I have ever seen anyone give.
Mind you, it would make for a pleasant, forgettable sermon coming from, say, a pastor or a rabbi. But when you slip on the Google Glass of memory and overlay his TED Talk with Mr. Brooks' long, loathsome, unpaid butcher's bill of fraud, revisionist claptrap, obsessive Fake Centrism, hippie-punching and just plain getting-every-fucking-thing-wrong, it is genuinely unnerving how radically Mr. Brooks has dissociated himself from his own past and his own words.
But the creepiest part? Not a single member of our mainstream media ever dares to mention that he is doing this.
And that is power.
9 comments:
Senator Roark said it:
"Power doesn't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes outta lying and lying big and getting the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you got 'em trapped. You're the boss. You can turn reality on its head and they'll cheer you on."
Now you're killing it.
It's hard for me to predict, but when you kill, you kill.
Hat's off.
It is a weakness of the human brain that we tend to believe anything, however absurd, if we are repeatedly told it is true for a long enough period of time. This enables unscrupulous humans to manipulate their peers with lies, some of them surprisingly blatant.
However, there are hazards to use of this strategy.
A fairly obvious hazard is that enough of the people who are being deceived might see through the lies, and turn on the liars.
A more subtle hazard is that the liars are human, too, and so they share the same weakness of the brain. Therefore, since they are always hearing their own lies, they may forget that the lies ARE lies. One of the many reasons the Axis Powers lost WW2 is that many of their civilian and military leaders started believing their own propaganda about their invincibility, and took foolish gambles which failed--the Japanese, once they sobered up from that intoxication, called it "Victory Disease".
Nobody mentions or really drills at the failings of their own circle Driftglass. See your own failure to fault Charlie Pierce for worshiping at the feet of a crazy crank who backs the oath keepers and other yahoos pulling armed insurection in Nevada right now.
When you hold Pierce to the fire and burn him to ash, then complain about others failure to do so with Brooks. Till then, you're living in a glass house with nothing but stones.
Sadly you're becoming proof that both sides DO.
Good one.
I believe the topic was David Brooks, not Charlie Pierce... lemme see here, which fallacy is it ... ah: false analogy. Or maybe it's association fallacy. But purity trolling is also good.
i think that is an unfairly gross simplification of Messr. Pierce's opinion and really misleading equivalence. Purity trolling indeed.
Or head injuries.
And that is power.
So, Mr Brooks is obviously not Adam I, and he is certainly not Adam II, is he saying that he has no character? About this question he may accidentally be right.
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