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Democrats: Please start making sense. Please.
In the 1970s I was told that we were all going to die in the next ice age, which was said to be already underway with the colder winters we were having at the time. Then in the 1980s, I was told that we were all going to die because of global warming, which was said to be already underway with the warmer winters we were having at the time. Now, with the weather seemingly cooler again, they’ve given up and said that we are all going to die of climate change. All the same people believed all the different stories as they came, because this was never really about the weather, it was about the acquisition of money and power.
Last night, my 16-year-old daughter was writing a paper for her high school English class. In her papers for this class, she rarely mentions the reading material, and instead writes about the oppression of women, because that’s what her teacher talks about in class, and it’s easier to get good grades by writing garbage about her teacher’s pet topic than it is to write high-quality papers about actual books. I think I’m proud of her. Anyway, I was proof-reading for her last night, and I pointed out to her, “Look, in this one paragraph you describe women as helpless victims of male privilege AND as strong, powerful dominators of all they survey that don’t need men at all. You have to pick one. You can’t use both. You’ll sound stupid.”
She responded, “Yes, it sounds stupid because it is stupid. But no, I don’t have to pick one. She’ll eat it up. Automatic ‘A’. You just watch.”
Thinking back on the decades of dire predictions of our imminent demise due to, well, whatever the weather seemed to be at the time; I thought that perhaps she had a point. She wasn’t making sense, because she didn’t have to. In fact, it was in her best interests not to make sense, considering her audience.
I like to think that Democrat policy meetings sound a lot like my daughter and I. Some of their speechwriters saying, “C’mon – I know this is a fundraiser in Portland, but any voter with an IQ higher than their age is going to laugh us off the stage with this crap.” And then their political advisors responding, “Yes, but we’re not expecting any voters like that to attend a Democrat Party fundraiser in Portland.”
Or something like that. I like to think, at least, that there is some sort of debate along these lines.
In a democracy, voters don’t always get the government that they want, but they usually get the government they deserve. So maybe the Democrats are just serving up whatever is selling at the time, and right now, that happens to be, well, stupidity with a side of insanity. But my point is that it’s not the fault of Democrat leadership. It’s our fault. That’s what we ask for, so that’s what we get.
There was an absolutely brilliant post some months ago on Ricochet (Logic is Boring) about the conflict between the Democrat Party’s old guard (Pelosi, Schumer, et al) and their young firebrands (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, et al). I like to think that that conflict is an ongoing problem for the Democrat party.
I like to think that because the only other alternative is that the Democrat party really is as stupid and insane as it sounds. And in a two-party system, you don’t want either party to be absolutely bonkers.
The Democrat party seems determined to free itself from the constraints of logic and reality. The weather is cold! The weather is warm! Whatever! Vote for us! Women are oppressed and helpless! Women are powerful and self-sufficient! Whatever! Vote for us!
I have some friends who are former leftists who became conservatives later in life. They all explain their decision the same way. Some variation of, “I just realized one day that it didn’t make any sense.”
Only by controlling education and media can Democrats keep this many people on board with, well, whatever they’re pushing at the time, whether it’s baby seals or trans-sexual bathrooms. But now that the left IS the establishment, they’re creating a significant number of people like my daughter, who giggles while writing unintelligible garbage papers that will get her A’s.
It seems to me that the Democrat party is a house of cards, built on a foundation of Jello. There’s not much holding it together, so they respond to any questioning of their ideology with rage rather than debate (as explained in another absolutely brilliant post).
But I wonder how long can they keep this going? At some point, it won’t just be 16-year-old girls. At some point, even fools and college professors will hear a little voice inside them saying, “This doesn’t make any sense…”
What do you think? Is the Democrat party’s current strategy of passionate arguments for nonsense a sustainable strategy? Will this work long term? Their strategy of taking over the educational establishment and teaching students to embrace hatred and disdain independent thought has certainly helped. But is it sufficient? Will they eventually be forced to attempt to make coherent arguments for their positions at some point?
You may think, “Who cares? It’s their own fault for being incoherent. I don’t vote for them anyway.”
But I care. Because if they succeed in continuing down this rabbit hole of impulsive incoherent insanity, they’re taking us with them. They already are – I offer you President Trump as evidence.
Come on Democrats. I’m rooting for you. I really am. Please start making sense.
Published in General
This is a major reason why Democrats are winning the culture war. Most people on the right choose good grades, good pay, and easy social relations over truth. Most people prefer security and comfort over truth.
Democrats have raised the costs of speaking truth. Recent attacks on free speech (in both laws and corporate/school policies) and the degradation of rule of law show how such evil becomes bolder as it acquires power. More power among the lawless means less reason for restraint. Power is gained slowly when one a group or ideology is weak, but quicker the more mouthpieces it gains and more consequences it can levy. The lies are getting bolder, coming faster, and the consequences of truth are getting harsher.
The Right has little time before the Left doesn’t need to moderate their ambitions.
It’s will-to-power dressed up in some pseudo-religious gobbledygook, complete with heretics (“deniers”) and persecutions of the all-holy favored victim groups of the moment. It’s the worship of Tashlan in Narnia’s Last Battle.
You can’t make this stuff up. Oh, wait…
I believe this is a function of recursion of thoughts/ideas. An iterative echo chamber. There are the schools, the media (including the entertainment complex) and the safety of the herd, being fed back in a constant and ever-adapting loop.
When the results become increasingly absurd, there’s no mechanism to bring them back. The outside world that tries to talk sense is a threat, is attacked and demonized. It’s a massive cult.
We are all susceptible to these influences. Consider how many people believe in Scientology, Mormonism, Witchcraft ( more people than watch CNN I heard recently) conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists .
I can think of many things I once believed myself that I discovered later to have been ridiculous. Mostly because everyone else generally believed it and I didn’t diligently explore the evidence or lack thereof. It’s often the case that there is simply no compelling reason to bother to question the default belief.
But I’m also sensing another dimension emerge from the left. There is a concerted effort to attack reason itself. They enjoy and relish watching their flustered enemies using this defense of ‘reason’.
But…but…but, we say, trying to bring our logical skills to bear, not knowing where to start, while they laugh like a comic-book villain, “I am immune from your antiquated weapon! I will put up my shield and I will twist your words against you! I will use my powers of shared belief-systems and network of influencers to taint you as evil and someone who should never be heard!”
It is a fundamentally adolescent attitude. I remember, vaguely, sometimes using this form of defense as a teenager.
It’s also like trying to convince an alcoholic in denial. Any and all logic, real life examples, documented history is futile against the power of the alcoholic’s desperate and ridiculous rationalizations.
The thing I’ve noticed is that there seem to be two opposite things that are both referred to as “Critical Thinking.” The first is something like employing the Socratic method, logic, etc. to arrive at the truth. The second is applying Critical Theory to your thinking, which tends to lead you down weird rabbit holes where you come to conclusions like numbers and the scientific method are oppressive relics of the western capitalist colonial hegemony.
Hmm. This may be why I am not going places . . .
When you package up and sell the path of least resistance as the most laudable and morally virtuous choice you’ve built the ultimate mousetrap (for the young and ignorant of any age).
Sadly, much of the empowerment education is employed for nothing short of collective self-interested solutions based on identity. Critical thinking is a power tool and in the hands of weak minds is often a dangerous weapon.
I don’t believe it’s weak minds so much as weak character.
Perhaps weak character as well but weak mind as in given to cheap emotional gratification at the expense of intellectual exercise … which almost invariably leads to weak character.
My daughter at U of AZ got it in her “US History Since 1877,” where she was also told that the Plains Indians taught the settlers of the West how to farm. Not mentioning that the Plains Indians were hunter gatherers.
Was this taken before you went to medical school?
No, that was at a medical conference last week.
<Biting nails….waiting on grade report…>
Yes, I had a writing class in college called “Utopian Visions” taught by a newly minted Hahhhvad Ph.D. We read Plato, More, Rousseau, Descartes, Huxley etc. and wrote papers. I would prepare a “T” account on a scratch piece of paper and write on one side what I would say and then write the opposite proposition on the other side. I would then use the “other side” as the outline for my paper to be submitted to Dr. Hahhhhvad for the grade. As your daughter said: “Automatic A”!
Hang in there. I’m not exactly rich or famous, but I never sold out, and I’ve had a Ph.D. and an honest teaching job for nine years.
Another occasion to quote William James:
I would only add that in certain contexts believing the wrong thing becomes almost a psychological impossibility. It is very difficult, almost a psychological impossibility, for anyone who works at a university to doubt macro-evolution, just to pick the best example.
This is aside from all questions of logic, mind. If the theory is true, then at least those university peeps aren’t wrong. If they can follow the logic for their position, no great harm done. The problem is when people believe independently of logic, or when they are immune to logic that might point against their beliefs.
The nagging fear one should feel after reflecting on these matters concerns the possibility that one’s own beliefs might be such.
The right way to deal with this is to attend to the logic on both sides.
Karl Marx said “Religion is the opiate of the masses”. His philosophical descendants realized long ago they still had to replace religion with their own opiates (metaphorical or literal) to control the masses. The opioid crises, opening the borders to drug traffickers, and legalizing pot is probably all part of the plan. Drug the population and we will never suddenly realize “this doesn’t make sense”. Thinking is hard, but you can avoid it all together if you stay stoned. Then you just let somebody else do it for you. Compounding the problem is now the new leaders appear to be stoned also. AOC has to be. (Why does the movie Idiocracy keep coming my mind?)
Another Tyler’s maxim:
I’m thinking the way to pop the magical dream balloons is to keep asking one or two questions, like:
How?
Why?
But keep asking why (the “5 Whys” approach) – and see what they come up with. If they’re honest about it, they’ll start seeing the logical fallacies, or the complexity will unfold in front of them. Then they’ll start to understand things like trade-offs, etc.
My niece posts on Facebook a bit, she’s in college, studying environmental science. She has the occasional online freakout, about how bad something is, then when I point out an alternative, she spouts a bit of the common responses (deniers of climate change, etc, which has basically nothing to do with my response to her post in support of banning plastic bags at grocery store checkouts).
But there’s hope. I posted a response to the above, to an article that shows the rise in food-borne illnesses in places that have banned plastic bags. Why? People are taking food home in a re-usable bag, typically cloth (and there are trade-offs for using cloth, too), and bacteria can have long “legs”, so to speak, nesting in moist warm places where your bag gets stored. Boom – now you’ve got an unintended consequence from what, on surface, might just seem like a good idea.
She responded well – she said she hand’t thought of that, and she would read the article. I only wanted her to consider the fact that there will always be trade-offs for every decision, and those have to be considered. I hope that idea sticks.
Things have changed since I was last there to BEAR DOWN.
It seems to be mostly in the general ed classes freshmen take. She was a French major, which I agreed to pay for since one of my medical students had been a French major. I had hoped for Accounting but no luck. She later said she wished she had done so but she loved France and wanted to try to live there.
To deny what’s right in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.