Post by Brooks Imperial.
Happy Birthday Karl Marx
The more we learn behavioral psychology, the more we understand that ideologies are as much a product of people’s nature as of observed experience. The perverted doctrines that actuated the Bolshevists may be immanent in a portion of humanity. Some people are determined to see every success as a swindling of someone else, every transaction as an exploitation, every exercise in freedom as a violation of some ideal plan, every tradition as a superstition. How delicious that, as we approach the bicentenary of his birth, Karl Marx should have turned into the thing he loathed above all: the prophet of an irrational faith.
Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom
clever propaganda
Consider this.
Mayor de Blasio in New York announced he is closing down several charter schools. These schools are performing better than nearby public schools. Thousands of supporters of the charter schools are rallying this morning to stop the closing of these schools. Fox News ran a segment with video of the thousands of upset, pleading parents, including snippets from some of the speakers.
Then Fox News cut to a panel of two experts for some analysis with the news anchor. Sometimes the experts in these panels sort out for and against the news subject, sometimes they’re both in favor or both against. In this case, they were both critical of de Blasio’s action, both in favor of the charter schools.
Here’s the rub – during the analysis segment when the screen showed head shots of the screen anchor and the two experts, the tag line on the screen underneath the panel read in part, “de Blasio rallies against charter schools.” For the rest of that news subject, the producers did not cut back to video from the rally.
Now, de Blasio wasn’t at the rally they’d just shown pictures from that contained thousands of people who were all in favor of charter schools. The propaganda effect from the tag line’s misrepresentation was to aggrandize de Blasio by falsely assigning the rally images just seen to him, and confuse the impact of the news analysis portion of the segment. Leftists would call this a win/win.
People who came late to the news report, who did not see the video from the rally or hear the sound clips from some of the rally speakers, saw a confused news presentation where the content the panel speakers delivered did not reconcile with the report of a de Blasio rally that never occurred.
Was this some news editor’s attempt to be clever that ended up taking down the impact of the entire segment? Or was this a deliberate misrepresentation intended to undermine the agreement and conclusions of the news panel that were in favor of charter schools and against de Blasio?
Understanding how the Left works, my money is on the latter explanation.
We’re surrounded by this sort of thing in the media. You cannot just absorb program content – audio, visual, or the interplay between the two – without putting it through a critical filter. And Fox News is, sadly, not exempt.
the new normal
If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?
…I would happily organize with other feminists on campus to stop him from publishing…
People on the right opposed to boycotts can play the “freedom” game…
if we give up our obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom, we can consider more thoughtfully what is just.
The Doctrine of Academic Freedom
Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice
All these tens of thousands of years humanity thrived on nothing more than a mere assumption of normalcy. How serendipitous! I expect heterosexuality is only one of many obsolete norms Komrad Korn would purge from our thoughts.
A Harvard education isn’t what it used to be.
A Missed Chance For Epic Oil Deal
Nafta 20th Anniversary Summit A Wasted Opportunity For A North American Energy Pact
Elections alone will not defeat the left.
One Election Away from Losing Our Freedom, by Daniel Greenfield
If the Democratic Party continues to function as a radical leftist party, abiding by no laws, imposing radical change unilaterally, and using its media to cover for its corruption and political sins, the United States will face a Venezuelan or Egyptian scenario.
Every area of life is being politicized and this politicization did not take place as a result of elections and cannot be stopped with mere elections.
The totalitarians employ every cultural, political and economic element that they can against their enemies.
The electoral wars matter, but the totalitarians have to be fought for control of every institutions and defied at every point of control.
The Elbert County Free Press
It’s always a challenge to excerpt from Daniel Greenfield’s Sultan Knish writings because he rarely includes a sentence one could consider less meaningful than the rest. With that caveat, he writes today;
The voters who most depend on government vote to break it far more thoroughly than any Tea Party politicians could. No Republicans could have done to Detroit what Detroit did to Detroit. Not even the most extreme Tea Party politician could have done as much damage to the Federal government as Obama did.
Corruption and ineptitude are far more of a threat to the progressive vision than any number of people waving Gadsden flags. Republicans can shut down or slow a progressive program, but only progressives can discredit it from the inside[.]
Surely much of what I’ve held forth about the effect of Elbert County zoning falls neatly into this paradigm.
In a preface to Chapter 2 of Inventing Freedom, Daniel Hannan included a quote by Roger Scruton,
The English law existed not to control the individual but to free him.
Scruton has written books about environmentalism from a conservative approach, pointing out both the failures of statist solutions along with examples of successful environmental protection by vested owners of natural resources. He reminds us of the futility of dispossessing individuals of environmental ownership – call it regulation in America – along with an expectation that those same individuals will carefully husband that which they no longer control – a restatement of the tragedy of the commons.
Which brings us to New-Plains poster-boy Chris Bailey explaining, in effect, his view of law as the polar opposite of Scruton’s. He laments that the county laws and MOU passed this week were not what he wished for in “minor” facility O&G property control;
- He wanted the planning commission to retain approval authority for O&G development, despite their over 3 years of endless deliberations to get to square one of a passable law.
- He wanted the CDS director to have no authority to administrate O&G zoning, despite New-Plains’ love of former planning director Richard Miller.
- He wanted the dozen anti-O&G activists in Elbert County to retain the ability to stage public procedural delays, er, opportunities to scrutinize, O&G zoning administration.
- He wanted an un-flawed MOU, notwithstanding other regulatory conflicts and litigation such a document would have initiated.
- He wanted to make the O&G industry pay for the right to exploit their property.
In his zeal to uphold the collective Bailey doesn’t show much concern for individual property holders.
And let’s not forget the delusional Bishops at the Prairie Times this week. Susan and Jerry apparently told SOS Scott Gessler that,
Many conservatives were delighted by this judge’s ruling,
. . .in reference to the heavily Democrat partisan decision against Commissioner Rowland published last month.
Really? On what planet? Oh, that’s right, this one–the planet where Leftist Susan Bishop is still a Republican PCP.
One hopes that Republican caucus attendees take the opportunity afforded them in a couple weeks (March 4th) to relieve people like Susan of their conflict of interest, and excuse them from the ranks of the ECRCC.
As for the progressive tidal wave awash in America, with so many self-referential enforcement devices available to them, light at the end of the tunnel looks dim.
The Law Of The Land
In Inventing Freedom, Daniel Hannon writes, “English-speaking peoples still commonly, and exceptionally, talk of “the law of the land.” Not the King’s law, not God’s law, but the law of the land–a set of rights and obligations immanent in the country, growing incrementally, passed down as part of the patrimony of each new generation.”
As President Obama continues to demonstrate, the Left do not hold the law of the land in the high regard traditionally upheld by “English-speaking peoples.” Conservative writers and speakers chronicle this feature of our new age on a daily basis, and mentioning it here has earned this writer a variety of libels–short of using the blood of Leftist babies to make matzah balls, though the day is still young.
Anyway, with due respect to the objectives of the Left with regard to Elbert County oil & gas development, I find their chosen tactic – to cause local zoning operational conflicts with COGCC – legally insufficient. It is my 1st Am. right to make the finding and to publish it.
Over the years I’ve documented in these pages evidence of a Leftist policy to push Elbert County into expensive litigation over oil & gas regulation, and county vs. states rights. I maintain that the county cannot afford that expensive litigation, and I applaud the BOCC for avoiding it thus far.
Rather than address the substance of my analysis, the Left comes back with libel on the front end, and politicking out the back door. The Left continue to push for operationally conflicting local regulation and they just don’t care about the legalities.
The Sierra Club recently entered the Elbert County oil & gas political arena by sponsoring a letter containing the following language:
Elbert County needs strong oil and gas regulations to protect our air, water, land, public health, safety, and quality of life. We are asking you to protect Elbert County residents by adopting regulations which would prohibit open pits for toxic produced water and prohibit spraying of toxic produced water to mitigate dust on county roads.
We also urge you to support citizen-drafted MOUs which would protect Elbert County citizens by increasing drilling set-backs to 1320 feet from homes, require green completion systems to reduce air emissions, require operators to notify residents within a mile of production activities, and increase baseline water sampling.
Please do everything in your power to ensure that Elbert County residents and their property are protected from the toxic spills, groundwater contamination, ozone-inducing emissions and other impacts that the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission has documented. The industry averages more that a spill per day across Colorado and has been found to be responsible for more than half of the ozone pollution causing federal air quality violations in nine Front Range counties. A recent Colorado School of Public Heath study found an increase in the incidence of congenital heart defects within 10 miles of drilling operations.
You have a duty to protect Elbert County from these impacts and risks and we are relying on you to do so.
Thank you for your consideration.
Well, the President may be able to walk all over Congress and get away with blatant constitutional violations, but Elbert County need not follow his “leadership.” The duty of the BOCC runs first to the law of the land, and I am relying on the BOCC to not break that trust. Under our system, the ends don’t justify the means.
If the Left cannot abide that framework, there are plenty of totalitarians in the world who would be glad to have them as subjects.
The Meta Left
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” Albert Einstein
A lot of great explanations on the Left’s mental state made it to print in the last few weeks. Much of it advanced themes that have probably been known for some time, but there’s a real concentration of this sort of analysis going on right now by Conservative writers. They are rallying to explain the Left, each in their own way, and in doing so are exposing Leftist Man like never before. If the Left could shift their attention away from crafting political narratives to sway public opinion for a few moments and take a breather to look around, they might get a feel for how the reasoning world sees them.
In an essay today entitled Hate is the Force that Gives the Left Meaning, Daniel Greenfield asks the question, “The Left finally has its Un-American tyranny. So why is it [still] so angry?” Greenfield then answers the question in his typical definitive, dispositive, fashion. He explains that since the Left cannot rely upon their solutions to ground their political offense, all that remains available to them are the negatives they can frame about their opposition. Those negatives get drawn any number of ways. The only necessary element is that they’re negative. How, why, based on what, none of that really matters. It’s the negative conclusion that keeps them going and gives them something to build on to advance their cause.
In The Poison of Postmodern Lying, Victor David Hanson explained how good intentions are the only truth that matters – how democratic laws and objective truth must give way to the more powerful truth of social justice [which the Left will define for us.]
In Progressives Without Progress, Daniel Greenfield discusses how the Left see scarce resources as an unsolvable problem. [Forget that markets do this without any controls.] He shows how the Left’s rationing makes things more scarce and more technologically backward, and how their planning causes a conformity of unimaginative redistribution that solves nothing. He shows how the Left’s utopian police-state economics deny progress and kill off the human creative spirit.
In The Kindergarden Of Eden, Evan Sayet illustrated how the Left demonizes and makes enemies out of the those individuals in society who don’t follow the Left’s utopian plan, notwithstanding how those same people create real solutions to real problems.
In The Closing Of The American Mind, Allan Bloom shows how the Left removed all of the traditional cultural standards that used to moderate and frame the appetites of free Americans, and replaced them with a sterile orthodoxy obsessed over the avoidance of politically incorrect taboo outcomes. In other words, Bloom asks, and answers, the question of whether a Left life is a life worth living.
Recently Thomas Sowell put his spotlight on the Left’s narcissistic personality disorder in a column entitled Visceral Hatred Has Always Set Left From Right. The thinking goes that the Left’s good intentions, by themselves and without outcome evidence, give them all the self-esteem they need. To mention how the Left’s solutions don’t actually get to the outcomes they intend is not merely a scientific judgment, it’s a vile attack on their self-worth. The Left has always had trouble separating the person from the idea, which perhaps explains why they so readily resort to ad hominem attack. Sowell points out, in other words, how the Left’s penchant for ad hominem attack hoists them on their own petard. Criticize their good intentions and you criticize them. There’s a certain consistency of error here, but still wrong whether applied to themselves or against those they disagree with.
With all of this good, free, substantive analysis a mouse click away, you’d think some on the Left might risk noticing, or might even offer a substantive rebuttal. But not only do the Left seem disinterested in understanding themselves, they don’t seem too interested in understanding Conservatives either. We know all the flavors of hate, all the special names the Left reserve for Conservatives, but we have very little evidence that the Left have any deeper understanding of us.
Mau Mauing the MOU
If the Elbert County BOCC bows to the Left’s Mau-Mauing of Oil & Gas, we’ll end up with more expensive energy, and no local development.
(click on following excerpts for analysis from today’s IBD)
“The self-appointed environmental stewards. . .”
the warp and woof the Left weaves
“Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like “truth” were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege.”
“[G]ood intentions . . . are the only truth that matters.”
“If ignoring bothersome laws . . . serves a greater social justice, then such dereliction also becomes “truth.”
“Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses.”
“But outside of math and science, whose natural truth man so far cannot impugn, almost everything else in America has become “it depends.”
Under these ground rules, there’s nothing the Left won’t say.
The Sultan’s Laws
“The domestic left destroys everything it does not control as part of a cultural war[.]”
“Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power in a nation, that nation becomes socially backward, technologically backward and culturally backward.”
“[U]nplanned change is locked out of the equation because reactionary progressive utopias have to be relentlessly planned.”
“Time slows down and utopia sinks into its own progressive muck.”
“[T]he flower children became professional activists and politicians and ran a system of stale conformity[.]”
“The left only believes in change when it moves in their direction. But once change has been achieved, then their ideal is a static changeless society.”
“The progressive movement . . . depends on the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its philosophy, its art and its activism[.]”
“Fuel, water and even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running out. Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put in a locked box where qualified personnel will only distribute it at need.”
“Progressives equate progress to redistribution.”
“[U]topia becomes an economic police state.”
“The utopian is really a cynic, certain that individualism will unleash everyone’s worst impulses, and offering instead the iron order of his vision.”
“[T]he utter undoing of humanity is only a land use resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle away.”
“Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress of social controls.”
“Under their rule, progress in this country, once its secular faith, has slowed to a crawl outside of a few select industries that are able to move faster than the speed of progressive regulations.”
one rule for thee
The problem with viewing the world through the lawyerly lens is the prerequisite of conflict. The whole business exists to force someone to behave according to a law as interpreted by some judicial or quasi-judicial third party.
Conflict means a disagreement exists between at least two parties. The progression of law, therefore, is built on conflicts by people who, for whatever reason, cannot otherwise agree to get along. Where there is a-priori agreement, no law enforcement is necessary.
As an aside, so the Left can avoid inserting the canard of criminality in their expected rebuttal, obviously I’m not talking about criminal matters.
Now, the Elbert County Left love this legal business. Whether it’s a zoning matter enabling them to push the government to make some code to control land use behavior the way they want, or whether it’s an electoral claim to harass the Republican leadership of the county, the law is a game in which they can at least score points, and maybe even win.
One hopes that the Colorado legislatures who create the enabling statutes for governing the playing fields of county zoning and election law, do so with the intention that what subsequently occurs in those domains will inure to the benefit of Colorado citizens living with the consequences.
One hopes that the statutes aren’t created for the purpose of enabling a gaming environment where the law can be turned, within the rules outlined by the legislature, to the advantage of one group of citizens over another, based on how well the game is played.
If legislation allows, however, for sharp dealing, or heavily loading the boat on one side by filling public meetings with a noisy minority, or filling courtroom proceedings with a noisy minority, then unscrupulous people will seize those gaming opportunities to serve their own advantage.
Some humans seem to have a gaming instinct, an ability to set aside ethics for personal advantage. And fiat legal structures seem to attract people who look for an unjust enrichment or a power play in their own interest. Where no conflict exists to start the playing field conditions that might sustain a game plan, such people will simply invent the necessary conflict. Fish can’t “go blub” without water in the tank.
Ultimately our legal systems cannot prevail over deficient ethical sensibilities. Our systems cannot withstand continued gaming attacks from a dedicated minority of baby boomer Leftists, many of them sustained by publicly funded pensions, who despite repeated failed attempts to get themselves elected as Elbert County officials, think they should be governing Elbert County’s highest offices, and who do everything they can to impede the officials elected to those offices.
Evan Sayet summed up the syndrome in one passage as follows;
Everyone in the Democratic Party, then is convinced that he or she is a victim, and every one of them agrees on who their victimizers are: the men and women of God and science who do things and make things. Their victimizers are the people who, because they live in the real world, have to engage in discriminating thought and choose the best (but by definition not utopian) answer.
When a Shick, a Thomasson, a Duvall, a Blotter, or a Brown, take umbrage over a bit of zoning code or some judicial matter, they project an alleged offense personal to themselves. Cosmically, it’s them in the cross hairs, their whole world in the chain of causation directly targeted by the alleged harm. For the practicing Leftist, it’s always their water, their money, their property, their minerals, their rights, their speech. Leftist standing is assumed, but never demonstrated.
And since utopia is their measure, and no human being can possibly measure up because human beings operate with imperfect information and imperfect capabilities, and since Leftist standing is a given, the ingredients for an endless umbrage that can never be remedied are also a given.
But don’t fail to notice that the only times less-than-utopian outcomes matter to the Left, the only times they feel targeted, are when they’re not in control. That’s the false alternative the Left presents to the world. Either put them in control, or they’ll selectively engage their grievance machinery and make a living hell out of things as perpetual victims.
The dilemma they present does not materially differ from the one presented by the Taliban – whose world view provides sufficient motivation for them to make war on the West, notwithstanding anything the West actually does to avoid or provoke them. They have an offensive metaphysical foundation in Islam which they can choose to ignore or follow. Reasoning and reality feedback from the world external to their domain are largely irrelevant except to the extent they get in their way.
Those of us outside the cults are constantly placed on the defensive from endless experiments and harmful inventions presented as progress toward their utopias.
The adversarial system that the Left invest so heavily in can be manipulated. Despite systemic mechanisms that push in the direction of objective justice, those principles can be overcome by unscrupulous tactics. But the Left won’t publicly own the ethics they practice to reach the ends they consider justified by any means.
Their post-hoc explanations, which get utterly fantastic when they’re challenged, know no bounds. But their super-sensitivity to anti-utopian harm is no more than a tactic, a practiced art they’ll turn off the moment they get power.
Under the Left it’s one rule for me and another for thee. Under the Right it’s one rule for all and one chain of causation for all. That’s the difference.
Left is infallible
Looks like the Elbert County News has gone off the reservation where most of the Elbert County press lives. Good for them.
As you can see from the comments to the Rowland/Gessler story of 1/24 (copy saved here if the above link expires), the Elbert County Left posse came out to reinforce this new skirmish line in their political war on Elbert County.
Most of their rhetoric consists of the usual damnation/salvation dichotomy where they represent everything good and their opposition is all bad. But they’re not as smart as they think they are.
Mr. Thomasson let slip a comment that undermines all of their moral authority;
. . .but I believe the facts of the case will suffice to keep the court from overturning the verdict. If it goes the other way, it will be because the ALJ made a mistake, not because of some wild claim that the Leftists are after the good Republicans of Elbert County.
If the judge does not agree with the Left, then the judge will have made a mistake. The Left can not be wrong. Ever.
You need to look at the cases the Left make in and around Elbert County from this perspective – especially the Planning and Zoning cases. Truth is not on the table. Efficiency doesn’t enter into it. Economics, legalities, justice, sound science, none of those dispositive disciplines matter to the Left. Those who don’t agree with the Left have made a mistake. Those who don’t agree with the Left in the future will have made a mistake!
I only know of one guy in history who successfully pulled off a claim of infallibility, and he got crucified for it.
Visceral Hatred Has Always Set Left From Right
Thomas Sowell wrote today in the Investors Business Daily, “The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. It is also a very flattering vision of itself.”
The entire column is linked here. (If this link fails, click on the paragraph below for a saved copy.)
Whew! – A lotta’ hatin’ goin’ on Facebook at the New-Plains and Meadowlark pages.
. . .must be good for their communities.
the “high” Left
The Left own the domain of the Elbert County Planning Commission. It’s their sandbox.
If looks could kill, yours truly would be cold in the ground from the sneers, snarls, scowls, disgust and disapproval they’ve thrown at me on the few evenings I’ve ventured on to that hallowed forum for regulatory orogeny. [Read more…]
Evan Sayet, Understanding How Modern Liberals Think
bursting bubbles
New-Plains Hypocrites
gender, class, environment, pacifism, rogue markets
So many “foundational theories” – like those in the title of this post – lay strewn about like scattered tinker toys. The Left use them to frame all of their views, whether in Elbert County or the Universities. They’re not really theories in the scientific sense, because a theory is an idea capable of being disproved. These “foundational theories” of the Left are outcomes the Left intends to manifest. They are “foundational” in the sense they create movement toward whole sub-menus of corollary Leftist activities. Leftists hold these truths to be self-evident, above question, and they will protect them from refutation at any cost.