like Communists sending the wrong-thinking people into Gulags. Forcible conversion seems to have many fans among people with this mentality.
After contemplating some clips on the internet about Joy Reid, I reckon that she believes her nonsense. By convincing herself that anyone who disagrees with her is an evil Nazi she can justify the use of any government force.
This train of thought logically brought me to Joy Reid. I think she genuinely believed all her crazy nonsense in order to seek domination over people different from her. By believing it, she can further her political tribes’ consolidation of government power. Maybe Rand had a point.
On a related note, I think Joy Reid and the regular MSM make white people more racist towards black people. On the rare occasions when I watch the local news, the black people they have on are always against white people. According to them, all the problems that black Americans have are the result of white people’s racism; whites are racist all the time unless they support Democrats; America is a very bad, no good country and your ancestors were hamsters who smelt of elderberries (I might have misremembered the last one). I also notice that there is a white lady who agrees with the haranguing black person.
I doubt these news programs affect white people who work with black people. I suspect that over the water cooler, white and black Americans talk about sports and their favorite Netflix shows, as Americans are wont to do. But in Idaho I suspect it has a more pernicious effect because there are extremely few blacks there, so the depictions on the news shows carry more weight.
Conversely, I think Fox News helps make white Idahoans less racist. On Fox News there are leftwing blacks, but they tend to be nicer. Also, there are blacks like Cyrus who likes sports and Tyrus. Tyrus also talks and makes jokes like a masculine blue-collar guy unlike the blacks on the local MSM who are either effeminate or take pains to speak in a way that shows that they went to college. A slightly racist kinda rednecky Idaho guy could watch Tyrus and think/feel, “I can relate to this guy.”
The firing of a race grifter is not in and of itself an important event — welcome though it may be. What is important is the vibe shift we are seeing throughout the wider ethos of American culture and society.
I pay attention to the nerdy pop culture front and things are clearly changing. Mainstream video games such as Avowed are falling in sales as people turn to indie developers who aren’t interested in preaching to their customers. Apple is backpedaling on DEI. Younger folks are reading manga rather than comic books. Perhaps most importantly, one of the DOGE wunderkinds was not fired for the dumb tweets he made.
There is a shift in in the air and the old tactics aren’t working anymore. Not just here in the USA, but in Europe too, wokism is being rethought. I’m not sure where this will go, but it’s interesting to observe.
Published in General
If I understand you correctly, you have come to believe that
AND
Congrats.
Now if you will just stop starting articles with “So”, we can finally stand in the gap, shoulder to shoulder. It is not a moment too soon.
I think both are correct. Most leftists I know don’t understand trade-offs. Many believe we can have a wonderfully large state that provides goodies for all of us but will not invade any of our civil liberties. I think the lefties in charge want as much power as possible so they can mold our society the way they want. The good side of the left doesn’t understand the malevolence of the other side.
I agree and I think your last sentence is about the only way to explain it. I’ve seen it in close family members who I know are very good people.
I think the evil occurs when the power and control aspect dominates and excludes the other good intentioned attributes
The problem is the “good” side is unwittingly manipulated by the bad side.
Good-hearted people can seek dominion over others and it is still evil.
But conversely, if you were not well-meaning…
Let’s say you were downright nasty and wanted steal people’s wealth, and maybe imprison them or otherwise make their lives miserable. And you needed to rally up support, funding, people, and resources to accomplish this.
How would you market that operation?
I’m guessing you’d make up some virtuous cause.
I took a step in 2016 when Donald Trump won the Republican primaries and switched my support to his candidacy. I remember in our Utah Republican Caucus we asked Senator Lee, while we voted to support Ted Cruz in our state convention, what he thought about Trump. Mike said he didn’t really know much and I guess that was the case for most of Trump’s supporters then.
We supported Trump, he won the Presidency in the 2016 election, and served his four year term with distinction and revealed much truth about America’s political system that had been obscured to that point in time. Then we got four years of Democrats that revealed even more.
And Donald Trump gives all indications of being a different man this time around, for the betterment of the nation and the world.
I look forward to the collapse of the Democrat Socialists, Communists, and other collectivist elements inside America and perhaps we’ll see some of that in other parts of the world as well.
But those beliefs and all the others you ascribe to the left are absurd. All of reality instructs every one of us that all those things are false. It is not possible to both “mean well” and actively choose false beliefs.
Friedman was wrong about the motivation of the left – they are not well meaning. Sure, we can find things we approve of in any person. But there isn’t a “good side” of the leftist persona.
I’ll disagree…
The simpler explanation is that Joy Reid has been getting paid really good money to act like she does.
Yes, of course. And that’s *exactly* the intent.
Because unrest is a catalyst for political authoritarianism; blame it on the opposing party and promise to fix it.
I’m no expert in Marxism or anything, but it appears to me that Marx did the same thing by ginning up a “class struggle” between the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie”, where none actually existed.
These sound like the beginnings of the 1789 French and 1917 Russian revolutions.
And after you make up the virtuous cause, you identify the villain.
[This may or may not embed. There is some bleeped swearing.]
Don, was that a real video, not AI?? I can’t believe what she said!!
Well, it’s very accurate, complete, and beautifully presented.
Actually, she is smarter than I thought! Not that I’m a regular viewer…
If that we’re real, I’d have a good bit of respect.
“Dumb people are going to believe somebody’s bull____, so it may as well be ours.” –MSNBC motto, per Joy Reid
But conversely, if you were well-meaning…
Let’s say you truly believed in some cause you thought to be of the highest possible virtue. Like bringing about heaven on earth for 1000 years or forever. (The workers’ paradise, for example, or the Thousand Year Reich.)
And needed to, for the Good of Mankind, confiscate people’s wealth* and maybe imprison them or otherwise make their lives miserable (or, over prematurely).
How would you market that operation?
I’m guessing you would tell what you believed to be the truth about it to your comrades, and once you had complete power (which means justice has prevailed) you would boast about it on loudspeakers to the people you held captive.
This exact scenario has happened many times since the dawn of “leftism”, (aka “rightism”), at the end of the 18th century.
*Not steal it. According to your deeply held convictions, you would only be administering virtuous justice by taking it from the evil capitalists who stole it from the workers, in order to eradicate all private property, which you and your co-religionists believed to be the source of all evil.
The intention to benefit society and the intention to strip human beings of their economic, political, and religious freedoms, which the left view as the source of society’s evils, are not two competing intentions. They are the same intention.
Friedman may have said that, but I believe he’s dead wrong. Leftists think they’re well-meaning people, but their solutions are destructive – sometimes in the long run (think Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) or short term (Obamacare, trans “rights”, DEI, etc.) . . .
The fact that people are self-deceptive enough to convince themselves that it isn’t their greed that is pushing them to do and say specific things does not, in my mind, absolve them of guilt. I am sure that Hitler probably felt at some level that what he was doing was for the good of the German people. That does not absolve him. Joy Reid, from the little I saw of her in clips, was a race hustler. She was too well educated even in the watered down curriculum of modern universities to not have any moral compass. Ignoring true north or pretending that it doesn’t exist doesn’t make you a “well-meaning” person. She was in it for the millions she took home on an annual basis. Had she not received such lucrative rewards for her spewing of racist memes she probably would have developed a less odorous approach to what passes for journalism these days.
This is why it’s important to differentiate between leftists who are in on it, and leftists who fell for it.
I am impressed and grateful with the Ricochettis contributions to political psychology. You guys are quite literally better than I class I took in it. If I had Gad Saad’s E-mail I would urge him to read this post and focus on your comments. Two comments, one by Thelonius and the other Eugene Kriegsmann stand out to me in particular.
Obviously some people think voting democrat means you like puppies and poor people. We should not underestimate the thoughtlessness of most voters.
Many folks are in it for the money and at some level, you are culpable for your self-deception.
I am reminded of how Jordan Peterson was thinking about joining the left-wing party in his college youth. I think he went to one meeting and then realized that these were rich kids who were mad at their dad and resentful at the world. This was very different from the regular working-class he grew up around and generally liked.
This is where intent matters alot. According to books by David Johnson and Roger Scruton, leftists with dark intentions eventually turn to dark policies. The working class may vote for too many government goodies but are rarely interested in building gulags. As always, some people float along with the intellectual current to grift money. There have probably been people like that since the stone age.
What I wish to add is that political psychology is deep and has many self-reinforcing spirals. Leftists are attracted to leftism out of a hatred of themselves or their history and since they view the world that way and they can gain advantage by being leftists they become more leftist. Likely conservatives are the same way.
What is near impossible to judge is how morally responsible we are for self-deception. We can easily condemn a man for lying to another man for nefarious purposes. He knowingly committed a sin in that case. But since a man by definition is ignorant of his self-deception how can we punish him?
I knew a crazy Mom who screwed her kids up in the nasty divorce. In her own mind, all her destruction was justified and she was the victim. Though only Logos knows for sure, I suspect that she did had some liability for her self-justification.
Psychology has quite alot “of chicken or the egg” debates. It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek where the crew encounters a race of superintelligent godlike beings with powers incomprehensible to even the most brilliant Federation physician. In their interactions, the Q constantly fail to understand humanity and often surprised at their decisions.
Easily explained by my mantra, “Most people have an IQ of 100 or less, by definition.”
I am more worried about people who high IQs who have the wrong ideas and people who never examine what they believe in. But I do think we should encourage people with an IQ of 105 to vote more. I think you need an IQ close to 105 to understand basic economics.
Highly educated people overwhelmingly vote Democrat. I would also estimate a large portion of the Trump vote has an IQ under 100. I don’t think IQ is the problem.
Then you won’t get upset if we tell you there’s a test on Monday . . .
After he tells us 5 things he did last week . . .
My homemade chicken soup was so delicious it counts as two things.
It counts as chicken AND soup!
It’s chicken soup, and a floor cleaner!