Posted on 02/05/2005 7:53:21 AM PST by Slehn
Wonderful, friend. All the more credit to you for having the integrity to come on over. There was a famous quote from Whittaker Chambers in the 1950s, when he became disillusioned with the Communist Party he had been active in and would up in the ranks of the anti-Commies. He said at the time that he felt he was leaving the winning team to join the losing team. We don't feel that way today.
She was impervious to evidence from 1968 to well past 9/11/2001, but Andrew Sullivan's blog made the scales fall from her eyes?
Don't know what the point is, but this story doesn't work for me. It reeks.
"She was impervious to evidence from 1968 to well past 9/11"
How many people remain impervious to evidence to this day? You can start with names like Kennedy, Pelosi, Reid, Kerry and so on and so forth. This woman claims to have been transformed in her thinking. Whether or not you care for Sullivan, she gives him credit. What's wrong with that and why does the story reek?
"It does seem like maybe a quarter to a third of Freepers are converts from the left. "
I started out as a Stanford socialist going to Black Panther meetings, and look at me now! Fortunately, I came around by the late 70's, the leftist stuff simply didn't work. In fact, it crumbled if you looked at it crosseyed.
A lot. When you're militantly impervious, you're often totally unreachable. It it's just militant libs. It's militant anything. Activism is a very corrupting thing.
What's wrong with that and why does the story reek?
Suddenly one day after 35 years of being bulletproof, she's reading Arianna Huffington. AH mentions AS who mentions some other bloggers and suddenly a wicked case of Morton's Demon spontaneously clears up.
Well, it happens, some. But don't expect a lot of that. She's one in a million. Glenn Morton is another.
But then, she doesn't explain it very well. OK, maybe she was gulled into reading AH because AH has largely reverted to lib (after calling for Clinton's impeachment in 98-99). Perhaps that lowered her defensive shields a little. But she has to know who AS is. One look at those blog sites she talks about, she has to recognize this as the stuff she was too sophisticated to believe.
She's been resisting opposing viewpoints all her life. What happened?
It isn't so much that it's impossible. It's a statistical miracle if not a physical one and miracles should not occur in a story without comment or explanation.
Great story. I'll bet you find yourself hanging out with a very different group of people than before!!
Well, it isn't like I was a Black Panther myself, it's just hard in that atmosphere not to be around someone who was a radical. I even worked with Joan Baez's mother at a bookstore! Just about got walked over by a swat team when they barricaded White Plaza during the Vietnam protests. Those were the good old days.
bump
ping
I can believe it.
People's views are guided by the data they get. If she was getting her news from the alphabets and points left she was not going to get the info to change her mind. Blogs only came about in the last couple of years.
And notice how it was Arianna Huffington (lefty) who led her to Andrew Sullivan (who is to the left of most of us) to others. She may now even be lurking here.
Hee hee. Yeah, the cops liked nothing better than to have a chance to bust some longhairs. Joan Baez's mom!! Why do I have the feeling that the acorn did not fall far from the tree?
Hey, I wasn't just a longhair, I also had a bushy beard then and a hippie Greek sailors cap! Lost a girlfriend to an old hippie who took her up to live with him in a teepee up behind Oakland. Joan's mother was actually pretty nice, but I think her daughters were sort of from Lesbania, at least I was unfortunate enough to lust after a French girl/guitar singer who was a Baez friend and of that persuasion.
In hindsight it was a lot of fun, but pretty dang nutty.
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