Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Never Forget — They Hate Us
Bless your (little) heart, Bill Maher.
I simply can’t improve on that, other than to Find/Replace every mention of “liberal” with “leftist.” Or maybe “urban elitists” to cover the (ostensible) conservatives who hate us, too.
Published in General
Yes they do.
Always start with the definitions – M.A. taught me that. Hate is the habit of fear and anger. They are always angry at everything and especially us because they see things of the mind first, but reality is always at odds. (How can that be, they’d ask if they valued God’s world over their own mind.) Cognitive dissonance + a little trained hormone response = anger.
Fear is the more basic emotion of course, being nothing more (!) than the organism’s manifestation of the drive to be away from something. In their unformed child minds they need very much to be away from anything that threatens their little mental domain.
The human mind is plastic – repeat the activation and the mind will learn. People of the left experience anger and fear so much that it becomes habitual. They don’t need any stimulus; the leftist state of mind is always accompanied by fear and anger. Look for it now that I’ve pointed it out and you’ll see it.
So yes – they hate us, all the time and with an intensity that can only grow.
You always have an interesting take on how the mind works. Aren’t you an engineer by trade? Studying the mind is just a hobby?
I first learned of this exercise in pure, white hot, seething hatred of everything that made America great on the Klavan podcast, and just made myself watch the whole thing after you posted it; I find that these days I’m wearing my Roget’s Thesaurus out looking for new ways to describe screeds like this, but despicable will do for now.
@westernchauvinist, the only thing I’ll add is that it is most instructive to note the guests this purveyor of hate has sitting with him — mainly placed there to tell him how “great” and “bad” he is, such as Donna Brazile, definitely not one of New Orleans proudest exports, and the person who gave Felonia von Pantsuit her debate questions in advance for CNN (of course) and former Senator Claire McCaskill, the once and not at all missed Senator from Missouri.
As I looked at those eminent states persons (PC enough?) it occurred to me that here you have two noveau members of the Georgetown Cocktail Circuit being a cheering section for a “comedian” savaging the very “flyover country” they both hail from. Tough duty, but I guess someone has to do it.
Thanks for the post; after watching that horror show, the rest of the day can only get better!
Sincerely, Jim
I come away from Maher’s red-state-hate fascinated by how pinched and narrow his worldview is. He seems convinced life is only worth living if you’re living the way he is, with your legal dope, artisanal ice cream, deviant sex, and yoga studios. What a bigot. How shallow.
“Liberals” have already ruined Colorado. They should do flyover country a favor and stay away!
Bless you, Jim, and enjoy your day.
The irony here is Maher is one of the comedians who won’t play college campuses in part because he’s not extreme enough for the hardest of the hard-core SJWs, because his hatred or religion extends to radical Islam. That’s what almost got him barred from speaking at the winter commencement at Berkeley five years ago, but if he had his way, it wouldn’t just be college campuses like that where he’s the new Emanuel Goldstein — after the SJWs eliminated the rube attitude in the Red States, they’d be coming after him everywhere for his heresy to The Narrative.
Yup. I believe it.
It keeps me sane. I had a basic notion of how it worked, then I got seriously interested several years ago after reading Jeff Hawkins’ (not our member of the same name) book On Intelligence. I read tons of papers because you can’t learn serious neurobiology from textbooks that haven’t been written yet. Major sources for me have been Vernon Mountcastle of course, but more significantly Richard Granger. If you’re into the topic, read his work.
I’ve not been successful at building a synthetic intelligence, but I’ve built reasonably good neuron models, an unsuccessful Bayesian region model, and a minicolumn model that I think will turn out to be useful after I fix a couple of things someday.
But keeping this topic alive in my mind has yielded something I didn’t expect. I’m naturally oriented to materialism and stoicism. Studying how the mind really works, with frequent references to observation and (other peoples’) experiment, has led to a satisfying personal philosophy with good explanatory power. Subjectively, at least.
I wish this Revolution would hurry up; I want to see the part where Robespierre gets shorter.
Is anyone else a little shocked at how empty and small Bill Maher’s conception of the good life is? Pot and Orchestras and artisanal ice cream are all well and good but G-d, family and literature are nowhere in his conception of the good life. It’s bigoted to be sure why I rather expect that from Bill Maher. It seems genuinely tragic. To have so little meaning in your life that pot and some fancy new tech thing that the rubes don’t know about are all that matters.
I don’t see him spending much time at the Orchestra.
I think “detest” might be a more accurate word. There is contempt mixed with hate. It is why Hillary used the word “deplorables”. It is a dangerous thing for one group to detest another. In the extreme it an lead to genocide.
Yes, I’ve been paying attention to how dehumanizing they are to us. It’s much easier to commit atrocities against people you’ve judged to be subhuman or evil.
Danger on the Left.
I’m grateful that we have all the guns, military and police.
He can say what he wants. I still feel comfortable leaving my car unlocked when I park it, or letting the kids play outside without constant supervision. Try that in his utopia.
In his world, you are weird and bad for having kids.
Salena Zito had a great column on this.
I once asked one of those brain-dead twits why he was ticked off all the time and got what I think was an honest answer: We have the capability to create Utopia here on Earth and some people spend all their time making things worse.
If I were delusional enough to believe that we could create Utopia, I might be ticked off at those that I believed stood in the way myself, but I’m not that delusional. I think the guy I asked that question is representative of a large swath of the left.
Hey Bill, haven’t you watched Hot Housewives of Orlando?
Sadly, we don’t, concerning those last two. Most policemen and soldiers are with us, but the upper echelons largely are not, and they are doing their best to squeeze out their ‘deplorable’ subordinates while indoctrinating earnest rookies.
“I won the places that represent two thirds of America’s gross domestic product”
I wonder how GDP is actually calculated on a state or city basis? If a corporation is headquartered in, say, New York City and has factories in 5 different rural areas and sales offices or stories in a lot of other cities, then how does the value-added of that company’s work show up across the various geographies in the reports?
I found a BLS description of the methodology here, but have not yet waded through it.
It’s pretty obvious, though, the corporate HQ operations, advertising agencies, corporate legal and financial services, etc, are entirely dependent on manufacturing, logistics, and sales operations which are very likely to be in different places.
It’s also skewed when they start touting “blue states create more tax revenue than they spend, while red states consume more tax revenue.”
They manage this calculation by counting things like military bases as “consuming” tax revenue. So when a military base in Texas spends a few million on fuel for tanks, from a refinery in another red state, but the company is headquartered in NYC, the “income” goes to New York, but the “outlay” is “spent in Texas.”
The other tricky move they pull is that they count Social Security spending – which means that all of those old people who lived in California and New York for decades (“creating tax revenue”) who then moved to Nevada and Florida count as “government funding outlays to red states.”
There is also the reality that if you split the country according to the red/blue map shown, a lot of the money they are used to would evaporate. There wouldn’t be any reason for people in the red land to have their retirement accounts administered in NYC, when they could have it done in the new Omaha exchange. Same for businesses that have their factories in the Midwest. Why put your headquarters in a foreign country?
They’re not as rich as they think.
I’ve written about the factors that I believe are driving the fear, contempt, and anger that many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people demonstrate toward Christians and rural people (especially southerners).
The Phobia(s) That May Destroy America
It was a brilliant post, thank you for reminding us.
So Hillary only cares about money?
I think I already knew that.
Maher is contemptible. And his audience are idiots.
It’s easy to disdain Maher because he’s a smarmy shallow nihilist. However, as with anything like this, I think he has some kernel of a truth. That kernel is exaggerated and stretched to breaking and it completely ignores other truths, but there is something there.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Differing perspectives, differing circumstances, differing values, differing ages, differing ways of life, even differing moods make a difference. It’s true that cities are magnets of people, material, ideas, and capital. Migration to cities from rural areas is an established phenomenon. Many rural areas or smaller cities and towns are experiencing loss of people, materials, and capital that make living in those places much more difficult – that’s true too. My own city of Chicago might be mired in dysfunction and corruption, but it is still home to far more economic engines and opportunity than any of the surrounding area.
That accumulation of talent and material isn’t a permanent feature, though, and it can be difficult to tell apart the pros from the cons. That big city prosperity and attractiveness is real, but there’s no guarantee it will last. I’m reminded of the scene in Goodfellas after Paulie went partners in the restaurant. Run up the credit, spend all the cash, sell off any productive assets – it’s a grand time until it goes bust. Maher, in his limited understanding, doesn’t see that part of the movie coming.
It’s also true that President Trump (and Tea Party and Occupy too) has tapped into some feeling that we’re missing something, that despite signs of health there is something dangerously wrong. Does that mean we think coastal Blue places have the answers and that we should be like them? Of course not, but there’s also an aspect to this where we think we’re all going to Hell anyway so why not run up the credit, eat all the food, sell off the assets before we all go bust?
Ok, I realize this might nor be organized in the best way, but it’s tax season and I wouldn’t have commented at all except that I knew this would be taking up brain bandwidth until I put some expression to paper (so to speak). Hopefully it made some sense – now I’m back to the grindstone of tax season.
Indeed. I think what Progressives* always forget, however, is that this is mostly due not to the cultural attributes and human capital of cities but rather to the very laws of economics that they scorn, and any cultural and human capital that may have facilitated the emergence of their city as such a hub in the first place usually happened decades or even centuries ago, and is therefore not an indicator of a more productive, or even more dynamic, cultural paradigm here and now. In light of the fact that the Left is obsessed with tearing down the same achievements and values of the past that created urbanized prosperity in the first place, its probably the exact opposite.
*And many urban conservatives with progressive leanings and prejudices.
If Bill Maher wants the left to take credit for New York and San Francisco, he’s also got to accept that the left created the problems of Detroit and Baltimore, and a number of other major metros that — unfortunately for them — fell on the wrong side of the “Hot or Not” divide for big metro areas, for a variety of reasons. Chicago is a mixed bag, in that it is the major economic hub of the region, but current politics are testing the staying power of residents, in the same way New York’s six-murders-per-day crime rate, which was turned around under Giuliani, now seems to be turning back up again in Year 6 of the de Blasio administration (and we’ll see how long San Francisco’s homeless problem and the surging COL in the Bay Area can go on before enough people decide it’s not worth the hassle, which in part was what sent NYC toward bankruptcy in the 1970s).