It didn’t used to be so hard to get the liberal message heard over the screams of reality. Journalism was once a respected profession where liberals ignored reality to portray themselves as unbiased newsmen while actually pushing people towards liberal ideas and away from thuggish reality. Reality still found ways to occasionally get people to listen to it, whether through economic conditions or war, but its message could be contained. Eventually, though, reality weaseled its way into the media, first through talk radio, then Fox News, and now the internet, where pajama-clad imbeciles with brains too simple to understand anything other than reality spout reality on numerous websites on a daily basis.
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Samizdata quote of the dayNovember 15th, 2010 |
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Reality is not for everyone, of course, but it can be handled in small doses. And I prefer to rose-colour my eyeballs the oldfashioned alcoholic way!
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised plenty for all
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul,
But though there was plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, “If you don’t work you die.”
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”
It seems as timely now as when he wrote it.
Yes, reality cannot be broken.
Bent, distorted (which will require counter distortion) but not broken.
A love of truth is one of the best things one can have.
Where ever it takes one.
The deceivers are a crime against humanity, and eternity.
But I think they know that. It’s why they get so mad.
Reality cannot be broken.
Yes American “liberalism” (now returned to its early 1900’s name of “Progressiveism”) was based on the denial of reality.
Both of reason (or the reality of such things as “A is A” and “I am not you”) and of empirical reality – of observable facts (such as that government “help” to a city tends to make that city a worse and worse place to live).
This is not me being bigoted about the political foe – in fact the American philosophical school of “Pragmatism” was open about its denial of reality, its denial of the existence of objective truth.
“Truth is just what is useful in our way of thinking” – William James.
It really is not such a long road from Pragmatist philosophy to such things as William Duranty of the New York Times covering up the murder of tens of millions of people by the socialist regime in the then Soviet Union in the 1930’s.
Or saying that Barry Goldwater (a radical anti collectivist and part Jew) was an ally of German Neo Nazis and had met them in Germany.
Or that there were “cuts” in government spending and “deregulation” under “market fundamentalist” George Walker Bush.
If there is no such thing as objective truth – if reality is simply whatever is useful for the cause, then all things are allowed to the Progressive (journalist or other).
Of course it is hard enough to get people to ignore reality even if you have a de facto monopoly of information – by controlling EDUCATION (so often forgotten – but never forgotten by the left) and the journalism.
It is not just that people can see things that contradict what the Progressive journalist is saying – for example right now people are being told that American unemployment is falling (the Financial Times and so on report the numbers – without pointing out that the “seasonal adjustment” has been rigged) and that there is no “inflation” – by which the establishment mean rising prices (more rigging – on an almost Soviet scale).
But it is the real world people know (from their own experience) that it is harder and harder to get a job – and that prices in the shops are going up and going up very fast.
However, I repeat, it is not just this – there is a doubt in the minds of many people a voice that says “this just does not make sense”when they are told that more government spending will make everyone better off, or that all inventions for the last two centuries were produced by government (that gem was from Vice President Joseph Biden – almost as if he has read “1984” and thought it was an instruction manual).
Someone who knew no history at all might accept the historical point – but wild spending produces prosperity that offends basic reason and (Bill Maher to the contrary) human beings do reason – we are not just “dogs” to be ruled by the elite.
All this is very hard for the left – even with their control of education and the media to get people to accept.
And then you have a few (not all by any means) voices on Fox News (and so on) saying “these things are LIES, the truth is……. here are the sources LOOK FOR YOURSELF” and the task becomes much more difficult.
No wonder that the intelligent left have given up on free speech – understanding that free speech is just incompatible with their aims. To achieve their aims they must convince people of many things that are untrue – that is hard enough without allowing people to contradict what they are saying.
Plato understood all that – and the left are returning to their spiritual founder (“but Plato was not a Pragmatist” – well he did invent “double think” look what he says about the movement of the planets in “The Republic” – but yes he was not a a Pragmatist, but neither was Karl Marx. Pragmatism is just a means to an end [the end being POWER], the left do not believe it is objectively true – indeed the very doctrine itself says that nothing is objectively true).
The next battle, of course, lies in education.
I’d write something about Constructal Theory and how stylized human behavior lines up with it, but that would be too much work. I’ve got another aspect of their delusion to shatter today.
They’re becoming an ox-bow, and they know it.
Reality is just an illusion caused by a gin deficiency.
But then again, if that were true, then journalists would be the most realistic people on the planet.
This explains why ‘liberals’ often admire places like Fidel’s Cuba, Communist China or the Soviet Union.
The supply of reality based bad news is simply banned.