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Thursday, January 13, 2011
The New Civility
KEEPING ON KEEPING ON. All right. I'm feeling a smidgin better, thanks to DJMoore and Diogenes. It was Diogenes who offered this comment:
The behavior we witness from the left
is classic [as in, "as defined by Cleckley"] psychopathic behavior. The
difference is that it has been institutionalized into our "press" and
the democratic party from its sources in the various radical lefts of
the '60s and '70s. It is most easily represented by the Alinsky tactics
that we've been hearing about and the Cloward-Piven strategy as well.
If you compare the Alinsky/Cloward-Piven crap to the definitional
behaviors of a psychopath, you'll find that they are strongly
correlated. The left has analysed psychopathy, refined it, and made it
into their operating system.
What the right has not yet learned is that you cannot fight a psychopath on his own terms and win; you will always lose. In almost every case, a psychopath will deceive a psychiatrist, let alone a "layman," into believing him; and then will wreak havoc on the "victim." They are, I assure you, almost magical.
As long as righties think lefties are coming from actual legitimate [or possibly legitimately arguable] positions, they will be tricked and will lose. It requires a tremendous amount of skill, insight, and energy to react to reality rather than the thing thrown at you by a psychopath. The only person who I think has an inkling of this is [I shock myself with this, frankly] Glenn Beck; and he's not entirely clear much of the time. Krauthammer has a clue on occasion. Conrad Black's pretty good, well, really good; but he can't lead the right here. Mark Steyn, ditto. Limbaugh doesn't need to understand this; he simply handles it better than anybody [my wife has the same gift]. But he's not going to run for office. Maybe Chris Christie...
Another way to think of this is older: diabolical [literally, in Greek] -- the evil thing thrown across the path of good. One must assume that everything "they" say is a lie.
What the right has not yet learned is that you cannot fight a psychopath on his own terms and win; you will always lose. In almost every case, a psychopath will deceive a psychiatrist, let alone a "layman," into believing him; and then will wreak havoc on the "victim." They are, I assure you, almost magical.
As long as righties think lefties are coming from actual legitimate [or possibly legitimately arguable] positions, they will be tricked and will lose. It requires a tremendous amount of skill, insight, and energy to react to reality rather than the thing thrown at you by a psychopath. The only person who I think has an inkling of this is [I shock myself with this, frankly] Glenn Beck; and he's not entirely clear much of the time. Krauthammer has a clue on occasion. Conrad Black's pretty good, well, really good; but he can't lead the right here. Mark Steyn, ditto. Limbaugh doesn't need to understand this; he simply handles it better than anybody [my wife has the same gift]. But he's not going to run for office. Maybe Chris Christie...
Another way to think of this is older: diabolical [literally, in Greek] -- the evil thing thrown across the path of good. One must assume that everything "they" say is a lie.
Thing is, this is nothing new. Why my heart has been so dark of late. I've been talking very directly about this stuff for 20 years at least. Care to hear (from my Y2000 Amerian Glossary) about the "nonpartisan" initiative the kindly liberals are now urging on us because they lost a congressional election?
Non-Partisan Politics. 1) Obsolete:
Doing what is right, without regard to the positions or preferences of political
parties. 2) The spin
employed by Democratics
in support of their political
objectives.
Or is "bi-partisan" the better term?
Bi-Partisan Politics. A cooperative, non-confrontational legislative process in which both Democratics and Republians work to achieve the political objectives of Democratics.
Read the rest of the Glossary, too, every jot and tittle. It's almost as good as I think it is. The story is always the same. When Republicans acquire some measure of power in Washington, they endeavor to play nice, make compromises, get along with their "esteemed colleagues across the aisle." What they always get in return is a dirk in the gizzard.There is no civility any more. There won't be any civility in the future. This is a fight to the death. (Oh yeah, sorry for the crude martial metaphor. My defense? It's not a metaphor at all. It's literal reality.)
Why I despise Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar, and John McCain. "My good friends across the aisle..." Pooey. Why I hate -- yes, hate -- Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, and Barbara Boxer. Because they're so naked in their hatred of us that it's actually humiliating to half the country when some dumbass Republican politician shakes hands with them in public. They should be pariahs, shunned by all decent people everywhere.
So the president made a speech last night that impressed some people. Whoop-de-doo. I can tell you he didn't impress me. We've had enough speeches. It's how he got foisted off on the American public to our eternal regret in the first place. Forget what he says. Look at what he does. And what he does is just awful. What he will do is equally awful.
Forget all this crap about moving to the center and extending a hand across the aisle. That's not how it's going to happen. They never vary in their tactics. Never. They are assassins targeting our lives and liberties. They hate us. They intend to kill us.
And every moment we waste pretending that they're about to turn the page to a new day of collaboration and compromise is another step toward our destruction.
Do you get that? Do you? I don't think you do.
P.S. And in case you didn't think psychopathy was a generalized, spreading problem, here's a snapshot from Shuteye Town 1999, published in, uh, 1999.
The
Functional Sociopath
The Thesis
Item. An 18-year-old girl in the company of adults sees a friend she has not spoken with for many weeks. As they talk, he reminds her of a ‘funny thing’ concerning one of their friends. The friend announced to several of her peers that she was leaving for a weekend jaunt somewhere. Subsequently they did not hear from her again, although she had been a frequent caller by telephone. Curious, a trio of her intimates visited her apartment about two weeks after the ‘weekend jaunt’, found the door ajar, and entered. There was no sign anyone had been inhabiting the apartment in the previous two weeks. Nothing was missing, but a few things were strangely broken. The trio left the apartment and went their separate ways. None made any further inquiries. By the time the ‘funny thing’ was related as an anecdote, more than two months had elapsed since the ‘friend’ had been heard from.
This is just one of dozens of such items I have collected in recent years. Not as spectacular as school shootings, they nevertheless have in common with them an odd emotional discordancy. We regard it as striking when a teenage boy responds to teasing by murdering a dozen of his schoolmates, but isn’t it equally striking that ‘friends’ seem unable to summon enough concern to investigate or sound the alarm when an intimate simply disappears?
I believe that such discordancies are both striking and widespread. It may be rare, thus far, for them to result in violence, but if my theory about what is happening turns out to be correct, we will see far more apparently inexplicable violence in the years to come.
What is my theory? I am convinced that what amounts to a system-wide collapse in all our child-rearing institutions has created a virulent new strain of personality disorder—one I call the functional sociopath.
A sociopath is a person without conscience and without deep emotional connections to other human beings, individually and collectively. Science has long sought an organic basis for this kind of pathology, but it is also known that early environmental influences can play a major role in shaping the sociopathic personality.
I am persuaded that we have, as a culture, established an accidental combination of educational and child-rearing approaches which are practically ideal for generating sociopathic personalities in otherwise healthy children. To wit:
Self Esteem. The elevation of self esteem as a principal, if not the cardinal, goal of elementary education has dramatically reduced the opportunity for children to experience the necessary pain of perceiving that the world outside of themselves can and will make demands on them. This is a deprivation which stunts the prime mechanism by which children grow from infantile self absorption to fully individuated, ethical adult personalities. In other words, the permissiveness that accompanies the emphasis on self esteem aborts or sabotages the development of a real self of any kind.
Arma virumque cano...
And something about young, crazed shooters from the same work. But now they're not just gun-toting losers; they're lefty blogger losers with millions of admiring followers. Markos Moulitsas anyone?
Why, oh why, am I in a bad mood?
