Random Stupidity

A few passing thoughts of a Tuesday afternoon (Limbo Standard Time), all of them — sadly but typically in these times — thoughts of stupidity:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the fastest-fading cutie in the history of passing novelties, is doing what the very stupid always do when faced with the daily refutation of all their bright ideas: making even louder declarations of even more ludicrous ideas. (The miserable fact is that in a progressive-educated era, this method usually works.)

Two days ago, it was cancelling the United States economy with her Green New Deal — not really hers, per se, but she claimed it, without understanding either the proposal or how absurd it was, as the childish and self-important tend to do. Yesterday, it was threatening to keep a “list” of Democrats who are insufficiently socialist to meet her standards of ignorant undergraduate hatred. Today, having crapped out on those idiotic pronouncements (unless, that is, her goal was to make Nancy Pelosi look reasonable and moderate), she has put the whole parade on booster rockets and shot it to some cuckoo star that a slavering teenage power-monger might mistake for the moon, declaring that capitalism is an “irredeemable” system that is “to blame for income inequality.” 

As for offering an explanation as to why income inequality — i.e., people earning different amounts of money depending on what kind of work they do, how much work they do, or how highly in-demand their work is — is a problem that must be solved, and for which someone or something must be blamed, you would be hearing crickets from AOC on that one, were the crickets not currently at the airport trying to escape before they are harnessed as the motor of the wind turbines AOC’s Green New Deal mandates for every building in America.

To pick up where I left off a few days ago, partly because I don’t have the patience to spend time actually refuting such absolute stupidity, I will merely add two more pertinent quotations from Eric Hoffer, who was actually a blue collar worker, unlike the phony student-Bolshevik Ocasio-Cortez.

The significant point is that people unfit for freedom — who cannot do much with it — are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a “have” type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a “have-not” type of self. If Hitler had had the talents and the temperament of a genuine artist, if Stalin had had the capacity to become a first-rate theoretician, if Napoleon had had the makings of a great poet or philosopher they would hardly have developed the all-consuming lust for absolute power.

Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, Journal entry March 28, 1959

The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

— The True Believer, Part Two, §28

There seems to be growing trepidation among Republican senators to stand alongside Trump in his “emergency declaration” regarding the southern border. Today, I read at Right Scoop that several have already declared their intention to oppose the measure outright, while several others, including a rare one who has not yet proved himself to be a pure establishment careerist hack, Mike Lee, are on the fence and asking Trump to negotiate a better version of the proposal.

Scanning down to the comments on the above-linked article at Right Scoop, as I sometimes do merely to re-verify my presumption that Trump cultists have destroyed everything in the mainstream “alternative” media, I see that my old friend K-Bob, the moderator who banned me from commenting there after we had a “disagreement” which he won by asserting his gatekeeper authority, has put on his usual know-it-all hat to stifle rational discussion of this issue with the following holier-than-thou pronouncement:

So recapping the situation, Trump wants to do something…

It’s constitutional.

It follows the law.

It’s an emergency.

It’s what Republicans promised to do.

…but now Republicans want to stop him.

So reviewing K-Bob’s sophistry:

Trump wants to do something…

Its constitutionality is entirely questionable, so much so that even so thoroughly compromised a Trump-ophant as constitutional lawyer Ted Cruz is still keeping quiet on the matter. The whole question about this declaration, in fact, is whether it sets a dangerous precedent for future encroachments upon the Constitution’s separation of powers.

It follows a law that Republicans hated back when Obama was exploiting it — a law that has its modern roots in America’s heyday of limited government, the Lyndon Johnson era.

It’s an emergency — except that the President who declared it such stood in front of the press immediately thereafter and explained in no uncertain terms that it is not an emergency, but rather that his reasons for declaring this fake emergency were purely pragmatic, thereby adding a whole forest of wood to the burning question of its constitutionality.

Republicans never “promised” to use illegitimate and dangerous precedent-setting executive powers to raise funds for a Trump-cult-baiting campaign promise by raiding the federal budget over the heads of Congress.

K-Bob the Trump-Friendly Sophist strikes (out) again.

Speaking of the U.S. federal budget — which is to say speaking of nothing, since there is no such budget — Trump has just handed over his budget proposal for 2020, which happens to be the biggest proposal in U.S. history. Wow, the biggest! The most amazing! Only Trump would have the guts to do it! To spend more taxpayer money, and run a bigger deficit, than any president ever! 

He’ll need his very big hands to carry all that loot. Oh, and of course he will not balance the budget, ever, and he has no intention of ever trying to do so, in spite of having promised repeatedly that he would do so within ten years, during his campaign. 

Whatever he said most often during the campaign (calculate carefully, since he pretty much says everything at some point or other), just turn it upside down and you’ll see what he is actually going to do.