When He's Gone

Rule 6

Total criminalization.

If we're all guilty, then you can't hold me responsible without the risk of exposing your own culpability.

 

Lucas Bean

Lucas Bean Redux

I may have put this one up before. No matter - it bears repeating.

There's A Reason For That

There has to be a rebirth of expertise, and that requires a rebirth of respect for people's real abilities - and a resurgence of actual common sense.

Not the phony kind of common sense that so many conservatives and libertarians are trying to substitute for knowledge because they've spent so much time convincing themselves they don't need to know anything - they just need to adopt a radical skepticism that allows them to feel smart without having to do any real work.

I can take myself as a fair example.

I'm a generalist. A generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more until he knows practically nothing about almost everything.

After 73 years, I'm the intellectual equivalent of the Platte River - my knowledge base is a mile wide and an inch deep. Too thick to drink and too thin to plow.

But because I actually know quite a bit about a few things, and because I'm a good salesman, I can spin it all into giving people the impression that I'm smarter than I actually am.

If I'm not careful, my ego gets in the way - sometimes to the point where I can flop all the way over into Cliff Clavin territory. Fake lord forgive me my sins.

So I have to be careful not to overstep my limitations. I have to look for - and listen for - people who carry real bona fides on a given subject, and shift my conversation from declaring what I know (or think I know) to a more inquisitive thing where I can put what I think on the table, and ask if there's something I've missed, or I've gotten wrong, or if there's something new I can learn.

So anyway, the main point is to remember what's supposed to help us maintain a certain humility:

The more we learn, the more we have to understand how much more there is for us to learn.

Lucas Bean

The manosphere has self-destructed, and nothing of value has been lost.

Lucas Bean

Lucas Bean

MAGA Don't Think

Propaganda works best on people who don't (or can't) think in the abstract.

Lucas Bean

Confirming that you have to draw them out of the cult. Trying to yank them out usually just strengthens their resolve to remain.

Part Of The Plan

Tell me how it's not what the Plutocrats have had in mind all along.

Lucas Bean

Trump Delusion Syndrome

Theories

It's not just something you came up with based on a couple of videos that sparked a random thought.

A theory is a series of observations, rigorously tested and debated, leading to conclusions that stay consistent as the tests and their outcomes are independently replicated.

The Oversized Amygdala

MAGA is a toxic support group for adult children.

Lucas Bean

When DumFux News fans watch "regular news" instead.

Boomers

... whaddaya gonna do?

1. The Me Generation
2. Epidemic Narcissism
3. The Collapse Of Social Capital
4. Desire For An Authoritarian

Divide-n-Conquer on an industrial scale.

Obama Derangement Syndrome

1. The mirror
2. Envy
3. The coward's move
4. The trap
5. Scapegoating

Lucas Bean

 

Lucas Bean

Lucas Bean Explains

Olbermann tells the story from a friend of his who explained it with a scoreboard analogy.

If there's something about you that you've been trained to think of as wrong and immoral and evil, you can deny yourself that thing for only so long - eventually, it will manifest in your behavior.

So what often happens is you begin to condemn that behavior very loudly and very publicly in order to score points against it. But in the meantime, you're scoring points in favor of it because that's just something you really can't deny always and forever.

So you trick your brain by keeping score. You may have 90 points for it because of what you do, but as long as you make a show of scoring 110 points against it, you're ahead of the game.