A lot of Pwogs seem to be very upset and alarmed by the sudden upsurge of conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school massacre. Alternet worriedly notes:
thanks to the Internet, the media can no longer suffocate a smoldering conspiracy theory by ignoring it.
Golly, isn’t that a shame: we can’t depend on Walter Cronkite any more to tell us what’s thinkable and what’s not. People can share crazy notions with each other. They might make up their own minds, unguided by expert opinion.
Personally, I’m always glad to see people being skeptical about what the Teevee and the Gummint tell ’em. Of course, most ideas are bad ideas, and so it’s not surprising that when people start thinking for themselves, a lot of the stuff they come up with will be dogshit. But a lot of elite ideas are dogshit too; just look at sociobiology.
The dismay of the Pwogs reveals the fundamentally managerial-totalitarian-therapeutic mentality of liberalism: We must stop people thinking this stuff. It’s crazy.
Well, of course it’s crazy. We live in a crazy world, so naturally we think crazy thoughts. The tinfoilers recognize the craziness, and deal with it by finding a source for it: the Illuminati or whatever.
The nice thing about the tinfoiler line is that it doesn’t project its own craziness; it doesn’t claim the Illuminati are crazy. Au contraire. It sees craziness as a project. It credits the Illuminati with a high degree of intelligence and rationality for trying to make us crazy, and keep us that way.
Grosso modo, the tinfoiler approach doesn’t seem a million miles from the truth, though it may give our actual elites a bit too much credit — Illuminati they ain’t.
The Pwog view of the matter is just the opposite: craziness bubbles up from below and some way must be found to keep a lid on it.
Now I personally think the tinfoilers, crazy as they are, might be just a little less crazy than the Pwogs. The tinfoilers live in a thought-world where a cabal of powerful people are out to get them, which, modulo a bit of detail, sounds to me a lot like the world we actually live in.
But for the Pwogs, we live in a world that’s basically sane and sound, apart from a few necessary policy tweaks — like gun control — and a bit more money spent trying to manufacture another chimerical product that goes by the name ‘mental health’.
Hey, with sanity like this, who needs craziness?
Progressives are the shepherds of ideas. When the sheep become distracted, wandering off and bleating randomly, the self-appointed herders scurry about, gesturing frantically, telling the creatures that they’re sadly “off-message.”
And what is the appropriate message for sheep to convey to their future butchers? Nothing that would mean anything to the slaughterers. That’s the bathos of the progressive mind: taking punctilious, wearisome pains to craft a message which, when received by officialdom, will likely be read with a yawn and chucked into the nearest designer-brand waste basket.
Give-away phrase for a PWOG: “You have no right to think that.”
Progs regard themselves as shepherds… I don’t see much evidence the rubes actually listen.
Climate Change is a good example. Hard to blame people who’ve been lied to their whole lives by authorities for their skepticism; esp. when libs-with their lifestyle choice morality-act like it’s rednecks driving crew cab F350s who have brought us to the brink of doom.
“You have no right to think that.” – Thank you so much. I have the hardest time trying to sort out denialism (bad) from skepticism (good). If only there were some consistent way to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy.
Cf. the horror of ‘denialism’. Discussed here before.
Hell, I’ve found myself actually welcoming the batshittery simply because the Liberal/Pwog brand of “sanity” is driving me out of my goddamn’ skull.
I spent a huge chunk of 2009 and ’10 covering Tea Party rallies and the like because my posse and I thought it important that people see what kind of looniness is out there. Of course my DW — bless her — gave me a hard time about it as she thought the way to deal with that crowd was to “ignore them”.
After the better part of two years following the Teabagger crowd while simultaneously observing the behavior of Liberals/Pwogs during the ’10 off-year “elections”, I came to the conclusion that the Teabaggers and Liberals/Pwogs were equally batshit, the only difference being that Teabagger insanity was entertaining, and Liberal/Pwog insanity was merely banal and annoying.
Liberals don’t care much for working people. I used to work with two teachers, husband and wife. God what elitist shits they were. They loved Bill Clinton and no doubt worship Obama. They opposed the War in Vietnam but as soon as the commies won, they would go on and on about the boat people. My best memory of them was when the wife, looking condescendingly over the top of her eyeglasses, said to me, in reply to some outrageous thing I said,”Well, you can take Mike out of Ford City [my working class hometown, filled in her mind with ignorant and narrow minded louts] but you can’t take Ford City out of Mike.” I got even years later by smacking her husband so hard in the ribs during a game of basketball that he ran off the court, never to play again.
Good intuitions followed up by investigative excavation, even if happened after a few decades.
You are (nearly) as big a snot as the “pwogs” you condemn, condescendingly referring to skeptics as “tinfoilers” and “crazy” as consistently as the douche on Alternet. What will “we” do about those people who just won’t shut up about murder? There are basic issues with the story around the Sandy Hook shooting, and no answers have been provided. Why was the press conference with the medical examiner so…”crazy”? The guy couldn’t even say how many girls vs. boys were killed, the cause of death, or even the gun(s) used to kill them. Why don’t we even know what weapon the alleged shooter used to kill himself? What about the other guy(s) arrested that day? Why no mass photos of people fleeing the school, only the one we have seen ten gazillion times of a dozen or so kids in a conga line walking out? Why the bizarre story of the guy who “took in” several Sandy Hook students who fled to his yard after the shooting, who he claims to have entertained (rather than call their parents, etc.)? I know I may be crazy (being a lawyer, after all), and my tinhat barely keeps the rain off my head, but I have read a bit about Operation Gladio and I know a thing or two about the ruthlessness and duplicity of our rulers. This thing smells. Maybe you should lower your nose just a bit so you can catch the scent as well.
Sorry if I seemed snotty. I don’t have any problem being skeptical about the official story, but then one has so few resources, apart from imagination, toward constructing an alternate one.
Sadly enough, in this case, the official story about Sandy Hook doesn’t seem improbable to me; and there have been so many such. The poor ill-used imposed-upon guy — and I see Lanza as a poor guy, not as a monster — who finally snaps and acts out a movie fantasy.
I feel sometimes that I came within a neuron or two of *being* that guy, so maybe that affects my judgement.