In the movie The Usual Suspects, the wily main character utters one of the most memorable movies lines in recent times. “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The line is allegedly lifted from the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire. According to the Quote Investigator, versions of the line have been used by Christian ministers before Baudelaire. That seems plausible, given the inclinations of reformist Christian ministers.
Something similar can be said for radicalism. Perhaps its greatest trick is to convince the world they did not win and rule the West for the last century and a half. Instead, the radicals go from triumph to triumph, convincing their adherents that the fight must go on, as well as convincing their opponents to fight future battles in a way that is guaranteed to result in their defeat. It really is a remarkable thing, when you stop and think about the past century or so of political conflict.
One trick the Left has used is to alter the shared consciousness in such a way that everyone is a binary thinker. That is, every issue, not matter how trivial, is assumed to be one thing or the other. Whatever the issue, there are only two options, so if one is made invalid, the other is the right answer by default. Therefore, everyone participating in political discourse is forced to defend one side or the other. Further, they think they advance their side by discrediting the other side.
The classic example of this was the homosexual marriage debate. Before anyone knew what was happening, the beautiful people were insisting that anyone opposed to the idea must hate homosexuals. In fact, anyone not embracing everything about the homosexual lifestyle must be a hate-filled bigot. This binary thinking has now extended to men dressed as women. The only options for the debate were one extreme position or the other, which obviously worked to the advantage of the Left.
Another example is the current debate over the pandemic lock downs. The alarmists insist that the choices are lock everyone in their homes until there are no more sick people or allow people to die in the streets from the virus. Most people have happily accepted this framing, so that anyone questioning the lock down is viewed as a dangerous nut. The idea of a third or fourth position is no longer possible, as those are lumped into one extreme or the other by the two sides.
Yet another example is one that has turned up in fringe politics. Those opposed to the current economic order are cheering the lock down, as they assume it must be bad for those they blame for the current economic order. This urge to harm their perceived enemies is so intense, they seem willing to harm themselves and their friends in an economic collapse, if it harms the bad guys. Any questioning of this is characterized as a defense of the current order, possibly even a betrayal.
Probably the clearest example of this binary way of thinking is something you see from the intelligent design people. They assume if they can discredit evolutionary biology, their preferred explanation of life must be true. They make no effort to prove their claims about a great designer. They just assume that if they discredit the alternative, they must be proven correct by default. It is why they invest all of their time and energy into attacking evolutionary biology. Theirs is an either-or worldview.
There’s almost always a strong moral component to binary thinking. Side A looks at Side B as immoral, perhaps evil. We see this now with the lock down. Those questioning the policy are accused of being indifferent to their fellow humans or even putting lives at risk with their crazy ideas about going outside. The same moral signaling was at play with the homosexual marriage debate. In the binary worldview, there are only good guys and bad guys, black hats and white hats.
This hyper-moralized binary thinking can have some bizarre results. The Left is endlessly mewing about the danger of right-wing authoritarianism, but cheers what can only be described as authoritarianism during the lockout. Right-wing opponents of cosmopolitan globalism are now embracing left-wing schemes to crash the system, like rent strikes and overloading the welfare system. The so-called hard-right now sounds like a bunch of leisure suit wearing Progressives from the 1970’s.
The reason for this is the hyper-moralized world of binary thinking must necessarily be detached from anything resembling fixed truth. If all that matters is opposing the bad guy, then the only truth that matters is they are wrong and therefore the opposite of what they say is the truth. In a world of binary thinking, everyone is defined by who they hate and what they oppose, not by objective truth. In the great dance with the Devil, he leads by simply existing in the mind of his partner.
That is the great trick of the radicals. By convincing the world that politics is a constant struggle against some enemy, the corrective of factual reality has been abandoned in favor of binary logic. Since radicalism itself is rooted in the endless revolution against something, societies in a constant struggle to find some new devil to oppose must always embrace radicalism. The very identity of a radical society is rooted in the constant struggle to move past some evil onto the next.
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Zman finally comes out as “non-binary “.
That was actually funny lol But there is actually a kinda serious point there; you have to be binary about your thinking but are not allowed to be so about your crotch. That is really a war on reality and all ratioanl thought.
II is an interesting experiment as to how far people will accept relativism, where even ones own body, which by definition is the ultimate unchanging unary of direct personal experience , is made to be ambiguous to oneself.
It is a denial of your own reality, let alone anyone elses.
The west is not grounded in reality anymore maybe because the life is easy and not a struggle anymore. I was raised in the 2nd world and even under a communist regime the reality could not be denied. It’s like you come into a room and there are 3 guys in there , one looks at the wall and doesn’t say anything but looks at that wall 24 hours, another screams and hits the wall all day and third guy says that he is Jesus. If you come from normal place you will not engage the Jesus man in a… Read more »
That raises an interesting question: Is the opposite of binary thinking relativism?
Is this a variant on the 10 kinds of people jokes about binary?
Of course all of this comparison with Satan reminds us that liberalism/leftism is a religion. This is what gives its followers that religious intensity which is absent on our side. The fascists had it for awhile, but nobody on the right has been able to resurrect that kind of fury since 1945.
This is a good point. Sometimes you need to think in binary terms. The other side hates us. They don’t see shades of grey (or “white”, if you will).
We’re in a war for our survival. When assessing our enemy, trying to recruit allies and determining the best plan to victory, we need to avoid binary thinking. However, there will be times when the battle is engaged and those are the times to throw binary thinking out the window.
To be effective you must name the enemy. You can’t declare war on a hunch.
And you can’t declare war without an army because if you do then you aren’t going to win… Attain the power to win first and then name the enemy…
You don’t attain the power to fight an enemy by asking people to form an army in order to fight a nebulous cloud of who knows what. That is just discouraging. Like asking someone to fight an incorporeal being. How? Why? There needs to be a clear objective in order to attain support.
You form an army through building Communities…You have to have people that know and trust one another before you can form an army out of them…You really think you can take scattered individuals and form an army out of them just because you all can agree on an enemy? I just don’t see that happening…
communities are made with objectives too. if it was just people shacking up together, the hippies would have been right. they weren’t.
Nope. You really can win without being the aggressor if you plan ahead, As can be seen from WW2 the best strategy is to declare war on someone and use someone elses army.
Lets you and him fight is a great recurring tactic that continues to this day.
Ah yes, war by proxy (in 3rd world). Perhaps it’s a lesser of two evils (supporting “our side” in a distant land…) Whatever the moral qualms, it’s always been a practical way of disposing of obsolete arms, and a market for arms dealers 🙁
that is, until the foot soldiers rebel
(((enemy))) and their POC foot soldiers.
Revelation that Star Trek Deep Space 9 is a metaphor:
(((Shapeshifters/Changelings))) and their suck-up Vorta devotees, and the Jem’Hadar foot soldiers ” Allahu Akbar “/
“Victory is life.”
@Citizen
I hope you and yours are doing well Brother…
My world is fine. (I live in the DC area. We never get impacted by anything. Naturally, no layoffs around here outside of restaurants.) However, my wife and neighbors aren’t happy with my attitude about the lock down, proving Z’s point about binary thinking. Hope you all are doing well in cleaner regions. When this is over, you guys need to help us less bright folks figure out how to start getting together. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to get together without putting everyone’s career (and thus family in danger). It’s fine joining some local… Read more »
I hear you, Citizen. I live in the shadow of the Imperial Capital as well. I have old friends who are like-minded, but I can’t figure out any way to meet new community members.
I live deep behind enemy lines in Chicago proper. It’s challenging, perhaps unpossible, to meet in person here typically. I have two friends of twenty-plus years acquaintance who reside down the street from me and they are dissident-right but even these guys are skittish about expanding the local group. The best places here to connect with DR are the firing ranges, although even at a busy place like GAT in the ‘burbs it’s difficult to find like-minded who are not law enforcement or other government.
CSC, I live in fun filled Cali where most people I know work in government or academia OR like me and my wife are getting monthly defined benefit pension and SS checks. All is good; what economic hardship or possible collapse? And nice anonymous drivers keep leaving packages of food and supplies on our doorstep. I am well aware of the difficulty of finding and meeting like minded people. The only solution I have to date is getting back in contact with old friends whose relationships date back over 40 years. I know them and can trust them. Unfortunately they… Read more »
agreed. the last Leader and Defender of the Faith on the Right died in the 70s. his successor’s car was bombed by ETA, otherwise the pozzed Bourbons would have never returned.
The political spectrum is a circle. The communists and the fascists are at eight and nine o’clock, fishing in the same pool.
My theory is that there is essentially a revolutionary type of person: someone who has the pre-existing desire, independent of social conditions, to burn things down, to hurt people, to torture, to mass murder–and think well of themselves while doing it. In short, the “political psychopath” type. Before, these psychopaths were “locked up” in traditional social arrangements: stuck in small numbers in local villages, disempowered by undemocratic structures, quickly lynched by kings and frontier justice mobs, etc. They couldn’t do much damage. But in the democratic-industrial age, traditional society has been completely dissolved. Now these toxic types can all gather… Read more »
The traditional Churchlady could be redirected into relatively benign pursuits – she spun her wheels on the Easter flowers or the latest charitable fad. We lack an outlet for her (and it’s mostly her) natural energies, so now we’re faced with disaster. The male version of the Churchlady is both more and less dangerous, in a strange way. He’s either a sociopath that gets locked up, or a narcissist that gains a ton of power in today’s social order.
I agree that there is a kind of resentful contrarian who will oppose whatever political order he finds himself in. Some seem motivated by hatred of their parents, society or themselves. The college I attended was full of these types.
However, I am by nature a conservative who opposes reckless change, yet these times have radicalized me and I don’t think I’m alone. Burn it all down doesn’t sound so crazy to me anymore.
Or build our own system and let this corrupt one fall down and burn because no one pays attention to it anymore…We have to have something in place otherwise we will be ruled once again by those who do have an organization…
This. We need to focus on building our own communities. As they get stronger, we become less and less concerned with the larger society because we can function without it and can protect ourselves from it. But this takes work. Slow, grinding, at times, boring work. DBs like Spencer never wanted to get their hands dirty with this grunt work. It’s forming small groups that help the community (quietly using resources for “our” community). It’s recruiting Joe Normies when we can and slowly, very slowly, letting them find their way to our side mentally. (We can make that journey as… Read more »
Build our own communities, but do so as invisibly as possible. Community-building is a threat to the powers-that-be, at least when we do it. Now, “community organizing”, the big-city way, that’s an entirely different kettle of fish.
In the current timelines. It will be short notice until the TLA crowd etc rock up to break up the community. The PTB are never going to allow a counter current of any size to establish itself. Where do you think all the surveillance since the 80s has come from? It was just planning ahead based on earlier forecasts of rising discontent internally in response to the upcoming policies. Any group will be picked up and immediately infiltrated and disrupted. They have a lot more practice at this than those opposing them. There is no way one can rely on… Read more »
Burn/Build has always been a linked strategy for me. Helping the Empire “recover” is not in our best interests but old habits die hard for some.
Interesting take, Exile. I think you might be more correct than not. This is a revolution, dammit, we’re going to have to ruin somebody.
That is wisdom right there.
LineInTheSand, I believe I am the contrarian you decry in your posting. However, I must say that in the last few years—and especially within this pandemic “crisis”—it has served me extraordinarily well. Like most in this group I have been shouting “bullshit” since the first days of January and the reports leaking out from China.
What I failed to predict was the obsequious behavior of the American public to their “masters’” whims. I will not make that mistake again.
What? You’re the practical moderate trying to find a workable compromise.
Sir, your honesty and integrity betray you.
I’ve been called many things, but never a moderate. If in this group I am the token moderate, then I’ve indeed found a “home”. 😉
There are protests everywhere even in So Cal and several states are on the verge of reopening. There have also been a fair number of shootings including one almost certainly lock down related in Nova Scotia. The stress level is hitting the red zone and I know of otherwise solid working class young people now on meds to get through it People are pretty damned scared about this virus, some for BS reasons others because it appears to have nasty lingering effects on people who get it up and including serious liver damage. Thus compliance. In any case for heavy… Read more »
I think the Athenians had a tradition of banishing one person every year from the city by popular vote. It would straighten things out pretty quickly.
So your saying you would be good with being banished…I hate to break it to you but we haven’t been on the right side of that equation in a long time in the cities…
I wonder if there has been any particular group heavily over-represented in all the destructive radicalism of the past Century and a Half???
…as in (((particular group)))? Hmmm…let’s see now…
Funny, when( I ) came to this country USA was 10% Black and 90% White. (I ) heard the phrase ” white flight”. Why would 90 whites run from 10 blacks? Maybe ( they) stole your balls? But don,t worry , it is a human condition to look for the fault elsewhere
Probably because if they had tried the fight route they would have been put in jail by the gov’t or possibly executed. Or do you think we live in Mad Max world? I wish you were right, but no. We can’t just forcibly remove malcontents from our communities…. yet. And here again the usual suspects were heavily involved in the implementation of the laws that prevent people from the “fight” strategy in this situation.
I’m about to do the unthinkable and recommend that you all watch a (((Netflix))) documentary.
“Wild, Wild, Country” is about badwhites standing up to a coalition of brown people and goodwhites in early 1980’s Oregon. It took years, but the Badwhites won.
Check it out. It’s a major whitepill.
“Spanish Lake” is good, broadly the same topic. Was on Netflix, I don’t currently sub.
I’ll check it out…thanks for the recommendation
Thanks meme, just added it.
End the jailers , werent they White? But I understand the need. (( my people)) used to run a goat to desert end stone it for this purpose.
Yes, but it never was 10% against 90%. More than half the White population was about that time (50-60’s I am assuming) race traitors. So that, wrt laws enacted, it was more like 55-60% against 40%.
No it was more like 2% with money and media control plus 10% foot soldiers vs 30% without money or media control with 58% not in the fight at all because it didn’t effect them, it affected those “redneck hicks” who they had been taught to not have any solidarity with and even more look down upon by the (((media))).
Careful. Z thinks that noticing this is some kind of crazy and that centuries of overwhelming coincidences and reactions to the same behavior can be explained in a thousand disconnected ways that can’t possible be connected in any way. No Sir.
After all that would just be binary. Lets salami the problem ad infinitum till we can make the pieces sit far away from each other.
There’s a difference between recognizing the relative culpability of another group and viewing them as some omniscient, mystical force. Jews are a reasonably bright people with stunning amounts of chutzpah who have been bred to work the system, especially a system designed by Europeans, to the benefit of themselves and their people. They’ve also benefited from the concentration of power (govt and financial) and media over the past century or so, which has allow them to dominate the commanding heights of society. All true. But we didn’t have to let them do that. The Japanese don’t give a crap what… Read more »
Where did I make a point about all powerful? You are arguing your own strawman. My point was the same immoral, criminal, conspiracy and hyper antagonistic behavior towards every host society has been commented on through the ages since at least Roman times in scores of countries and yet some keep making excuses like it sort of just happens. History shows time and time again that a concerted small number of individuals working to a common goal will subvert a large diffuse society and it is a fool who denies this. Domination of media,politics and banking is a series of… Read more »
I’m not trying to make excuses for Jews. They are what they are. I’ve just seen too many people get obsessed by them. It clouds their judgement and makes it harder for us to recruit Joe Normie. That said, the JQ is tougher than Z admits. Unlike any other group, they – and by “them” I mean many individuals and some groups acting mostly independently but toward a shared goal – are actively trying to destroy (or, at the very least, damage) our people. They want us brought down. (I believe that the Holocaust narrative really changed the way Jews… Read more »
Shlomo is the final boss at the end of the game. Karen is the boss of the first level. Act accordingly.
There is a reason historians once used terms like “Semitic fury”. The Semitic people gave us the Three Desert Dogmas which now dominate.
Meme…I’m wondering if this simpleton binary thinking stems from people who don’t take full responsibility for creating and making their own life. They want a good life handed to them taken from someone else. And think they are denied a good life by bad people on the other side of the divide. Bad people/Good People. This is a ferocious religion that claim You are not responsible for your life. People will break the mirror before staring into the looking glass. My father the Commie Trot was a Trot because he blamed all the usual suspects for an imperfect world and… Read more »
RFF – as usual, you raise a lot of thought-provoking topics. I’d certainly agree that you’re always better off to take responsibility for your situation, no matter how bad it may be. If you’ve ever read anything by Tony Robbins, this is pretty much his whole thing. The generational question is a vexing one….On the one hand, today’s kids are the most blessed in human history from a creature comforts perspective. On the other hand, they’ve never known what it’s like to live in a “real” country, and if you’re a paleface with a Y chromosome your very existence is… Read more »
Meme….this is greater than taking responsibility. This was a collective conscientiousness. The ancestors 4 plus generations back were almost uniformly protective of their liberty as liberty gave freedom to be responsible for one’s own life. To cobble together one’s life through success and failure. Now western civ is a nest of baby birds screaming to be fed and coddled. The generational problem is, man has, since the core flaked stone tool of australopithecus, been striving by his nature to invent and improve the material objects that are used to survive, and eventually to thrive. In the last 100 years alone,… Read more »
Wretched had a pretty good statement that the cost of “politicizing the pandemic is that it locks people into positions.” I have come across people so opposed to Trump, and so into this lockdown even though they know it is meaningless (ostensibly because it makes Trump look bad), that they are positively giddy over high unemployment rates. Sadly, I can dismiss this because leftists don’t care about economics. However, I have come across Libertarian-minded people that will, at best, receive a pay cut, and at worst lose a job, cheering on the lockdown because it hurts the current order. Strange… Read more »
Those same libertarians will cheer on corporate tax cuts while they themselves have their taxes raised (net). It’s quite something to see.
The rich will lose also because they get rich by selling stuff to middle classes and the poor also. Maybe the stress interferes with peoples minds
I’m still amazed that the loss of local tax receipts hasn’t pushed the states to open up their economies. I guess they are in denial for now.
They’ve totally immersed themselves in the mass psychosis. The US has become a Jim Jones compound patrolled by shrieking Karens. What a bloody mess.
I think you are missing the point. This is exactly intentional.
Burn the local and national infrastructure to the ground and your wealth with it. You will be begging for intervention when this tops out.
Sure, it’s possible a lot of government officials want to play Kim Jong-un and exert absolute power over a destitute populace, but I think Ostei’s mass psychosis theory is a more likely explanation.
They assume the Fed will print money and bail out their profligacy.
https://youtu.be/CbT77idLZI4
Very disappointed and not one bit surprised.
The devil hides in the middle, in plain sight too. My first big red pill was about homosexuality, when I claimed that the problems and downsides of it were obvious and not even up for argument. I was told that I was a binary thinker, only saw things as black or white, and that there were many shades of grey in between. And of course today, we have whole frooty rainbow of social consequences between the black and white that we argued about 20 years ago. And… it’s also true that if Lefty tells you it’s black and evil and… Read more »
This is how we got here. They started small to seem more reasonable but kept on pushing, relentlessly, for more. “If you give a mouse a cookie”. I say NO, take your shades of gray and and shove it. I don’t care about the outliers, they don’t disprove the trend. The slippery slope is all too real. Binary thinking is not always a bad strategy. If gays had been kept in the closet, we would not have come to the point where trannys are allowed to read to children and grope them in public libraries. And, if the usual suspects… Read more »
Tranny story hour at public libraries was the tipping point for me. Went from social conservative to buddies with Uncle A in about a week. Feel my blood rise just thinking about it. We can train ourselves to think critically, recognize nuance, etc. But there’s a time to hold fast and bring hellfire and damnation raining down from the heavens. I think about the parts where holy writ speaks of God spewing the lukewarm out of His mouth. Eventually we’ll get to the point where people can no longer sit on the proverbial fence. This is more of a prayer… Read more »
AMEN Brother…
Yeah, the trannies at the library PLUS the white parents happily indoctrinating their kids with this ideology.
Does everyone remember when they used to tell straight men that didn’t like being around gay men that it meant that they were gay? I do. It was a common refrain when I was in high school in the 80s.
There were no queers in my high school in the 70’s.
Or in mine in the 60’s, but they were held as mythical creatures somewhere out there who would try to grab you if you got too close.
Okay that’s interesting so it started in the 80s. There was a gay group an my high school. The boys grew up to be gay the girls grew up to be straight and had babies and one of the girls got abducted and murdered.
But any straight guys that expressed disgust about being around gay guys was told repeatedly that all homophobes are actually gay.
It was a tactic meant to silence dissent about faggotry/sodomy…
It did not start in the 80’s. I went to high school from 83’ to 87’, and there were no gays in that school. Mind you, this was a catholic high school in a working class industrial city of about a half million people in upstate NY, but it was a huge school with kids from all over the city, and there were only 2 guys I can think of that were effeminate, and they absolutely did not flaunt it or refer to themselves as gay. Quite the opposite. I don’t know where you went to school, but it sounds… Read more »
we definitely had that club but my high school was weird. It was a public school in a major city 50% black 50% White with a sprinkling of other and yet it was incredibly peaceful. even looking back I know there was something weird about it
Calling a guy a “fag” was the worse insult at a man. Gays were still stereotyped as limp-wristed, lisping effeminate creatures.
They still are stereotyped that way. Watch any gay portrayal on TV. It’s just supposed to be cool now.
Pretty sure that’s another recruiting pitch trying to rope a few more bodies into the, “alternative lifestyles,” crowd.
I was in high school in the 80s and that line of thinking hadn’t yet penetrated our halls. No fag in his right mind would have been out of the closet, so there was no point in lecturing those who didn’t want to be around them.
Earlier that decade, however, it was posited that if you wore green on Thursday, it meant you were a doughnut puncher.
Yep, the logical fallacy of false choices. Still seems to work on the normies.
I was in hs in the 80s and in my area, gay was still something to be mocked and ridiculed, really just barely tolerated.
I bloodied the face and knocked out the queer dude who inspired my seventh grade locker room buddies to quip that apparently I had acquired a new “girlfriend” early 1980’s. No action was taken against me except the flamers in my thespian troupe maintained formal distance as they still do today at our reunions. Gays were mercilessly harassed throughout my high school years and into undergraduate. Then came the Clinton years and the booty bandits and rump rangers came out from their closets and they were celebrated by our women and their (((thought leaders))), quite possibly as a distraction-deflection technique… Read more »
“Something similar can be said for radicalism. Perhaps its greatest trick is to convince the world they did not win and rule the West for the last century and a half. ” Actually, the US “founders” were about as radical as anybody could be in the 18th century and came from a long line of radicals inspired by Martin Luther and other engineers of the Reformation. They indeed have ruled in the West for even longer than a century and a half. The tenets of the radicals are generally amorphous and useful only in the abstract. Nobody believes that all… Read more »
He means Communists, not radicals. And of course Satan pulled the same trick – it’s his Party. The old East Berlin rope-a-dope. Impressive.
So much – BINARY – wrong-headedness; so little time. A couple of examples must suffice: Nobody believes that all men are created equal except as a political tactic. I believe it with all my heart and I, you may rest assured, am nobody’s dummy”. It all depends upon what one means by “equal”. On the surface it is manifestly absurd to insist that “all men are created equal”. Look around and you see male and female (i.e.some “men”are “women”), short and tall, intelligent and unintellient, various phenotypes (inheritable physical traits loosely referred to as “races”), slower runners and faster, higher… Read more »
Your assertion that “every last U.S. citizen who was ever drafted was at some point released from military service and returned to civilian life” is FAKE.
There have been hundreds of thousands of such citizens who were never released. They died in service to their rulers, ((( those kind ))), or otherwise.
How can a man be free if mass murderers like Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Truman have a prior claim on his life?
Draftees were killed by the thousands.
They did not return to their pre-draft (pre slavery) life.
When your life has been taken over and you are sacrificed,= Slavery!
Japan, like Germany, was being economically sanctioned and crushed to death by the ‘noble’ Western powers. They were being positioned to attack so as to draw the US into the war. A lot of European blood from both Europe and America were spilled in the 20th century for the very same elite and banker’s that continue to rule the world today. I realize you are a Boomer who was raised on the fairy tales of the ‘evil’ Axis powers and that mental conditioning is nearly impossible to break. But much of what you think you know and understand about those… Read more »
Even assuming the truth in your assertions. the Japanese system was nuts. Top to bottom nuts. Each significant interest was it’s own mafia. Army, Navy, political class and business, financial class. They assasinated each other in turn to gain advantage for twenty years leading into WW11. The result, with the exception of the chosen people, is that any rational person would prefer occuapation by Nazis to Japanese occupation. Negotiating with monsters is a fools errand.
I hear ya, don’t get me wrong I have less than zero interest in Asiatic rule for anything other than asian countries. This wasn’t giving the japs a pass they were brutal and insane as you mentioned.
This was more a refutation of the very Boomer ‘dubya dubya two was a “good” war’ ideology fought by the noble Allies against the evil Axis. When most of that was (((engineered))) for the true winners of that conflict who rapaciously divided up nations & assets while european blood was still running in the streets and on the beaches.
Who was negotiating with the Japs?
Japan and Germany both are evidence of the power of emotion over rationality. Japan is a small country of islands. There was no need to physically occupy those islands. The USS Missouri could have sailed into Tokyo harbor and MacArthur could have explained to the Japs that the war was over and to stick to their own affairs. The Japanese military had ceased to exist. The use of atomic weapons was both an instrument of revenge and a demonstration to others, particularly the Soviets, of US power. A couple of light cruisers could have enforced an embargo on the place… Read more »
The primary vulnerability of Japan leading to war war was that they could feed domestically 40 million people out of ninety million. Now 40 million would die of starvation and disease in the coming year of privation, so yes, embargo would have worked very well, and invasion a disaster. Truman made the best choice he knew, but your enlightened opinion is far more deadly. Enlightened opinions often are.
“Truman made the best choice he knew…”
I’m inclined to agree it was a prudent decision but consideration should also be given to the fact the Soviets were already crashing through China and Manchuria when the order to nuke Japan was given. They were already demanding occupation rights similar to what they possessed in Germany soon after the Japanese surrender. Given Americans did the heavy lifting in the Pacific, it’s disingenuous to imply the atomic bombs weren’t also political instruments used to ward the Soviets off.
Scott Adams describes the problem with binary thinking as artist vs. engineer. Whenever he comes across a binary thinker, he checks their background, and sure enough, it’s usually a writer, or a journalist, or a musician, or some other field dominated by esthetics. People who can see both sides (or more) of an issue, weigh evidence, and develop positions logically tend to have STEM backgrounds.
The Darbyshire Hierarchy of Thinking comes into play too. “The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal.” All of those modes of thinking lend themselves well to binaries.
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal
This strikes me as fairly insightful and probably sufficiently true to help more than obscure thinking.
There is also the phyzzz. When I see a fat guy in a mask, limping along behind a woman in a mask, I think: A. There goes a guy that ain’t getting laid. B. Following a woman that is a liberal. Was in a Stew Leonard’s yesterday – masked employee at front, guy, asks: “Do you have a mask?” “No, do I have to have one?” “No, but you will starting tomorrow.” So in I go, with a woman I spend time with – both of us the only un-masked people in the place (it is a semi high end… Read more »
That sounds more like a cope. Everyone has been primed to see certain subjects as inherently good or evil. They have been emotionally primed. It is absolutely everywhere. A long time ago (late 80s early 90s) I used to read the paper every day. The first time I really noticed this stuff in black and white was with the words man and teen. If they wanted you to have a neutral or sympathetic view of a young person, they were a teen. If they wanted you to view them in an unsympathetic light, they were a man or woman (though… Read more »
I brought it up because it is such an obvious way of emotionally manipulating people. Is is sophistry.
Ah, yes, the ‘Normie Old Daze’ when I used to pick up two papers every day, NY Daily News and NY Post. I liked the sports page of the former better. Used to follow Dondi when I was a kid, in the Sunday Daily News. Then again, I used to drop a quarter in a payphone to get West Coast scores via Sports Phone. Now I can give a damn. They shit up their own cages. Now I laugh as I walk past these papers in the market – slim pamphlets, compared to what they once were. They still have… Read more »
There were 2 main newspapers in Philadelphia, one of which, The Daily News, openly pandered to blacks. The other, The Inquirer, was fairly neutral in that stuff. Today, they have been rolled into one progressive anti-white propaganda rag. Maybe I’m just old, but I think a proper newspaper could be profitable. Whatever financial pressure has been on them, they have made things infinitely worse with their awful editorial policies. If you are anything other than a raving progressive, the newspaper people hate you! Why would you read their shitty leftist propaganda rags? All of the attempts at “fixing” the papers… Read more »
And based on the embarrassing (for the oh-so ‘intelligent’ leftists) lack of page count, most former readers are voting with their dollar$, and putting these places where they belong: a mass media g.r.a.v.e.
They can pander all they want to people with no money, shows a real lack of basic business acumen.
Tarstarkas, I just got hit up for a donation to the foundation that was set up to own the Philly papers. I opted to ask for no further emails from them, and was presented with a list of reasons to click on. On that list was “other”, and an invitation to explain, so I did, good and hard, so to speak. Probably gave some blue-haired womyn or soyboy initially a shock, and then an occasion for feeling morally superior when this hireling read my response. It was mostly for the reasons that you outlined, but I also threw in that… Read more »
I mostly ignore larpy self-professed “neo-nazis” and “fascists” Most of them just hate Jews. The fawning over blacks always comes across as phony to me. To compare the struggles of a guy who went and fought a horrible war to a woman stuck at home in her mansion with her private tennis court to practice and exercise in also sounds a bit contrived. It’s just a lame attempt to make a “hero” from someone who never had the opportunity to display heroism. Her being a woman and there being no horrible war to go fight in is certainly not her… Read more »
We saw the same several decades ago with the gun grabbers. They were trying to make their case by labeling deaths 19 yo and under as children killed by guns. Intimating youth and non-culpability of the “victims”. Of course, upon further analysis of the stat’s, we found the overwhelming number of those killed were gang bangers, while there were only a mere handful children who found dad’s unlocked firearm in a drawer.
They raise ‘lying with words’ to an art. Anyone can tell a mere lie. But it takes a special kind of dishonesty to lie when saying things that may be technically true but so weaved in a narrative and laden with emotion that the reader comes to the exact opposite conclusion than what facts alone would tell them.
Caveat: I’m a Christian and I think Christianity is good. I think the present radicalism, whether or not it comes from a Christian worldview, has at least been persuasive because of the Christian worldview. Christian thought is binary in the sense that it’s good vs. evil, but honest Christians also grant that the world is ruled by Satan and will always fall short of God’s glory. The point isn’t to save the world but to save souls— to be in the world but not of it, to always be looking to the next life in eternity. As society fell from… Read more »
A common and binary thinking example virtually all of us has encountered is “so you don’t like CNN?, that means you like Fox News.” Our opponents have no idea what our positions are and aren’t interested in finding out since they’re too invested in shrieking “racism!”
While I wish we could stake out nuanced positions, binary thinking often reflects political reality. For example, I may agree with environmentalists that we ought to take far more care of our natural environment. However, I am afraid that any power I grant them will be used to promote open borders and transsexuals. It’s all of a piece.
Therefore I reluctantly respect the binary divisions and do not support the environmentalists.
Hunters, Fishers, Loggers, etc take way better care of the environment than the environmentalist who only want power and don’t give a shit about the environment…
I support the hunters, fishers, and loggers. I distrust the corporations that employ them.
Amen to that Brother…
The environment, blacks, gays, etc. are a means to power. Nothing more, nothing less.
You misstate the Intelligent Design group. It merely askes if something could be an accident. You find a body smashed into the sidewalk next to a tall building. Someone excitedly shouts “see! see! he fell off an unsafe roof!”. He could have accidentally fallen off. He may not have fallen from the roof. He could have committed suicide. He could have been pushed. What ID points out is the roof is secured with an alarm and secure locks and a fence with barbed wire, so it would be difficult to “accidentally fall off. They aren’t talking about a creator or… Read more »
Binary thinking (and stupidity in general) is the inevitable consequence of prolonged affluence, too much leisure time, and the extinction of real hardship and existential threat. We have become too soft and too lazy. Puerile debates about the current crisis du jour can only exist in a society in which no one has to fight to stay alive anymore. No one has to prove themselves via accomplishments rather than words. Nannyist government used to provide free food, shelter, medical care, cell phones etc. And now you get a paycheck too, to not work! Is this the way we want to… Read more »
It ends with real hardship and existential threat.
It’s easy to be high-minded, moral and idealistic when you have a wallet full of cash or when someone else is paying the bills. How will it end – war and or national bankruptcy. As an example, here’s a quote from Mayor Mike Bloomberg in 2011; “If you show up with cancer & you’re 95 years old, we should say, Go & enjoy. There’s no cure, we can’t do anything. A young person, we should do something. Society’s not willing to do that yet.” He was condemned for that comment. It’s easy to be pro-life and willing to spend an… Read more »
This really is the heart of it.
GlobHom can only exist in a soft, excess-filled society like the post-industrial West.
I fear we are potentially on deck for CW2 and WW3.
If CW2 breaks out, WW3 is nearly guaranteed. While the US is distracted by CW2 China will move on Taiwan and Russia will roll Ukraine.
WW3 is less likely if CW2 does not break out. Already, the CCP-funded hoaxstream media is maximizing the, “wet market,” virus origin and labeling the lab origin as a, “conspiracy theory.”
“Never let a crisis go to waste” applies to international affairs, too. You are 100% correct.
I’m a lot less worried than I used to be about Taiwan and Ukraine getting rolled. Or for that matter, Israel, Hong Kong, or S Korea. Canada/Mexico sure, because of our borders. Even with Mexico, it depends on who is doing the rolling. Everyone else can fend for themselves.
You are deranged. The idea that Russia and China have imperial ambitions held in check by the US’s limp-wristed fagarmy is a joke.
http://images04.military.com/sites/default/files/styles/full/public/media/news/service/2015/04/rotc-heels1-600.jpg?itok=mHut5Can
How’s the Big Pink One doing with the 5,000 Afghan goat fuckers?
We have no real interests in fighting for other lands, only our own.
Which does not mean we won’t, just that we have no interest in doing so.
The powers of Asia can have the Ukraine et al. They can have Europe too although that’s unlikely, Europe has nukes. Even Germany and Turkey, NATO have some number of US B-61 gravity nukes. We ‘shared the burden’ with them. <Interesting bit of competence on our part.
But only our own soil should concern us , as it happens that’s the heart of the matter.
Where does it end?
It ends badly for those still in the system so let’s build our system so we can have a chance to succeed while others are failing…
I think that binary thinking is largely the result of the Mass Media and the over simplified views on pretty much any topic which it covers, the great corona panic of 2020 is an example.
I suppose binary thinking is just another angle to a polarized age but it is indeed everywhere even among dissidents. I have friends who insist Trump is ‘a genius’ and will not brook that maybe he’s just a civ nat generation rebel against leftist orthodoxy but with all the faults civ nat implies. One argument I’ve heard is that it is ‘proof’ that the MSM hates him, ie arguing from the receiving end of reserve psychology. I also agree about the virus and the economy; I think the virus looks serious but I also think it’s healthy to have a… Read more »
Well, I am a simple man. I understand that we must be quick, adaptable and intelligent in our response to the forces that wish to destroy us. We must be able to discern the truth. Still, in the end, nearly the entire structure of our society is bent on destroying us. If forces are trying to kill me, by definition, that calls for a binary response.
In some ways I don’t think enough of us are binary enough. “We are surrounded by the enemy.” That simplifies the problem.”
My version of this is “these people hate you and want you dead” No nuance necessary.
Actually all they want from us now is to cower at home.
Why bother to kill us?
Good Chesty Quote.
We’ve been overrun by the enemy.
The problem has been solved.
Getting at the truth. One guy whom i don’t normally pay much attention to is pirate Dan Crenshaw. I have kind of discounted pirate Dan until I saw his interview with Bill Maher recently. Worth watching. Pirate Dan took Maher apart. And it was on the subject of what is true and what is not true. Not that I trust pirate Dan in all areas but I do see some good things in him. The whole purpose of the media narrative in 2020 and pretty much on both sides of the media, Fox News and CNN, is to drive society… Read more »
I watched it and it was great to see that smug, smirking a-hole Maher get knocked down a few pegs.
I’m surprised he even posted the interview.
The truth is making it binary means the choice is to submit or fight.
At present its submit.
If it became fight – it would be good.
If it stays submit, bad.
“They assume if they can discredit evolutionary biology, their preferred explanation of life must be true. They make no effort to prove their claims about a great designer.” Here we go again on the intelligent design people. The Zman doesn’t recognize his own binary thinking on ID. That’s his hypocrisy. According to him, if the ID people can’t prove the great designer in the sky, then evolutionary biology must be true. His position is just the inverse of theirs. And don’t try to give me any of this crap about ID doesn’t make any “affirmative claims,” because evolutionary biology doesn’t… Read more »
This is why I’ll be forever grateful to the Zman for introducing us to the term, “abduction”.
All of our public “discussions” are framed and argued in sophistry. Any dissident who has ever engaged in a discussion with a leftist or even people not normally engaged in political discussion notices they will react to virtually everything you say with emotion. They simply are not capable of arguing the merits of something in a dispassionate and rational way.
This is what people like Yuri Bezmenov were talking about when they said that 12 years of the public schooling has made people incapable of thinking.
Not noticing the responding with emotion, and not observing the rewriting of the past. Buying into the framework of ideas and choices that are (((given))) to you. Spending time and energy on the dilemmas and issues that are presented to be “front and center” to you. All things that will poison your ability to discern what is really going on, and destroy your ability to make informed judgements.
Upvote on PS.
Of course I’ve said raze them for years.
It seems that there will always be a boogeyman. Someone/thing to fear and fight. I can’t even imagine what’s in store for the dirt people after Corona is vanquished.
As night follows day, someone/something is sure to follow given the current great…um…success in controlling the dirt people. Pure conjecture on my part, but suspect what’s in store next (or eventually) will have some climate change theme. It’ll be really hot one summer – or really cold one winter. Everyone will be required to shelter in place till somemore trillion(s) of dollars can be thrown at the problem. In the brave new binary world – dare go step outside, or question the settled science: you are by defintion a denier and punishment(s) will be meted out accordingly, but most importantly… Read more »
So true. Driving would become a criminal offense in such a lockdown.
So the question is, how long will the breadlines stretch if proper social distancing is in effect?
Lol. Too long to see the front.
Yeah. This was the Red Team v. Blue Team circus that lots of us bought in to for too long. Because the enemy was soft on, say, illegal immigration, the other team was ours. We were flummoxed upon discovering they were enemies, too.
We’re seeing it in these economic debates. Hating capitalism can only mean approving socialism because there are only two alternatives in their minds. It’s limiting.
To quote a (in)famous Jewish Prime Minister, “…sometimes the enemy of your enemy—is your enemy too.” 🙂
Binary thinking on the JQ:
A) “Magic Jew Theory”: These high-functioning gypsies control everything, they’re the principal cause of Western decline, and that’s the first problem we need to solve.
Z) Anti-anti-semitism: They’re annoying, but mainly just a distraction from our real problems. Also, I reject anti-semitism because it’s déclassé.
Z’s answer is as crude and superficial as the one he rejects.
I’ve long claimed that the Left is intrinsically irrational because it simply cannot accept the reality of a beneficent status quo. To do so, would put it out of business. Were to the Left to admit of a fundamentally good establishment worthy of conserving, it would lose its raison d’etre. To the Leftist this means, perforce, that such a thing must be impossible. And, if that is the true, then what’s the point of working to create the good society? The Left is trapped in an irrational tautology. And when you bend the knee to crazy people…
Leftist Utopias don’t just happen. They need to be nurtured into being, with blood and strife.
Or a viral panic load. That seems to have put us on the path to Venezuela Communism.
Gentlemen the decision has been made.
You may continue to vent, its a safety valve.
Working as designed.
The most primitive binary, Us-v-Them, was there long before politics, radical or otherwise.
When the Usual Suspects have Tyrone’s boot on your throat, this binary is as natural and appropriate as the hate that flows from it.
Actually, the MOST primitive (I prefer “fundamental” as opposed to “primitive”) binary is “me” vs “not-me”. “Us” is merely an extension of “me”. Once an infant becomes self-aware and develops a sense of “me” it becomes aware of various classes of “not-me”. It is only when the mind matures sufficiently that “me” expands to include various “not-me” individuals and thus becomes “us”. I have long been convinced that sociopaths and psychopaths never truly progress to the stage of “us” and so “me” is the only measure of benefit.
Sounds like q fancy way of describing Marxism where the revolution never ends..
Why does it never end? Because it would mean the revolutionaries would have to get jobs at the local factory. And work is a four letter word to this particular class of parasite.One that is often found on college campuses, government agencies like the FBI, DOJ and DoD; and mooching off their upper middle-class parents.
One fundamental flaw of Democracy is its ability to make the common man hate the other common man across the street. Since it’s seen as a numbers competition to get their own people in power, the rage people feel even among close friends when they act against each other divides a If we had, say, a king or aristocracy, who went overboard, the common man would be able to find common ground when the system went off the rails. Not to say people should not have some democratic control, especially locally, but the current system puts brother against brother while… Read more »
I agree with you on a monarchy but it would have to be one that we haven’t seen before in history…Lot of discussion would have to take place once we had the power to achieve something like that…
The Roman system of temporary monarchy/dictatorship would have responded better than our liberal democracies to the current pandemic because it had express and legitimized means to transition between Senatorial aristo-plutocracy and a monarchical dictatorship bounded by strict time limits and tradition. Of course many will warn of “what happens when they don’t honor tradition” ala Sulla & Marius. That kind of breakdown should be seen as a symptom of underlying social rot rather than some wholly-external cause. A healthy society’s citizen-soldiers don’t impose martial law on their neighbors b/c “constitutional loophole.” A corollary fallacy with binary thinking is slippery-sloppiness –… Read more »
Apparently, “Most Americans don’t support stay-at-home protests”
Funny how they’re calling it a “stay-at-home protest” instead of a “lock down protest.”
I wonder where “most Americans” come from. At one point, didn’t most Americans support slavery? Not that I care about the validity of that claim, but it’s hilarious how this virus has exposed our culture of “likes make rights.” The more thumbs up an idea is given, the more correct it must be. “Stay-at-home” has more likes; therefore, it’s correct. Just like how most Americans said Hilary Clinton would win the election.
Well Z-man. Your missive today has a theme song. Groucho Marx put it to words close to 80 years ago. Enjoy:
https://youtu.be/xHash5takWU
Brilliant, and just like Groucho, I’d never join a club that would accept me as a member.
Is that a binary choice, or not?
Ying, yang. Theism, atheism. Male, female. Right, wrong. Good, evil. Friend, foe. We get in the habit of seeing the world as binary because it makes life easier and you don’t have to think so hard. Socrates got into trouble for seeing too many shades of gray.
I think the binaries are true and useful to comprehension but they interact in various ways, creating all those shades of gray. The trick is understanding and diagnosing what’s going on. Just my opinion.
When does night end and day begin? How can you figure it out without the night/day binary? Lots of gray as one gives way to the other.
Good point Paintersforms. The binary provides a structure for nuanced aspects to operate in. When there were just men and women, you had a variety of different kinds of men: gentle men, aggressive men, boastful men, thoughtful men, etc. In the age of gender spectrums there isn’t room for that any more – there can be only one kind of man and if you don’t fit that model you must be somewhere in the lgbt! universe. In a weird way over-structuring and over-categorizing has suffocated the breathing room for nuance. All those things Ifrank brought up were macro (meta?) comparisons,… Read more »
When schools started grading by Scan-Tron “a”, “b”, “c”, or “d”, fill in the bubble and be sure to use a #2 pencil, things got more binary in nature. It was simply easier for the teachers, not needing to navigate and evaluate long-form answers. The students learned that the world was binary, and that the answer was “right” or “wrong”.
We see this in psychology and sociology too. On a scale of -e to pi, how happy did seeing this picture of a cat make you? Over-quantification leads to ‘binary’ thinking. The idea that we can specify everything with a number.
I don’t hold myself as a scientist, but I collect quotes (and rarely, the correct attribution):
“Not everything that counts can be counted, not everything that can be counted counts.”
Other times data are required. Math is kind of useless unless you have numbers.
Socrates really got into trouble by making others see shades of gray in their binary thinking. 😉
That is not true. In fact, wasn’t he invited for a nice cup of tea? 🙂
Yep, and like a good CivNat he drank it. I left the ranks of the Hugh Hewitts a long time ago. I don’t read many cool aid drinkers on these pages, thank God. Only thing that keeps me somewhat grounded in reality.
Binary thinking is infantile. We live in the age of Infantilism.
We are seeing mass insanity on a biblical scale. Reminds me of this self-inflicted catastrophe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse
A child plays the part of today’s fanatical public health “experts”
These monsters push for “a vaccine” like it’s a supervitamin or a penicillin. They never heard of ‘viral load’.
Faucci, that criminal in charge for 36 years since the AIDS hysteria, should hang with his co-conspirators Redfield (CDC) and Brix.
I really do believe that many of us will have to protest. I’m not one for radicalism, but it seems like certain governors intend to string us along interminably. How the hell can we stay like this until July? And we know their kind to be capricious and deceptive. They might just decide that even more government interference is necessary to “stop the spread.”
CNN Lady: It’s APPALLING to me that people would prioritize making money over saving lives!
Our path to salvation is clear: we must make as little money as possible so that nobody ever dies. That way, when we’ve finally lost everything, we will be immortally poor.
What’s appalling (and dangerous) is that a women with such a wide audience could be so stupid as to spout such claptrap.
I honestly don’t get it. Do people really imagine that skeptics of the shutdown are rooting for money at the expense of human lives?
Binary thinkers bad! Relativists good!
…but some relativists are more equal than others.
Binary thinking has been a feature of the Western worldview since the dawn of ecclesiastical Christianity.
And as John Smith says below, the flip side is the Appeal To Nuance: homosexuality was normalized thus.
A good example of NOT conducting what the blogger Zee here addresses as “binary thinking” is: A: Abortion is murder, period. B: More black children are aborted in New York than experience live birth. C: If A is enforced, what effect would there be from 30-40 million more black people in the country? So the Christian view is that A = true. So A = bad. And A surely is used to raise a lot of consciousness and money. But as a Christian, I am aware of the stats noted in B. As well as other stats relating to that… Read more »
If you try to solve a problem, ask yourself when will be the result if you are successful. Sometimes, when you solve one problem, the result may be that an even bigger problem occurs. It’s the logic of failure.
How many people don’t have children because of the tax of the brown people??? Probably more than all the aborted brown kids…The abortion issue wouldn’t even be an issue if we had an all white country…So many issues that we have today wouldn’t even be an issue if we had our own country…
A fellow once said to me that he and his wife wanted a third child, but couldn’t afford one. He figured he was supporting three kids in Newark, NJ, though. “Do I ever get so much as a Father’s Day card?” Opposing abortion is the sole remaining issue for what passes for social conservatives. They lost every other battle, most recently the one regarding gay marriage. Lose this and they’ve lost everything. The price of being pro-life is accepting bastardy and welfare dependency as legitimate lifestyles. At least the Moral Majority of the 1980s tried to defend traditional virtues such… Read more »
If abortion were illegal, there would be more black babies, but no where near 30-40 million. Poor blacks have the number of babies they believe will maximize welfare. Once they hit that number, if abortion was illegal, they would be much more likely to use all the birth control options that are free at all the clinics within walking distance.
That would be the logical thing to do, but you are dealing with denizens of the hood.
DLS, this is what I believed in the era of “Losing Ground” by Charles Murray – the Reagan days. Now that I have actually lived around Blacks for decades, I see they’re just Sun People.
Rushton’s r/K theory better describes and predicts their Black nature than Murray’s libertarian homo economicus Black balance-sheeters.
I see little evidence that Blacks are sitting around carefully calculating their baby-momma strategies to maximize advantage.
Exile, it’s not a difficult algorithm. Can I take one more screaming delinquent for one more EBT card.
This is very sound analysis.
for some reason i thought of the conservative case for leisure suits… surprised Charlie Kirk hasn’t written that one lol. fair enough mr Zman, but we thought going against binary thinking meant we were supposed to break from the ziocon/libertarian paradigm. i dont want more welfare (they will create more money for public employees than welfare), but some way to solve the land ownership issue for young whites in mating age would help. ask perhaps companies that want sweet wuflu relief funding to build affordable housing for graduated college students in productive fields. or go along with companies, or offer… Read more »
If you read the comments over on MSM boards, what Z says is absolutely the truth.
The intelligent design analogy completely fails. I.D. shows through information theory and incompleteness theory that evolution can not work and you need a provider of the information. They do not make any claims on what this god must look like. He could be the Christian God or some disinterested AI type being. Note that information theory is the next breakthrough in science, e.g. Quantum Information Theory. In summary, I.D. shows that “random chance” doesn’t work in evolutionary theory. That is their goal. It is not binary. If there is a theory that provides the information needed, that will be plausible.… Read more »
Which is why ID is binary sophistry. It assumes the results can *only* be random chance or design. That’s like saying the results of a sports game are random or by design.
The silver lining in gulag from home is Mommy is Now On Board with what’s being taught via schooling from home, she can’t ignore it now. Women are very immediate, it must be within eyesight and touch to exist. Even brilliant women. Women do not abstract. Fantasy life of children, abstraction impossible.
This may come to nothing, it’s just now The Curriculum exists.
But I think that all politics reduces life to Us vs. Them, and whose side are you on.
And, of course, it has to be a matter of life and death.
Our task is to delegitimize “politics with everything.” But it ain’t easy, as the failure of Buckley/Bush/neo-conservatism makes clear.
Binary choices don’t always go the way people giving them intend. Germans were given a choice between Communists and those crazy National Socialists. They’d never choose That Guy, right?
Last time they tried that stunt they had the good sense to pick a harmless businessman for That Guy.
True, and something to keep in mind when talking in good faith with fellow dissidents. When talking to the other side though, binary moral thinking is the game and therefore play to win. For example, when they attack Trump, the proper response is not to defend the reasonableness of his actions, but to mock senile China Joe and what he did (or didn’t do) at the time. Make them defend the unreasonable. Sure, straw man tactics kill real debate, but they’ve been doing it and winning so we should just do it too when dealing with them. One set of… Read more »
Ruh roh. Ruhhh roh!
Talk about binary. Rush is talking about Vice President Michelle, stepping up after President Biden’s test results come in- and then nominating the First Husband as her VP in 2024.
Darn tootin’ our “news” corrals us into binary.
Ya gonna vote Pub or Dem?
How bout lamppost or a good sturdy tree???
Not sure about first hubby as VP. One has to be able to step up into the President’s role. I believe two termed Obama to be Constitutionally ineligible
I believe two termed Obama to be Constitutionally ineligible
Incorrect. The 22d Amendment would permit Mr. Obama to serve as VP under Mrs. Obama. He would be ineligible to run for election again as President but he could step into her shoes for the remainder of a single presidential term. And he probably would enjoy wearing her shoes.
If they follow the House of Cards script. Our elites follow movie scripts, a recurring one being the Heist Film.
Just a little update on yesterday’s post: some of our younger guys are doing a bad-optics frenzy for Hitler’s birthday on Twitter.
Happy belated birthday, Favorite Uncle!
He was right. About everything.
(Personal aside: Mom used to tell us Albert Einstein was our great uncle. She wanted her kids to think they were smart. Sorry, Mom.)
Thanks for mentioning yesterday, though, I had put in a quick blurb about UBI.
I left off the part related to yesterday’s musings about incentives.
UBI’s incentive: the ability to reward or punish, directly. It’s very binary.
Uh, we’re being forced into UBI now.
While we blabbed they acted.
Total collapse of the oil price which trades in negatives So if you buy a barrel they are going to give you 35 $ This may easily trigger the total collapse of the whole system Those who thought they can stop the world going (for the first time in known history) should be hanged on the closest lamp post Not that will change anything just for pleasure of seeing assholes hanging Where is that orange clown, just the other day he bragged about “the art of deal” and tremendous solution he helped to be negotiated between Russians and Saudis F*ucking… Read more »