Ghost of a flea

Escalation of failure

Charles Krauthammer discusses all the withdrawing as the United States wakes up from "end-of-history illusions" (via lgf):

The world talks in ominous terms about the new American empire. But the U.S. was far more of an empire in, say, 1949, when it sat behind its great wall of tank armies and nuclear bombers in static defense of large territories in Western Europe and the Pacific Rim. That empire we are in the process of dismantling.

You don't have to be a barking moonbat to believe the United States is perpetrating empire. But it helps. Oh sure, a metaphorical empire of popular fast-food chains and well-crafted films. Even an ideological empire of liberty, representative government and free enterprise. But an honest to goodness, you know, empire would mean imposing an actual, that is to say, empire.

It could be the moonbats do not know what an empire is. I had a fascinating conversation with a voice of Moonbat Central the other day. A long lost friend of the Flea claimed to be in favour of "capital punishment for Bush" (that's President Bush to you), spoke favourably of Animal Liberation Front terrorism (she relished the word "terrorism") and spoke volubly against, and I quote, "imperialism, racist genocide and war".

Not actual imperialism, actual racist genocide or the actual war inflicted on the people of the United States. She had not heard of the Marsh Arabs and was baffled when I suggested the Guardian's Iraq death-count might usefully include a number of children buried with their toys by the recently defunct regime. No, her outrage was reserved for representative democracy which enacts the opinions of the majority of people who disagree with her, the views of FOXNews broadcasts she has never seen, and for the concept of freedom itself which she claims is nothing more than an "empty word". She then wondered how I could typify her opinions as fascist. Not just sympathetic to every fascist from Serbia to Cuba to Iraq but explicitly fascist opinions in themselves.

I read something clever some time ago. It was to the effect that "liberals" tend to think "conservatives" are evil while "conservatives" tend to think "liberals" are stupid. There was something instructive about the conversation nonetheless. I had wondered about some of the barking moonbat talk bandied about at sf.nazimedia.org or parodied through the genius of a Scrappleface or a Frank J. But I had thought that we libertarian voices of the blogosphere were engaged in a measure of hyperbole.

Turns out not. The point of sheer bafflement for me was not in our difference of opinion concerning specific points of policy or analysis of particular social problems. Indeed, I found it difficult to discern the roots of our difference. There was no point of policy, no analysis and no fact I could raise which met with a coherent response. There was no there, there. This must be how Galileo felt when attempting to describe the principles of optics to those whose religious certainty precluded the possibility of debate let alone a parsing of the finer points of physics.

Steven den Beste describes a comparable situation in some outraged responses to his recent Wall Street Journal article:

When someone tries to use a strategy which is dictated by their ideology, and that strategy doesn't seem to work, then they are caught in something of a cognitive bind. If they acknowledge the failure of the strategy, then they would be forced to question their ideology. If questioning the ideology is unthinkable, then the only possible conclusion is that the strategy failed because it wasn't executed sufficiently well. They respond by turning up the power, rather than by considering alternatives. (This is sometimes referred to as "escalation of failure".)

Attempts by the leftists to show how emphatically they oppose war don't seem to be having any impact. Invective and ridicule has failed to discredit those of us who have been advocating war. (And that's puzzling, too. In college, denouncing someone as being "conservative" would instantly discredit them and silence them. Why hasn't that been working in the debate about the war?)

Funny that. My arguments against the CBC, the United Nations and the silencing of minority opinions in academia were met with one response: ridicule. My arguments were not met with counter-argument but dismissed as "right wing" or with overt mockery. Even my jokes were all too often met with the puzzled look of someone working out whether they were ideologically correct before deciding to laugh. It was a valuable, if disconcerting, experience. I have learned that, unlike those undergraduate days, being called "right wing" by an anti-democracy, anti-freedom, fascist-sympathizing loud-mouth is irritating but that it no longer has the power to silence my arguments. The blogosphere means those of us with arguments to make no longer have to sit back and shut up while the cultural elites of the fascist fashion-bubble lay down the law.

Posted by the Flea at July 30, 2003 11:02 AM