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04/26/2004 Archived Entry: "Dowdifying Reality"

Posted by steve @ 01:44 AM EST [Link]

VIEWING REALITY WITH A LEFTIST FILTER: Brian Tiemann is quite possibly one of the best writers on the Internet that you may have never heard of. Apart from his silly love of Apple computers, he's a very bright guy. He proved that with a great essay on Saturday that I would have loved to run in ESR had I seen it earlier.

In that essay Brian writes about leftists who make assumptions and then try and force reality to conform to their vision of the world.

Have you ever seen a testimonial quote on a DVD case that says something like, "This is ... a good movie"?

Makes you wonder exactly what the ellipsis is leaving out, doesn't it? Like, say, the word not?

Anyway, that's how I often feel these days when trying to work out exactly what ails the Left so severely as to completely alienate me from all the Leftist ideals that I once held so dear, not to say from all my Leftist friends who (with a few rare exceptions) want to have nothing to do with me once they've discovered I'm no longer batting for their team.

It has to do, I guess, with being able to formulate complex hypotheses about how the real world works, founded upon completely, provably incorrect basic assumptions. They'll take some concept that they picked up somewhere, like "The Republicans and the KKK are basically the same thing"—and use it as the foundation and the springboard for a whole worldview that assumes that anyone who votes for someone with an R next to their name is a racist, or at least condones racism.

Sigh and trot out unpleasant facts that specifically refute the fundamental assumption, and you get sputtering, hemming, hawing, and furious attempts to reclaim some kind of moral high ground—certainly not anything like an "Oh, I guess I was wrong."

Read on.