Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Speaking of alternate realities ...


Blogging Tory Paul E. Marek wastes no time in bringing the jaw-dropping hilarity:

Another Reason to Loath [sic] Progressives

... because when reality bites ... they create an alternative reality:
[quoting conservative philosopher Rush Limbaugh]

Somebody tell me: What have I missed? Will somebody explain to me what tea party person has advocated violence? What have I missed here? What tea party has engaged in acts of violence?


Seriously, Mr. Marek? You want examples of teabaggers advocating violence? Really? I just want to make sure that's what you were asking before I set to work. But here's the capper from Paul:

I can see it now ... Rahm and the boys wishing for a domestic terrorist act ... hoping for an Oklahoma city ... begging for a crisis that shan't be wasted.

Huh. Hoping for another deadly terrorist attack because it would be useful politically? You mean, like this? Or this? Or maybe Paul doesn't deal with that particular reality. He prefers his.

MY BAD: As commenter "PO" points out, I would be appallingly remiss if I didn't mention PNAC's quiet longing for "a new Pearl Harbor." Oh, and support the troops. Or something.

7 comments:

CK said...

http://ledaro.blogspot.com/2010/04/american-cons-armed-and-dangerous.html

Above is a video of an interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews; check out the main wingnut in the suit...he actually tells Matthews that he's not free because he can't carry a machine gun to walk the streets.

I caught your links, frickin' scary!

Polyorchnid Octopunch said...

Good lord, you're slipping man. That's almost directly from the old Project for a New American Century, hoping for a new Pearl Harbour so they could galvanize the American people... written during the Clinton presidency.

Niles said...

I think there should be a standard policy to apply to 'conservative' opinions of the usual suspects.

read it as projection.

homophobic flag-wrapped traditional values? Closet case anarchist.

accuse the opposition of holding weird-ass violent anti-social attitudes. They've been looking in the mirror again and unable to discern it as a reflection, decided that person MUST be a 'liberal'.

vw: charatao - the philosophy that having some character and principles is a good thing. stay classy blogging tories, stay classy.

Ti-Guy said...

And the sins of the Right continue, when one of our favourite harridans "Louise" and some other commenter fail to use the opportunity to challenge their co-partisan on simple matters of fact.

Not that it really matters though. I've given up on the Chomskyan ideal that error can be defeated by exposing people to facts and credible evidence.

jkg said...

Re: The Chomskyan ideal

Ti guy,

I believe the term used is "cyber balkanization" in the sense that while the internet was supposed to allow for the free flow of information that would lead to further 'enlightenment,' it has resulted in like minded groups to congregate and insulate themselves such that it is a reinforcing feedback loop. This means that even when presented with evidence, they can simply retract into their own cyber cabal, comforting each other that they are still in the right.

Ti-Guy said...

I think it's worse than just echo-chambers. Errors and fabrications spread like wildfire on the Internet and never, ever disappear. In that way, people (even well-meaning people) always have recourse to a source to substantiate *any* assertion they care to make.

There is however, something more psychological going on that was brought to my attention in a comment over at Dawg's, that linked to this piece featuring Slavoj Žižek

With all my admiration for Noam Chomsky, I partially disagree with him. It's an underlying premise of his work that you don't have to do any theory - just tell all the facts to the people. The way ideology works today is much more mysterious ...People just do not want to know too much. There's an active refusal to know. If you ask average citizens with enough of their own worries, they'd say, "Don't even tell me this. We pay taxes so the government can do all the dirty things that I don't want to know about."

The question isn't of any real link between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. I remember a debate on TV where some viewers' calls made their point clear, which is: we are not talking about empirical links. Both Saddam and al-Qaeda hate the U.S.. That's enough of a link. You cannot really help by making factual refutations. The key factor is not that people are duped - there's an active will not to know. Remember the Reagan presidency, when the media pointed out his factual mistakes. That only raised his popularity. This was the point of identification. With Bush, you have an almost ideal image for how things worth: a naïve, unknowing president, and a sinister figure of knowledge, like Dick Cheney, the operative, who really controls him. This is really quite a nice metaphor for how things work.


This bears repeating: "Remember the Reagan presidency, when the media pointed out his factual mistakes. That only raised his popularity."

Now that's something I had never had cause to really think about and would never have believed before 2003. We've now had years of evidence to demonstrate that this is undoubtedly true, even in our country.

jkg said...

We've now had years of evidence to demonstrate that this is undoubtedly true, even in our country.

I seriously think it is a lack of meta-cognition; hence, when pointing out obvious rational errors in these people's thinking, they wave their hands so vociferously. I had such an experience where I challenged his faulty generalizations, citing actual well known errors in psychology and logic only to be told that I was just using "grandiose terms' that mean nothing. It is ridiculous, really; Dunning Kruger is certainly at play, for the willful ignorance coupled with a false sense of superiority makes them easy pickings for populist manipulation.

It is bad enough that this workerism has creeped into the discourse such that intellectuals are to be derided. I don't think they realize that that their assault on academia is reminiscent of Lysenkoism in Stalinist Russia.