Vote for someone smarter than you

Michael Seitzman, writing in Huffington Post, exemplifies the self-justification of the Left:

She said "nucular." Twice.
[...]
Stop voting for people you want to have a beer with. Stop voting for folksy. Stop voting for people who remind you of your neighbor. Stop voting for the ideologically intransigent, the staggeringly ignorant, and the blazingly incompetent.

Vote for someone smarter than you.

The Left is a tribe. Left ideas - fully thought through to a denouement in the world as it exists - are consistently revealed as both unworkable and harmful. An example is equality of outcome -- application of which - outside of communes of nuns or monks - can only and must result in more mediocrity, less excellence, and thus more eventual misery, pain, and hunger in the world. The Left avoids thinking its ideas through to their inevitable ends.

Why does the Left avoid full examination of its ideas? Wouldn't a principled Leftist be eager to think those principles through to the end? Wouldn't a seeker of truth be eager for full examination of a hypothesis?

Because the left is not eager to examine its own principles, we can see the Left is about neither principles nor truth. Instead, the Left is about belonging. The Left is a tribe.


Janeane Garafalo:

Democrats as a people are fundamentally more decent.

The Left is a circle dance. The dancers know they are more virtuous and more wise than those outside the dance. The dance justifies itself. To wit: all dance is beauty, beauty is truth. Nothing more need be said, lest intrude uncomfortable and judgmental thought about the beauty, or lack thereof, of the dancing. The Left is a circle dance of the virtuous and the wise.

neo-neocon quotes Milan Kundera, from his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

“Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.”

We all want to dance in a ring, to a certain extent. It’s wonderful to be part of a coherent movement, a whole that makes sense, joined with others working for the same goal and sharing the same beliefs. But there’s a price to pay when something challenges the tenets of that movement. When that happens, there are two kinds of people: those who change their ideas to fit the new facts, even if it means leaving the fold, and those who distort and twist the facts and logic to maintain the circle dance.

It seems proper for that to be lavender.

neo-neocon:

[Liberals] see themselves as tolerant, but they see Republicans and Conservatives as intolerant. Ergo, by being intolerant of Republicans and Conservatives, liberals are striking a blow for tolerance.