Category: Uncategorized

by Smitty

Power Line catches us up on the ‘curious’ nature of the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, PA:

Rawls, Burnett and others have lodged additional criticisms of the design. They say that the crescent points toward Mecca and is, in fact, a traditional Islamic mihrab. They point out that one of the memorial’s most striking features (not yet constructed, I believe) is the Tower of Voices, which they describe as “a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial.” It is shaped–wait for it–like a crescent, and 40 wind chimes hang inside it, representing the 40 dead passengers and crew members.

Now, if Islam is a religion of peace, and terrorism is against Islam, then where is the host of imams decrying this clear tying of an evil terrorist act to their faith?

I should think they would demand a re-design, STAT. I mean, arranging the grave markers at Srebrenica in the shape of a fish would have been roughly as tasteful. And, presumably, unintelligible to adherents of the faith whose symbol is so utilized.

by Smitty

Dear George Lakoff,

I used to think that Lefties held beliefs. Now I’m not so sure. Can you ground this argument about intimidation and framing in real history, starting with the Founders?

Reading your PuffHo post, it sounds as though you may be the heir to Chomsky. You’re making weighty-sounding pronouncements, which arrive like a flatbed load of lumber for the audience to assemble into who knows what. What are your first principles? What do you hold absolutely true? If you are one of those no-truth intellectual invertebrates, then how do you argue against anything, conservative or otherwise?

Wishing you made more clear sense,

Chris

The mechanism of intimidation is framing, not just the use of words or slogans, but rather the changing of what voters take as right as a matter of principle. Framing is much more than mere language or messaging. A frame is a conceptual structure used to think with. Frames come in hierarchies. At the top of the hierarchies are moral frames. All politics is moral. Politicians support policies because they are right, not wrong. The problem is that there is more than one conception of what is moral. Moreover, voters tend to vote their morality, since it is what defines their identity. Poor conservatives vote against their material interests, but for their moral identity.

All language activates frames in the brain. Conservative language activates conservative frames, which activate conservative moral worldviews in the brains of those who hear the language. The more those frames are activated, the stronger the conservative moral views get in people’s brains.

When Democrats are intimidated into using conservative language, they help conservatives, even if they are arguing against them. Here’s why. The main voters you want to affect are the bi-conceptuals, those who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others; that is, those who have both conservative and progressive moral worldviews, but on different issues. They are sometimes misnamed as “the center,” “independents,” or “moderates.” But they do not have any single overriding worldview. Instead they have two. Given the way brains work, the activation of one worldview will inhibit the other worldview. The more one is activated, the stronger it gets and the weaker the opposite one gets. The worldview that is most activated by the public discourse they hear will most likely govern how they will vote. What activates one worldview versus another? Framing. Conservative language activates conservative frames, which activate conservative worldviews. If Democrats use conservative language, even to argue against it, they are just helping conservatives.

To a large extent, Democrats don’t understand this. They think that language is neutral and that reason works by logic. If you just tell people the facts and reason logically, everyone should be convinced. But they aren’t, because language works by framing and by brain mechanisms. Framing is just the normal way people think and talk. Conservatives tend to understand this. They avoid using liberal language. They frame issues very carefully to fit their goals. Democrats need to do the same — avoid using conservative frames and instead frame the issues with their own values.

Maybe somebody else can RTWT and tell me if there was a point other than whining about having lost the tempo in the public discourse.

by Smitty

iOwnTheWorld:

Ulsterman: Stop right there. Did you just say that the Obama administration wants to unionize the American military?

Wall Street: Oh my – look at you now! That’s got you a bit riled does it?

Ulsterman: Are you being serious?

Wall Street: Oh yes. Absolutely serious. A bit over a year…perhaps a year-and-a-half ago. A younger gentleman who was said to be with the administration – affiliated with the DOJ actually – these people were crawling all over everything at that time. That situation itself was enough to sour many of us on the Obama White House. They would walk in as if they owned you. Wall Street had become a plantation. Ironic, isn’t it? But that’s how it felt. It’s improved somewhat, but not enough. Not nearly enough…

One might argue that the military-industrial complex, of the four branches of the DoD, or the various parochial communities within hte services exhibit some union-esque behaviors at times. Then there are all of the political lobbies championing veteran’s causes.

So what, other than creating a dues system to siphon dues money into Democrat party coffers, would this idea solve?

Hmmm, if you wanted to weaken the U.S. military, a mechanism to allow group insubordination (i.e. mutiny) would probably do the trick.

Peradventure one supposed that such existed, it would be met with derision and scorn. Like an unnatural sexual pairing.

by Smitty (h/t Jazz Shaw)

I really can’t comment on this in any family-friendly way.

by Smitty

Understood, Karl, you’re making the point in the context of electoral politics. The calculus is that a third of the country is conservative, another third is wee Socialist sheep, and those cancel. Thus, the election amounts to figuring out who courts the independent third of the country most effectively.

The difficulty of this approach is that you’re accepting an aggregation of large chunks of the electorate. Voters don’t actually vote in slabs; those polling percentages are numbers on paper, not the actual people. This top-down, Socialist sheep approach to government is at the heart of the problem.

A conservative, liberty-oriented approach would be to have a Social Security amnesty day. Let everyone of voting age now, and when signing up for the Selective Service hereafter, make a yes/no decision to emanicpate themselves from the entitlement scourge.

That is, let me just walk away from Social Security as though it was a girlfriend whom I did not think would prove a junkie, because heroin is so passé. Sure, I’m eating some financial loss, but the sunk cost of entitlements is nothing compared to the marginal disaster of this idiocy. I won’t even go on and on about how ‘unfair’ it is that I’ve paid into something for a couple of decades that leaves me nothing more than a brace of puncture wounds to the jugular. Toxic, indeed.

And that’s not even mentioning the World’s Youngest Blogger. I hope to be able to discuss our current entitlement slavery with the WYB in the past tense, some day. Our struggle for liberty and emancipation from the false, unsustainable nonsense known as Progressivism will continue to be steep, as a result of feckless talking heads like you, Rove. The good news is that there are still Americans of courage who are willing to call a Ponzi scheme a Ponzi scheme. Is the simple truth toxic? Only if you’re a vampire, and the truth arrives inscribed on a religious symbol.

The good news about the simple truth is that it matters not who bears it.

Via Instapundit, some additional grist.

by Smitty

Greg Sargent cries out from the ComPost: “The secret to the right wing noise machine’s success”

It’s simple: Keep making noise, regardless of the facts, and hopefully with a big assist from the major news orgs, until the other side caves from sheer exhaustion, in order to make the noise go away.

Conservatives and Tea Partyers have managed to generate a third straight day of outrage about Jimmy Hoffa’s non-call for violence on Labor day. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is now raising money off of Hoffa’s speech, circulating an email with a subject line that says: “Take us out?” It calls on Obama to “condemn this call to violence against Republicans.”

The Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity is also citing Hoffa’s “take these sons of bitches out” line as proof of “hate” from “left wing labor bosses.”

Of course, these folks know that Hoffa didn’t call for violence at all. His quote was actually a call for people to go out and vote.

Thanks a ton, Greg, for that narrowing of the focus to the present tense, at the expense of the context.

For those paying attention, no one has much difficulty with Hoffa engaging in loutish speech. Hoffa is only memorable in the light of calls from the likes of Senator Durbin, in January:

Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democratic leader in the Senate, today cited imagery of crosshairs on political opponents and Sarah Palin’s combative rallying cry, “Don’t retreat; reload.”

“These sorts of things, I think, invite the kind of toxic rhetoric that can lead unstable people to believe this is an acceptable response,” Durbin said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

So, Greg, if you have shred #1 of intellectual integrity, maybe you can help the rest of us not in the media priesthood understand the underlying rules whereby some people are allowed to use arguably aggressive language, and others are in some kind of hot water over using simple graphics.

Is a request for a simple, fair, evenly applied ruling on the tone of public discourse such a troublesome matter, Greg? I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt, and not conclude that you’re a propaganda-peddling crapflooder.

But let’s be clear what the real goal is here. It’s to get the other side — Hoffa, the White House, whoever — to cave and issue an apology out of sheer desperation to make the noise go away. An apology would reveal Dem weakness and validate the right’s outrage and its ongoing storyline about labor thuggery. And heck, even if they don’t get an apology (which has not yet been forthcoming from Hoffa or the White House), the right’s undeniable skill at keeping the noise going at full blast has other benefits. It keeps the base stoked. These folks are very good at this game.

Hoffa is irrelevant. As are you, Greg. But the commitment to reality avoidance and fact distortion that you represent, now: that is a troublesome matter.

More from The Camp of the Saints.

by Smitty

A post by Sooper Mexican, who is a jolly hoot on Twitter, BTW, makes an interesting point about raaaaacism.

As we get nearer the 2012 election, and the Obama administration gets more desperate, we’re going to see more of the racecard accusations against the GOP and the Tea Party in order to shore up the 81% support from African-Americans, which has fallen from 95%.

This serves a triple purpose – to pacify African-American anger at the fact that their unemployment is reaching crisis levels, to re-direct that anger from rightfully criticizing the failing policies of the Obama administration, and to falsely accuse the greatest enemy of the Left, the Tea Party.

Sooper’s post, to summarize, pokes a hole in the Left’s logic by noting that, while approval of the Tea Parties varies widely across the several states, the black/white unemployment ratio holds unexpectedly constant. That is, if Tea Party racism were prevalent, we might expect to see black unemployment higher in states where the Tea Party is popular.

I’d like to come at the point that the Left is full of hooey from a Veterans angle, if I may. The military both offers a reasonable cross-section of American society, and I can tell you from a personal experience since 1987, really doesn’t care AT ALL about your ethnicity. I mean that at the actual unit level. Go watch Restrepo. It’s folks from all over who are more concerned with not eating a Taliban bullet than fretting about whose great-grandfather did what to whom. That is the reality.

Also anecdotally, the percentage of Tea Partiers who are veterans is quite high. I’ll venture, without backup, that somewhere between a quarter and a half of people at Tea Party events have supported and defended the Constitution of the United against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

And yet, this Administration has officially viewed military veterans as right-wing extremists. This is essentially a code word for Nazis, since smearing conservatives with the fascist brush has been a long-term project of the Left. Lefties who object to that point are welcome to try to come up with counter-arguments.

Summarizing:

1. The military is a representative sample of America, and raaaaacism is something that has been minimized.
2. Veterans have actively been demonized by the Administration.
3. The Tea Parties have a substantial military presence.
4. The Tea Parties are being attacked as raaaaacist.
5. It is strongly dissonant, and nearly contradictory, to assert that people who’ve devoted chunks of their lives (temporally and occasionally physically) defending liberty would suddenly condone or engage in raaaaacist activities.
6. Conclusion: the Left is wrong, insulting, and dishonorable. Furthermore, this insult continues to be recycled, in the utter absence of factual basis.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope for a change in the Left’s tone, either. Speaking only for myself, and not for the rest of the military, I’m at the point where I view these guys like flag burners. I’m protecting their Constitutional privelege to distort the truth mercilessly. They can say whatever they want here on Earth. They can recycle deceit endlessly, like cheap moster movie villains. One day, in the fulness of time, they will meet the Almighty.