Interesting analysis by Democracy Corps about what motivates the conservative fringe which included this paragraph:
A central part of the collective identity built by conservative Republicans in the current political environment is their belief that they possess knowledge and insight that the majority of Americans – whether too lazy or too misguided to find it for themselves – do not possess. A combination of conservative media outlets are the means by which they have gained this knowledge, led by FOX News (“the truth tellers“), and to a lesser degree conservative talk radio. Their antipathy and distrust toward the mainstream media could not be stronger, and they fiercely defend FOX as the only truly objective news outlet.
This goes along with what DougJ has been talking about for months- that these folks really are speaking their own language, and have a complete different language, reality, and collective understanding. It really is to the point that the echo chamber is reverberating so loudly that when you hear these guys speak, it almost seems like they are from a different planet.
Only they know the real truth. The rest of us are just sheeples.
alien radio
The founding of conservapedia was the point at which it was flatly stated that they believe in a reality quite divergent from that of the average person, and challenged people to let them argue from facts they can just make up.
Most people presented with that argument would call bullshit.
Eric
and have a complete different language, reality, and collective understanding
I’m old enough to remember when we used to just call this “dementia”.
Now it’s a political movement.
Times change, I guess.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
When will the Wingularity occur? Will it be the point at which they shut out all non-conservative news outlets completely, and begin fashioning their own news entirely out of rumor, hearsay, happenstance and pieces of lint and tinfoil?
That could be some fun reading. I want to do some investigative journalism on how the French are the major financiers of the Taliban. Dibs on that story!
Svensker
There’s a real glamour in having the “real” inside knowledge — see gnosticism. The irony is that nowit’s the Know Nothings claiming to Know All.
calipygian
Isn’t that the basis for any revealed religion? Shouldn’t Real Truth be capitalized? If Fox is the Revelation, aren’t all these “good Christians” committing blasphemy?
burnspbesq
Hopefully I’m not going to give our genial host a sad that will ruin his weekend, but on the back page of the November issue of Stereophile there is a column that renders the following verdict on the new Delbert McClinton album, Acquired Taste: great performances, crappy sound.
I haven’t heard it yet (although I will, and soon), so I can’t say whether I agree with Robert Baird. But the fact that he felt strongly enough about it to devote an entire column to it is a bit scary.
Jay C
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
You mean this hasn’t happened already???
AkaDad
You may think this is funny Balloon Boy, but the helicopters ain’t laughing.
Bob In Pacifica
So true.
The whole kerfluffle over Rush buying into the NFL was translated by the true believers as to whether or not Rush is a racist, and they were threatening to sue anyone who called him a racist. These are people who are openly racist who want to deny Rush’s racism. There are plenty of rich, white (and probably) racist owners in the NFL. They just don’t want someone being a loudmouth and bringing attention to the ownership and alienating half the audience.
These people can’t tell the difference between socialism and fascism. Why? Because they read Jonah Goldberg and watch Fox.
There is a group that wants to rewrite the Bible to remove all “liberal” concepts. They want Jesus to be a mean, vicious SOB that wants to get even with sinners. That’s what is going on inside the bubble.
Insanity.
Brick Oven Bill
Re: Conservatism (aka Classic Liberalism) and modern Liberalism
Tim F. recently had a very thought-provoking post on the contemporary definitions of Liberalism and Conservatism. I stated my opinion that Conservatism, in the past year, has been transformed into a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. This probably is ‘fringe’ in 2009, but in reality is Classic Liberalism. IIRC, my take on modern Liberalism was:
“A Belief System seeking to impose Artificial Law and suppress the free exchange of ideas.”
This still sounds good and is in contrast to Classic Liberalism as embodied by the seven Liberal Arts; Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Physics (formerly Astronomy), which freed the minds of men from the constraints of the Catholic Church-1500s, and heralded the Founding of America. This was the ‘5000-Year Leap’, referring to the gifts we have received from the Greeks.
We have since defined the transformation of the Catholic Church-1500s (‘Galileo, you Heretic!’) to modern Liberalism (‘Rush Limbaugh, you Racist!’) as the ‘500-Year Slouch’ in the Balloon Juice comments section. But the Catholic Church-1500s gave women no voice. This had to wait for the French Revolution, where women were granted suffrage for that short period of very bloody time right before Napoleon became Dictator.
DougJ had a post on race yesterday, to which I added hard academic data from an organization called ‘Blacks in Higher Education’. Then I respectfully referenced the realities of Zimbabwe, Haiti, and the consequences of their revolutions on their populations. Anne Laurie responded:
“Whomever’s writing the BoB spoofs this week must be tired, because the angling-for-another-timeout is getting waaay too obvious.”
Therefore, the transformation of Revolutionary France’s short period of very bloody universal equality to modern Liberalism is hereby defined as the ‘220-Year Twitch’.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@AkaDad:
the…scanning…of…the…certs begins in 5, 4, 3, 2..
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Jay C:
It’s begun, but they haven’t reached the tinfoil and pocket lint stage yet. I won’t acknowledge the Wingularity’s existence until that happens, on a mass scale.
bago
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Uhm, that’s the homeschooler movement. When I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music or watch secular TV.
People who aren’t going to deal with reality have a very strong incentive to make sure nobody else they control does either.
MattF
The wingnut mindset isn’t so much a matter of some particular knowledge or insight as an attitude towards knowledge and insight. Basically, it’s a “our leader is always right” attitude, and yes, I’m resisting the urge to write that in German.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
So is this process a virtualized form of secession? Movement conservatives would really like to do what the CSA states did in 1861, but that isn’t practical so instead they are going to settle for the substitute of seceding from the consensus reality which the rest of the country adheres to.
Reason60
I regularly read and correspond with bloggers and commenters on conservative sites, and it does seem to me that the study by Democracy Corps was dead on- that the conservative Tea Bag movement is not motivated by a simple factor like racism, but something deeper and more profound- they really do believe sincerely that America is falling into tyranny and Socialism, and only they can see it like the end of the body Snatchers where Kevin McCarthy is wandering through traffic shouting incoherently at the oblivious drivers.
It is sad and ironic how this destroys any attempt at rapprochement- any discussion of seemingly objective reality like the budget, instantly spins into a discussion of Bill Ayres, FEMA camps, and every sort of black helicopter theory.
Alex Massie in The Daily Beast had a good item yesterday where he said from the British Tory view, it was like “your favorite cousin had a nervous breakdown, found religion, and became an evangelist for an apocalyptic cult prophesying the imminent end of the world as we know and love it.”
When people become convinced that they are standing alone against implacable evil, shared ground and reason become pretty difficult things to reach.
Atlliberal
The whole thing was fascinating to read. They really have created their own reality.
It never occurs to them that the reason nobody else covers the story they are so intent on pushing is because it isn’t true.
Brachiator
@alien radio:
I think the defining moment was the Terry Schiavo case. Despite easy access to accurate information regarding this case, many conservative instead turned to Limbaugh, Hannity and their ilk as their sole source of information, reinforced by conservative blogs.
Hell, see late night UFO/conspiracy talk radio or The X Files. Even though “the truth” is supposedly out there, only a few special glamorous people have really figured it out, and even though huge, powerful interests work hard to suppress the evidence of what is really going on, when “the people” finally accept and understand what is happening, glorious nirvana will fart all over the universe.
The GOP is plugging into the wingnut variation of this stuff not only with Rush and the other Limboids, but with the ongoing adventures of Sarah “Rogue” Palin as she travels to the Galtian outposts of Real America.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@bago:
Same concept, yes. They’re probably going to crib from the homeschooler movement every step of the way. But given that there’s probably a very large overlap between homeschoolers and wingnuts (no offense intended to any homeschooled non-wingnuts), this comes as no surprise.
Svensker
@Brachiator:
Really? I hope I live long enough to see that.
Ambergris
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
That sounds like “silent secession”.
Jack
This.
It’s like attempting to understand the shorthand speech of gamers or RPG aficionados, without the relevant reference points.
MacsenMifune
You want to talk insanity, check out the post David Neiwert did over at Crooks and Liars, Militia madness Online game. Its a post about an online game where Obama makes himself dictator, and all the chicken hawks fight back. The game reads like a really bad fan fiction.
Steve Balboni
I’m really surprised to see that one old white southern dude surveying a bunch other old white southern dudes on race and politics reveals no racial prejudice in old white southern dudes.
Did Pricewaterhouse help out on this?
Jack
@Brachiator:
There’s a prehistory in NDCiC and the Birchers; they are the initial conditions upon which the movement specially depends.
New Yorker
So the right in this country becomes more and more like North Korea, with its own reality completely detached from the rest of the world.
I have a wingnut uncle who is like this. I try comparing the deranged stuff he believes in to 9/11 Truth, but he just doesn’t get it, even though it’s the same conspiratorial mindset driving each.
cleek
of course they do. most groups do, to one degree or another.
New Yorker
Also, I never thought I’d see movement conservatism in this country ever embrace the most trendy left-wing postmodern ideas about how reality is just a social construct, but it appears they’ve done just that.
What we need is Alan Sokal to pull a hoax on these people, but you know they’d just dismiss it because Sokal is an elitist edumacated lib’rul.
Jackie
I spent some time this week talking to a woman who is spending hours every day fighting health reform. She is neither stupid nor demented. She was shocked to hear the numbers from the study of unnecessary deaths due to lack of insurance and the number of bankruptcies that happen to insured people due to uncovered health care costs. I was shocked that anyone who cares so passionately on an issue could have managed to avoid that information. I asked her to try to find a solution to that problem that suited her better and fight for that. I don’t think an oppostion with actual alternative solutions is a bad thing.
There are plenty of people who think Fox news is news.
She and I will never agree on the solution but at least now she understands that there is a serious problem. Just maybe next time they rile her up she might double check the facts. The 24 percenters are impervious, we have to fight for that next 20 percent.
Jack
@New Yorker:
One of the wellsprings of the movement is the Yellow Fringe (and the “Law of the Admiralty”). It’s a remarkably persistent meme.
superdestroyer
In case people have not noticed, conservative and republicans are irrelevant to the political process. The progressive liberals along with the tradiational power blocs in the Democratic party have total control of policy in the U.S.
Instead of worrying about an irrelevant political groups that demographics will eventually eliminate totally, why not discuss why the Democrats seem totally incapable of accepting responsibility for their own policies and decisions.
Why are progressive bloggers spending so much time fighting the old political battles against an irrelevant opponent? Is it funnier to bad mouth Republicans instead of thinking what the future of the U.S. as a one party state that will be majority black and Hispanic will be like?
cleek
LOLZ
monkeyboy
Freedom through Authoritarianism
I believe that a lot of their perspective has to do with their belief in social order – that an ordered society is natural because it follows from the rules of nature or God. Most everybody should know their place in society and stay there to prevent friction or conflict. The people at the top are naturally better and deserve to be there and likewise for those at the bottom. The sole purpose of government is to police this order to keep the lesser people from stealing from or assaulting their betters. Any taxes that pays for government outside of the police action is theft.
To have a Negro president is about as natural as cats mating with dogs.
Many promote this with their take on Libertarianism (basically Social Darwinism without the explicit racism) with the strong dose of Authoritarianism need to preserve social order. Only with a strong Authority are people free to live in their given place in life.
Freedom?
Jack
@superdestroyer:
Because armed, passionate, motivated people (misinformed by mercenary pundits) who comprise up to 25% percent of the population are not irrelevant. Especially if they believe themselves to be politically irrelevant.
me
Does this mean we can place Rush under house arrest and ban him from publishing anything for the rest of his life? If not, you’re full of shit.
Woodrowfan
North Korea is a good example. These people are now in a cult….
Jordan
I would rather say that they never checked out if their word comprehension complys with dictionary/ majority established meanings, not that they are creating new language/new reality. They grew up in less educated rural areas where dictionary use was not part of the dialogue, hence GOP rules in rural areas. Education is what makes developement/comprehension more reliable understanding of each other trough using established word meaning. By using the meanings from one single source, a dictionary, will lessen miscomunication-a major cause of fights and division.
On the other hand, i would say that this is also a continuation of upset that started in ’60 with baby boomers comming into power today. They are new ‘wise old man’ that are abdicating a previous generation in power. It is a continuation of a strugle between ‘anarchists'(GOP’s smaller government) and ‘hippies’ (Dem’s equality and cooperation/ environment awarness) that are comming into power right now.
Roger Moore
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I think it’s worse than that. The South seceded from consensus reality before seceding from the USA, and the former led to the latter. Southern newspapers printed outright lies about the stated aims of Lincoln and the Republican party, especially that they intended to abolish slavery ASAP. It was that distortion of reality that eventually led to secession.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@me:
You do know that tragically Galileo never got to own the NFL franchise he always dreamed of, don’t you? Known Truth! And Columbus never made it to Mars either! The slimy venom-dripping tentacles of Liberal Fascism reach more deeply into history than you can possibly imagine.
Jamey
Democracy Corps is wrong. I believe Karl Rove has the real numbers.
Jack
@Reason60:
And this has been the core and vital fiction of movement conservatism since Skousen and the JBS. Movement conservatism (which is not actually conservative, but deeply revolutionary) never really triumphed over the New England/New York establishment which dominated the GOP even through the Reagan years (although Reagan did speak in their idiom on a national stage).
It’s only been since Clinton that the revolutionaries (the early Patriot Movement) began to re-assimilate into a GOP that was increasingly becoming the nation’s first explicitly religious party of a continental reach.
Brick Oven Bill
Obama has directed politicians not to listen to Rush, me. If Obama had the power to silence Rush, he surely would.
But, as of yet he cannot, as the Founders embraced the Greek art of Rhetoric, codified in the 1st Amendment
Superdestroyer is incorrect in that the Founders embraced Natural Law, the protection of talent and virtue, from Artificial Law, those of wealth and birth. This is codified in the 2nd Amendment.
As our use of fossil fuels has caused a world population bubble, in the midst of a paper currency bubble, and reproductive medical advancements, it is impossible to predict future demographics.
Morbo
@me: The fact that you’ve refuted him only further proves his point.
T. Scheisskopf
“Sheeples”.
Follow that word back to its progenator and you will learn much about the collective mindset of the whack-a-doodles.
Hint: said progenator made his bones by posting drunken, obscene and mis-spelled rants on alt.conspiracy and alt.ufo. Much to the ceaseless delight of the rest of us. One of his posts was a bright, shiny new thing for us. Hours, nay, DAYS of fun, however mindless that fun might be.
Bubblegum Tate
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
You know who else never got to own an NFL team? Jesus.
Brachiator
@superdestroyer:
Hah! You make the funny.
Fatcats with fat checkbooks have near total control of policy in the U.S.
And progressives who believe that they are central to anything are seriously deluded.
adolphus
Would I be too much the history geek if I pointed out that Galileo’s troubles with the Pope were in the 1600’s? And don’t look to hard at the Galileo trial or you might learn his crime was less heresy than incompetent court political gamesmanship. You can’t refer to an avatar of the Pope as “Simplicio” without getting some push back, regardless of what words you put in his mouth.
Also, the more I pay attention to the current populist right, the more it reminds me of the left in the 80’s. Maybe earlier and later, too, but I was more active with it in the 80’s. Other bloggers and commentators have pointed out the similarities, the strange amorphous protests at once against everything and nothing in particular, the same reliance and this cocoon like mentality. Back then most of us, at least the people I hung out with and went to DC to protest with, were convinced that only we knew what was really going on and if people just knew what we knew they’d agree with us. Back then you had to read the right magazines or you were being lied to (the old Mother Jones being the preferred periodical before that Ramparts, and possibly the Village Voice) as a matter of course. I am not arguing the respects merits of the policy or political points, merely comparing the mentalities.
Of course the HUGE difference is that back then the media outlets for “The Truth” were small, marginalized, and unpopular. Nowadays the right’s version of this crap is mainstream and being shouted by national politicians. There will always be these isolated cocoons of nuttiness, but the legitimacy conferred on them by national “leaders” worries me. (makes me a little jealous)
smiley
This seems appropriate for this thread (via Benen).
Mike in NC
The photo of the teabagger in DC with the sign that read, “Thank you FOX News for keeping us infromed” was priceless.
me
He had a point?
Chad N Freude
@New Yorker: Sokal provoked a defensive response from Social Text. A similar attack on the Rightist Religion would not elicit dismissal but a violent counter-attack.
Your post provoked me to go pull Sokal’s book out of the dusty stash of books I have to keep forever and riffle the pages. Science, intellectualism, frat boy prank, all rolled into one hilarious take-down.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Bubblegum Tate:
Blasphemer! Heretic!
Everybody knows that Jesus owns the Dallas Cowboys.
pragmatic idealist
The modern “strict constitutional constructionist” is like, and often the same person as, the “biblical literalist”.
In both cases the appeal to past authority obviates any need to make an actual real world case for the espoused policy. Both tend to encourage ignorance over knowledge and experiential over empirical truth.
What shocked me, in my decades of close personal experience with them, was how ignorant Christian fundamentalists were of the Bible and strict Constitutional constructionists of American history. The Bible and the Constitution are symbols that mean whatever they want them to mean. Too much actual knowledge would disturb this function.
The “Truth” they value is the justification of a static system. The truth I value is the product of ceaselessly acquiring knowledge. Their minds are closed and they can admit no error.
Chad N Freude
the difference being that Galileo was hereticized for asserting facts.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@smiley:
Funny, they didn’t say anything about a cute dog and a big honking cat teaming up to drag the tree all the way to Washington?
wilfred
Hmm. Now that sounds like a definition of intellectual arrogance as applied to politics. After all, being a know it all can’t only apply to the members of one political party, can it? How about a little critical thinking once in a while?
After all, it wasn’t the conservatives who perfected the ‘veal pen’ technique, charmingly manifested as:
Barney Frank did pretty much the same when he urged gay people to forego their right to peaceful assembly.
How about a little critical thinking once in a while?
Chad N Freude
@me: I can picture Rush locked up in his own home muttering “But still, they’re black.”
PeakVT
that these folks really are speaking their own language, and have a complete different language, reality, and collective understanding.
This could also describe the bubble containing the Villagers and the major DC policy organizations.
Cat Lady
@Mike in NC:
… and God Bless Amercia.
The Grand Panjandrum
What is most fascinating about this “revelation” is that it isn’t just a bunch of toothless hillbillies lost in the mountains of West Virginia, go read this gem at Big Hollywood:
He goes on to freak out over Fergie and Serena Williams being part of ownership. Really worth a read if you want to see another example of perpetual victimhood and boohooing because “they just don’t understand” the real truth.
Sasha
@Atlliberal:
Are you kidding? The fact that the MSM is deliberately hiding the truth PROVES that what they believe is true.
Chad N Freude
@wilfred: The first blockquote is a conclusion about the mentality of a political movement. The second block quote and the Barney Frank reference are about two politicians telling their fellow Democrats that they’re not accomplishing anything with their tactics and are doing things detrimental to their goals. I fail to see the similarity.
mclaren
For an entirely different perspective, consider historian Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State.
Van Creveld has pointed out that the era of dominance of the Westphalian nation-state now appears at an end. Everywhere we observe the failure of legitimacy of the nation-state for a wide variety of reasons.
Militarily, nation-states no longer have a monopoly on massive lethal force, as 9/11 and the Madrid train bombings show. The most basic function of a nation-state involves protecting its own population, and if it can’t do that, what good is it?
Too, the modern nation-state has systematically eroded its own legitimacy as it has progressively alienated its own citizenry. Examples abound: consdering the case of post-1980s America, we observe that America harasses its own citizens with a “War on Drugs” that most citizens view as a pointless and counterproductive. America incarcerates vast numbers of its own citizens, a far greater percentage than any other country on earth, in a pointless wasteful process which convicts and executes innocent people and wastes incredible amounts of money — all to no purpose, since America doesn’t have lower crime rates than other comparable first world countries. America has a gigantic wasteful military that it sends around the world to fight lost wars in nameless third world hellholes for no discernible reason. America’s political system seems sclerotic, unable to “make anything bad stop happening, and unable to make any good start happening,” in Bill Maher’s words. Failed pointless wars go on and on and on, crazy policies like the War on Drugs continue seemingly infinitely, gobbling up limitless amounts of cash and government resources, while genuine reform seems permanently out of reach, with politicans gerrymandered into impregnable electoral districts for life and lobbyists permanently in control of Congress.
For these reasons the perceived legitimacy of the American government has faded badly. Congress enjoys a 21% approval rating, which is truly startling for a democracy. Fewer and fewer of the population votes in each election. Clearly, something is terribly wrong.
It seems clear that this crisis in the legitimacy of the American state (due to technological and social reasons, not due to the actions of any given political party) is making itself manifest as an opposition party which refuses to accept the legitimacy of the party in power. We saw this first in the 1990s, when Republicans declared that Bill Clinton was “not their president.” Then in 2000, Democrats described Dubya as the “President select” and refused to accept his political legitimacy because of the problems with the ballots in Florida. Then in 2004, dark rumours of electroal fraud in Ohio swirled around the presidential election and Democrats became more convinced than ever that Dubya had stolen the election by electronic voting fraud. And now of course we see armies of teabaggers declaring that Obama was born in Kenya and is not the legitimate president.
These all seems symptoms of a deeper malaise, the failure of the nation-state in the 21st century to meet the needs of the population. Nation-states today cannot keep their population safe from terrorism (no one can, it’s an impossible task) and the draconian police-state lunacy perpetrated by the TSA only further destroys the credibility and legitimacy of the state. nation-states cannot provide jobs for their population as skilled jobs get outsourced to the third world. Nation-states cannot make a dent in social problems like chronic poverty, the existence of the underclass, or drug abuse. Nation-states have become to bureaucratically sclerotic that they cannot seem to end the pontless lost wars they start, and they cannot decrease the size of the corrupt oligopolies (insurance companies, the military-industrial complex, giant media monopolies, cable TV and internet regional dupolies, etc.) that have captured the government.
So the average citizen must ask: what good is the government? As it becomes increasingly hard to answer, in the face of systemic failures like the ongoing failure to respond adequately to the New Orlean flood or the continuing crisis of our broken and seemingly unreformable health care system and military and congress, citizens find no answer. And the decline of the perceived legitimacy of the nation-state manifests itself as teabagging or “Bush derangement syndrome.”
IndyLib
Conservatives are sad, strange little people an they have my pity.
Chad N Freude
@The Grand Panjandrum: Yes, it’s sarcasm, but Sondheim should sue for defamation.
athena
I know this alternate reality to be real. Just this week I met a well-educated man (a physician) and his wife (a manager) who whispered the name Milton Friedman with awe and claimed that tax cuts make the economy grow, so Obama’s doing it all wrong. He kept saying I don’t know anything about “economics”, so we should just believe him, since he does. He literally argued the supply-side gospel.
I thought the Laffer Curve had been so thoroughly discredited that even Republicans didn’t mention it anymore.
Beauzeaux
There’s very little difference between the conservative fringe and a religious cult like Heaven’s Gate, except that the conservative fringe has a really powerful set of megaphones.
calling all toasters
I am so wanting to prank the next teabaggerpalooza.
My sign (maybe):
Support freedom/boycott the
Nobama
Feminazi
League
…although I may have to misspell “boycott” to pass muster.
calling all toasters
@mclaren: Shorter mclaren: False equivalencies just got a brand new coat of historical inevitability!
gocart mozart
balloon-juice.com/?p=28341#comment-1405146
My take on B.O.B. is that he likes to fuck goats.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@mclaren:
This sounds like a carbon copy of Shield of Achilles by Phlip Bobbitt, right down to the (gauging from the Amazon reviews) turgid writing style. Have you by any chance read both books, and if so how would you compare and contrast them?
Brick Oven Bill
I have never fucked a goat gocart mozart. By the way, your mom says hi.
DougJ
Then in 2000, Democrats described Dubya as the “President select” and refused to accept his political legitimacy because of the problems with the ballots in Florida.
You have to admit, it was strange to have judges selected by one candidate’s father decide the election in that candidate’s favor. And, yes, if the shoe were on the other foot I’d say the same thing.
We’re actually have a local scandal, not of that sort, but involving Republicans who are getting indicted/arrested very close to the election, by a Democratic DA. The guy is a straight shooter by all accounts, and the timing of the arrests/indictments is explainable (basically, the investigation has been going on for 15 months and there’s been a new break about every month or so). But it still gives me pause.
So I don’t buy the stuff about people being paranoid only when their side is on the receiving end. The Bush v Gore decision was strange, inappropriate, and unsettling, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on.
me
You may not blow goats, but you blew that joke.
gocart mozart
@monkeyboy:
See Bill, Brick Oven.
Brachiator
@athena:
Bad ideas never die. They don’t even fade away.
Consider the Republicans, who look at the failures of deregulation and call for … more deregulation.
Church Lady
As opposed to the left wing media echo chamber, the one usually on display at this particular blog? I’m shocked, shocked, shocked that there is gambling in this establishment.
Neutron Flux
@Jackie: This is exactly what I see when I talk to my co-workers. We all work at a nuclear power plant and they are very smart people.
However, they just believe. They pass out the constitution amongst themselves and interpret it any way required to conform to their expectations. They fully expect a revolution while being 100% convinced that the 10 million vote delta was an anomoly.
It is well and truly depressing, but I agree, we must continue to engage.
gocart mozart
@me:
Did you like the pie my mom gave you?
gocart's mom
@Brick Oven Bill:
I don’t like you. You have a very small penis.
AhabTRuler
@Neutron Flux: I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear that the nation’s nuclear technicians are expecting, perhaps even hoping for, a revolution!
I can hope that the security background checks weeded out the truly dangerous nutters, but I fear that is somewhat idealistic.
Mirthless Chopper - Frmrly TheFountainHead
Fix’t it for ya!
Will
PUMAs suffer from this level of derangement, too. I cannot count the amount of conversations I have had with those who claimed to have been loyal, liberal Democrats for all of their 60+ years, but abandoned the party when Obama came in and started re-regulating industry, re-opening diplomacy with our enemies, attempting to expand health care, protecting civil rights, combating global warming, and ending torture. I tried to explain to them that it appeared they had belonged to the wrong party their entire lives. But they always just repeated the same over again.
I understand that they might have just been lying to me. But the amount of people I met like this, and the specificity of their Democratic membership history as told to me, made it seem more likely that a latent racism had driven them so insane, they not only abandoned every policy principle they ever held dear, they actually forgot what the platforms of each party actually were.
AhabTRuler
@Church Lady: Where is this left-wing media that you speak of?
Brachiator
@Neutron Flux:
I noted in another thread an aspect of this that I had never seen before. During the primary and general election season, most of the people in my office would openly talk politics. But recently, the most wingnutty employees (including a guy who can’t start his day without going to the Michelle Malkin site) refuse to talk politics with the larger group, especially when they are shown to be wrong about something. Instead, they huddle together for solace and refuse to let anything disturb their increasingly insular wingnut world view.
mai naem
Isn’t the plural of sheeple and not sheeples?
AhabTRuler
Ask ’em what they think of Amendment IX (“many machines on IX”).
gocart's mom
@Brick Oven Bill:
You have a very small penis
jetan
Am I the only one that is concerned for Brick Oven Bill? His condition appears to be deteriorating.
Mirthless Chopper - Frmrly TheFountainHead
@jetan: Would you deny us such delicious pie!?
Neutron Flux
@Brachiator: Yes. I talk politics to only a very small group of neocons these days. The rest have just went “quiet”.
Interestingly to me anyway, is that the quiet ones despise the Republican party almost as much as the do the Democrats.
W just put them in a bad place and now they are just hatin’ on everything and everyone.
Linkmeister
O/T, but in what thread did the “scanning the documents” trope start? I got here late (damned Yankees! Damned Angels defense!) and missed it.
Napoleon
There is no way if this condition last any substantial time that it does not lead to either great social unrest in this country, including a significant level of domestic terrorist activity or possibly civil war.
Bubblegum Tate
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Oh, that’s Jesus? I thought that was Jesus’s asshole cousin.
@The Grand Panjandrum:
I just read and laughed at that BigHollyBlart piece. For starters, the unforgivable wackness that is Ja Rule wrote and performed that stupid-ass line (and weren’t the BigBlartyBarts all up in arms about accurately quoting people a day or two ago?). Secondly, they made it sound like the assault on musical decency that is Fergie was backstage shotgunning a case of beer before going on stage and pissing herself, which simply isn’t true. And finally, those useless r-tards just made me defend Ja Rule, J-Lo, and Fergie, which is an unforgivable sin.
@athena:
No, no. The failure of supply-side economics is indeed central to their point that what this country needs to do to repair the horrific damage that supply-side economics has wrought is double down on supply side economics.
AhabTRuler
@jetan: Yes, he goes on endlessly about pie. It’s not healthy to be so, well, obsessed about a foodstuff in this way. I am afraid he might try to assassinate Sara Lee.
DougJ
As opposed to the left wing media echo chamber, the one usually on display at this particular blog? I’m shocked, shocked, shocked that there is gambling in this establishment.
With all due respect, a lot of your comments are good examples of conservative alternative reality.
AhabTRuler
@Linkmeister: Now It Can Be Told
Neutron Flux
@AhabTRuler: Security is tight. Yearly MMPI’s. Constant behavior observations. Intrusive drug and alcohol testing.
I do not worry that they will attempt anything at work, but am sure that they would not hesitate to be at the front of some sort of social “movement”.
They are my friends and I have known them and their families for over 20 years, but it is worrisome, man.
Worrisome.
sloan
I think what we’ve got now is an entire generation raised on the Ronaldus Magnus mythology. They know that American history began on Jan 20, 1981. They’re all decorated veterans who fought in the One Day War, a.k.a. the Republican Revolution on November 8, 1994. And they know that America was, is, and always will be a center-right nation.
They know Republicans are the majority – it’s just hard to tell right now because there are more Democrats in office. (But that’s irrelevant because they only got elected by acting conservative.)
I don’t speak Reaganese so it’s difficult for me to understand their truths. I was recently informed by a co-worker that Pepsi is destroying traditional marriage. I responded in English and it went downhill from there. It didn’t help that I was drinking a Pepsi at the time.
I can’t put myself in their shoes so I often wonder what it must be like to be so supremely overconfident in your world view and see it fail over and over. My Generation Ronaldus friends all believed that McCain/Palin would destroy Obama on election day and that all the polls were liberal, lying MSM propaganda and that only those fluent in Reaganese knew the real truth: Obama was down 15 points but it was a secret because pollsters wouldn’t talk to Real Americans. This was a known fact in their world. It was not debatable and to suggest otherwise was like talking to a brick wall. They had “THE MATH”. Case closed.
Right now they know that 2010 will be 1994 and 2012 will be 1980. Newtus Maximus has seen the prophecies. Sara Magna will mount a golden moose and ride naked onto the Republican National Convention stage and give her acceptance speech while speaking in tongues.
AhabTRuler
@DougJ: I disagree. CL is more a “false equivalency” centrist.
Napoleon
@Roger Moore:
You have it exactly right.
DougJ
I disagree. CL is more a “false equivalency” centrist.
Perhaps. She’s one of a handful of commenters here who consistently attack the posters and other commenters for things the poster and other commenters haven’t actually said.
You’re right that not everyone who does this is a conservative though. It’s a kind of craziness that correlates with conservatism but not perfectly.
Mirthless Chopper - Frmrly TheFountainHead
This is off topic but Sully linked to this fascinating portfolio of Horror Photography by Joshua Hoffine, and I suspect it’s something other BJers would find interesting. Also, Halloween Bitchez.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Provocative idea. But I think it’s more that the South created their own reality, and then acted on it’s “inevitability.”
One of the better books on the subject is Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis, by by Donald E. Reynolds (available through amazon and other booksellers).
Reynolds makes the point that as prospects for Republican success in the November elections increased, Southern editors began to ratchet up the idea that Lincoln and other abolitionists intended to immediately abolish slavery.
If this works, a google books excerpt should be available here.
books.google.com/books?id=PpkeIsPeAC4C&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=Southern+newspapers+and+se…
smiley
This might get interesting.
I think I just heard gunfire in my neighborhood. Really. It happened right after Oklahoma scored a TD so maybe it was just Sooners shooting their guns in the air in celebration. Have to see if the cops show up.
Tim P.
Conservatism really is a religion at this point. It brings to mind Dawkins’ thinking on how Christianity has been so successful and has propagated itself so widely by containing as a key component of its ideology such a powerful mechanism for dismissing, a priori, any criticism leveled against it: the devil’s temptation. Anything that questions the group consensus is dangerous and needs to be stamped out, on pain of spiritual/societal decline. Even listening with an open mind counts as weakness and giving in to ‘the enemy’ – thus ignorance becomes a virtue. Sound familiar?
There are many similarities: In conservatism, you have the same persecution complex, the same idea of ‘articles of faith’ (known truths), the same hierarchal structure (with Fox as the Church and Rush Limbaugh as Ted Haggard, etc.), the same need to create an insulated society in which one deals as much as possible with fellow believers (manifested in homeschooling, Christian/conservative business directories, e-mail chains and the like).
I don’t know where this will all end up, but it’s certainly a little scary.
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
@Linkmeister: The thread about balloon boy titled now it can be told. Look for comments from Michael gass
pragmatic idealist
Sloan reminds me of a book by a sociologist who infiltrated a doomsday cult. He got to know the members well. When the end of the world didn’t arrive on schedule most did not have their faith shaken despite the fact that the world’s ending on that particular day was the central tenant of their faith. He concluded that the more committed a member was to the organization before the failure, the more likely they were to be committed afterwards.
I always assumed that the followers of Miller that gave away all their possessions before the great disappointment of 1844 were largely the ones who claimed that the end of the world had indeed begun on that date and incorporated that belief in creating the Seventh Day Adventists.
There is literally no point in debating the true believer because evidence and facts are not relevant to them.
Chad N Freude
@jetan: One can only hope.
dadanarchist
These nuts are now soliciting help in writing their wingnut warpr0n fantasy:
United States of Earth: Talented Writers/Bloggers Wanted
Seems even better than the WaPo contest.
mclaren
@ ThatLeftTurnInABQ asked:
Yes, I’ve read both books. Van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the Nation-State dates from 1999, three years earlier than Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles, so frankly the Bobbitt book seems derivative. In fact, the Bobitt book seems like a combination of Van Creveld’s The Transformation of War and The Rise and Decline of the Nation-State. However, the Bobbitt book is a distinctly neocon flavor of derivative, which gives it an entirely different slant from the Van Creveld books.
The differences between the Bobitt book and Van Creveld’s can be summed in several points:
Van Creveld’s book does not make any predictions, even implicit ones. By contrast, the Bobbitt book suggests that the world is headed away from nation-states and toward market-states, and he gives three possible future scenarios. Think Chicago School of Economics Milton Friedman boosterism combined with the Project for a new American Century. Given Bruce Sterling’s blogging of the collapse of so many traditional markets (newspapers, the automobile industry, the TV networks, etc.) in the face of the onslaught of open source peer production of the kind we find in Wikipedia and the Arduino, Bobitt’s implicit predicton of a move to global corporate governances seems unlikely. We’re headed for something new economically and socially, but at present no one can say what it is. Certainly phenomena like Wikipedia and linux, along with the collapse of conventional top-down corporate-style hierarchies like Microsoft and the U.S. military and their pervasive inability to accomplish simple tasks (in Microsoft’s case, write OS software that works, in the U.S. military’s case, win a war against barefooted tribesman who use bolt-action rifles) suggests that some kind of huge social disruption in the works. Giant institutions that don’t get the job done may continue on for years, but eventually they fall apart of sheer unworkability. Note that Bobbitt wrote back in 2001, when the utter failure of the last 8 years of massive deregulation had not yet become obvious. Bobbitt’s book plays very poorly in that respect today, especially his calls for less capital investment by government in infrastructure and his repeated urging of less regulation of the free market. We’ve seen what that resulted in after the Wall Street subprime meltdown. Van Creveld calls for no such measures: he is concerned purely with societal transformations as a result of technology.
Another big difference between Bobbitt and Van Creveld is that Van Creveld is one of the pioneers of 4GW theory in modern warfare, along with William S. Lind and John Boyd. As such, Van Creveld views the decline of the nation-state as a byproduct of larger historical forces. Van Creveld also comes off as intensely skeptical of the value of the current conventional first world military, particularly the American military. Bobbitt appears to view certain wars as especially crucial in history and thus his view of history seems more conventional than Van Creveld’s or Linds. I.e., Bobbitt believes that tradtional war is a basic transformative force in history. Bobbitt is a big booster of the alleged efficacy of the U.S. military. He sees the WW I-WW II “long war” as especially crucial, while Van Creveld and Lind view that era as marking the end of conventional warfare and the rise of 4GW with the concomitant decline of the nation-state, together with the eclipse of the U.S. military as an effective fighting force when faced with modern 4GW warfare.
Reasons to argue against Bobbitt’s view of traditional war as the engine of history abound. Some of the most transformative social events in the 20th century involved lost wars. Mao lost 90% of his People’s Army on the Long March, yet he ultimately emerged victorious — the first and perhaps best example of 4GW n the 20th century. The Vietnamese militarily lost against both the French and the Americans, yet they ultimately defeated both nation-states. The Algerians consistently lost every military engagement, yet France eventually pulled out of Algeria and the country won its independence.
So Bobbitt’s view of conventional warfare as an essential transformative force in history has some problems. It works better as you go farther back in history, but even then has some problems. For example, when the Athenians surrendered to the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta forced them to tear down the Long Wall and set up Thirty Tyrants as puppet rulers in Athens, who promptly instituted a Stalinoid purge replete with mass murder and enemies list, etc. The Athenians revolted within a few years and overthrew the Thirty Tyrants, casting them out and reinstating a democracy, so once again even historically the allegedly decisive role of traditional war seems doubtful.
A third distinction invovles Bobbitt’s neocon Chicago School of Economics style emphasis on free markets as a crucial driving force in the development of modern societies. Neither Van Creveld nor Lind view free markets as especially crucial in shaping history compared to technology or the long-term growth of social trends like universal education and communication technologies like the printing press and the free public library and the telegraph and the internet, and there seems little evidence that long-term social transformations have been engineered directly by the free market itself eo ipso. Democracy and free capital market appear to have co-evolved, and in states like China and Singapore, the degree to which free capital markets give rise to democracy (as Bobbitt alleges) seems dubious. Moreover, as oil prices have risen, global trade has declined, and this seems likely to accelerate in the near future. Already many Chinese factories that used to ship cheap goods to the U.S. (and many other countries) have shut down to the high cost of shipping as a result of skyrocketing oil prices. In the future, regional manufacturing is much more likely to dominate over globalized trade, a fact which Bobitt’s analysis seems to overlook. Eventually, as oil prices reach the $400-a-barrel range, globalized trade will become practical only for extraordinarily high-value items. There will be such an economic incentive to manufacture goods locally to avoid ruinous global shipping costs that the dreams of globalized free trade doyens seem destined to be dashed.
So the three scenarios Bobbitt gives at the end of his book, enumerating possible future market-states, seems already out of date. Global market-states appear increasingly unlikely in a world of sky high oil prices. On the contrary — van Creveld’s point that nation-states appear to be shattering into smaller tribal units seems a more likely scenario.
Bobbitt more explictly credits the modern European nation-state with most of the innovations that have improved quality of life throughout the world over the last several hundred years. Some of Bobbitt’s arguments in favor of this point seem valid, others less persuasive. The invention of the scientific method does not appear to derive from the rise of the modern nation-state: it appeared first among monarchic theocratic European governments. Arguably, the scientific method has done more to improve the quality of life of most people on earth than any other invention. The creation of market capitalism dates back to the Isis cult during the Roman Empire, when the temple prostitutes generated so much wealth that it was necessary to set up a banking system to invest the money. Current capital markets were essentially mature by the time of the 14th century, when international letters of credit and most of the sophisticated financial instruments we take for granted (such as financial derivatives and options) today were invented. So there’s mixed evidence about the alleged role of market capitalism in driving history.
Bobbitt’s The Shield Of Achilles is also much more of a traditional far-right Republican laissez faire argument for less taxation, more presidential authority, less public investment in infrastructure, and so on than Van Creveld’s book. The Van Creveld text simply survey’s history and reaches some conclusions about the decline of the legitimacy of the current nation-state. van Creveld emphasizes the technological aspect of the transformation of war, which Bobbitt only deals with tangentially. Bobbitt’s book, with its (dubious) emphasis on free market capitalism as the alleged driver of history, masks a strong agenda familiar from the Republican right — cut government spending, reduce regulation, and so on. In short, more war, more deregulaton, pretty much the whole Bush-Cheney agenda for that 8 years. Van Creveld reaches a much more skeptical conclusion about the value of arms in the 21st century. He judges the wisest course of action in most cases for the first world to disengage from third world hellholes like Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s worth noting that Bobbitt hails from Texas where he has degrees in constitutional law and history, while Van Creveld is an Israeli historian. If you imagine a Texas Republican writing a book on history, you get the idea. Van Creveld has no such ideological or economic axe to grind. Bobbitt worked for the Bush White House on national security issues, so you can imagine his mindset. All war all the time, PNAC, neocon dreams of global dominance, and so on. Van Creveld has voiced the utmost skepticism about America’s ill-fated “Global War On Terror,” and described Dubya’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 as one of the great strategic blunders in history.
Ideologically and militarily, therefore, Bobbitt’s book has a lot more in common with grand delusional schemes like Thomas P. M. Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map, which essentially boils down to a neocon wet dream of global hegemony by America with a few of its first-world buddies. Although Bobbitt’s Shield Of Achilles was written prior to 9/11, as the book went to press Bobbitt added a 4-page postscript in which he enthusiastically describes 9/11 as an opportunity to form a grand new coalition of the developed nations against non-state terrorism. We’ve seen how well that worked out in Afghanistan, and of course the loss of civil liberties in Britain and America as a result of this unworkable “long war” with no end against a nebulous enemy with no face (“global terrorism,” in which America has defined such harmless groups as PETA as “terrorists,” and the Pentagon has characterized non-violent political protesters as “low-level terrorism”) seems curiously untroubling to a scholar of constitutional law like Bobbitt. Par for the course for a hardline neocon, I suppose.
Van Creveld has savagely criticized the Bobbitt-Thomas P. M. Barnett neocon fantasy that the developed world can and should send hi-tech armies to every third world country to root out and destroy terrorism. As Van Creveld points out, each JDAM bomb that blows up a village in Afghanistan creates a hundred new terrorists. The sheer number of wedding parties murdered by U.S. Predator and Reaper drones in Afghanistan has created far more anti-American feeling and many more terrorists than al the Taliban and Al Qaeda recruiters put together. People like Bobbitt and Barnett don’t seem to get this — Van Creveld and Lind do.
As for “false equivalence,” please note that I don’t mean to equate Democrats’ claims that Dubya became president as a result of politically and socially illegitimate manipulation of the U.S. political process with crazy teabagger allegations about Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth certificate. There is clearly no equivalence there. Democrats’ complains were founded on hard evidence (viz., the “brooks brothers riot” consisted entirely of paid Republican political operatives) while the teabaggers have no evidence to back up their bizarre claims about Obama’s birth certificate.
What I think it’s important to point out is that even since roughly 1992 we have now had an ongoing crisis in the perceived legitimacy of every American president. This does not appear to be coincidence. It’s not just “bad luck.” It’s the result of an extremely closely divided electorate (the fundamental cause of the legitimacy problems with the 2000 presidential election) which in turns results from a general decline in the ability of the modern nation-state to meet the needs of its population.
liberal
It’s true!
* Saddam had WMDs.
* Iraqis were a majority of the 9-11 hijackers.
* The Earth is 6,000 years old.
* …
Chad N Freude
@Linkmeister: The balloonboy thread also gave us condensation, and another thread (don’t remember which) gave us the conflation of credentials and credenza. You are now fully initiated. Except for the Secret Handshake, but be patient, it’s coming.
arguingwithsignposts
@Chad N Freude: And don’t forget about the Very Serious Helicopters, who Were Not Laughing at Balloon Boy.
Chad N Freude
@mclaren: You’re postings on this are quite good. They transport me back to the (not so) halcyon days of my undergraduatude. When is my term paper due?
But seriously, this is educational for me.
licensed to kill time
Seems Steve Benen is on the same wavelength :
Brachiator
@sloan:
Snort*
I’d almost be willing to pay to see this. Almost.
Chad N Freude
@arguingwithsignposts: Oh! I almost forgot the strategic use of … three consecutive periods.
Chad N Freude
@sloan:
Fixed. Also.
tc125231
I have brother who is a Harvard graduate who lives in the cocoon. Honest to god, you would think he had been raised in a fact free bubble.
The more I think about it, the more I believe a friend’s contention that she saw reliable research indicating that political and religious opinions are wired into the pleasure centers of the brain, and are thus not subject to the ordinary mechanisms of critical thinking.
Brachiator
@mclaren:
But all this prediction stuff is as pointless as the predictions laid out in stuff like The End of History. Reality is always messier than any attempts to discern patterns and trends from particular events.
This sounds like the umpteenth iteration of the neo-isolationist delusion.
And neither Afghanistan nor Iraq can be accurately described as third world hellholes. Particularly Iraq, which has materially declined as a direct result of Dubya’s Folly.
tc125231
@Bob In Pacifica:
What they really want is the repressive structures of Christianity, as promulgated by Paul (you think there wasn’t a reason people kept asking him to leave?) without the teachings of that pinko Jesus.
It reminds me of an old Peter O’Toole movie, called “The Ruling Class”: O’Toole thinks he is Jesus Christ, which is socially unacceptable. So they “cure” him and he becomes Jack the Ripper, which is socially OK.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruling_Class
tc125231
@Brick Oven Bill: Is BOB this week a user of some codein based pain-killer?
He makes even less sense than usual.
ChrisB
@Mike in NC:
There’s only one thing to call these people: morans.
You know, if not for the bad spelling, I would have thought there was a good chance that Fox News had given out that sign, particularly after seeing their producer try to whip up the crowd several weeks ago.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@mclaren:
Thanks for the extended book review. Sounds like I need to go get a copy of Van Creveld’s book.
I’ve slogged thru Bobbitt’s opus a couple times and there are things I both like and intensely dislike about it. To dislike: the neocon BS that you point out, which obviously has aged about as well as Fukuyama’s End of History (which is to say about as well as Dorian Grey when the picture came out of the attic). And Bobbitt’s predictions of what to expect in the future feel and smell like BS – if the market meltdown last year taught us anything it is that what he calls the “market state” is profoundly unstable and untrustworthy – and likely to last as a new constitutional form about as long as the original Qin empire based on Legalism did.
On the other hand I very much do like the broad framework he uses, which asks questions as to what is the nature of the three way relationship between state legitimacy, systems of constitutional law in the broadest possible sense of the word, and military power. His answers are far too sweeping and Hegelian for my taste, but I think the questions he poses are very important, and they don’t necessarily lead to the Reagan/Thatcher-ite world he clearly anticipates.
One nitpick re: what you posted:
Personally I think this is a poor reading of 1940s Chinese history. The PLA won the post-1945 civil war with the Guomindang forces using largely conventional military tactics and weapons (tanks, artillery, etc.) – the guerilla war version of that conflict was a romantic bit of propaganda cooked up later. And the guerilla tactics used under Mao’s leadership prior to 1945 consisted largely of running away and hiding out in a logistically difficult part of the country while the Japanese Imperial Army slugged it out with the Nanjing/Chongqing based GMT government for the duration, while doing little to fight against the Japanse invaders and thus make it worth the effort for them to destroy his bases in Shaanxi. There were some successful examples of 4GW carried out in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the Jiangnan region and in remote parts of Hubei and Jiangxi provinces by some of the Communists, but they were on a small scale, mostly unfolded outside of Mao’s control (and in some cases against his wishes) and played little role in the way the post-1945 civil war developed.
So not the best example of germinal 4GW, perhaps.
licensed to kill time
@tc125231:
BOB was warned about the brown acid, but it doesn’t say anything about it in the Constitution, so he went ahead and dropped it anyway.
Frank West
@Jackie: You make an excellent point! We can’t turn our backs entirely on those who (vehemently) disagree with us when they can still be reached with reason and logic — the others (the willfully, pridefully ignorant) are probably a lost cause.
Frank West
Brachiator mentioned the late-night UFO radio folks… I started listening to such radio (“Coast to Coast AM with George Norry”) by chance; the material that dealt with UFO’s and ghost stories was entertaining! (I’m not saying I believed what I heard was true!) However, I swiftly noticed a very rightwing edge to much of the content; the guests routinely deny global warming; they believe that the H1N1 virus is either overblown or that the vaccine is a extremely dangerous. They believe that “a new [and dangerous] world order” is on the way.
They do not align themselves entirely with the standard Fox News talking points; they seem to believe that Bush & Co. were inept or somewhat in on the whole “thing”.
They are extremely confident in their perspectives; they clearly believe they have a lock on the truth and that the rest of us are stupid or willfully ignorant. They are not swayed (generally) by facts; after all, facts are quite subjective, aren’t they? “Facts are funny things…” John Adams said. In the world of the uber-rightwing, “facts are not funny; they are, evidently, quite subject to interpretation!”
I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks about the late-night UFO/conspiracy-theory crowd.
matoko_chan
You can see that ‘tude on this Sully thread.
So it isn’t just the teabaggers and proles, the soi disant conservative intellectuals think they own teh knowledge too.
I liked this comment.
Thing is….we read all those old books in undergrad….and rejected them.
;)
Beej
Once upon a time I had a poster of a brick wall. All the bricks were aligned horizontally except two rows in the center right that went in a crazy zig-zag pattern. The poster said: “For every complex problem, there’s a simple solution. And it’s WRONG!”
I’ve always thought that this was the conservative and/or Christianist mindset in a nutshell. They are frightened of our complex, technological, fast-moving world. The more complex it gets, the faster it moves, the more frightened they get. The more frightened they get, the more willing they are to believe anyone who presents them with absolute certainties, no matter how ludicrous those certainties may be.
Change the health insurance system? No, no, the socialists are trying to take over.
NFL owners don’t want loudmouth Limpbaugh owning a team? It’s a “librul” conspiracy to silence The Prophet.
The census will be prepared this year? It’s a plot to identify “enemies” so they can be incarcerated in a FEMA camp.
These answers are ridiculous, but isn’t it more comforting to follow those who have the absolute, definite answers? Limpbaugh, Beck, Hannity, et al, are nothing if not definite.
LoveMonkey
What exactly is the point of yet another in the 10,000-post series “Stupid Right Wingers and the Stupid Right Wing Things They Do and Say?”
The fact is, there is a 25% slice of the population that will believe anything, has no respect for process and facts, cannot tolerate ambiguity, panders to the lowest and basest values and imperatives in our society.
So what? We outnumber them, and we out perform them on every level. Who cares what they say? Why focus on them all the time?
matoko_chan
Well….evo bio and cognitive anthro and cog neurosci would say its simpler than that…..the distribution of umm….population mindsets is a gaussian distribution like IQ or height.
Half the curve tends to cling to the status quo and fears change (conservative)…..the other half embraces change, seeks innovation(progressives).
It isn’t binary, all or none….there is a wide range …..it might even be bimodal instead of gauss…..we don’t know…..yet.
;)
Svensker
@LoveMonkey:
Because it’s fun?
My hub wants to talk about how Goldman Sachs runs the country and we need a revolution and Obama is doing jack and blah, blah, blah, blah. I’d rather talk about El Rushbo and how fat he is. The outcome is the same (nothing changes for the better) but I’m happier.
Chad N Freude
@Beej:
Unintentional humor?
General Winfield Stuck
@matoko_chan:
Oh you college kids:-)
Anne Laurie
@AhabTRuler:
You think our own personal NSA minder is gonna encourage further perusal of such reality-based doubleplusungoodness? ! ?
Notorious P.A.T.
@mclaren:
You had me until you wrote this:
“this crisis in the legitimacy of the American state (due to technological and social reasons, not due to the actions of any given political party)”
This is totally unsupportable. Technology has nothing to do with fighting wasteful, pointless wars far from home, or persecuting mass numbers of citizens for no particularly good reason, since those have both occurred at every level of technological attainment. As for not blaming either political party, sure the Democratic party has been far too gutless in ending the war on drugs, but they have also been much better about it than Republicans. It was FDR who ended Prohibition, after all.
Beej
@Chad N Freude: Totally unintentional. Wish I had thought of that though. LOL
Notorious P.A.T.
As a kind of sidebar, here’s a great article about Laffer and the school of “economics” he founded:
tnr.com/article/feast-the-wingnuts
He was not just a wingnut, but a NUT.
Mario Piperni
There’s a real psychology behind their madness. It has medical terms such as motivated reasoning and inferred justification. I personally refer to it as Lunacus Republicaus Insanus.
Illustration and details.
calipygian
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Jesus.
Notorious P.A.T.
I misremembered. It wasn’t Laffer but his main disciple who was a nutcase.
Notorious P.A.T.
We can’t talk about things that don’t happen.
Dr. Loveless
@calling all toasters:
The next time there’s one in my town, I think I’m going to show up with a sign saying, “TOSS OBAMA’S SALID [sic] BEFORE HE TOSSES YOURS!!!!” Whaddya think?
☭
Somebody should commission a 90-foot tall bronze socialist-realist sculpture of Obama in overalls with a sledgehammer over his shoulder, beetling his brows and pointing forward and up 15 degrees or so, put it in Lynchville or somewhere like that. Just as a goof, see what they do.
Chad N Freude
@Dr. Loveless: I think DEATH TO SMOOCHY would get some attention. (Replace “SMOOCHY” with the name of the real subject of interest. I will not type the correct phrase on a webpage searchable by a government law enforcement agency.)
AhabTRuler
I think that you’ll blow your cover. The [sic] is a dead giveaway.
Notorious P.A.T.
Max Blumenthal video
This will help you infiltrate a teabagger event. My favorite is the guy carrying a sign saying “Politians are like dipers”–and, of course, he says that English needs to be America’s official language.
Brachiator
@LoveMonkey:
Because “we” are not a monolith. And 25% can make a powerful swing vote.
And these are not silly irrelevantly harmless goobers. The potential for mischief should not be under-estimated.
Enlightened Layperson
@Brachiator
So, basically, you’re saying the South seceded because they listened too much to the Glenn Becks of their day. Not an encouraging thought!
mclaren
@ ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I’m not as up on modern Chinese history as you are so I’ll have to demur on that. My understanding is that Mao used traditional guerilla tactics against Chiang and the nationalists, but I could well be wrong.
@ Notorious P.A.T.:
Actually the U.S. Army War College has a famous saying: “Capabilities create intentions. New war-fighting technologies tend to create a desire to use them in those who invent ’em. And since America is now by far the world’s pre-eminent inventor of new war-fighting technologies…well, it’s pretty obvious why the Pentagon has suddenly discovered the necessity of running around the world blowing up dirt-poor peasants.
As for persecuting large numbers of Americans for no reason, the growth of information technology is directly responsible for that. You can see it at work in Britain, where anti-terrorism laws are being used to snoop on and fine people who let their dogs out unsupervised. When you look at the recent mass arrests of protesters prior to the Minnesota Republican National Convention on anti-terror charges in their own homes, before the protesters even had a chance to protest, it’s entirely due to modern information surveillance technology. And as surveillance technology gets more ubiquitous, the harassment of citizens will continue to get worse and worse and worse. Statistics on Afghan killed by U.S. Predator and Reaper UAVs show at only 6% of the 763 villagers killed to date by Hellfire missiles fired from drones were actually terrorists. That means that 94% of the people killed by drone strikes in Afghanistan have been innocent bystanders murdered for no reason. As the UAV technology gets cheaper and more sophisticated, following Moore’s Law, we can expect that UAVs will soon be deployed here in the United States. They will surely be used by the police, and undoubtedly they’ll eventually be armed. That 94% rate of innocent civilians will undoubtedly apply in the U.S., just as it did in Afghanistan, as police officers in remote air-conditioned offices staring into blurry monitor screens press a button to kill people they think are burglars are rapists, but who turns out to be kids skateboarding or little old ladies walking their dogs.
All this is driven by technology. And it’s destroying the legitimacy of the nation-state. In a major American city today, law-abiding citizens have much more to fear from police officers tasering them to death than from muggers or rapists. Tasers? Technology? Ring a bell?
These problems are all being driven by technological advancement, and as the technology gets more sophisticated, the problems get worse.
Information technology lets citizens fact-check congressional leaders, determine their campaign contributions from lobbyists, study their voting record, and it’s rapidly becoming clear that most politicians don’t pass those kinds of tests. This leads to cynicism by citizens and general apathy, together with a general disgust about the entire function of government. Information technology is what’s accelerating the breakup of the nation-state, and it’s driving 4GW too. From the IEDs in Iraq to the dirty bomb plots, it’s all about technological advancement.
As the main driver of advanced technology in America, spending far more than any other single entity on new technology, the Pentagon has usurped from the state department the role of shaping U.S. foreign policy, as this article points out. Once again, this is driven entirely by technological advancement.
So I think we’d have to disagree about the role of technology in creating a crisis in the legitimacy of the nation-state, P.A.T.
Regarding the ever-increasing fanaticism of the Republicans, the phenomenon of cults getting more extreme each time their doomsday predictions fail to come true has been thoroughly studied. The evaporative cooling model of cult beliefs explains why, as group beliefs suffer increasing conflicts with reality, the group itself gets increasingly more fanatical. This appears to be happened with the Republicans, and will probably end when the Republican party disintegrates and goes the way of the Whigs. In the meantime, we have a one-party system largely controlled by an imperial presidency with no oversight, which is not a good trend.
Uncle Glenny
@Bubblegum Tate:
But he did infest some pigs with demons and drive them into the sea, right?
Chuck Butcher
My sister graduated with Honors from Honor’s College at Michigan State University with a BSME. Not an easy degree and not for the weak of intellect. She is also a Born Again and Obama as Soshulist despite being employed for many years by GM and her husband still is – a TeaBagger. I’m pretty sure also a 6K year old worlder.
A no-shit good education from K-12 to BSME and a pair of professional parents. As far as I can tell she received no brain injuries or consumed large doses of drugs (or any at all). She is personally about as nice a person as you could ask to meet and she’s a fucking idiot. There’s her and then there’s me. My father whom she doesn’t like much has turned conservative and my mother whom she does is pretty damn liberal and her mother … well let it go as they don’t make left like that anymore.
I’ll be go to hell if I can figure out how she got there and it is the mindless repeat the latest nonsense reichwing talking point kind of thing. Her religion and politics are of a piece, both in function and adherence. Maybe you can guess that 2400 miles between us makes it easy not to talk religion or politics – I can always hang up … and have.
Figure that one out.
Chuck Butcher
@Church Lady:
John Cole specifically asked me to be nice to you, so I will be much nicer than this deserves. You show up, after an extended absence, with this shopworn oft-repeated canard that has not an iota of backing other than from its repetition and you expect what??? That somebody will take that crap seriously? How masochistic are you?
If, in the face of all scientific evidence, somebody told you repeatedly that you can fly would you throw yourself from a high place?
You can fly you can fly you can fly you can fly you can fly you can fly
Sm*t Cl*de
Sloan reminds me of a book by a sociologist who infiltrated a doomsday cult. He got to know the members well. When the end of the world didn’t arrive on schedule most did not have their faith shaken despite the fact that the world’s ending on that particular day was the central tenant of their faith.
When Prophecy Fails. Not just a line from a Blue Oyster Cult song!
And for a couple of years now, I’ve been saying to anyone who’ll listen that all a bright young sociologist looking for a career needs to do is infiltrate the American right-wing.
alien radio
@mclaren:
The internet is the panopticon, however it works differently from the one to many panopticon of victorian prison building, it is a many to many panopticon, and the more the authoritarians try to push their advantage and become reliant on it’s surveillance abilities, the more they expose theselves to a much wider surveillance, and at that point scale matters. We have more eyeballs and more time. By the time they realize what they’ve done it’ll be too late. It’s probably already too late.
The survielance police state is to be feared because it’s so far always been a top down power relationship. Technology has now made it possible to gather intelligence on the police state as well, and the power asymmetry will cease to be so imbalanced.
the Important development that is not yet here that will enable the transition to resilient communities is the wireless high speed mesh network, once communities own their own network infrastructure, repression will become almost impossible.
matoko_chan
Chuck Butcher.
I’m kinda smart….and I was a Bushie.
I was raised republican, my grandfather was in the state house of representatives.
People have a belief system that holds together…..and when the integrity of the system fails at one point the whole thing collapses.
For John Cole it was schiavo….for me it was seeing Bush lie about hESCR on national television.
Granted, I know a bit about hESCR, but it was like he rubbed my nose in it….he FORCED me to see he was deliberately lying.
Then the whole thing collapsed and I could see he was lying about a lot of things.
Before, I could never admit he was lying about Iraq or torture…..MY country simply didn’t do that….it was unthinkable.
That is where your sister is.
I have to think she will get the luck eventually.
Cheryl from Maryland
Everyone knows Jesus follows college football and his team is Notre Dame. What NFL team has Touchdown Jesus?
ray butlers
wilfred,
the subject was Republicans, not Democrats. Pointing out the faults of the other side does not absolve the first party of their misdeeds.