Our Make-It-Up World

Townhall.com ^ | October 30, 2014 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Kaslin]

Do bothersome facts matter anymore?

Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.

The Islamic State is at times dubbed jayvee, a manageable problem, and a dangerous enemy -- or anything the administration wishes it to be, depending on the political climate of any given week.

Some days Americans are told there is no reason to restrict connecting flights from Ebola-ravaged countries. Then, suddenly, entry from those countries is curtailed to five designated U.S. airports. Quarantines are both necessary and not so critical, as the administration weighs public concern versus politically correct worries over isolating a Third World African country.

[yldstrk]

Now the laws are just “norms” or “protocols”. Such bull crap.

[Dr. Sivana]

So far, political myth making has become confined to popular culture and politics, and has not affected the ironclad facts and non-negotiable rules of jetliner maintenance, heart surgery or nuclear plant operation.

The EPA is working on that with the manmade climate change myth.

[Travis McGee]

A society can stretch itself into a fantasy-land for only so long.
Eventually, reality and natural law will be reasserted with a vengeance.
For example: The Chinese military will not use affirmative action to include 120# girls, open homosexuals and “transsexuals” in their combat ranks, just to make a war with the USA “fair” to both sides.

[The_Reader_David]

And this seems an opportune time to again remind FReepers of H.G. Frankfurt's charming little philosophical treatise On Bullsh*t. (A Google search for Frankfurt and the unexpurgated title turns up a free pdf of the text.)

Accusing Obama administration officials of lying is too charitable -- it presumes they know the truth and are saying the opposite to deceive us. They neither know the truth nor care about it, they say whatever seems expedient, without any regard to its relationship to fact. They are that greater enemy of truth than liars, they are bullsh*tters.

[RWB Patriot]

“This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit.”

It’s a good thing for me that those claims are mostly made on TV and chat rooms. Having personally experienced just how much crap they are, I don’t think I’d be able to control my anger if someone said it to my face.

[The_Reader_David]

Quite, as Kipling put it, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings."

(I fear this thread has somehow induced me to post lots of obscure references, first to Frankfurt's On Bullsh*t now to a Kipling poem -- still they're a little book, and a poem every FReeper should know.)

[Travis McGee]

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

[Elsie]

Rudyard Kipling

[Blood of Tyrants]

No, facts don’t matter to liberals. To them the end (a totalitarian socialist state) justify the means.