The Inscrutability of Angels

[Buster's Uncle]

Everyone's a hypocrite somehow.  The more interesting question is how we react when our hypocrisy is pointed out.

I agree that everyone's a hypocrite, but I think the reason why is largely to do with the world being too complex and interconnected for us to be morally uncompromised. I don't think the answer is to not care about hypocrisy, though; I think the answer is to realize we have almost no power to produce unalloyed, certain good and should therefore focus our attention elsewhere.

(An easy refutation is, duhhhh everything's uncertain, but we can measure uncertainty. If the odds of some act being morally positive are good, do the bleeping act, man. My answer to that is I think the complexity of the world makes the uncertainty significantly greater than we realize in a butterfly -> hurricane kind of way.)

^This^ is probably a better answer than mine - but there's still some specifics need thrashing when I get caught up...

[Syn]

Hypocrisy is fine. The problem comes when people deny that they are hypocrites.

[Vishniac]

The more interesting question is how we react when our hypocrisy is pointed out.

I have only one policy: DENY EVERYTHING! 

[Buster's Uncle]

Inappropriate.

-Solver is consistent about not answering when he'd need to deny.  Some jokes are true.

[Buster's Uncle]

Re: hypocrisy, I don't think it's reasonable to expect smart people to be less hypocritical.  If anything, I'd expect the reverse, or at least some sort of bell-curve effect, since intelligence lets you handle more complex ideas and thus allows ever finer distinctions to be parsed as to why it's different in your personal case.  I think everyone's a hypocrite to some extent.  Remember the last election, when everyone said with a straight face that we needed to elect Bill Clinton's wife to show the world that we don't turn a blind eye to sexual predators?

I read Empire, thought it was open-minded by Card's low-bar wackadoo standards.  Then read Hidden Empire and found it was a completely different book with an essentially unrelated plot which just happened to have certain common characters.  Because Card got ambushed by an idea halfway through writing and felt compelled to jam it into his current WIP come hell or high water.  He can be bad about that.

I'm virtually certain Scott was having serious marital problems IRL circa 1996 - it's right there on the page in whichever Alvin book, and Xenocide or Children of the Mind.  -Then either they worked it out or I just didn't keep up with his work, 'cause I stopped seeing that pop up.  Most of his work is very personal on some level, no matter how divorced from his actual reality of a very successful writer living in suburban Greensboro NC and working indoors, who really would rather be a professor.


-I'm going to presume on our friendship and mutual respect and be rude, Elok - apology for that in advance.

You know, the kind of political I am, it's not so much that I'd boycott a fellow for being a political nut -or no Heinlein or Poul Anderson or a lot of those guys for me- it's just, he decided to be part of the problem, and after Empire -and I daresay I speak conservative as a native, while you don't speak liberal at all, Elok- I can't stomach his bullcrap anymore.  That book picked a side, the wrong side, pretending not to, and that's precisely the problem.  You people are blind; the Regan Revolution was reactionary, NOT conservative, and we're still paying for the mistake of tolerating that empty-shirt sack of crap, with unqualified fascist-leaning presidents from the right, Eisenhower conservatives posing as Democrats from the "left" - both sides of the isle have lost their way THAT badly, contrary to the rightist lie, stuck in the sixties, that the mainstream "left" is even left, let alone getting more strident and aggressive and extreme.

It. is. a. LIE - and Empire is nothing but an 80-page adventure novella without that assumption - but probably a very good one.

I wouldn't pee on the Clintons or Mrs. Pelosi if they were on fire, and I'm glad Ted Kennedy is dead so I don't get him thrown up in my face anymore. Like Mr. Clinton, he was a loathsome, contemptible sack I'd cross the street to avoid.

I'm a social conservative with a libertarian take on the moral/political intersection, and if there was a REAL conservative party left in this country, I'd take a serious look.  My politics are a mishmash of column A and column B -outside labor issues, where I'm genuinely liberal- but I look like a lefty from the cheap seats, Regan having hopelessly soiled the mode zeitgeist before I was old enough to vote - and one of the greatest failures of his moronic Revolution being that it drove people like me into the arms of the less contemptible -not my fellow travelers and not even competent opposition- side.

Don't blame me; I've voted against a Clinton in the primaries every chance I've ever had, starting with voting Tsongas in 91 after he'd already dropped out.

Mr. Clinton got away with it -he was guilty as hell and everybody knew and most said so at the time- because screw giving the professional Clinton haters what they want after he sprang their trap; those guys' moral failings are out there in public professional behavior, whether a single soul of them suffers from any private problem with their pants staying on or not.  It was a trap, and that's why he got away with perjury; the question had no business being asked, being as the circumstance/motivation of the questioning was evil and wrong.

I'm not defending the POS.  I'm just calling his dedicated enemies (that the Clintons have professional haters is on them for being faithless scum, but irrelevant to criticism of the excesses of said haters) on their excessive and inarguable sins.

"Sexual Predator"?  The #Me Too stuff makes me twitchy -I think I posted about that around six months ago- but from your POV, a convenient club to beat Scumbag Bill with, assuming facts not in (credible) evidence.  That koolaide tastes bad, man.

C'mon, don't be tiresome, you know what I mean.  The [cat]-grabbing tape comes out, and everyone's horrified.  You see scores of people on the Left arguing that we can't possibly elect a man with that kind of attitude towards women--ignoring the fact that his opponent's husband has spent his career dogged by accusations of worse, and admitted to a "consensual" relationship with a girl half his age and fifty ranks lower on the White House totem pole.  After the election was done, the MeToo spotlight turned retroactively onto Bill--but it would never have touched him during the election proper, because that would be party disloyalty.  Everyone's a hypocrite somehow.  The more interesting question is how we react when our hypocrisy is pointed out.

I really don't remember ANYbody saying "we needed to elect Bill Clinton's wife to show the world that we don't turn a blind eye to sexual predators".  A good 95% of this is koolaide, plainly because you don't care for the man and understand the left about as well as you do Protestants.


-Note that I didn't soil any of this mentioning Bakrama and the vigorous fantasies about HIM on both sides...

[Buster's Uncle]

-Really recent, as it turns out...

-And this is getting a bit afield, but the #MeToo movement and the High School students protesting for sanity in our policies re: murder tools both make me a little twitchy, even though I strongly agree that men being horrible pigs are bad, and so are murder tools everywhere.  -I wish the former hadn't nailed Charley Rose and Kevin Spacey, but that's not my problem with it; it's just that both movements are setting off my Group Mind detector - it looks to me like a lot of pile-on mob psychology going on, and --- I won't be surprised if both movements end up going way too far -again, not because I have reservations about either cause- and causing more harm than good, if the later even turns out to have any staying power and achieves anything.  Call it the French Revolution Effect, as a great example of the Group Mind going so way too far that they end up with Napoleon, and all the political murder being for nothing.  (It's a fundamental problem with revolutionary movements -witness how Lenin perverted Marx, leading to Stalin- not knowing when to ease off on the killing, but it's definitely also a mob psychology problem and something responsible mass communications gatekeepers need to be aware of and wrestle with how to handle.)  Journalism has a way of being about life the universe, and everything, in the end, when it's done responsibly with awareness of the power wielded for good or evil.

Empire is 400+ pages of "Stop hitting yourself.  Stop hitting yourself" over and over is all - this isn't the 60's and the hippie movement, is all, and any claim/implication that the "left" is the aggressor -or even a fraction as guilty; au contraire, with collaborationist leadership of the Democrats for decades now- is MORE than just koolaide.  -It's the OG poison Jim Jones kind.  It's a lie, and it IS hypocrisy, and nothing but.

[Elok]

No, they did not literally put it in my deliberately-ironic formulation, but there was a HUGE uproar over those tapes.  Which fundamentally didn't make sense, because that was one of the few moral flaws the two candidates had in common.  Hillary was "better" only insofar as she was merely married to somebody who obviously viewed and treated women the same way [Sleezebag] did, rather than being that way herself.  And that's not much of an improvement.  It was ludicrously hypocritical.

... I don't like Reagan or the RR, never have.  Not sure where you got that impression.  I didn't think the impeachment proceedings against Clinton were reasonable back when they were happening (and I was a teenager), and I still don't.  I'm just saying, everybody's a hypocrite.

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't disagree.

I just had to lay out some bit of high-points context of who I am and how the climate has polarized me - and koolaide, and all that.

I dunno what being a faithful and put-upon wife has to do with it - it made the choice/contrast even clearer, if anything; between two black holes of charisma, why not the one who's worked in the White House, held elected high office (ANY elected office winning that, from local dog catcher on up) and spent a life in public service and arguably demonstrated she's an actual capable administrator (if not principled, courageous or a competent politician, still hands-down better than the alternative)?  Saying Bill is even AS BAD as Pig is still Kool-Aid.  He, at worst, doesn't brag about all the groping, even privately, or some former friend -of the legion he's thrown under the bus- would have come forward by now.

I don't want to be on the same planet as any of them.

-And I'm still pretty sure it was you who said something somewhere about the Pig's "election" maybe finally driving "a steak through Reagan's filthy heart".  -I LOVE that, whoever said it, and wish it was working out that way - and it makes me sad when I see good, thoughful people like you in bed with the racist/bossman/statist party...

[Elok]

One right-wing blogger compared our current situation to being in prison; when you're inside, you don't bother over whether the gangs agree with you philosophically, or have good people in them.  You're only concerned with which gang will have you, and whether they are strong enough to keep the other gangs from beating or shanking you.  It's not quite that bad yet, and the odious Reaganite wing has mostly subverted the radicals since the election, because [Sleezebag] has turned out even more incompetent and careless than I expected.  I don't know if his counterpart of SJWs and sundry hard-left moonbats have any real chance of taking the Dems for a spin this year or 2020, or if they will be similarly squashed back when they try it.  I don't identify with either, but I'm uncomfortably aware that the generally-better Dems' radicals hate me, the white Christian male, personally, while the generally-worse Republicans' hold me in mostly-benign contempt.  Which has to be balanced against the awareness that the Dem radicals are far less competent and effective, or have been historically.  But what does historical precedent count for, in a world where [Sleezebag] can be elected?  I don't know.

I don't think of HRC as a faithful and put-upon wife.  I have no idea what their relationship is like, beyond "presumably strained," but she stood by a man with a long history of sexual aggression (who, yes, is not dumb, drugged-out, and/or insecure enough to brag about it), nobody really believes he's in any way repentant, and that makes it hypocritical to frame her as the moral high ground.  Their relative merits in every other area notwithstanding; yes, [Sleezebag] is completely inept, corrupt, childish, etc.  He's a walking bag of character flaws and apparently devoid of literally every virtue, I've said as much multiple times.  That doesn't change the fact that Hillary has no advantage over him in the very narrow coddling-perversion field.

[Buster's Uncle]

No.  Just no.  One's obviously a perversion enabler, yes - the other's an actual PREvert, and only your selection bias could make those morally equivalent.  She STILL wins on that, if a very dubious achievement.

This is like me having to stick up for Bakrama for being the opposite of a socialist, and I despise being stuck in a world such as where it comes up so often.  I would be fine, just fine, with not having the backs of people who don't have mine and I hold in contempt, if only regard for the truth in an atmosphere of lies would LET me...

-True about the prison gangs; we just disagree about which crowd of trashy murders is worse...

[Elok]

If one gang will have you and the other won't, it hardly matters which is worse.  Yes, the orcs are overall worse than the goblins.  But the goblins wouldn't have somebody like me in their ranks even if I wanted to join.  That limits my options to joining the orcs or staying out of the fight.  I'm opting for the latter as long as it's an option.

[ColdWizard]

Which is why I voted for the kobolds and promptly gave up when they didn't even make 4%.

[Syn]

Could not care less about politicians getting fellated and getting peed on. Supremely low on the list of reasons why one should take issue with an authority figure.

[Elok]

I feel our country would benefit enormously from preferential voting.

[Lorizael]

I dunno I feel like maybe democracy has run its course and we should try out the philosopher-king option.