“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” Lord Acton 1887
Democrat Kammunism
back slapping public officials
“Its pretensions to “comprehensitivity” destroyed, we can now see this “system” as a form of intellectual charlatanism, a studied fascination with process and minutiae that bespeaks the true soul of the born bureaucrat–the man who does nothing in particular, and to no societal good, but who by his own lights does it very well.”
The context of the above writing is not county politics, political appointments, school boards, citizen committees, or similar local governing bodies that folks–so eerily described above–zealously seek out and set aside for themselves each year in Elbert County.
How many times have you heard one of them hold forth on how hard they, or one in their cohort, works in the power role they’ve secured?
Do they expect us to believe that obsessive protection of their local offices somehow disproves the corrupting influence of power?
Social Correctness
Sorting things out, providing grist for the grievance millers; a few might see the medicinal spirit here, but the adult adolescents most in need of the medicine will foreseeably emote with more blind defensive rage at the man holding the mirror.
What should matter is what you show people – the intentional connection offered and objectively accepted – an orderly social transaction based in reality, and manageable by both giving and receiving parties. And perhaps most people still operate this way. I’m not talking about them.
I’m talking about those for whom the inferences 3rd parties make are more important. People governed by this standard must be seen to process the culture around them appropriately and in a good light.
Social media probably empowers the mechanism, however, societal approval was never intended to mask content problems in the general culture. Everything got tolerable when the most important objective became to look good. Things are way out of balance now.
I’m talking to those who are not shy about telling you what looks good, what you may acceptably talk about, respond to, and engage. Young people and the perpetually adolescent will express social correctness about politics, life styles, entertainments, and psychoactive substances, but no subject is safe from the socially correct.
Speech outside of their bounds will cause shunning, taboo, ostracism, ritual condemnation, and vicious attack. Social correctness is political correctness on steroids.
Intrinsic value, durability, and objective worth, don’t weigh heavily in the analysis because those things require agreement. They can’t be imposed by one party over another. Social correctness is about power.
Social correctness is relative, adaptable, subject to fresh interpretation each time it is used. It is an ad hoc device, made up on the spur of the moment to transfer power from one person to another under the color of social justice. But unlike social justice, true justice is an objective evidentiary process.
In Seattle the 12th man is the crowd who help the team on the field. At least the 12th man is an objective expression everyone can see. But social correctness is like an invisible third party monitoring every exchange, who is completely subjective. Outsiders can’t see the structural barrier to real communication between them and the socially correct. But that’s okay since the socially correct will inform them.
Engage on a taboo subject, or bring up a non-prescribed inquiry that could expose a vulnerability, and you’d better brace yourself for hysterics and emotional terrorism. Speak correctly or deal with a freak-out.
Everyone has vulnerabilities, makes mistakes, has stories of personal foolishness in their lives. Enjoyment of our human foibles is a substantial source of humor for secure adults. But the socially correct see foibles as a first step down the path to a judgment, and a judgment could lead to the whole socially correct lattice coming under scrutiny. Scrutiny could lead to loss of control, power shifts, and decloaking the cultural icons that define intolerance. We’re talking substantial disempowerment of the socially correct.
Boundless tolerance requires strict intolerance to keep it up. It couldn’t be more hypocritical. It also couldn’t be more subjective and passive aggressive. This is a tool which makes everyone but the speaker of socially correct truth into a loser.
I wish I could turn the clock back to the time before people got their heads so full of this stuff – a nicer, more humorous, not so super sensitive time. But the cults have grown, and their subjects appear quite comfortable in their blinders hauling those heavy wagons of social correctness around.
Hopefully these pathologies will self-limit over time once natural selection has killed off all the hosts.
science vs. nonsense
People engaged in practicing scientific methods came to the Society of Exploration Geophysicist‘s [SEG] annual meeting and exhibition this week in Denver. They came to talk about all aspects of the science that uses imaging techniques for virtual simulations of the composition of the earth below the sea floor, below dry land, and below the sandy shallow shorelines. They brought examples of many of their tools for gathering the data to build the simulations – at least the tools that could fit on a semi truck, including a few as big as a semi truck. They brought a full library of reference books that SEG publishes and sells to anyone in the general public. They brought supercomputers built with arrays of CPU cores and stacks of graphics processors cabled into large racks to form co-processing centers capable of petaflop processing speeds. They brought software experts to manipulate datasets hundreds of terabytes in size through exotic transformations and functions for improving, interpreting, visualizing, dissecting, and representing the reflected seismic data vibrations gathered from massive tracts of potential energy-bearing geologic structures. They came to share their passion about their good fortune to be engaged in solving real and interesting problems using state of the art technology for the tangible benefit of mankind.
Last Sunday this technological frontier was out of sight and out of my mind. I hold our mass broadcast media responsible for that condition. Shame on those media content providers who evidently think the only thing interesting to talk about with regard to energy production is the latest bunch of creepy counter culture dregs carrying hand lettered signs with hyperbolic messages about how we’re all going to die from fracking.
Sure. We’re all going to die. You can’t seriously argue against that proposition. But the scientists exploring for energy actually push that day further out into the future for all of us. Geophysicists take on the hard challenge, the difficult question that requires years of education to successfully answer. Meanwhile, fractivists scribble up a few signs, organize their community of activists from the Left, and show up.
What do fractivists do for the betterment of mankind? That’s right. They show up. They occupy space. They “be.” And the media sends out their heavy satellite dish trucks to record the drama as news, to crowd out real information from the airwaves with an endless stream of meaningless pablum that will never build anything, inspire anyone, or improve our existence.
That’s why you have young kids stealing a couple thousand dollars from their parents’ credit cards to buy a ticket for Istanbul to go join some jihadi who will put an AK47 into their hands and add meaning to their empty existence. The kids know on some level that the world has amazing and fulfilling human endeavors in it, but they don’t know where to find them. So terrible forces move into those vacuums of meaning.
Educators and communicators steeped in Marxism for the last 40 years don’t dwell on real accomplishments because those events don’t politically empower the counter culture. Things like geophysics make the counter culture look silly, laughable, a waste of time and energy – all very disempowering characterizations. With Denver hosting a ground-zero event for worldwide oil and gas exploration – an evil incarnate population of engineers to a fractivist – not a single fractivist showed up to object at the Colorado Convention Center. Real meaning is kryptonite to them. Even geologist Governor Hickenlooper stayed away, perhaps not wishing to offend one of his Gang of Four deep pockets.
While geophysicists improve the world, the chattering classes spin their tales of Ebola, head chopping jihadis, financial collapse, wreckages of all sizes and shapes, storms and climate changes, victimization dramas, and politicians frame one hot mess after another with instant interpretations that always end with a moral that improves their side, their position. A cascade of false narratives give the Left the power to destroy, and power is what they live for. Disempowering the Left is the most politically incorrect thing one can do. Disempowering the Left is so wrong that the Left brand it with the most deplorable label imaginable – racism.
Don’t let the Left consume any more young people with destructive power. The Left squandered their franchises in the schools, the universities, and the media with false narratives, false dilemmas and false analyses.
It’s time our educators and communicators focused on the creators, those who accomplish the hard solutions from the difficult problem sets, the ones who tangibly improve mankind and don’t just talk about it.
Leave the dramas that empower the Left in the past. I doubt we ever needed their monkeyshines, but surely we don’t need them now.