"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
For Hugh, who invoked the tune in comments yesterday:
(For reference, see yesterday’s rambling post, “DWUC” for what Hugh was “Amening”)
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Wandering through a disjointed, rambling discussion with the voices in my head this A.M….
It’s a good thing I was under-caffeinated this morning. Too many “driving while brain dead” people on the road. Had I been properly caffeinated (thus, awake), I’d probably have stroked out at the number of folks who let a little dampness (after a night full of heavy rain) turn them into Aunt Tillies on the road… But enough of that.
Ever think about the differences between stereotypes and archetypes? They have common roots in real world relationships and usefulness. Archetypes as theoretical models actually have less usefulness in our quotidian experiences, IMO. Stereotypes though…
Ever notice that stereotypes get a bum rap in the talk of Academia Nut Fruitcakes, Mass Media Podpeople, et al, and yet Academia Nut Fruitcakes almost universally stereotype stereotypes as “bad” and Mass Media Podpeople cannot utter two sentences in a row without using stereotypes.
Why is that?
Well, on the one hand, Academia Nut Fruitcakes despise anything that simplifies models to the point of actual usefulness, while at the same time unconsiously making sweeping generalizations (oversimplified assumptions) about the unusefulness of simple models, AKA, stereotypes, which they have come to characterize as oversimplifications of some observed or imagined trait of behaviour or appearance.
(Mass Media Podpeople, OTOH, are unable to think in complex terms at all, and so have nothing BUT genuine oversimplifications to offer. In their case, stereotypes really are a bad, bad thing.)
Why do stereotypes exist to begin with? Because humans are generalization machines and Occam’s Razor is one of the most powerful tools (I almost typed “forces”) of reason. Face it: most “jocks” are intellectually stunted boors. Yes, it’s true. Nerds are, by definition, socially inept. Latino men are almost universally dominated by machismo (natural public reaction to their basically matriarchal home life–*heh*), and American society is becoming ever more feminized day by day.
Sidebar: I don’t have to defend any of the statements above, because to any person who has more functioning brain cells than a head of cabbage they are self-evident. Stereotype-driven, because they are generalizations from the real world that are testable hypotheses that can stand against exceptional tests: they work.
Example: the feminization of America. 99%+ of America’s future is brainwashed in our society’s prisons for kids (disingenuously referred to by Academia Nut Fruitcakes, Mass media Podpeople and politicians *spit* as “public schools”). More and more kids are being drugged out of their minds because, being boys, they act like boys, and our prisons for kids are dominated by female teachers for whom boyish behavior is anathema. Take a typical playground event: bully picks on victim. If the victim does the female teacher-acceptable thing and “goes crying to surrogate mommy” all is well in the eye of the prison for kids. If the victim does the right thing and plasters the bully, he gets in trouble. OK, maybe both get in trouble, but the point is that to satisfy a feminine culture, a forceful personal response results in injustice: punishment for self-defense.
And this trait is, of course, permeating our society. Self-defense is equated with aggression at an increasing rate. By all meeans, lets talk with the crazy guy with the atom bomb…
And that is but one of many examples of the feminization of America.
And so it goes with many things slurred as stereotypes: they are reflections of a reality the politically correct simply want to deny, as they embrace instead their reality-based fantasies and tyrannical utopian/dystopian views.
As someone once said (something like :-)), “In much of [their] talk, thinking is half-murdered.”
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Energy policy. No matter how much we work to reform tax policy to get the “feddle gummint” out of savings/investment policy and level the international trade playing field a bit, with the energy lashup that passes for “feddle gummint” policy we now have in place, our economy is hamstrung, our billions are being sent OUT of this country, largely to third world thugs, and we face a future of spiraling inflation.
The answer is complex but can start with one simple thing: learn some commonsense steps we can take NOW… and take them.
See American Solutions for more.
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Yesterday, I posted a video intro to The FairTax as an intro to the idea that real tax reform can have the single greatest ameliorative effect on our economic woes by introducing The FairTax. Today, part two:
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Of the many issues facing citizens nowadays, it’s easy to say that the answer to “What’s toward the top of your current concerns?” would be “It’s the economy, stupid.”
And, beyond simple concerns about oil/gasoline proices and the closely related rise in costs of concumer goods, that’s a very good answer. But it’s important that we understand that our economic problems go far beyond percieved consumer pain caused by rising costs and relatively stagnant wages. Think of several even more important, deeply embedded issues:
The primary “weapon” with which the U.S. used to bring down the Soviet Union was to sucker the soviets into attempting to compete with our economy. And still today, our best largely unused weapon against enemies such as Islamic terrorism is our economy. That’s something even a noncom fighting in Afganistan recognizes (a long read, and the economic observations are buried well down, but a read wll worth your time. h.t. Rosenary’s Thoughts).
Suffice it to say, every effort made by our politicians *spit* to weaken our economy both in obvious ways and in obscure, structural ways, is working. The dollar is at its weakest in decades; our trade imbalance is growing; our indebtedness as a nation is worsening. What to do?
Let’s start with some common sense steps. Step number 1 (even more important than Drill Here-Drill Now): Embrace the FairTax.
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Found via Hotair (via Pursuing Holiness):
Go Here. Now.
While nuclear energy would make a good near-mid term addendum to our energy needs, we have enough oil in our own back yard to be able to stop paying the Saudi (and other Middle Eastern) thugs for our oil. All we lack is congresscritters who aren’t bought and paid for by those whose real desire is to “Sink America First!”
Also via Hotair:
Yep.
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Arose this A.M. to the sounds of more rain. OK, I like rain, but really. We’ve had enough, thank you. I see the animals are lining up two-by-two…(At least it’s cooler than normal.)
OK, so it’s raining. And… left my driver’s side window down last night. *sigh* So I get wet as I drive this A.M. So?
So… I go out to roll window up anyway and… the horn on my car’s blowing and will NOT shut off. *sigh* Pull battery cable, cos can’t find fuse puller and fingers too fat to pull fuse.
Drop cable nut.
It’s one of those days already.
*heh*
[UPDATE: Of course, once I had early A.M. out of the way and could get back to third world county central, I was able to a.) Locate the cable nut, b.) determine that it was actually the switch in the steering column–shorted out from rain– and c.) detach the horn from the circuit then d.) connect the charger to the battery *sigh*, all in the continuing rain, of course. Car now starts and horn doesn’t “blow (although the tinny thing always did “blow”–*heh*), but now I need to get a hair dryer on my steering column to see if I can effect a “repair” that way, cos I really, really do NOT want to have to disassemble the steering column… All’s well, though. Lotsa stuff canceled cos I didn’t know how long the horn “repair” would take, so… twc central projects and “remote support” the rest of today.]
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Well, it’s happened (or has it?). Hillary Clintoon has convinced me to vote for Juan Mexicain. *sigh* Heck, if the presidential “Homecoming Queen” election were to have been between The Hildebest and Juan Mexicain, I’d have been sore pressed to select a candidate to vote for (Bob Barr’s Quixotic candidacy is a waste of time, IMO *profound sigh* I could wish he were the Repugnican’t candidate instead of Juan Mexicain, but no, he has to waste everyone’s time*). On the one hand, there’s the utterly detestable Juan Mexicain who advocates a “Hildebeast-Lite” platform. On the other hand, there’s Satan’s Left Hand in the Senate, The Hildebeast her(?)self.
Of the two, Juan Mexicain would stand the best chance of getting almost his whole hog eaten by the Congress and The Hildebeast would likely have the shortest “honeymoon” on record… and the hardest time getting her “Sink America First!” agenda passed.
But with Barry Husein Obama-Winfrey as president, we’d be subjected to his entire socialist/communist, multi-culti agenda as he played the race card over and over.
And that’s just stupid, because far from being “America’s first black president” he’d in fact be America’s first Arab president. Check his family tree if you doubt me.
Oh, well. Maybe The Hildebeast has a copy of the infamous and elusive (apocryphal?) Michelle Obamamama “kill whitey” DVD hidden away to break during the Dhimmicrappic convention.
Meanwhile, folks it’s time to start ignoring the presidential race. Seriously. The more attention we pay these childish, destructive personalities, the more power we lend them. It’s time to focus our attention on the races for Congress, our state representation, etc. Hamstring whichever of the lousy candidates are elected president, and maybe the republic (what’s left of it at least) will survive one term of whichever yahoo is elected president.
[N.B., now that the dire predictions of global warmists are proving to be less than accurate, the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming now uses “climate change” in place of their long-trumpeted “global warming” but it’s all just sleight of hand.]
Freeman Dyson is smarter than you or I. Heck, he’s probably smarter than you and I put together. So, when he speaks on the subject of global warming/climate change, even in something so brief as a review of a couple of books, he’s worth listening to, at the very least. For example, writing about A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, by William Nordhaus:
For the benefit of those who are mathematically illiterate or uninterested in numerical details, Nordhaus has put a nonmathematical chapter at the beginning with the title “Summary for the Concerned Citizen.” This first chapter contains an admirably clear summary of his results and their practical consequences, digested so as to be read by busy politicians and ordinary people who may vote the politicians into office. He believes that the most important concern of any policy that aims to address climate change should be how to set the most efficient “carbon price,” which he defines as “the market price or penalty that would be paid by those who use fossil fuels and thereby generate CO2 emissions.” He writes:
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies.
If this chapter were widely read, the public understanding of global warming and possible responses to it would be greatly improved.
Indeed. Of course, the several assumptions (apparent assumptions; I have not yet got my hands on a copy) of the Nordhaus comment above are large assumptions indeed, but the public’s understanding of the costs of dealing with carbon dioxide–whether such a thing needs to be done or not–would indeed be a great step forward in opening the dialog on “climate change” to other than True Believers in AGW (more rationally known as Reality-Based Fantasists, IMO).
But it is the assumption Dyson makes that is truly frightening. He’s a really, really smart man, but it looks like he misses the critical factor in his approach to the material above. To repeat:
For the benefit of those who are mathematically illiterate or uninterested in numerical details, Nordhaus has put a nonmathematical chapter at the beginning with the title “Summary for the Concerned Citizen.” This first chapter contains an admirably clear summary of his results and their practical consequences, digested so as to be read by busy politicians and ordinary people who may vote the politicians into office.
The “busy politicians” and the “ordinary people who vote them into office” are both likely to be not only mathematically illiterate but functionally illiterate as well. Heck, neither of those facts matter, because neither class would read it anyway, even if they could read or understand the book–or even Dyson’s review of it. And there lies the crux of the problem: politicians only listen to their flappers (review your Swift for the reference) and “ordinary people” are brain-sludged (not brainwashed) by the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind and self-lobotomized to the point that they’d never even pick the book up.
Or any other book that might challenge them beyond the level of People Magazine or Sports Illustrated.
The second book reviewed in the Dyson article is, Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto, Ernesto Zedillo, ed. Although it, too, suffers from the same “It’s not People Magazine or Sports Illustrated” lack of appeal to ordinary citizens, it nevertheless sounds rather interesting to me. *heh* (Yeh, you’ve picked up on the fact that I don’t read People Magazine or Sports Illustrated, right?) For example, as Dyson notes,
Zedillo in his introduction summarizes the arguments of each contributor in turn. He maintains the neutrality appropriate to a conference chairman, and gives equal space to Lindzen and to Rahmstorf. He betrays his own opinion only in a single sentence with a short parenthesis: “Climate change may not be the world’s most pressing problem (as I am convinced it is not), but it could still prove to be the most complex challenge the world has ever faced.”
Later in the article, Dyson gets to the meat of the review,
All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.
Should we be environmentally responsible? Yes, of course we should, for any number of reasons. But the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming, in attempting, with great success, to shut down all dialog, all debate on its dogma is performing a serious disservice to everyone. Heck, the pagan religion they practice is not even well-qualified as religions go: “redemtion” in the Church of AGW means essentially killing off most of mankind. In that, AGWers are hardly better than Islamics.
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Bob Dole v. Scott MCClellan: Junkyard Dog v. “Step-on-it” Chihuahua.
Dole:
“If all these awful things were happening, and perhaps some may have been, you should have spoken up publicly like a man, or quit your cushy, high profile job.
“That would have taken integrity and courage, but then you would have had credibility and your complaints could have been aired objectively. You’re a hot ticket now but don’t you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?”
Of course, McClellan will have the full force of the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind behind him when he responds with, “Waaaaah!”
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