What is at the core of this desperate refusal to engage actual reality?
Roger L. Simon at PJ Media has a pretty good handle on what is happening:
Now these are likable people who are decent or better to friends and family, but they are monumentally square and unsophisticated. They grew up up in an environment where certain, now highly old-fashioned, liberal views not only were cool, they were the veritable given, donnée as the French would say, of their society, so they are constitutionally unable to reexamine them. Change is difficult for all of us. Few achieve any kind of growth. But we are surrounded by a generation of people whose ideas are stuck in 1968, though most of them were just little kids at the time and too young to participate. Nevertheless, being stuck, they are loath to see what is going on around them. They are terrified of it, lest they suffer from alienation of friends and family, loss of work, even personality disintegration. So they watch MSNBC and nod when some reactionary nitwit says the decapitation in Oklahoma was nothing more than “workplace violence” when the perpetrator had converted to Islam in prison only months before and posted beheadings to his Facebook page.You can point out the absence of any rise in average global temperatures in the last 18 years, the CBO report about the effect of a minimum-wage hike on employment, the cost of a month's supply of contraception, the contempt with which Iran responds to post-America's overtures at our silly-ass patty-cake sessions over its nuke program, and they refuse to look at it. They are so invested in what really amounts to nothing more than a sentiment that they fear they'd crack up if forced by the actual world around them to abandon it.
There are reasoned counterpoints to each and every one of your positions so to ascribe arguments to the contrary of your positions (and of course unanimity to various positions posited by those not in agreement with you) as being stuck in 1968 is simply and absurdly preposterous.
ReplyDeleteI don't think so, but take a look at what the sum total of them have in common: an argument that human freedom should be diminished. Climate: We have to drastically change our way of life, starting with letting government supervise the thermostats in our homes and the engines in our cars. Minimum wage: government interference in voluntary economic exchanges. Contraception: Making workplaces offer insurance that covers it. Iran's contempt: Letting the current regime in Iran continue to exist and thereby oppress its own people and acquire nukes with which to change the balance of power in the world.
ReplyDeleteYou forgot to include your vastly mistaken notion that all not with exactly with you on the FUBARRED mess in the Middle East think our domestic beheading was simply an act of workplace violence, though we probably have more than that than any country in the world. Some not of your ilk think we should just indiscriminately bomb all the players in the Middle East which, by the way, was pretty dammed FUBARRED going all the way back to 1968
ReplyDeleteNot indiscriminately. We definitely want to hit the appropriate targets.
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