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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Thu Jun 18th, 2009 02:34 am |
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This is a story about an article at RealClearPolitics by Cathy Young, called "Hysteria on the Right and the Left". The article is below.
When you look at what is happening in Iran or here, while the level of strife is ifferent, the methodology is the same.
What you need are people so completely taken by their perspective (about which they have little, by the way) that only their side leads to Salvation, the Light, and peace, happiness and good will. It usually involves embracing one ideal to the detriment of its complementary ideal, with no spirit of compromise and no balance.
This lack of balance arises out of the failure to realize that some essential aspect of the opposition needs to be heard, the "third force" that makes the triangle, the context in which opposites come into balance.The other side can only be wrong or if it can be right, it is in way that has no real weight in the present situation and, complementarily, we, on our side, can only be right, and where we are wrong is of little or no consequence.
This is a point of view loaded with what Gurdjieff called "buffers", psychological mechanisms that keep us from experiencing the shock of conscience.There is an element of hysteria behind the campaign which helps turn it into an inquisition as well. This is where the emotional center, as GI Gurdjieff called it, takes over for the intellectual center, demanding results now, action now, without thinking through what we should do and what its real outcome could be.
Unconscious lying to one's own self is another essential aspect of this, which sets the stage for becoming possessed by the most difficult defense mechanism of all- projectioProjection, a much-used defense mechanism, allows the person to displace his own tendency to do evil onto others.
Projection allows you to deny history and even the facts, to yourself, that is, as the emotional center just jumps right over those fine points and discards the work.
Projection is the penultimate rejection of the idea that "There but for the grace of God, go I".The idea of this, that the "Hatfields and the McCoys" feuds are based on projection to a large extent, and establishment types and reformers do the same, has been around for years. The Who are among those who have said it best, with "the new boss, same as the old boss", along with George Orwell in 1984 and Animal Farm.
Hysteria From the Right and Left
Political hate speech has been all the rage in recent days. After the shocking attack at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC by a white supremacist, New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Frank Rich have charged that the right-wing media are creating a dangerous climate of hate in America. Meanwhile, conservative outrage has focused on David Letterman's nasty jokes about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family's trip to New York - more proof, many commentators argue, that enlightened liberals condone hateful sexist slurs as long as the target is a conservative woman.
The charges on both sides are wildly overblown, but they also point to a real problem - one to which, unfortunately, both sides respond with stones thrown from its own glass house.
For starters: the actions of 88-year-old James von Brunn, who fatally shot a Holocaust Museum security guard, had exactly nothing to do with Krugman and Rich's chief villains: Rush Limbaugh, the king of right-wing talk radio, and Glenn Beck, the clown of Fox News. Neo-Nazis are not part of the following of mainstream or even far-right conservatives; they are people who see the United States government, under Republicans or Democrats, as a tool of Zionist puppet-masters.
As conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg points out on the website of National Review magazine, one could at least as convincingly link anti-Semitism to the animus toward Israel and its American Jewish supporters in certain quarters of the left. Indeed, Von Brunn's list of possible targets included The Weekly Standard, a leading conservative magazine.
While the right-wing pontificators are not responsible for von Brunn, that doesn't quite get them off the hook. Limbaugh, Beck, and quite a few other talk show hosts, journalists, and bloggers on the right have undoubtedly trafficked in political paranoia and hate. There has been much irresponsible, over-the-top scaremongering about looming fascism or (Soviet-style) socialism, the imminent loss of our freedoms and even federally run concentration camps. Barack Obama has been cast as Hitler, Stalin, and a radical Muslim mole. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the target of an assassination joke read over the air on the Rush Limbaugh show by substitute host Mark Davis.
Even if none of this ever leads to violence, it is toxic stuff. But the liberals who rightly deplore it rarely acknowledge the equally toxic stuff on the left - including, not long ago, Bush assassination jokes, Bush/Hitler comparisons, and hysterical claims that Bush's America was five minutes away from fascism if not already there.
The left has its own Glenn Beck in writer Naomi Wolf, who published an essay titled "Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps" in 2007 and then a best-selling book called The End of America. Wolf got to make her case on National Public Radio and the Colbert Report; later, The Huffington Post, a leading left-wing website, published her article calling Sarah Palin "the muse of the coming police state."
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"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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*Phil*
Opinionated Interventionist
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Posted: Sat Jun 20th, 2009 12:44 pm |
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You are right. I think truly hearing the opposition requires even more rigorous thought about who we are and what our shared experiences are and the experts we call upon who confirm what we know together. A healthy pluralist society has the ability to mostly listen and to tentatively accept the oppositions claims long enough to give them a good hearing in the light of common sense. There are different forms of knowledge and not all true knowledge can be formulated in terms of scientismist falsifiability.
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Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Sat Jun 20th, 2009 06:49 pm |
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I disagree with her about Glenn Beck, and I have to say that something of the criticism of Bush by Naomi Wolf was true.
There is a certain kind of centrist who is too moderate and doesn't see the danger and therefore doesn't get the emotionality of the critic.
But, it is absolutely fair of her to point to the left and remind them of how they talked.
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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*Phil*
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Posted: Mon Jun 22nd, 2009 01:57 pm |
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To me the bigger problem of centrism as we see it practiced in politics is that it does away with knowing who we are, rigorous judgment, expert opinion, and common sense. All the centrist needs to do is find the policy mix that will have the greatest voter mass satisfaction. This causes a slow steady creep or drift of government's intent and purpose which is why the US Constitution is now considered a mere piece of paper and the government budget is so far in deficit that it is crippling the economy.
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Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Tue Jun 23rd, 2009 02:52 am |
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There are two kinds of centrists.
The first kind is not always in the center, but goes right or left as the situations demands in the context.
Sometimes we need to go forward and change and sometimes we need to stay the course or even go back to what we used to do.
The second kind of centrist adds up the relative positions and divides by two and comes up with a "moderate" version of the policy.
Now, I am much more the first kind than the second kind.
The first represents flexibility and allows resilience, whereas the second is a good way to advance somewhat when you need compromise.
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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