by Jerky » Mon Dec 25, 2017 2:30 pm
Sigh... okay, I'll bite.
You wrote:
>Emmett Rensin wrote...
Just so everybody knows who you're referencing here, Rensin is a Far Left socialist and avowed Marxist who was suspended by left-wing website VOX for urging people to "riot" if and when Trump should visit their town. I'll leave it for anyone reading this to figure out for themselves how this might play into the hands of known destabilization strategies, and how both might relate to his avowed hatred of "liberals" in such a context.
>The most significant development in the past 30 years of liberal self-conception was the replacement of politics
>understood as an ideological conflict with politics understood as a struggle against idiots unwilling to recognize
>liberalism’s monopoly on empirical reason.
Right off the bat, Resnin's thesis is nonsense polemic with no supporting evidence, and which seems to be based entirely on the author's anecdotal observation, on social media and in the blogosphere, of attitudinal posturing that he, for whatever reason, finds distasteful.
I mean, seriously… try and make sense of what he’s saying. Does he really think “liberals” view “politics” as “a struggle against idiots unwilling to recognize liberalism’s monopoly on empirical reason”? Does he not understand that this value-free bit of cant can be repurposed to fit an attack on any and all ideological stands? Let’s try:
“The most significant development in the past 30 years of conservative self-conception was the replacement of politics understood as an ideological conflict with politics understood as a struggle against idiots unwilling to recognize conservatism’s monopoly on empirical reason.”
Or how about…
“The most significant development in the past 30 years of socialist self-conception was the replacement of politics understood as an ideological conflict with politics understood as a struggle against idiots unwilling to recognize socialism’s monopoly on empirical reason.”
Gee whiz. Somebody get me a MacArthur grant!
>The trouble with liberalism’s enemies was no longer that they were
>evil, although they might be that too. The problem, reinforced by Daily Kos essays in your Facebook feed and
>retweeted Daily Show clips, was that liberalism’s enemies were factually wrong about the world. Just take a
>look at this chart …
I won’t bore you with a repeat of my experiment above, but with a minimum of tweaking, it still works.
Fact is, the reality of the current American realpolitik is far too fraught, complex and volatile for such a glib and facile conception of it to possibly be correct. And even if it was true, it certainly isn’t the ONLY truth, if you know what I mean. When seen in such a light, Rensin's vacuous statement itself ends up being an example of that which he claims to deplore.
I have read Marx, and I think there is a lot of wisdom in his works. But some of his admirers, Resnin being one I suspect, view absolutely everything through Marx-coloured glasses. For people like him, EVERYTHING is political, and the political is everything.
So let’s say he goes to Youtube, and he looks up a debate between say, an brilliant PhD geneticist (who happens to call himself liberal and votes Democratic) and an angry, bible-thumping creationist (who happens to call himself conservative and votes Republican). And let’s say he peruses the comments section, where “liberals” mock “conservatives” for their retrograde, anti-science views. Never mind the facts, the “empirical” element… all Resnin can see is the political, and it gives him a distorted view.
>Liberals turn themselves into idiots when the basic assumption is that conservatives are idiots.
Which liberals? Which conservatives? WHICH IDIOTS?! Resnin’s “analysis” is not analysis, nor does it offer any helpful hints or potential solutions to the problem. It does nothing but stir up resentments on all fronts. It makes conservatives happy and angry. It makes liberals sad and angry. It makes Marxist socialists stand back, stroking their chins, smugly chuckling to themselves at how, taken in aggregate, all of this pissing people off posing as rigorous political analysis is BOUND to “accelerate” something or other...
>Liberals unjustified sense of superiority hurts the cause long term.
Again, which liberals? And what “cause” exactly? And in a great many cases, is it really so “unjustified”?
>Sigmund Freud conceived of the superego (snip) The mechanism is simple: sin goes in, censure comes out. Slip up too much and you’re excommunicated.
>Hence thread titles such as 'Why do people apologize for Russia', or 'The far-rights love of Kremlin policies'.
>Conformity enforcement is big business.
And how big is the “business” of getting people to question and disbelieve anything and everything, no matter how true, all based on such sly conceits as “you don’t wanna be one of the HERD, do ya?”
Meanwhile, the “rugged individualists” who gather at such MSM-averse watering holes as InfoWars, Red Ice and the rest are now the woolliest sheeple on the Animal Farm.
I believe Resnin reveals more than he probably intended to in the following paragraph. Give it a close read:
>When history is meant to be over and a single political faction begins to conceive of itself as the
>permanent manager of a static world, then that faction ceases to be political in the ordinary sense.
>Politics, in its classic incarnation, is the art of deriving an is from an ought; the point, as Marx famously
>said, is not to describe the world but to change it. But if the world is as it ought to be already and the
>essential task is to maintain it — that is, to police the circumscribed boundaries of permissible behavior
>and ideas — then those tasked with that maintenance must conceive of themselves as acting above
>politics itself. They become a superego, beyond the libidinal whims of any faction and dedicated not to
>some alternative vision of the world but to resisting all impulse toward alternatives.
Now, ask yourself… does the above REALLY describe any “liberals” that you know? Is it liberals who think that “the world is as it ought to be already”? Are they the ones who conceive of themselves as “acting above politics itself”? Or would those descriptors better fit the conservative movement, with their justification derived from a supernatural source? Hell, I think the above paragraph describes revolutionary socialists than it does liberal Democrats.
>This is why social engineering will always fail.
On the contrary! Thanks to the increasing sophistication of communications technology at both the macro and micro levels, some of which already borders on mind control, and the accelerating pace of our merging with said technologies, I think it’s working like gangbusters on an increasingly large percentage of the population.
And with that, I’m signing off for the Holidays.
Merry Christmas to you all, and if I don’t come back before then, a very Happy New Year!
Sincerely,
Yer old pal Jerky