Tuesday, June 16, 2015

The Wit and Wisdom of Churchill vs. the Twaddling Twititude of Obama

One last thing I want to say about bubbles, and then I'll move on. Wallison mentions a crack by Warren Buffet to the effect that you can't tell who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. Or in the case of the 2007 crash, until home prices stopped rising, which exposed all those subprime people victimized by the subprime ideas of the left.

However, there are two ways to inflate a balloon. The usual way is to increase the pressure inside, but another way is to decrease the pressure outside. Liberal bubbles rely more on the latter. If we think of the ambient political pressure as "truth" or "knowledge," then the left absolutely can't function except in a low-pressure environment.

It is the function of the MSM to keep the pressure low around liberal candidates (e.g., ignoring Clinton corruption and criminality), but absurdly high around a conservative one (e.g., Marco Rubio's secret history of exceeding the speed limit and being prosperous enough to afford a luxury dinghy).

Democrat ringmasters know there's a lo-fo voter born every minute, except not necessarily in this country. D'oh! Thus the desperate need to import them from south of the border.

Remember, Mitt Romney would have defeated Obama by a wider margin than Reagan beat Mondale if the nation's demographics in 2008 had been the same as 1984. If it hadn't been surrounded by the low pressure media and low-information voters, The Obama Balloon couldn't have expanded at all, let alone to such grandiose proportions -- for example, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "nothing," an apt symbol of what was actually inside the balloon.

In reading this magnificent compendium of the wit and wisdom of Winston Churchill, I am reminded that no one will ever issue such a compilation of Obama's literary and oratorical gems, because there are none.

To be clear, I am sure some publisher will try, but you can be certain it will nevertheless be as empty as, say, Bill Clinton's turgid autofellatiography. Or, it will be a cornucrapia of malevolent bullshit, which is even worse, i.e., occuping "negative space" instead of merely being as vapid as, say, the collected poems of Suzanne Somers.

It is right and fitting that the first thing Obama did upon occupying the Big Chair was to send the bust of Churchill back to the white racist imperialists who gave it to us.

Another name for this 600 page book could be What Churchill Knew that Obama Doesn't, but even then it can only skim the surface, since it only represents 0.2 percent of his 15 million published words. Edward R. Murrow famously observed that Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle" against our socialist enemies.

Conversely, our socialist enemies begin by mobilizing a battle against the English language. Ironically, there are even some passages in the book to that effect, in that Churchill recognized the PC virus long before it had a name, expressing the "hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips."

In response to the left's relativism, he might say "The propositions of Euclid would be no less indisputable were they propounded by an infant or an idiot." And in reaction to Obama's War-is-Peace Prize, he might remind him that "A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war."

How did we get here? We were discussing the human interior, which is an ontologically real space. However, sometimes this space can become "unreal," which is really another way of talking about what happens when someone lives in a real bubble.

For example, if global warming is indeed the greatest scientific hoax in human history, then its advocates are living in a bubble that must eventually burst because reality always gets the last word.

You can tell you're in a bubble if your knowledge diminishes the unknown instead of enhancing it -- if you entertain the unwarranted belief that reality just so happens to comport with your ideas about it, with no remainder; or in other words, if you collapse the space between immanence and transcendence. Being that this latter is the "human space" -- or divine-human space -- to do this is to abolish man by rendering him absurd.

Thus the orthoparadox that "the finitude of things is discovered only in the very conclusion that also establishes the infinite source of their limitation" (Schmitz) -- which you can be certain has never occurred to this unhinged atheist.

Could someone be less self-aware or more ignorant of history, science, and metaphysics? He is only right if human origins may be reduced to physics, in which case he can only be wrong. I mean, science can't even say where our thoughts come from, let alone everything outside them. Such simplistic theories can't even explain the simpletons who believe them.

There's a name for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude." If you are a theological idiot, then you lack precisely the skills to appreciate the infinite magnitude of your idiocy.

How does a human being pass beyond this thing called "nature" in order to get at this thing called "truth?" Schmitz provides a clue: personal presence -- or the presence of persons -- "is the immaterial coin of human spirituality, and perhaps the medium through which the anthropological circle can be enriched by being broken."

In short, being a person means being gratuitously free of any ideological bubble in which the left might try to imprison us. For the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, boom, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17).

For that matter, in a letter to Lady Churchill after Winston's passing, the author wrote: That he died is unimportant, for we must all pass away. That he lived is momentous to the destiny of decent men. He is not gone. He lives wherever men are free.

Conversely, Obama lives wherever the state has a better idea of what to do with your freedom.

12 comments:

julie said...

In reading this magnificent compendium of the wit and wisdom of Winston Churchill, I am reminded that no one will ever issue such a compilation of Obama's literary and oratorical gems, because there are none.

Maybe I'm way off base, but I can't help thinking that once Obama is out, suddenly, first in drips but eventually maybe in torrents, all that pressure the media has been holding back from Obama through the course of his pResidency is going to be released. There will be stories. And they won't be flattering. The impression I have at the moment is that a great many people who desperately wanted to believe are becoming disillusioned; they are biting their tongues and keeping any criticism small for now, but once it is safe to speak out...

John said...

I just wish we had gone with Churchill's National Health Service model, rather than Obamacare.

Gagdad Bob said...

I like what he said about Mein Kampf: "Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message."

MSM ciphers will of course talk about Churchill's greatness, but if anyone expresses a similar sentiment -- say, Pam Geller -- off with their heads.

julie said...

Re. healthcare, Churchill didn't have a model, so far as I can tell, just an idea that disease was an enemy that must be attacked wherever it was found. There is some interesting commentary on that here.

And agreed, he said things which today one may not say unless one wishes to become a pariah.

julie said...

Heh - I didn't even realize, but the blog post I just linked was written by the same man who wrote the Churchill book Bob is reading. Definitely worth a look.

ted said...

Heard this from a Christian mystic recently: “God is reality with a personality, not a person outside reality."

mushroom said...

How droll, an atheist self-righteously lecturing and labeling Christians as self-righteous.

Gagdad Bob said...

What amused me is his over-the-top ignorance, irrationality, and extremism -- all in the name of education, reason, and common sense!

julie said...

You can tell you're in a bubble if your knowledge diminishes the unknown instead of enhancing it -- if you entertain the unwarranted belief that reality just so happens to comport with your ideas about it, with no remainder; or in other words, if you collapse the space between immanence and transcendence. Being that this latter is the "human space" -- or divine-human space -- to do this is to abolish man by rendering him absurd.

In Belgium, it seems they have conquered even death:

"Vermeersch seemed to refer to death as an option that had upsides and downsides, like any other choice, and I mentioned that it appeared that a lot of people in Belgium were less afraid of death than I was.

Vermeersch looked at me as if he were recalculating my age downward. “How can you be afraid of nothing?” he said. “Nothing can do you no harm.”

I said, “I’m afraid of not existing.”

“Millions and billions of years you did not exist—what was the problem?”

“But now I’ve formed relationships,” I said.

“After death, your relationships are finished,” he said brightly. “You are in the state you were before conception.”"


From nothing to nothing, with nothing much except a few "experiences" to make the space in between worth mentioning. If I were raised on such "non-confessional ethics", I'd probably want to end it all sooner rather than later, too.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"There's a name for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude." If you are a theological idiot, then you lack precisely the skills to appreciate the infinite magnitude of your idiocy."

Interesting that one of the indicators of the Dunning-Kruger effect is an unhealthy sense of humor. Which makes sense when you hear these smug, nyukless wonders attempt to be funny. It appears that the higher one thinks of one's self the less of a sense of humor they have.
Or, to the degree they have one, it is cruel, twisted, and warped, like their reasoning skills.

John Lien said...

Heard this from a Christian mystic recently: “God is reality with a personality, not a person outside reality."

ted, nice!

Of course, thanks Bob and fellow Raccoons for getting me to the point that, that sentence has meaning.

mushroom said...

Interesting that one of the indicators of the Dunning-Kruger effect is an unhealthy sense of humor. Which makes sense when you hear these smug, nyukless wonders attempt to be funny.

Most of it seems to consist of inserting 'Kcuf!' at various points.

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