Falling off the edge of the world

Sometimes, I think the olden mapmakers were on to something we’ve lost.  Sure, the continents were comically misshapen, and they often favored beauty over legibility, but there was a certain style to the operation that’s sorely lacking now.  And of course they were just as interested in precision and accuracy as we are today; they just lacked the tools.  Where they excelled and we falter is that they didn’t sit around waiting for the tools before they drew the best maps they could.  They also didn’t stop there and consider the latest thing they’d done to be finished forever.  They kept at it.  (And they weren’t afraid to just up and stick all sorts of mythological beasts in the margins.  A little imagination counts for much in the world.)

We ought to bring their approach to the misshapen mental landscapes of the far-left.

Morgan’s been trying to map these burbling swamps for a long while now, and his latest expidition makes for a good read.  A sample:

I think the thought process in place is as follows, and this is my observation: If you have some (free speech), that has to mean they are missing some. After all, that is how they look at money, is it not? It’s okay for you to have, oh, one or two hundred dollars in your bank account…maybe four digits in the balance instead of three, if you’re about to sit down and pay your bills. But if you are “two-comma” wealthy, that’s bad, because that has to mean someone else is missing something.

He then adds that he remembers when “nuance” was the buzzword of the day for the left: a vague, gassy way of praising themselves.  This word is no longer in vogue, you’ll notice – it was a pretense all along.  And true to Morgan’s observation, the left had all of the nuance and the right had none, those simpletons.

It’s hard to know which is worse: the progs’ pride in their “nuanced thinking” or the complete absence of any evidence of it in their actions.  Or – no – maybe that’s a little over-simple.  There is one way in which they show an amazing plasiticity, which no doubt fools them into thinking that they’re nuanced.  They are masters of winnowing out some measly sliver of a difference between what they are vociferously condemning and what they are in fact advocating or doing at the moment.  Then they project searchlight levels of wishful thinking at that sliver in the hope of casting enough of a shadow for them to hide in.

We’re only ordinary men

I cheated this time: I wrote this as a comment, and decided to steal it from myself for a post.

It began as it usually does: the simplest question, WHY?  When I read a description such as this, I immediately wonder why someone gets trapped into thinking in such terms.  Something has gone out of whack, clearly.

Think of it as a balance of impulses and desires, all sitting heavier or lighter on a large platter, and a fulcrum upon which they pivot.  That fulcrum is the will of each person.  I have a desire to be bold and daring, and a desire to keep from being hurt.  Given an event – think of it like a pebble dropped on the surface – I tilt towards reacting boldly or cautiously.  And since we’re all “weighted” differently, and face different tugs and forces upon us, and seek a different balancing point for all of this, we all wind up quite different people, and thank goodness for it.

Now, what I’m looking at in Morgan’s description is not balance, however, but failure of balance.  Something’s gone wrong and the platter has tipped way over.  No matter what drops onto that person’s plate, it’s going to roll and tumble its way down to the low end, and get the exact same reaction, no matter where it initially came in.  The normal metaphor is that “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  Everything that hits an unbalanced mind becomes a confirmation (or a victim) of this bias in one direction, exacerbates it, and sooner or later the platter tips into the dirt and everything tumbles right off.