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| Silverfiddle Rant! |
We are in an age of extreme cowardice and maximum mendacity. Pale imposters stand on the rotting foundations of our institutions wearing the skins of their slaughtered predecessors, angered they cannot command the same respect and prestige.
Ben Shapiro: The center is gone, and it's the elites' fault
The destruction of that institutional trust has been well earned: It represents the natural result of policy elites lying to those they supposedly serve.In short, our institutional elites rely on the power of civilizational foundations that long predate them — free markets, religious values, military strength — to prop up failing ideas that undermine those foundations. The result is failure.
Henry Kissinger: "'painful' need for better leaders"
"Once again, it is a tale first of exuberant confidence generating overextension and then of overextension giving birth to debilitating self-doubt," he wrote in the book. "Once again, in almost every region of the world, the United States confronts major interlocking challenges to both its strategies and its value."That has led to "renewed potential for catastrophic confrontation," he warned. "The present age is unmoored."
Good leadership can make up for weak or dysfunctional institutions. Solid, well-run institutions can survive poor leadership. We have neither.
Please peruse the links below for further evidence. Most importantly, what say you?
See Also:
Covid, schools, and the death of the liberal expert class
Waitaminnit. Are you suggesting that our betters are no better than us?
ReplyDeleteExactly. In fact, worse. and the "experts" are anything but.
DeleteKronos separates the experts from the experts. ;)
DeleteA "peak" into the problem...
DeleteBeing as we had no internet yesterday (storm induced power outage), I re-read Nietzsche's critique of David Strauss. What was true then is doubly true today. We have no men of culture, we have journalism and its' never ending focus on the present. Lindy would surely by hated there, as here. For the narrowing of our education focus to concentrate upon advancing "science" and "technology" has convinced us that what is "important" is what we will discover tomorrow, not the things that are time tested and learned long ago.
DeleteThe radicals in arms STILL have it right, as the "hysterical Syblene Reporters of the New York Times" have replaced those at Delphi in the hearts and minds of our "decision makers" and "representatives". The never-ending hypernormalization through diegesis continues...
DeleteWe now return you to your hypernormally scheduled programs.
DeleteFor you must be taught how to properly bow before Cycbele, you hypernormalised castrated Siblene and Attisian Journo consort!
DeleteWe "rightly" toilet trained you in consumerism to flush your daily papers away. Never gaze into beyond the interstitial spaces! You may not like what you see
Plato's Cave awaits your attendance!
DeleteExcellent podcast from this week. 38 minutes.
ReplyDeleteHow the West brought economic disaster on itself
Experts have been fallible, and commentators noting their failures, since the dawn of civilization. The reason I think centre is gone is because people associate it (not always fairly) with the bland "post-ideology" managerial style of politics pioneered by Clinton (Bill) and Blair. People need ideology, it turns out; or if none is available, populism will do.
ReplyDeleteI would settle for some basic competency
DeleteThere's a difference between "fallible" and "lying." It's usually fairly easy to spot, because when they are fallible their story stays the same, when they are lying they cannot remember what they last said and so their story changes constantly.
DeleteSadly Jayhawk, conservatives who supported Fmr Pres Trump have little ongoing currency with which to criticize other politicians for lying because for years, they looked the other way when he too lied.
DeleteI agree with the sentiment that our leaders need to be held to account. That's one reason I did not vote for Hillary or even Al Gore. Both of them struggled in this regard. In much the same way, so did Trump.
But far to few of his supporters ever voiced any concern for his veracity while he was in office, even as they knew and in some cases, acknowledged his frequent less than truthful statements.
Dave,. I acknowledge your point, will also pointing out that most of his lies were bombastic braggadocio and immaterial to anything important to the government of this nation
DeleteThe significance or insignificance of Trump’s lies could be argued of any given day, or perhaps hour, of his 4 year shit show of a presidency.
DeleteI assume you’re uninterested in examples?
Bring 'em.
DeleteAnd since you've displayed a third grade reading comprehension level, I'll plainly state that his lies are one of the many things I do not like about him, and I do not defend them or try to say they aren't really lies.
So, over to you.
Bullshit!
DeleteYou'll accept his meaningless lies as lies but not those that are consequential to our government, it's institutions, or the Constitution. If it's Mexico paying for a wall or a Trump University diploma, you might concede he fibbed a bit (although I don't ever recall such from you). If it's lies after lies after lies about a worldwide pandemic killing over 1 million Americans or lies leading to a mob assault on our Capitol, those weren't lies or you'll defend those lies as you join the cultists and take the side instructed to you by Tucker and Friends.
You've recently claimed his innocents to all 3 articles of impeachment, refusing to accept any possibility that he lied like a dog. You claim to denounce the big lie that he lost the election yet still cling to it. You refuse to give any credence of the evidence exposing his lies about the election and the lead up to Jan 6.
But additionally damning is the new level of "extreme cowardice and maximum mendacity" he's whipped into his already corrupt lot of plutocrats as well as the "pale impostures" he's ushered into his party.
I wasn't asking if you wanted me to list examples, I was assuming they didn't interest you.
Mexicans aren't paying for "remain in Mexico"? Who knew. A Partial truth.
DeleteThe US Election... drop boxes declared UNCONSTITUTIONAL in Wisconsin (one of Trump's lawsuit points). How's that for "the big lie". Still "completely" untrue?
DeleteThe point is that partial truth's aren't "lies". There often matters of "will" or a lack thereof.
DeleteNietzsche, WtP
493 (1885) Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.
512 (1885) Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases. In fact, to make possible logical thinking and inferences, this condition must first be treated fictitously as fulfilled. That is: the will to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all events is assumed. From which it follows that a drive rules here that is capable of employing both means, firstly falsification, then the implementation of its own point of view: logic does not spring from will to truth
534 (1887-1888) The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power.
Delete"How far is truth susceptible to embodiment. That is the question, that is the experiment." - Nietzsche
This isn't maoist china, so we don't demand people "denounce" other people. We discuss facts available to us.
DeleteSo Ronald, You live in a black and while echo chamber. I have said Trump's legal team was a clown car of fools and their legal "theories" ridiculous and corrosive to our democratic institutions, but indoctrinated people like you can't stand for that.
Your maoist mindset demands people recite the politburo-approved phrases verbatim from the Little Red Book. I know that's how the pinheads in progressive media do it, but we use facts and logic here.
and we encourage independent thinking. You bring stale talking points. Pity, you show flashes of intelligence and humanity periodically.
Delete++
DeleteAnd had Trump had a competent legal team rather than the clown car, he would have righteously succeeded in being seated rather than Biden?
DeleteYou do not encourage independent thinking nor do you use facts or logic. You ignore logical inputs to retain your illogical desired output and rely on spinning facts. Your responses to inconvenient realities of shortcomings of what you're selling have become more of accusations of me which, to use your own words, have become stale.
You've really slipped further down the rabbit hole lately.
Physician, heal thyself.
DeleteOh my, turns out Tim Ryan's a Trumper...(D) OH.
Deletebtw - Thanks, Mexico!
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
Delete:P
DeleteNo legal team in the world could have made that crack pot election claim succeed in a court of law.
DeleteI'll be interested to see which right wing talking point you think I'm echoing by saying that.
...with a scant two months between election and inauguration, it would require swift justice, indeed.
Delete“ No legal team in the world could have made that crack pot election claim succeed in a court of law.”.
DeleteBut there were options other than “that crack pot claim” that may have succeeded?
The only reason Rudy didn't claim "fraud" is that "intent" would have been harder to prove. Mind readers are a dime a dozen, but gathering evidence is more time consuming AND elusive. Just ask Mueller and Durham.
Delete...but of course, according to the DNC, there was no mismanagement or fraud in 2020. It was the "most secure election in history!" Take their word for it... they're the "experts".
Delete...but perhaps we should still await Lindy's verdict.
Delete:P
DeleteRonald: No. No scheme would have succeeded, not even an "insurrection of rabble wielding flagpoles and bear spray.
DeleteThere was no legal way, and I thank God for that. The people voted, the states certified, and that's the end of it.
The illegal actions of roque election officials in places like Wisconsin opened the door to fraud, but we'll never know.
...cuz the State will never look, for much like the Pope, it's 'infallible".
DeleteIf one becomes an expert after 10,000 hours of invested in an effort, by age three we're already pretty damned professional at being egomaniacal assholes driven near-solely by the pursuit of confirmation bias and discovering most of our freedoms are in fact painfully curtailed because someone with power, responsibility, or authority "said so." These same beings of power, responsibility, and authority themselves have long since expanded their repertoires to include subjectivity (if a cookie disappears in the middle of the night without a crumb, it means someone other than you could have taken it and it's wrong to punish you / us all for it) and objectivity (the people less versed in cookie-theft will always be caught, or by reputation even successfully accused falsely by cookie-theft secret masters)
ReplyDeleteBy age 9 we are veritable engines of confabulatory predation, indeed vestigial instincts of self-preservation and pain avoidance have melded with experiential memory and peer interaction to begin more complex expressions of subjective perceptions (Tommy's mom packs cookies in his lunch, it's not fair) and objective awareness (Tommy will gladly trade his fudge-striped cookies for your mom's leftover spaghetti but he has to come up off the pudding cup for your garlic cheese bread that Brian has intentions upon with his snack sized bag of Cheetos and the remainder of his peanut butter crackers in the spontaneous lunchroom agora). The devil takes the hindmost, and you've got plenty of mom's spaghetti and garlic cheese bread back home, or so you thought - your dad and siblings love spaghetti and garlic bread, that surplus is ghost. You're having baloney sandwiches tonight, like they serve three times a day in the county lockup Tommy told you his dad eats.
And so on it goes until we reach the age of figuring out that perhaps those with power, responsibility, and authority over you in the home of your upbringing, if you had those, probably winged it more or less successfully than others. The Pareto distribution has some outliers of course. The "revered expert" author of child-rearing literature your parents either scoffed at or emulated turns out to have no children, or at least none that survived suicide or turning to crime.
The beams in the eyes of everyone becomes even more aggravating when "grown ups" turn their endeavors towards trying to be the power, responsibility, and authority over their own fellow "grown ups," yelling louder, spanking harder, putting bars around the corner so you can't move your nose from it while you plot your vengeance or accept your fate.
Why? Because they said so.
+++
DeleteJez +1 on Clinton / Blair triangulation (Third Way-ism)
ReplyDeleteGood leadership can make up for weak or dysfunctional institutions. Solid, well-run institutions can survive poor leadership.
ReplyDeleteWell said.
The problem with 'experts' is multi-faceted. There is no common standard for what constitutes an 'expert'. Many 'experts' are self or media-anointed. Others by political bureaucracies of the State.
What we're largely left with, is consumers of information shopping for, and believing or discarding information, based on confirmation bias.
What we're largely left with, is consumers of information shopping for, and believing or discarding information, based on confirmation bias.
DeleteThe worst case scenario being something like Hitler's Ardennes Offensive without fuel, or Hitler's bunker rant about Steiner being unable to command and deploy non-existent soldiers to break the siege and collapse of Berlin's defenses.
If you go around seeking and only listening to and only hearing what you want to hear, and purging and dismissing all sources not playing along with your self-convinced worldview, you wind up finding out reality doesn't work that way.
Some, like Hitler, wind up feeling betrayed by others to the bitter end.
The more contagious, vaccine-resistant variant of Omicron is here. What's going on in Fauci's bunker?
Doctator Fauci is now admitting out loud what he and anyone with a brain knew over a year ago:
DeleteThe vaccines aren't really vaccines, they do not stop the spread of anything, they don't prevent you from getting covid, so they are not really an effective public health measure.
All they have left is the thinly-supported contention that a case of covid could be worse if you are not vaxxed and boosted.
That alone should invalidate all covid "vaccine" mandates and put the issue back where it belongs: In the realm of personal decision, and in the case of children, judgment of the parents.
Yep. And I, an unvaccinated non-virologist, "expertly" predicted that herd immunity would happen faster than sticking everybody with vaccines. Vaccines probably have hurt herd immunity development. I know unvaccinated people who have gotten Covid once (like myself) and vaccinated people who have gotten Covid three to fives times.
DeleteThe problem percolates down to all levels of our systems. Our HOA is run by people who have been in office for more than a decade and firmly resist a change in leadership. They are currently running a project that last year was costing $6000 per unit, and now we are being told that it is "on budget" at $9000 per unit.
ReplyDeleteA year ago 63 units had been completed with 59 remaining to be done. They could not tell us how much the first 63 cost because "accounting procedures to track the cost had not been put in place at the time the work was done." Now we are told that only 63 units were planned, of which 29 have been completed at a cost of $277, 865. The know that with no accounting procedures? And what about those of us in the 59 units which are not planned?
Winston Churchill:
ReplyDeleteNothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character
[source]
Well said as usual, Silverfiddle! On a side note, Mystere sends his greetings
ReplyDelete"Since we don't control the air, our good air decided to float over to China's bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then -- now we got we to clean that back up."
ReplyDelete------Hershel Walker, U.S. Republican Senate candidate from GA who also said “At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not?. If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”
"Joe Biden’s ATF is illegally collecting information on the gun transactions of millions of law-abiding citizens & putting them into a digital database. As Senator, I’ll not only lead the fight against Biden’s unconstitutional gun database, I’ll fight to ABOLISH the ATF.
--J.D. Vance, U.S. Republican Senate candidate and pro-defund police from OH.
You say something about "'painful' need for better leaders"?
Now I could go on and on with MTG and other MAGAnuts infiltrations of "Pale imposters" but this "age of extreme cowardice and maximum mendacity" is a product of a compliant (or, cowardice) Republican leadership along with a propaganda network (Fox, Newsmax, et al) taking a Sharpie to our institutions and reliable media.
Where is the "Good leadership" that "can make up for weak or dysfunctional institutions" that you've been told exist? The GOP leadership are openly endorsing these charlatan frauds, just as they have of scandal after scandal and lie after lie. And either directly or indirectly, so have you.
I think it was Zig Ziglar who often said; "if you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting".
Typical MSNBC snorter
DeleteYou referring to Zig?
DeleteYou'd have a better argument RJW, if you'd throw in a few Squad members or a Maxine Waters or two.
DeleteThat he doesn't infers a motive? I'm no mind reader.
DeleteAll in all Thersites, Dems have a much better track record of reprimanding or purging their own. Al Franken comes to mind. Compare that to toilet toe tapping Larry Craig. Pelosi has strongly rebuked Waters whereas the party of Trump seems to cheer Margie Toddler Green, Tom Massie, and the incoming dangerous lot coocoo for coco puffs.
DeleteAl Gore's illegitimate child put an end to his career and here you have Hershel Walker with another popping up daily. Yet here he is.
Nixon resigned, Clinton fought it, so Trump fought it. Who started it depends upon where you start the clock.
DeleteAs for MTG, I hope she becomes President!
Delete^ with our political landscape what it is, we might as well have MTG as POTUS. She can pick a random cartoon character as her running mate, it'll probably be smarter than her.
DeleteFJ, that's some pretty weak tea and void of reason, even for you.
DeleteAnd no, I'm not referring to MTG.
Rebublicans of that era were not today's so-called conservatives. They weren't going in with a predetermined and admitted not guilty verdict. There wasn't Fox News to brainwash the gullibles. Nixon resigned because he knew he was toast.
And it's makes for a fair argument to say that Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon played into his defeat.
Your Clinton comparison is additionally nonsensical and inconsistent with how either party have evolved. Republicans, after an exhausting witch hunt, finally found a lying under oath charge.
Fast forward a couple years to Scooter Libby and just like that, lying under oath ain't all that bad. Enter DJT with a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone and everyone lying under oath or for that matter, anything. So we're now in an error where lying under oath is perfectly acceptable and expected, turning an institutional and constitutional process into shit.
Looking back at SF saying something about which presidential lies that really matter, you're still yammering about Clinton telling a lie about his sexual shenanigans after republicans finally found something that stuck to the wall.
At some point, the Never-Trumpers and Democrats are going to have to accept that "democracy" entails submission to politicians (like Trump and MTG) that you don't agree with... at least half the time. They're not "evil low morality liars". They simply have different constituents (not YOU) requiring "representation"!
Delete...and attempts at demonizing "them" only reveal your own "devils".
DeleteI get it FJ, that the KKK, neo-Nazies, mafia figures, and fellow grifters and thugs find representation from Trump, MTG, and that sort.
DeleteI just refuse to accept any of this trash as good people.
Perhaps I’m just too old schooled.
Yes, the representatives of the "Erudite" faction hold those of "Abnegation" in disdain. Perhaps we should ask the Amity, Candor, and Dauntless factions how THEY feel? And perhaps even the factionless?
DeleteDoes it help you to understand me when I diegetically illustrate my points for you? Or are you erudite enough through the University discourse to follow an Analyst's discourse?
DeleteThe UniParty. Effectively keeping (D)s and (R)s apart since 1866.
DeleteJust manipulate their "feelings" via Madison Avenue guru Edward Louis Bernays' grand consumerist strategy. A little Objet Petit 'a in every product! Coke is it!
DeleteCan you taste the feeling?
DeleteCuz I'd to have to go OT on you. :(
DeleteOh my, was my "hate" missing, above?
DeleteIntellectual integrity means "losing the hate". Embrace an "abnegation" of "feelings" for a change.
DeleteForgo "missing something" that makes your current hyper-reality so "real" to you and which would allow you to entertain alternative.possibilities.
DeleteForgo experiencing that "missing something" that makes your current hyper-reality so "real" to you and so you can entertain alternate.possibilities.
DeleteShow a little caritas.
DeleteTurn down the "heat" a bit...
Deletefrom the Jowett summary of Plato's "Charmides"...
His approving answers reassured me, and I began by degrees to regain confidence, and the vital heat returned. Such, Charmides, I said, is the nature of the charm, which I learned when serving with the army from one of the physicians of the Thracian king Zamolxis, who are said to be so skilful that they can even give immortality. This Thracian told me that in these notions of theirs, which I was just now mentioning, the Greek physicians are quite right as far as they go; but Zamolxis, he added, our king, who is also a god, says further, 'that as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul; and this,' he said, 'is the reason why the cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they are ignorant of the whole, which ought to be studied also; for the part can never be well unless the whole is well.' For all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates, as he declared, in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes. And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first thing. And the cure, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance is, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body. And he who taught me the cure and the charm at the same time added a special direction: 'Let no one,' he said, 'persuade you to cure the head, until he has first given you his soul to be cured by the charm. For this,' he said, 'is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body.' And he added with emphasis, at the same time making me swear to his words, 'Let no one, however rich, or noble, or fair, persuade you to give him the cure, without the charm.' Now I have sworn, and I must keep my oath, and therefore if you will allow me to apply the Thracian charm first to your soul, as the stranger directed, I will afterwards proceed to apply the cure to your head. But if not, I do not know what I am to do with you, my dear Charmides.
Critias, when he heard this, said: The headache will be an unexpected gain to my young relation, if the pain in his head compels him to improve his mind: and I can tell you, Socrates, that Charmides is not only pre-eminent in beauty among his equals, but also in that quality which is given by the charm; and this, as you say, is temperance?
Yes, I said.
Then let me tell you that he is the most temperate of human beings, and for his age inferior to none in any quality.
DJT is Quint from Jaws. If you let him, he just might lead you, and the rest of you ungrateful mf'ers, to safety.
DeleteHere's the "beyond the normie-law" that you (and we) are currently missing.
DeleteThe charm that precedes the leaf (cure).
DeleteDJT is Quint from Jaws. If you let him, he just might lead you, and the rest of you ungrateful mf'ers, to safety.
DeleteNot in that tiny ass boat.
We're talking about a guy that wanted to spend $1.8 Trillion more for Covid relief on top of the $2.3 Trillion omnibus bill he signed. Where would inflation be now if he'd printed up $4.1 Trillion dollars to toss into the economy instead of $2.3 Trillion?
Biden's American Rescue Plan bill spend $1.9 Trillion dollars, $100 Billion more than Trump wanted to. We have inflation through the roof now, the same effect that Trump's additional spending would have had. Biden did exactly what Trump wanted to do, but 10 weeks later, and it's a disaster?
Uh, no. Printing up $4.2 Trillion from thin air and dumping it into the economy in a span of two and a half months caused inflation to rise. Trump's responsible for half of that, but absolutely wanted all of it.
...so, the real problem is not that Biden is screwing up the economy by doing precisely what Trump wanted to do (and not changing any of Trump's economic policies whatsoever), but that it's not Trump screwing up the economy.
Delete*WE ARE IN THE SECOND TERM OF TRUMP*:already. Biden is napping atop Trump policy still in effect.
What part of this is misunderstood?
The part where you rule in Rome, but don't have to pay the Praetorians.
DeleteHalf of the Republican Party does not want Trump to run in 2024.
DeleteA full 20% of Republicans will vote Democrat or third party if Trump wins the GOP nomination in 2024.
Trump's expected announcement right before the 2022 midterm elections that he will run for President in 2024 will likely swing voters to keep Democrats in charge of the House of Representatives even more than recent Supreme Court rulings and the J6 Committee findings already have.
Likewise, the Senate that wasn't in danger of flipping to Republican control will remain firmly in Democrat hands.
Even as unpopular as Biden is right now nationally, polling indicates he would win handily in 2024 in a rematch with Trump.
If Trump's ego has him run as an independent or third party candidate in 2024, the three-way split will fall to keeping Biden in office.
There is no where for Trump to go in American politics but away.
Trump will take several Republican prospects and incumbents to defeat with him, the same way he gave the House, the Senate, and the Oval Office to the Democrats despite a decent economy for three of his four years that might have grown even more significantly were it not choked in the crib by tariffs (even upon allies) and opposition to free trade.
Despite Biden not really doing anything to change Trump-era policies, thus Trump policies continuing to degrade the US economy, few want Trump back.
Even more want his Republican partisan enablers gone.
None of these probabilities are inevitable, but with half of the Republican Party opposed to more Trump and one-fifth of them militantly so, these probabilities are damned near certain.
The Clintons and their media allies gave their madcap fundraiser and donor Donald Trump a $3 Billion dollar free ride campaign blitz to the 2016 GOP nomination, to poison and destroy the Republican Party as a viable force in national politics. They succeeded.
Even now, Bill Clinton's legacy of financial and sexual scandal, of social engineering experiments with the military, of trying to socialize the US health care system, of watching militant Islam and genocide go unchecked in Africa and Central Asia, and even carving an Islamic state out of a piece of Serbia - all of this is misremembered, rewritten, and even hailed and praised as "pragmatic leadership and statesmanship," ironically by people who once meaningfully and credibly labelled themselves "right-wing."
The "Right's" eye, if there even is such a thing at "the Right" anymore, is so far off the ball that their stadium isn't even on the same planet.
This is where the Clinton 's piss bucket boy Trump took you.
You didn't even kick and scream.
We're supposed to storm the cockpit and crash the plane into Pennsylvania or something.
Delete"This is your captain Ashli Babbitt speaking. We're going to descend into madness now."
DeleteI am still very much in the center but the far left makes me look rightist. I dont side with Americas enemies. Yet children hanging with drag queens is stupid. Special pronouns and latinx stupid.
ReplyDeleteGreen anything is economical idiocy and greens are former communists. I might be alone in being an energy policy first man.
Drill it here reopen the closed nuclear plants. Build new nuclear plants next to radical left universities.
By your comment, you could fit on either the sensible right or the sensible left. I consume alot of liberal (in the true sense of the word) media content (podcasts and writings at places like substack) and they are as fed up with the far left crap as any other sensible person.
DeleteAnd the liberals are much better at expressing their opinions than people on the right.
DeleteSneers and smears are how to preach to the choir on the left and on the right. Civil discourse has largely been abandoned in favor of gotchas, Whataboutisms, and tu quoque fallacies. All, as in both left and right, are stunting themselves and being left behind.
DeleteYou can say liberals are better at expressing their opinions or just better at expressing themselves in general, but there are such people on both the left and right. It's only now in the garbage age of post-Trump politics that the right seems and in most cases is in fact imbecilic. And as someone situated mostly on the right, it's damned frustrating. Much of the swill that the left offers up can be countered easily and intelligently, but not alongside right-wing noisemakers making asses of themselves. In a bipartisan political system, by default you're only supposed to be able to disown one side and automatically be cast as "the other side."
Which simply isn't true. None of my anti-Trump views make me pro-Hillary or pro-Biden, but for the noise trying to drown me out.
The liberals I speak of are nowhere near the MSNBC circus. I'm talking IDW types: Brett Weinstein, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Katie Herzog, Bari Weiss, etc.
DeleteI don't agree with any of them 100%, Greenwald and Taibbi less that 50%, but they can all discuss issues without the slobbery slurs, and can call out the good and the bad in situations without referring to an ideological punch card.
That noise sells soap somehow. If it didn't, the media on both sides would clean up.
DeleteI'd add Aaron Mate to sf's list. Great journalism.
Deletebtw - Democrats are rapidly becoming the "Karen" Party.
Delete@anonymous
Delete"I dont side with Americas enemies."
I'm not particularly aware of the left doing that, who do you have in mind
"Yet children hanging with drag queens is stupid. Special pronouns and latinx stupid."
This doesn't have to be something that you spend too much time worrying about. It's a wedge issue, which you can safely leave to the small minority of trans activists and the culture warriers on the right who make their careers stirring them up.
"Green anything is economical idiocy and greens are former communists."
You could be right, but the problem is physics doesn't care about your economic models. Absorption spectra exist on a plain of reality infinitely less tractable than political "realities." If forced to choose (and we are) between economic idiocy and climate idiocy, the former may be the wisest choice.
"I might be alone in being an energy policy first man.
Drill it here reopen the closed nuclear plants. Build new nuclear plants next to radical left universities."
Reducing our exposure to tyrants is a sound objective. I appreciate the joke, but it prompts me to ask if you aren't more at home on the right than in the center?
Absorption spectra exist on a plain of reality infinitely less tractable than political "realities."... like the future impacts of that absorption? "Physician... __. " lol!
DeletePhysics may not care about economic models, but economic models sure as hell do care about enforced green energy pie in the sky that is inefficient and unreliable. Ask a German about their utility bills over the past 20 years it's been a pretty steep upward curve.
DeleteAnd now, thanks to the summer soldiers and armchair generals who like the world on fire for fun, Germany is going back to burning coal, but still may not have enough energy to keep their industry going and to heat homes this winter
Look around you, like what you see? Today's current crop of experts brought us to this point
I would cheerfully welcome some Bill Clinton pragmatism right now
DeleteHear, HEAR!
DeleteHillary was a Goldwater Girl. Just sayin'
DeleteI'm sure that the UniParty was full of them.
Delete"Look around you, like what you see? Today's current crop of experts brought us to this point"
DeleteA lot of our most pressing problems arise directly form the recent populism, ie the cynical rejection of expertise. Brexit was the triumph of the layman (egged on by the conman, naturally), a pointless exercise that will cost us multiple percentage points of GDP. Whereas the pivot towards green energy may cost even more (i think it's at least comparable) but in exchange it does bring tangible benefits, as anyone who enjoys a robust food chain would agree. And in any case, it is an expense which will be unavoidably thrust upon us sooner or later as oil grows more scarce, whatever we might decide to do about it in the immediate short term.
How many times have we supposedly hit "peak oil?"
DeleteBrexit didn't cause any of the turmoil we now face.
The UK should join the BRIC.
Delete"Brexit didn't cause any of the turmoil we now face"
Deletespeak for yourself.