Posted on 07/16/2011 8:03:22 AM PDT by Auntie Mame
Last night, while reading Journals, a book consisting of the previously private reflections of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., I came across this March 7, 1981 entry:
I guess I was wrong about the Reagan crowd. They turned out to be considerably more doctrinaire than I expected them to be. In domestic policy they seem really to believe that reducing the budget and cutting taxes will produce prosperity without inflation. The more likely effect, it seems to me, of cutting taxes for the rich and social programs for the poor is to rekindle social tensions. Still I think Reagan should have the chance to play his hand. If his policy succeeds, it will be a miracle, but a pleasant one; if it fails, then we will at least have got free-market therapy out of our system, and then can move on to something else.
In fact, Reagan’s policies produced precisely the opposite of what Schlesinger predicted.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
That’s why I have my tag line... courtesy of an old economics professor (who was a TA for Milton Friedman drecades ago).
Libs sit around and read each other’s BS and take it as fact. Conservatives get things done in the real world.
This is why it is important for conservatives not to get sucked in by the conventional wisdom. Don’t ever take anything as true just because you’ve heard it a lot. Liberals tell each other the same lies over and over and together they will hold off a whole world of reality. We should expect more of ourselves.
Schlesinger was nothing but a minstrel for the Camelot crowd. He is to history what Krugman is to economics.
Schlesinger was nothing but a minstrel for the Camelot crowd. He is to history what Krugman is to economics.
*bump*
Libs sit around and read each other’s BS and take it as fact. Conservatives get things done in the real world.
Importantly, there are different versions of what he is talking about.
1) Emotional investment. When someone realizes that an idea, say the Chicago Cubs, is a stinker, but they still support it because they want to. Often this is portrayed as “rooting for the underdog.”
2) Antithetical investment. Supporting a stinker of an idea solely because you dislike the advocates of an opposing idea. “My parents hate tattoos, so I’m going to get a tattoo.”
3) Religious/Philosophical investment. For 70 years, the Soviet leaders tried to make collective farming work, and it would not. Their response was to throw increasing amounts of money at it, then blame those trying to execute it as incompetent or traitorous, all the while insisting that it *had* to not only work, but be better, because it said so in their sacred book. This stubbornness and lack of pattern recognition establishes socialism and communism as religions, not, as they always claimed, “scientific” philosophies.
They also believe in socialized medicine, that also never works.
4) Abnormal or psychotic investment. Always keep in mind that, according to the Standard Distribution Curve, for any given mental illness, half of Americans are “below average” in that condition. While below average doesn’t mean they are mentally ill, it does mean that they have some degree of that illness reflected in their thoughts and attitudes.
Toxoplasmosis is a protozoa disease found in rodents, cats and people. Some 11 million Americans are believed to be infected with it. It is unique in that it promotes its life cycle by secreting a chemical that affects the brain chemical dopamine.
The protozoa finds its way to the pleasure center of a rodents brain, then by secreting its chemical, “changes the rodent’s mind” in a very particular way. Instead of responding in fear and avoidance to cat urine, it is attracted to it. The protozoa actually wants its rodent host to be eaten by a cat, because it can only reproduce in the gut of a cat.
So the protozoa makes the rodent, not just suicidal, but suicidal by being attracted to an enemy that will destroy it. Self destructive.
Oddly enough, despite the difference in size, a rodent brain is not that much different from a human brain, chemically. So what happens to a human brain infiltrated by these protozoa? Good question.
There is a possibility that it scrambles the human brain so that it makes a person self destructive as well. But since humans aren’t generally afraid of cats, perhaps it makes them attracted to other humans it thinks of as dangerous, as enemies.
What would you call an American who was an apologist for truly evil and murderous people? Who thinks that instead of condemning them, we should embrace them?
This sounds like Democrat foreign policy in a nutshell.
The libs were the ones who tried to rekindle social tensions by making it seem that every other person was homeless. Reading that excerpt from Schlesinger tells me why historians always rank FDR as our greatest President. Does anyone know why historians tend to be leftists?
Great post, thank you.
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