Speaking from prolonged, close, personal experience, it's almost impossible to get inside the mind of a lunatic and figure out how they see the world. You can do it for brief moments, but it's incredibly difficult to maintain for any length of time. The problem with crazy people is that since they don't think like you do, I mean structurally think like you do as in your internal logical flow charts are practically useless, you can't figure out their motivations.
During the Republican National Convention, we had Code Pink dressing up like giant vaginas to protest the GOP's War On Women and members of the news media finding racism in everything.
These are crazy people, plain and simple.
I spent some time trying to get inside this kind of mind, figuring I could get a decent blog post out of it.
In a candid moment, the ABC News Yahoo Bureau Chief says, "They are happy to have a party with black people drowning" and all his cronies laugh.
Here were some of my thoughts. They firmly believe Republicans are racists because ...
- they need to dismiss logical financial and fiscal arguments,
- they want to maintain their fantasy world of government spending and power,
- all of their hip friends think this way and they don't want to be seen as a square,
- it's a lot of childish, frat-house fun to laugh at the racists or
- they live in a fantasy world where it is still 1964 because they wish with all their hearts they could have been in the civil rights marches (my personal favorite).
In the end, I gave up on this. It's fruitless to try and live inside the world of the lunatic. I would argue that the proper response to the race-obsessed, reactionary left is to simply ask, "What's wrong with you?" The whole foundation of their race argument is wrong and it's immediately self-evident. There's no reason to grant them any merit in their position at all. We're happy that black people are drowning?!? What kind of sick mind comes up with that? And if you think it was isolated thought, watch the video again and listen to all the laughter. It's like some self-reinforcing bubble of delusional thought and there's no reason to react to it with anything other than scorn and mockery.
Dittos for the giant vaginas. Like Left Coast Rebel, I thought Clint Eastwood's speech at the RNC was a bomb, but it couldn't compare with Code Pink. Running around in giant vagina costumes? Are you just completely out of your mind? What kind of lunatic comes up with this? Elsewhere, fellow SLOB Dawn Wildman participated on an NYT panel discussing the War on Women. I couldn't watch it. I didn't even get started. Why not just go to downtown San Diego and hang out with the drug addicts and alcoholics? I'm glad Dawn participated in this, but I couldn't watch. You've got more patience than I do, Dawn.
So who cares why they think this way? Who cares what wild, statistical outliers they've got proving that conservatives / libertarians / Tea Party members are racists and waging a war on women? It's deliberate, self-indulgent madness and needs to be treated as such.
"What kind of lunatic comes up with this?"
ReplyDeleteThe kind of lunatic who wants to be on the news. It evidently worked, too. Meanwhile, the news organizations largely ignore anyone who is actually saying anything substantive, because spots about them don't bring in the viewers.
I don't think there are anywhere near as many crazy people out there as one would think from all the news stories about them.
You ask what was the point of dressing like giant vaginas. Well you've just spent a whole post talking about them. Its about getting attention. It used to be all you had to do was march. That got old, so then you had to resort to theatre. You act as if this doesn't happen on the right too. Rush, Coulter, Trump, they all do it because it gets them attention. It makes for drama and excitement.
ReplyDeleteThe attention theory doesn't work for the dude at ABC News and his buddies.
ReplyDeleteI don't suffer from mental illness. I enjoy every single second of it!!
ReplyDelete"Who cares why they think this way?" I do. And you should too. The reason is, that as long as they think this way, it will be extremely difficult to bring rational behavior to our government. We have to some how bring them into touch with basic sanity and reality. It really is the only necessary and sufficient condition to get to a future that's fiscally and socially sustainable.
ReplyDeleteTim,
ReplyDeleteYou are exactly right. There are not as many of these lackwits as one would think, or, more precisely, as one is tempted to conclude. In fact, Nobel-prizewinning cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman identified this particular cognitive bias (as he calls it) and labeled it the Availability Heuristic: i.e., "a mental shortcut that uses the ease with which examples come to mind to make judgments about the probability of events".
Secular, I was thinking more along the lines of confirmation bias, but it's the same thing.
ReplyDeleteA Cunning Stunt in Tampa.
ReplyDeleteI thought Clint Eastwood's speech at the RNC was a bomb
ReplyDeleteI thought it was great, he was acting you know. And the bumbling old man personna contrasted with the barbed comments he made on obama.
"if they don't do the job, you have to let them go."
His speech and the empty chair will be remembered long after the convention is history.
See this.