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I just emailed this warning to all my clear-thinking friends and relatives:
......................

I'd been thinking recently about how profoundly wrong liberals have been in recent history and how they've now descended into tightening spirals of irrationality.

Not to say that conservatives have been right about everything. I'd be the first to admit that conservatives, if there're any left in DC, have made some major mistakes in both policies and strategies, yet conservatism still retains a sane basis for deciding on its positions.

It's also not to say that the original Liberalism that guided the Founding Fathers is what's being discussed here. The liberalism I'm talking about arose from the 60's semi-revolution, and is a movement which I've been able to observe from within and from up close.

A fair observer would have to say that today's liberals cannot be uniformly categorized as evil nor eminently stupid. Too many of us have close friends and relatives that subscribe to liberalism, yet who are often quite nice and intelligent people. I will say, however, that they consistently demonstrate a major disconnect between the liberal policies they advocate for distant realms, and the way they live their personal lives and run their business affairs. Some would call this blatant hypocrisy, but I'm trying to be charitable here, and will attribute this to the need to survive, since if they actually followed what they advocate for the nation at large, they would not be around for too long.

In trying to capture what it is that makes them so reliably wrong, I'd started with their foundational assumptions and biases, but settled on the more accurate - "sentimentalisms", to coin a word. Sentimentalisms are utopian beliefs about what the world SHOULD be, and not what it is. Sentimentalisms guide liberals in their political beliefs, philosophies and movements, whereas real-world assumptions and biases are used to navigate their far more rational personal lives and business activities. As an example, here in Shanghai, where ALL my expat friends and colleagues profess to be liberals, most of them live and act like the hard-edged conservatives they so like to caricature Republicans as being. If they don't, they'll be absolutely steamrolled by the fast-moving and advantage-seeking Shanghainese, who don't even pretend to share their utopian fantasies.

By a stroke of luck...or synchronicity, I happened to find this link to an online YouTube speech about the same subject. It's a speech by a Hollywood comedian, who was a liberal New York Democrat, but who abandoned his liberalism after 9/11 and a lot of reflection. In the skewed credentialism that dominates the left when it comes to who they think should have the right to comment on particular subjects, he has absolutely sterling qualifications to speak out about liberalism. Here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

This hard-hitting speech says pretty much everything I'd wanted to put down on paper, but goes further in that it nails down the evolution of modern liberal thinking, and then details some of its more bizarre ramifications - such as leftist excusism for jihadists, who are not only against everything that liberals ostensibly stand for, but would happily lop off their heads for holding such infidel beliefs. This guy makes sense, and none too soon. You won't see this on mainstream media, of course, but the power of the internet is such that the leftist media can now be bypassed in getting messages of sanity out to the sentient beings out there that still care.

Normally, I couldn't be bothered to send these kinds of things out between elections, but world events are rapidly coalescing to challenge our wholly complacent existences, and the luxury of tolerating political insanity from our fellow citizens will be fast disappearing. The gathering clouds of war with a jihad-bound Iran (entailing mass terrorist attacks in the US), a financial implosion on the domestic scene, and a looming trade/currency war with China are collectively fixin' to hit the fan, and all at about the same time. It'd be a great plotline for a film about the fall of some great empire in long-ago history, but unfortunately, we're all going to be "extras" in this movie as it plays out.

Liberalism has done more than its part to engineer these showdowns in its typically obtuse fashion, but conservatives have also done their part in going along with what seemed so sentimentally and faaaaaashionably "progressive". That time needs to be over now, as the consequences of all the sentimentally irrational policies we've implemented at liberalism's behest are coming straight to our doorsteps.

Stay tuned to world events, as they will soon be local...