...In 2008, during election night, my husband Glenn and I did some commentary for PJTV and I remember PJTV host Bill Whittle asking me if the election of Obama would reduce the anger of liberals to which I said, "no, it would probably enhance it because now they feel entitled and emboldened to be even nastier." If one thinks of liberal bias and anger in behavioral terms, winning the presidential election would reinforce the self-entitled behavior of liberals even further:
In operant conditioning, positive reinforcement involves the addition of a reinforcing stimulus following a behavior that makes it more likely that the behavior will occur again in the future. When a favorable outcome, event, or reward occurs after an action, that particular response or behavior will be strengthened.
So, what does all this psychological jargon mean for the individual in regards to politics? It means that liberal bias and anger against those of us who do not go along with the liberal agenda could increase and in ways that cost people their jobs, livelihoods, relationships etc. A Trump election means that people (mostly liberal) will stop to think about the consequences of their acts more with the other side in power. The fact is, the media, schools, universities and much of society in general these days is driven by liberal thought and with a liberal president and Justice Department at the helm, people feel very free to engage in acts against dissidents without as much restraint.
...And for those who are not conservative and think you are safe if liberal, not so fast. Fewer conservatives in the liberal crosshairs means fewer targets; then they start picking off their own.
#1
"no, it would probably enhance it because now they feel entitled and emboldened to be even nastier."
Yup. DJT has to find a way to overcome the latest iterations of "Have you quit beating your wife yet." setups by Clinton, Reid and Dean III, et al, without losing it.
The sort of people who set off class wars as a hobby have very particular classless societies in mind. The average left-wing revolutionary is not poor. He is a homicidal dilettante from the upper classes with a burning conviction of his own importance that he is unwilling to realize through disciplined labor. His revolution climaxes with a classless society in which he is at the very top.
Not near the top, not adjacent to the top, as he usually was before, but at the very top.
Utopia has a class system. At the top are the thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans based on how things ought to be and then turn them over to lesser men to actually implement. They are the priestly class of an ideological movement whose deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.
In a planned economy, they are the titans of industry and finance, they are the heads of banks and the men who move millions and billions around the board, and they are utterly unfit for the job. But they also make decisions in matters of war and science. And in all things. They measure political heresy in all things and all the activities of man are measured against their dogma and rewarded or punished.
This is the way it was in the Soviet Union or Communist China. But take a closer glance at the White House and see if you don't spot the occasional similarity. That's why they hate Russia, who gave it up - reversing the "inevitable historical progress", so much.
In the middle of Utopia's class system is the middle class. This is not the middle class you are familiar with. There are no small business owners here. No one striving to make it up the ladder. Utopia's middle class is the bureaucracy, the interlinked hive mind of government and non-profits.
At the top of Utopia's class system are the philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy filters them through successive layers, transforming grandiose ideas into stultifying regulations and each successive layers expands them into further microcosms of unnecessary detail. This expansion of regulations also expands the bureaucracy. One feeds off the other. Ever wondered what'd happen to Obama's "pen & phone" if the bureaucracy just ignored him?
Utopia has no lower class. That would be dystopian. Instead it has a client class. The client class is what used to be known as the working class. Utopia however transforms it into the welfare class.
...The client class justifies the existence of Utopia's upper and middle class which are, in theory, dedicated to public service, to remedying the ills of an unfair society, which has been made fair by eliminating all free will and individual choice. But the client class exists to be subsidized. And its subsidies justify the subsidizing of the upper and middle classes of the planners and the bureaucrats.
This is Utopia's crisis.
Its upper class of philosopher kings expect to live like kings. They want to vacation in Aspen and New England. They want Bernie's summer home and Hillary's flat broke houses. And that does not come cheap. Utopia's middle class expects to live the way that our middle class does. And yet none of them actually produce anything. They will, in Obama and Elizabeth Warren's "You didn't build that" formula, claim that their public service makes the condition of productivity possible.
There is one problem with that. Their public service actually inhibits production. Whatever the rhetoric, they spend all their days killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. And then they are insulted when the goose doesn't recognize their contribution to her golden egg-laying. Interestingly Codevilla (whom I posted earlier) and Greenfield, reasoning from entirely different directions, reach essentially the same conclusion --- the Republic is dead.
Me, I'm more optimistic. Because I put my faith not in peoples' goodness but in their badness. If Trump wants to rule, and he wants to rule, he has to castrate the bureaucracy and restore the powers of the electorate.
#4
I watched them give Yugo Chavez a huge blank check over a fifteen year period because he was cont rt uniting to Hampton by crippling Venezuela's oil production.
#5
The remarkable thing is how much the utopia of left wing intellectual resembles the ancien regime.
The King ruled, with the assistance of the aristocracy, who were his high level civil and military servants. The upper classes consisted of lower level government employees (mostly poor relatives of the ruling class) Everyone else was one of the riff-raff.
The dream of our revolutionaries is this same system with them at the top, as in Cuba today.
#8
At the top of Utopia's class system are the philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy filters them through successive layers,
The Emperor, as Son of Heaven, gives his decrees to the mandarins of the Imperial Bureaucracy... Does this mean that The Imperial Dynasties of China are Utopia ...or... that the left wing intellectuals are full of bovine excrement?
#9
Is it just me, or does it seem that all proponents of their version of "Utopia" fancy themselves as "...the thinkers, the philosopher kings..." and never the fast-food clerk.
h/t Instapundit
Over the past half century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our ruling class’s changing preferences and habits have transformed public and private life in America. As John Marini shows in his essay, "Donald Trump and the American Crisis," this has resulted in citizens morphing into either this class’s "stakeholders" or its subjects. And, as Publius Decius Mus argues, "America and the West" now are so firmly "on a trajectory toward something very bad" that it is no longer reasonable to hope that "all human outcomes are still possible," by which he means restoration of the public and private practices that made the American republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s transition from that republic to some kind of empire.
Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives.
#1
Executive orders, phone calls, and the right judge mean a lot more than laws. They even trump state referenda. Over the past half-century, presidents have ruled not by enforcing laws but increasingly through agencies that write their own rules, interpret them, and punish unaccountably—the administrative state.
I don't see a good end this. The elites don't understand the notion of unintended consequences. Once the rock is tossed off the cliff, one cannot be certain what it might hit.
Deadspin's assumed the mantle of New Gawker, with every third post that's not an advertisement looking a lot like this self-righteous bullshit. Allow me the time and space to take a nice, steaming shit on the lot of them:
Today I asked my 18 year old nephew (to be clear he’s black) to drive me to my meetings so I can work on my phone #safteyfirst. In the distance I saw cop on the side of the road. I quickly checked to see if he was obliging by the speed limit. Than I remembered that horrible video of the woman in the car when a cop shot her boyfriend. All of this went through my mind in a matter of seconds. I even regretted not driving myself. I would never forgive myself if something happened to my nephew. He’s so innocent. So were all "the others"
I am a total believer that not "everyone" is bad It is just the ones that are ignorant, afraid, uneducated, and insensitive that is affecting millions and millions of lives.
Why did I have to think about this in 2016? Have we not gone through enough, opened so many doors, impacted billions of lives? But I realized we must stride on- for it’s not how far we have come but how much further still we have to go.
I than wondered than have I spoken up? I had to take a look at me. What about my nephews? What if I have a son and what about my daughters?
As Dr. Martin Luther King said " There comes a time when silence is betrayal".
I
Won’t
Be
Silent
Serena In other words, not a god damn thing happened to her on this occasion; indeed, the worst outcome would have been a speeding ticket. Yet the logically deficient do not let the mere lack of facts dissuade them from making a grandiose public declaration that we have to do something to fight 'racial inequality and police violence'. It bears repeating - nothing of the sort happened here, so it is now only speculation and conjecture that are required to allow yourself to pronounce your moral superiority to others who didn't do a god damned thing to you to cause harm, and let the rest of the dumb fucks like the hateful, smug hipster leftists at Deadspin (but I repeat myself) that dutifully reprint this fucking garbage without the slightest bit of reading comprehension (it's clear that none of them are actual journalists; they might have picked up on this point, no?), since it fits their hateful, smug hipster leftist agenda, who can't see through this ruse and expect everybody (read - WHITE FOLK!) to drop to their knees and grovel before them and beg for forgiveness before your morally superior set of comped Nikes. The equally moronic trained seals that comprise Deadspin's commenting section? Out of 28 comments, not one of them made this point that nothing happened, yet they hold themselves out to be quite the clever bunch. Yeah, like I'm convinced...
You know one area where Serena will stay silent? Ask her about steroid use.
#3
It is just the ones that are ignorant, afraid, uneducated, and insensitive that is affecting millions and millions of lives.
You don't say.
I am quite certain that if I posted the exact same thing, fewer people would see it then there are sets in women's tennis.
And here is the rub. If she honestly, truly believed this grammar wreck of navel gazing, then why did she purposefully have her nephew drive if the danger is so great?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
