non compos mentis

Afterbirth of a Nation

By in fresh hell, non compos mentis, race

One of the strangest things about the teabaggers I know is the way they vehemently deny holding any racist beliefs while making no effort to hide their, well, racist beliefs. I’ve heard radical right-wingers laugh at black people for being “too stupid” to get out of the way of Katrina, blame them for being the primary group responsible for taking out loans they couldn’t afford and thereby crashing the economy, and suggest that the reason Europe can afford to have such strict gun control laws is because “they don’t have a problem with the niggers like we do here.” A violent incident involving a basketball player leads to muttering about uncivilized thugs, but routine brawls in hockey don’t seem to reflect poorly on white people in general. Despite the majority of welfare recipients being white, the ones who always inspire apoplectic tirades about freeloaders and parasites are referred to with names like Shaquanda and Tyreesha (and good luck convincing a teabagger that the majority of their taxes are not going toward keeping “those people” living the high life in Section 8 housing, wining and dining on food stamps). And the only part of our “heritage” that my fellow Southerners seem interested in celebrating are the years 1861-1865. The bolder ones even argue that slavery gave blacks at least a rudimentary work ethic, not to mention Christianity.

It’s like they’ve internalized the idea that being accused of racism is a slur upon their honor, but it doesn’t seem to follow that actually being racist is a bad thing. Like I said, strange.

Bad Faith Effort

By in history, non compos mentis, religion, the madness of crowds, waiting for the barbarians

It’s difficult to say what amuses me the most about the way our revanchists do their utmost to deny the separation of church and state. On the one hand, you would think people who are so extremely concerned to make sure that every citizen regularly displays a gaudy excess of sentimental patriotism, lest the nation collapse from a lack of self-esteem, would be constantly harping on one of the things we Myrrhkins can all be justifiably proud of. As I mentioned recently, we’ve grown so used to the idea that metaphysical differences are not worth bloodshed that it can be easy to forget just how long it took for us to get to that point. Fifteen hundred years of Christianity being synonymous with state power, and we never did get around to acting on all those supposed ethics at its core, but a mere couple hundred years of secularism have already accomplished far more. Even many colonial religious groups understood this, realizing it would be in most of their better interests to keep any one denomination from enjoying state favoritism.

On the other hand, this is a situation that would appear to be tailor-made for the ideological template they favor — in a country where the government got out of the religion business, where it established a, shall we say, free marketplace of religious ideas, religion in all its forms flourished as a result, and has maintained a dynamic vibrancy ever since. In Europe, where many nations still nominally have an official state religion, the practice of it has become a hollow, empty ritual that no one even cares enough about to bother ending it. But where are the teabaggers with misspelled signs demanding you keep your government hands off their religion? Most of them seem to be just fine with the idea that the full muscle power of the government should be used to make sure no citizen goes five minutes without being reminded that Jesus died for them (the pathetic insecurity underlying this incessant need to preach and proselytize to a captive audience is pretty hilarious in its own right).
There are days when I just say bring it on. Let me just nestle into a nice, remote spot out of the way with plenty of refreshments and watch all these idiots battle in the streets over which group of Southern Baptist splitters gets to preside over the terminal decline of their tradition into meaningless irrelevance.

In the Depths of Their Humanity, All I Saw Was Bloodless Ideology

By in atheism, history, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, moralizing, non compos mentis, religion, waiting for the barbarians

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but the perpetually aggrieved Bill Donohue is a steaming, whistling little teakettle of a man, forever boiling over one thing or another. What is it this time, Bill?

The pope did not go far enough. Radical atheists like the British Humanist Association should apologize for Hitler. But they should not stop there. They also need to issue an apology for the 67 million innocent men, women and children murdered under Stalin, and the 77 million innocent Chinese killed by Mao. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all driven by a radical atheism, a militant and fundamentally dogmatic brand of secular extremism. It was this anti-religious impulse that allowed them to become mass murderers. By contrast, a grand total of 1,394 were killed during the 250 years of the Inquisition, most all of whom were murdered by secular authorities.

Yawn. Same old, same old. I’ve heard this so many times it’s starting to sound in my ears like the way adults talk in the Peanuts TV shows: Mwuh mwah muh mwah mwah mooah. Hitler an atheist? Nope. Stalin and Mao primarily driven by radical atheism? Pick your favorite response.

But let’s leave Mr. Donohue to his angry jitterbug on the stove burner and take a closer look at the more interesting theme here. One thing all three of those famous monsters actually had in common with Christianity was a belief in the teleological progression of history toward utopia, as well as in the redemptive, cleansing power of blood and violent sacrifice. Biblical scholars are united in saying that Jesus, assuming he actually existed as a historical person, was just one in a long line of Jewish apocalypticists. I know they don’t tend to emphasize this in devotional readings for some reason, but the entire point of his ministry was to prepare anyone who would listen for the coming end of the world, with violent retribution for all whom he felt deserving, followed by endless paradise. Since then, whether it’s based on visions of heaven, the classless society, or living in perfect harmony with nature, this idea that the ends justify the means pops up repeatedly throughout history. Utopia is waiting just around the bend, right after we get through the great purification by flood, fire, earthquakes or mass murder. It honestly has nothing to do with religion or the lack thereof. It’s an abstract concept of perfection that isn’t exclusive to anyone in particular.

As I’ve said before, I expect that we’re in for some hard times in the next few decades as the glory days of life in America fade further into the past, and we face choices over how far we’re willing to go to maintain our privileged position in the world, especially as nations like India and China look to get some of our standard of living for themselves. Perhaps some more equitable, balanced lifestyle will be the end result of our downward spiral, but human nature being what it is, I’m not optimistic. And because of that, I don’t see any reason to gleefully anticipate the chaos and upheaval that may come. Hell, I’d be happy to be wrong. For me, a rule of thumb is that if you’re so attached to your ideological convictions that you would rather see widespread suffering on a massive scale than to have to revise those convictions, if you can envision that sort of suffering while feeling smug over having accurately predicted it, you might just be the kind of zealot we’re talking about here.

I Refute Voltaire Thus

By in fresh hell, history, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, science, the madness of crowds

So, my parents have gotten into the whole “raw milk” thing, thanks to some quack doctor they went to see. Just to make sure I didn’t space out through science class all those years ago and hallucinate about the whole reason we started pasteurizing milk to begin with, I did some looking around on the Internets. This made me laugh…

Food scientists can hardly believe that so many consumers have turned their back on one of the most successful public health endeavors of the 20th century. In 1938, for example, milk caused 25 percent of all outbreaks of food- and water-related sickness.

…and it also reminded me of a recent righteous rant by Ed about an outbreak of pertussis in California, related to the trendy anti-vaccination movement.
See, there’s a part of me that appreciates this on some meta-level, the counterintuitive “victim of our own success” phenomenon. Science has done such a good job of freeing people from having to worry about dying from contaminated food and drink or formerly terrifying diseases that they’ve become complacent and ignorant, enough so to become contemptuous of their benefactor and deny that they ever needed its help in the first place. Of course, public policy deserves a lot of the credit as well, and it, too, has ironically helped breed a superbug of stupidity in the form of so many Joe Republicans, convinced that they never got nothin’ from no one and don’t see why they should have to pay taxes to help anybody else. Indeed, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have so many thankless, functionally retarded children.

And if you need further proof that history is not progressive but cyclical, not a steady advance of knowledge and compassion but alternating periods of high-minded cosmopolitan and knee-jerk provincial values, consider the fact that Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé The Jungle was written in 1906. What do you think the reception would be for a book like that today, 104 years later? An earnest portrayal of the hopeless plight of the working class, the corruption of unregulated business and the need for social programs, written by an unabashed !socialist!, of all things?
Progress? Age of Reason? I laugh in your face.

Raggedy Antichrist

By in jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, religion, the madness of crowds, waiting for the barbarians

14 percent say that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”
Curious about that final 14 percent, I performed a simple Google search for “Obama” and “Antichrist” which yielded almost a million hits. These numbers are alarming, not only for the president but for what it says about Americans and what passes for fact.
…Obama has bigger problems to deal with than to be sidetracked by the ridiculous. But what does it mean when a portion of the country views the president of the United States in this way? What is that really about?
Hey, a Google search for “Ronald Wilson Reagan Antichrist 666” got me 8,980,000 hits. Even a simple “Pope Antichrist” gets a not-too-shabby 667,000. And as I just said, 18% or so of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth. Quite simply, about one out of every five or six people here is functionally retarded and should be required to don a safety helmet, protective goggles, bubble wrap and water wings when leaving the house. How much analysis does this call for? What else is there to say about it?
Just this: I am supremely disappointed in the lack of imagination in this country when it comes to the diabolical, the malevolent, the fiendish, the infernal. I mean, really: even if we limit ourselves to these three sorry candidates, a senile old jellybean-munching actor and a milquetoast, technocratic centrist outpoll the ex-Hitlerjugend head of a secretive, worldwide criminal cartel of kiddy-diddlers? Surely we can do better, even the 13% or so who admit to having stuck their tongues into light sockets to see what electricity tastes like.

Same as It Ever Was

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, the madness of crowds

Raw Story:

Nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is down to just 34 percent.

Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: “As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?” In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn’t know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn’t know.

Bob Harris once provided a slightly more in-depth analysis of similar gobsmacking statistics, but I don’t remember enough details to track down the post. Basically, though, he showed pretty conclusively that no matter what the specific issue, 20-25% of the population can be counted on to be just insanely ignorant, even when it comes to things you thought were utterly beyond debate or misunderstanding. So take a deep breath and relax. One out of every four or five people is eye-poppingly, jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly ignorant. ‘Twas ever thus.
Update: Bob graciously raises the property value on this here blog by about a thousand percent by checking in and letting me know where I could find the post in question, and it’s even better than I remembered it! To wit:
65% couldn’t describe the basic facts about Watergate
56% think in war, the media should support the government over questioning it
48% say the news media acted responsibly during the Clinton Wars
45% characterized Watergate was “just politics”
43% attended religious services in the previous 7 days
40% believe the media was biased in favor of Bill Clinton
35% say the government should not fund stem cell research
34% think Rock and Roll has had an overall negative impact on America
33% believe a wife should “submit herself graciously” to a husband
30% say the Bible is the “actual word of God” to be taken literally
29% think people will be “more likely” to afford college for their kids in 2020
28% disapprove of labor unions on principle
28% say the government should have the right to control news reports
27% believe divorce is “morally wrong”
26% thought various disasters in 1999 might “foreshadow the wrath of God”
26% think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank their kids
24% describe themselves as interested in what celebrities think
21% told a pollster they’d never met that they had cheated in a relationship
21% say justice was served in the O.J. Simpson case
20% approve of the how the Catholic Church handles pedophilia
20% believe that the killing of civilians in Vietnam was “relatively rare”
15% were upset at Diana Spencer’s death like “someone you knew”
12% think the United States should have a British-style royal family
11% stockpiled food and water in advance of Y2K
11% think “Titanic” was the best American movie of the 20th century
11% would like “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” as their personal physician
10% would eat a rat or an insect on a “reality” TV show
10% think it’s advantageous to be a woman in American society
10% believe Oswald acted alone
10% say they are “very likely” to become rich someday
8% could not name a single TV network
8% fear they are “very likely” to be shot or badly hurt by a stranger
7% think Elvis is possibly still alive
6% say Garth Brooks is the best male singer of the 20th century
5% are ?very afraid? of thunder and lightning
5% would be “more likely” to buy food labeled as genetically modified
3% wanted to see the questions on “Millionaire” become less difficult

Wherever You Go, There You Are

By in augean stables, non compos mentis, science, the madness of crowds

Today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city sky-scrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcism … What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!

– Leon Trotsky
There’s this old lady I know. I heard her scoffing last week at the story about scientists calling climate change undeniable. This is coming from someone who consults the Farmer’s Almanac to see what the weather is going to be like for the next few months.
She also believes that WD-40 has analgesic properties, and uses it the way most people might use Bengay. I suspect this might have a bit to do with why her skin looks like old luggage that’s been left outside in the rain for months.
A lifelong smoker who frequently has coughing jags that sound like she’s choking up bits of her lungs, she nonetheless claims that her doctor says she has the health of someone in her twenties.
Oh, and despite being a typical Christian who thinks God is personally intervening in her life on a regular basis, she firmly believes the thing about the Mayan prophecies of the world’s end in 2012.
Stephen Hawking (who’s becoming a real downer lately, it must be said) says we need to make steps toward colonizing space if the human species is going to have any chance of long-term survival. I just wonder how he would ensure that we don’t carry our inherent deadly stupidity out there with us.

Fear of a Black Planet

By in drugs, history, media/propaganda, non compos mentis, psychology, race, the madness of crowds, waiting for the barbarians

Maybe I’m wrong and we do need a national “dialogue on race,” but my guess is that if Barack Obama figures out a way to turn the economy around and create some real paying jobs, a lot of this racial angst will disappear pretty quick. If you tune out the hottest parts of the Tea Party rhetoric and just focus on who these people are, what you’ll basically see are a bunch of middle-aged white people who spent their teens listening to Eddie Murphy albums and deep down are a lot more worried about their credit card debt than they are about ACORN taking over the government. Add a little more disposable income to that crowd and this whole debate will recede to tolerable levels. Or maybe not — but we can all hope, I guess.

Yeah, and if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle. No, really, turning the economy around and creating real paying jobs? That’s a pretty big “if” to hinge this scenario upon.
For once, I have to totally disagree with Taibbi. I don’t think this is just displaced anxiety over economic woes. As he seems to understand earlier in his post, oddly enough, this is a really deep psychological issue for the teabaggers, real lizard-brain stuff, this fear that the other races are taking away everything that’s rightfully theirs, and they’re either failing to stop it, or they’re being restrained from doing so by bleeding-heart liberals. I read something (don’t remember where) shortly after Katrina, when there were all sorts of stories about supposed looting, raping, murder, etc. floating around (and as it turned out, it looks like cops and vigilante rednecks were actually the ones taking advantage of the opportunity to kill people). The long and short of it was that whites have always lived in fear of blacks rising up and exacting revenge for slavery on them, dating back to the days of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Nat Turner at least, and that periodically, one thing or another will trigger another outburst of hysteria and projection, with whites typically lashing out in fear somehow, usually with violence. White people sure do love them some preemptive warfare.
On that note, it’s worth remembering that in fact, most of our shrill, moralistic, anti-drug hysteria came about as a result of whites noticing minorities indulging in these substances that had previously been seen as just another way to enjoy oneself (among civilized people, that is). It was really stunning to see front page articles in the New York Times from the 1920s soberly discussing the way cocaine transformed the Negro into a violent beast with almost superhuman strength whose only concern while under the influence was rapin’ him some white women. Always with the innocent white women being victimized! Some of the urban legends of the time, involving drug dealing minority gangs who kidnapped and trafficked in – you guessed it – our white daughters, who were turned into drug addicts and sold into prostitution, are almost too incredible to believe when you read them today.
The ’60s, then, represented a time when our children! happily consorted with those people! while indulging in those drugs!, not to mention men and women looking indistinguishable and refusing to play their role in continuing all we had worked for up to that point. I’m not sure it’s possible to overstate how much of a near-psychotic break this induced in a certain conservative mindset, one that will be around for another generation or two, at least.
So I think we could have been enjoying a renaissance of the postwar standard of living for the last few years, and the election of our first black president would have still led to the spectacle we see today. I guess we should just be glad that so far, rhetoric aside, actual violence has been almost nonexistent, unlike previous episodes of Honkies Gone Wild. Progress?

Cliché Guevara

By in augean stables, media/propaganda, non compos mentis, psychology, the madness of crowds, waiting for the barbarians

Until I saw that the link actually went to Fox News, I seriously thought S.Z. was making up the quotations from Glenn Beck here. This was my favorite one:

The other thing this thing is about is incompetence. I mean, how many terrible decisions has this administration made? I mean really — ones that are destroying the country, it’s almost like they’re intentionally trying to destroy it? Oh, did I say that? I better take another swig of root beer.

As it happens, I was out and about yesterday, and at one point I stopped in my local chain bookstore. And when I say “local”, I’m referring to a small town that exemplifies Real Myrrhkah, with all that entails, both positive and negative. So as you can imagine, the display stands up front are overwhelmingly top-heavy with bait for the kind of people who probably only visit a bookstore if Beck or Rush (the reactionary blowhards, not the musicians) have urged them to. There’s more teabag worship there than you’ll find in some quaint English hamlets, is what I’m saying. And while I’ve noticed this hyperbole before, it was especially striking to see, collected in one place, how many books are basically about “How X is DESTROYING AMERICA and Y may be our last chance to save it!”, with X representing something to do with leftism the majority of the time. Check it out for yourself (and that’s just the ones that literally have “destroying America” in the title; many others hum the tune without actually singing the lyrics). It’s a little counterintuitive to me to think that a nation that survived the Civil War and the Great Depression is too feeble to resist the merciless onslaught of the ACLU and secular liberalism, but then again, I’m not exactly the target audience here.

(Update: Okay, forget Beck — this is my new favorite “destroying America” example, from the intellectual giant who brought us “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang”. He even invokes Che himself!)

Continuing with the theme from the last post, it’s equal parts amusing and sad to see a group of people who, by all rights, should be thrilled at how much power and influence they have in this country, living in a delirious fever dream, beset on all sides by the forces of darkness, always one small misstep away from complete ruin. Once again, I say John Calvin should be considered one of the Founding Fathers for the psychological, if not political, influence he’s had on this country.
I do realize that people generally need to feel a sense of psychological balance. After all, don’t you start to feel leery when it seems like too many things are going right for you lately? Don’t you start nervously anticipating the inevitable reversal of fortune, to the point where it adversely affects your ability to enjoy what you have? But this — this is just pathological, to be this terrified of the phantom of radical leftism in a nation where milquetoast liberalism has been in pell-mell retreat for the last few decades, with no hopeful signs of a renewed vibrancy in the foreseeable future. I mean, if we’re truly living in the glorious U.S.S.A., wouldn’t you think that I could get my books from AK Press in less than three or four weeks? 

Certum Est Quia Impossibile Est

By in foolosophy, media/propaganda, non compos mentis, psychology, the madness of crowds

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
– Lewis Carroll
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.
This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.
Noam Chomsky has reiterated a similar point many times; namely, that the government or corporate clerisy, despite being “intelligent” by the standards we generally use to measure such things, and despite an impressive pedigree of formal education, are much more susceptible to absorbing propaganda than the rabble, who are more likely to believe what their experience tells them, rather than twist it to fit their preordained conclusions. And while your everyday bumpkin is certainly capable of believing all sorts of stupid shit, I’ve noticed a similar proclivity for open-mindedness myself among people with no emotional stake in forcing facts to conform to their rigid worldviews. Being more widely read, having a larger vocabulary, and taking an active interest in worldly affairs can just as easily provide an ideologue with that many more excuses, hiding places and smokescreens to preserve their dogmatic principles.
My brother is a typical Fox News foot soldier, a Glenn Beck devotee, the whole nine yards. And yet, he’s not truly a drooling idiot, unless you agree with the maxim of the philosopher Forrest Gump, who said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Some months back, I tried to play the role of Matt Taibbi to his Byron York on the issue of the bailouts and the more general theme of taxpayer money. I asked him why he was so outraged over the thought of “welfare” for shiftless minorities, while being apparently unruffled by the fact that he and I and everyone else, for that matter, had just been utterly robbed blind by a bunch of white suit-and-tie-wearing free-marketeers who almost certainly worship Ayn Rand as a goddess. His response was something along the lines of, well, the banksters were forced to make those bad loans to “those” people, even though they knew it was a bad idea, because the bleeding hearts in the government decided that every black and brown person in America should be a homeowner whether they were capable of handling the responsibility or not, so therefore we shouldn’t be angry at them for simply figuring out a way to profit from a disadvantageous situation. I pointed out to him that in one of the debates with John Kerry, Bush himself had bragged that his administration had done more than any other to increase the number of minority homeowners in America, and how did that square with his assertion of liberal do-gooders being responsible for it? He dismissed it the same way that his hero Beck has attempted to dismiss all the aspects of Bush’s presidency that don’t fit with teabagger dogma: by basically calling Bush too liberal on social and domestic issues. George W. Bush. Too liberal. The mind reels.
The other day, when it was widely reported that the “Climategate” pseudo-scandal had officially been debunked, I couldn’t resist taunting him with the headline in the New York Times. Immediately, of course, despite only having heard of this story two seconds prior, he snorted at the idea that the NYT could even report the weather accurately without injecting a commie liberal bias into it, before segueing effortlessly into blasting the study as a Justice Department conspiracy against capitalism, followed by a lightning-quick detour into ranting about the Fox-derived obsession with Obama’s DoJ and the New Black Panther party. I barely had time to inform him that this was a study done by a British parliamentary commission, and that the American government had nothing to do with it, before he sarcastically responded with, “Oh! Well, if the British say so, it must be true!”
You see what I have to deal with on a regular basis.
What kind of rejoinder is that? Who’s asserting anything about blindly trusting anything British? This is what’s so wearying about even trying to have arguments with people who possess no intellectual integrity — every single thing they say is built on a foundation of ridiculous assumptions and outright bullshit. You can’t even begin to address their ostensible “argument” — assuming you can even find a logical train of thought in there – until you clear up all the incoherent debris underneath it all. Trying to argue with them without challenging their assumptions plays right into their hands, much like taking the bait if asked when you stopped beating your wife. You’ve already validated half of what they’re saying just by answering it seriously.
To any neutral observer, he just proved twice in a matter of seconds that he has no clue what he’s talking about, and that facts mean absolutely nothing unless they conform to what he’s already decided he wants to hear. Yet he manages to blithely continue on, unhampered by the crushing weight of self-awareness that would shame him into silence, simply erasing such incidents from his memory as if they never happened, before changing the subject to whatever else Beck has started ranting about in the meantime. Like I said, he’s not an idiot. His brain does work. He can form complete sentences, spell fairly well, and even read for pleasure. But there’s something going on psychologically, on a different level, that subordinates those qualities to supporting preconceived conclusions, because it would be too stressful and chaotic to him to have to admit being wrong and start again, without being able to lean on one ideological crutch or another.
This is why I tend to be pessimistic about the idea that humans will always rationally choose to better themselves, that all we need is more information to lead us out of ignorance and self-destruction. Truth-seeking for its own sake is a relatively new ideal; far more ingrained in our makeup is the drive to see what we want to see, to cater to our own narcissism, to reinforce our hopes and fears rather than challenge them.

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds

By in books, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, tribalism, waiting for the barbarians

Synchronicity, baby. I swear by the feathers of Quetzalcoatl, just yesterday I was trading emails with a dear, sweet friend, and I was assuring her in one of them that she hadn’t missed anything at all by not subjecting herself to reading any of Ayn Rand’s novels. At one point in the afternoon, though, I stopped my typing and looked up, a quizzical look upon my face.

I said to myself, I said: “Self? Did you hear something?”

“Maybe… I’m not sure. What did it sound like?”

“Well…sort of like the collective strangled gasp of thousands of frigid, heartless Randroid fanboys and fangirls finding a momentary release from hating everyone else in the world through a simultaneous orgasm, despite the ironic fact that the thought of doing anything collectively would have spoiled even that meager pleasure for them.”

“Ah, yes, that was it. I was going to say it was just the neighbor’s dog making noise again, but no, you’re right.”

I shrugged and returned to my correspondence. Later on, I finally got around to reading the news headlines and noted that a crazy dude in a plane had gone all kamikaze on an IRS building in Texas. Ohhh, that explained it. Hell, even a name like “Joe Stack” sounds like a Rand character; straightforward, firm and rugged! Do we have a rambling fuck-the-gummint stemwinder? You know it! So there you go, my dear, sweet friend. All we need is a rape scene somewhere in there, and you’ve got one of her novels playing out in real time. See what you’re not missing?

I happen to be related to a few Randroids, so I’ve had ample opportunity to observe them in their native habitat. I was curious to see if they would, indeed, be all giddy with joy over this blow struck for freedom. So I solicited their reactions. Would they let puny obstacles like ideological consistency or fear of being called “terrorist sympathizers” stand in their way? Well, would John Galt have let that stop him? Of course not, you stupid, weak, girly-man commie. They were proud to claim this freedom fighter as one of their own (even as they claimed he was actually a leftist, trying to have their cake and smear it too).

I didn’t bother trying to point out that “It’s only terrorism when it’s done by people we don’t like for reasons we don’t agree with” is not a very sturdy ethical foundation. I didn’t ask if it was really only a few short years ago that simply calling the president a liar meant you were guilty of treason. I just promised to get my fellow bleeding hearts in the ACLU and Amnesty International to try and spring them from whatever secret prison camp they end up in under some hidden clause in the Patriot Act, and that I would send them Korans and pornography while they were there.

Eight and a half years and one Democratic president. That’s all it took before I heard Republicans, newly infatuated with moral relativism, start shamelessly arguing that crashing planes into government buildings in the hope of killing civilians was a legitimate act of political protest. If it hadn’t been so goddamned achingly predictable, it would be really funny.

These Sheep Were Made for Fleecin’

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis

Why is Vox Day telling us that Haitians don’t deserve or need our money? For the same reason he beats down bitches in the dojo: for their own good.

More importantly, at what point do people begin to recognize that because sending money to Haiti is the root of the problem, it cannot be part of the solution?

[…] The earthquake is not a sign that people should begin helping Haiti. It is entirely the opposite. It is a powerful warning that people must stop trying to help Haiti. Instead, they must leave the Haitians alone to help themselves, which, of course, it is possible they may not be willing to do after decades of dependence on external support.

Hey, it hurts him more than it does them, remember. Anyway — it’s safe to say that WorldNutDaily’s readers are no doubt nodding along, feeling smugly superior to those voodoo children who are too stupid and immature to be trusted with money, and too lazy to find the severed lower halves of their legs so they can start pulling up on those bootstraps.

Meanwhile, if you click through to his column, you’ll be greeted by ads that promise to teach you how to build a solar panel in ONE DAY to save 99% on your power bill, and how to discover what self-defense masters and the Army DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW. I’m tempted to see if refreshing the page will give me the inside scoop on how to add three inches to my equipment, make a hundred bucks an hour stuffing envelopes at home, get a master’s degree online, and create a perpetual motion machine from the parts of that junked car on my front lawn. I mean, if I’m going to get that solar panel done in one day, I might as well find something to do on Sunday!

So while your initial reaction might have been to gasp in shock that anyone could be so heartless toward victims of a horrific natural disaster, I think it’s far more understandable when you realize that these people have probably already given tons of money to Nigerian princes-in-exile; in fact, that’s probably where they developed a suspicion about foreign black people supposedly needing money to begin with.

Nostradumbass

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, the madness of crowds


The end is near! Again!

It amuses me to find that somewhere down in my numb, blackened core, I still retain a vestigial capacity to be surprised by the latest shiny object people have latched onto. What is all this shit about 2012? I got stuck in a room yesterday with someone who tried to tell me about it.

Human civilization may very well come to an end sometime soon, or at least suffer a severe self-inflicted downgrade. But if it happens, it will be because we’re just naked chimpanzees prone to fanatical aggression who are muddling on through the best we can with no idea why. This yearning to throw off the yoke of responsibility for one’s life and submit to some glorious divine plan that has been there all along is just embarrassing to witness. Stop it. Stop it right now.

Where Do I Sign?

By in non compos mentis, the big sleep

Just in case the rumors are true, and we will all be visited by Obama’s medical bureaucrat-assassins in order to inform them how we wish to die, I figure it can’t hurt to make a statement for the record, right here, right now. For all I know, maybe there are limited opportunities available for certain arrangements, and I don’t want to procrastinate on something so important. All y’all can be my witnesses, too. All right? Ready? Here it is:

I want to die by means of a lethal, heart-stopping orgasm (to be induced by a partner of my choosing, yet to be determined) while on a heroin high.

Is it official now?

Marduk and Baal Were Probably Involved, Too

By in fresh hell, non compos mentis, religion, waiting for the barbarians

Har har. I just wrote in the last post:

That doesn’t even touch on another favorite parlor game of secular liberals, that of insisting that no one with any kind of education or position of power could possibly believe this crap; it has to all be a cynical put-on.

And then I see this:

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

But I’m sure this was all just part of Rove’s eleven-dimensional chess plan to make Bush appeal to the average Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking stumpfucker in the heartland, even if we’re only finding out about this now. Or something. Truly crazy people would never actually be allowed near power, right?

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