We must pass it to find out what’s in it!

Ban*zai Gam*bit.  noun.  Essentially the imperative form of moonwalking, the Banzai Gambit is a proposition in the form “X, therefore Y,” where X is empirical, Y is political, and X is unknowable by definition.

I remember one of my first political apostasies, back in high school.  We were studying World War II in the Pacific.  The teacher showed us a filmstrip that featured banzai charges and kamikazes.  My hand shot up.

“Weren’t they even trying to win?” I asked.

At the time, I was just glad to escape a trip to the principal’s office.  I wrote the whole incident off as yet another example of students being smarter than their teachers (not at all uncommon, in the hippy-dippy citadel where I endured grade school).  It was only years later when I finally realized what a bind I’d inadvertently stuck that poor lady in:

No, obviously, they weren’t trying to win.  At that point in the war, the objective was to lose with honor.  But according to liberal dogma, this is impossible.  All cultures are equally good.  No culture actively prefers death, especially when those deaths prolong an already unwinnable conflict.  And kamikazes certainly couldn’t have deliberately targeted hospital ships, since these were protected by international treaties…

Well, that’s PC for you.  Still, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret towards Ms. Jerkins (not her real name, obviously) while following yet another desperate attempt by leftist gadflies to create a Thread that Won’t Die, and this nice piece of sarcasm from Sonic Charmer.

In both cases, the liberal argument boils down to:  “We don’t know X; we can’t know X; therefore hugely intrusive Y.”

It’s an interesting tactic.  Appeals to ignorance have long been among the feeblest of logical fallacies. And there’s the obvious Underpants Gnome quality to it, basing an entire plan of action on something that’s by your own definition unknowable.  Like kamikaze attacks and banzai charges, these “arguments” seem deliberately counterproductive.  If you really want to win the war, you’d carefully husband every man and resource.  If you really want to convince someone to get behind your hugely expensive, socially transformative policy, you wouldn’t start with an admission of ignorance on one of the fundamental points.

And yet, the Banzai Gambit does work — witness ObamaCare, which we had to pass to find out what’s in it (warning: video auto-plays).  The Zachriel differ from other alwarmists only in their OCD level — we have no idea where the “green tech” to reduce emissions will come from, much less any clue how the “binding treaties” on pollution will be enforced, but both have to be committed to posthaste.  And now the minimum wage must be raised, even though, as Sonic notes,

I might think that when the government puts a price floor on labor that has an effect – in the only conceivable possible direction for that effect to point – but I’m not allowed to ever say or think so without untangling this effect perfectly from every last variable with a definitive, complete ‘study’. Which is something that would be impossible for humans to do, hence, the minimum wage is permanently fine.

In any rational society, people who made “arguments” like this would be immediately deported to third grade, and not allowed to play kickball at recess until they’d read Logic for Dummies cover to cover.*

Alas, we don’t live in a rational society.  Our liberals have decided — evidently correctly — that most voters will fail to notice the only constant in these proposals, which is that more and more power accrues to them and people who think like them.  Banzai!!!!

*yes, this is a real book.  God help us.

Moon*walk. Verb.  1.To retreat to the numerical half of a two-placed empirical / political proposition.  2. To pretend that the truth / falsity (verifiability / unverifiability) of the empirical claim implicitly proves / disproves the political claim.  After Michael Jackson’s stylized backwards dance move of the mid-1980s.

It’s a fascinating quirk of liberal psychology, this insistence that “the facts have a liberal bias.”  And that right there should tell you how untenable this position is, since the words “liberal” and “bias” are both subjective and facts are objective, i.e. true no matter how one happens to feel about them.  But hey, it’s the rare battle cry that appeals to logic, and “the facts have a liberal bias” isn’t the worst slogan to have ever rallied troops.  But it does lead to some interesting, and eminently mockable, verbal tics.

Like moonwalking.  Liberals have this tendency to present their policy prescriptions as if they were the only possible outcomes of hard science and cold logic.  This allows them to tar their political opponents as anti-science, on par with gap-toothed creationists and the guys who locked up Galileo.  If they get called on their political bullshit, they simply retreat to their factual — or, at least, empirical-sounding — claim.  As here, from the Thread that Wouldn’t Die:

Severian: Lest anyone be tempted to miss the point yet again — and if my ridiculously over-the-top satire weren’t enough to convey this — “science,” properly understood, cannot be used to make moral / ethical / political prescriptions, because it deals with phenomena too large and complex to be boiled down to simple, point-to-point programs.

Science doesn’t make moral prescriptions. However, as humans are warming the globe, and this warming will cause disruption of agriculture, inundation and salinization of arable lands, increased desertification, mass extinction, human migration with its attendant political destablization, and as this is avoidable, most people would combine these scientific findings with their personal morality to try and find solutions, especially as those solutions are readily available, and have many other salubrious effects. But that’s just ourselves. We happen to be rather fond of the little apes you call humans. Call it a peccadillo.

Note the little maudochromatic flourish at the end for effect.  Charming, no?  It’s a nice illustration of how all the left’s bullying tactics bleed into each other.  But it’s an even better illustration of moonwalking, since the mooted political outcome (world climate cops, basically) relies so heavily on the purported scientific claim (Global Weather).  Wading through the verbiage, you find endless assertions that this or that will happen — it’s science! — coupled with endless insinutations that only someone colossally, willfully ignorant of basic science could fail to support the politics.  When the politics are questioned, you’re invited, and then commanded, to look at the “scientific” evidence.

Pictured: The Evidence. If you don’t see how this justifies torpedoing the entire world energy industry, you hate science.

As if worldwide human behavior can be logically predicted, let alone mandated, from a set of (quite possibly false) air temperature readings.

Moonwalking is a two-step dance, though, and they’ve got another trick up their sleeves.  Here’s my second-favorite liberal, Ed Darrell, doing what he does second-best:

Yeah, Steve Goddard laughed, too.  He made it a point to try to ridicule James Hansen for saying the water would ever flood the West Side Highway, even with a passing rogue wave.

Then Sandy flooded the West Side Highway with a surge, and left it under water for a while.  Sandy beat Hansen’s prediction by a good decade, too, making Goddard’s denials all the more silly, and mean-spirited.

The context here, again, is Global Weather, but it could be anything.  See, Steve Goddard missed a prediction.  Which means he’s wrong wrong WRONG!.  About everything.  This is why liberals make such lousy statisticians.  Note too the word “denials.”  This makes it sound — as it was intended to make it sound — that Goddard claimed the West Side highway Highway could never flood.  No matter what.  Obviously the man is a charlatan!  We can throw out anything and everything he says henceforth, because the West Side Highway got provably, empirically wet.

One could even make the case that there’s a third step in the moonwalk — the specious appeal to cherrypicked history — but I hesitate to do so, for the sake of the children.  What, after all, are we to make of this?

Of all the great civilizations that have existed, almost all were wiped out because of environmental error, or waste, or failure to prepare for the consequences of human change in the environment.  Thus the canals that supplied water to the great city in the desert, Babylon, silted in, and the civilization collapsed.  The volcanic explosion that caused the tsunami that wiped out Minos literally blasted the civilization into the back pages of history.  The salted orchards and fields of Carthage could not hold back the desert (Tunis still pays the price).  Silt from the Yellow River has, with too much regularity, caused massive floods that kill hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands.  Lead leaching from the wine vessels of the Romans made them stupid, and the Goths didn’t suffer from that problem.  Etc., etc.

Etc. indeed. Not only are these wrong — one might consult Cyrus of Persia, for example, on the matter of those “silted in” Babylonian canals — but they’re so obviously cherrypicked they serve as their own counterargument.  Unless “conquistadors” are the environmental event that undid the Aztecs, for instance; “Alexander the Great” the Global Warming of his day; and so forth.  And did you notice that he somehow seems to claim the Thera explosion was man-caused?  He’s trying to moonwalk back to history, but his Michael Jackson impersonation is even less convincing than that fat white mental patient from The Simpsons.

Isn’t it about time we retired this fad, too?

[UPDATE:  Right on cue.  I swear, you cannot make this shit up.

But you’re right:  It’s difficult to tell with climate denialists where their odd reality ends and parody begins.  Just like creationists and fundamentalists.

These are terms actually coined over at Morgan’s place, but I have a feeling we’ll be needing it a lot over here.

Virtue Addiction  N. A form of narcissistic projective identification in which the sufferer engages in ostentatious, ostensibly political action in order to shore up his/her sense of self-worth.  Those with Virtue Addiction are known as Virtue Junkies.

 

This is your brain on virtue

The guy in the video at Morgan’s place is a perfect example.  The Examiner describes it like this:

When he got to the window, he told the young lady at the window that Chick-fil-A is a “hateful organization.”

The woman disagreed politely and said the company does not treat any of its customers differently.

“But the corporation gives money to hate groups,” he said, meaning organizations that believe in traditional marriage.

Even after berating her over Chick-fil-A, the employee remained professional and friendly.

“It’s my pleasure to serve you always,” she said as she handed him his water.

“Of course,” he said. “I’m glad that I can take a little money from Chick-fil-A and maybe less money to hate groups.”

The real-world effect of this gesture is, of course, infinitesimal; moms with kids who can’t make up their minds hold up drive-thru lines longer than this douche did, and Chick-fil-A wasn’t going to get his money anyway.  The point is the theatrics.  In order to feel good about himself, this guy has to preen and posture in front of an audience.

That’s the saddest thing about narcissism, really.  We think they’re completely self-involved, but in fact the opposite is true:  Their identity requires external validation.  We’re all unwilling extras in the tv show that is their lives, because what’s the point of telling yourself you’re a saintly-yet-sensual ninja with a twelve inch wang and a license to kill?  One look in the mirror disconfirms it all.  If other people don’t believe you are who you say you are, then you’re really….. nothing.*

Virtue junkies suffer from a similarly debilitating weakness.  They suspect, deep down, that they’re not good people — or, at least, not as good as they want us to believe — and so they try to force the rest of us to play the baddies in their mental melodramas.  They’ll comment on the political blogs of their opponents, for example, solely to spew maudochromatic squid ink all over everything.**  Our job is then to “argue” with them until they get their fix.  Ideally we say something like “I do too care about issue X”…. at which point they get to list all the ways in which we our party have failed on issue X.

We’re their enablers.

*This fellow has lots of good stuff to say about it; I recommend a good long trawl through his archives.

**This is, in fact, an infallible test to identify a virtue junkie.  The content of a maudochromatic statement always boils down to “you’re a horrible person.”  The appropriate response to which, IRL, is “fuck you” and/or a punch in the face.  This is why virtue junkies never make accusations to people’s faces unless they’re protected by cameras and/or cops.  If an internet commenter can’t respond to the putative subject of his post without yet more maudochrome, he’s a virtue junkie.  Just walk away… or mock him mercilessly.

With apologies to Ambrose Bierce, I’m starting a 21st century recension of the Devil’s Dictionary here at Rotten Chestnuts.  But since it hardly takes a wit the level of Bierce to see through dumbass liberal tactics, I’m calling it D3, the Dim Devil’s Dictionary.  Here’s the inaugural entry:

Maud*o*chromatic:  Adj.  Characterized by hysterical appeals to virtue in lieu of any actual argument.  After Maud Flanders from The Simpsons, whose constant refrain in the face of any political or social issue was “won’t somebody please think of the children?!”

My second favorite liberal, Ed Darrell, provides some classic examples here.  The context is a “debate” over high-speed rail, but it’s immaterial.  Witness:

Making nations work well is not so much statism as it is patriotism, and good common sense. Of course, that is a bigger pigeonhole, and it’s not so easy to invent false snark if you’re in favor of patriotism and common sense, and things it causes other patriots to do — like advocate high speed rail.

If you don’t advocate high-speed rail, you’re unpatriotic.

Southwest Airlines ALSO frees people to travel (it’s a Constitutional right, by the way, but what do you care about the Constitution if it costs you money and benefits other people, right?).

Selfish, greedy people hate the Constitution.  And high-speed rail.  Also, “travel” is a Constitutional right.  Who knew?

And get ready for this hissy fit:

You are held completely in thrall to the “statism” that says Americans should have opportunity only if they are rich, that Americans cannot benefit from high speed rail. Oh, you curse the fact that you couldn’t oppose the creation of the interstate highway system (National Defense Highway Act, but who could ever invade us, right?); you rue that liberal Lincoln’s subsidizing the transcontinental railroads, and the giveaways to those lazy louts, the pioneers who settled Wisconsin, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Oregon, California and Colorado — they’ve had their hands out ever since!

Statism? No, Marie Antoinette was right, with “Let them eat cake!” If they’re not smart enough to substitute cake when they can’t afford bread, they DESERVE to have no way to develop economically, no way to travel for jobs or education or pleasure, and they MUST be held in thrall to the oil companies and auto makers!

But he did put “/sarc” afterwards, so that’s ok.  Because otherwise we’d have to order up a fainting couch and a balsam specific, to prevent him from becoming a danger to himself and others.

/sarc.

Meanwhile, the only arguments for high-speed rail are

High speed rails and people being able to get other places, faster, keeps them from the mercy of a centrally managed system

which is exactly bassackwards, and

High speed rail frees people from having to stick in the local community

which is frankly bizarre, coming from someone who in the very next paragraph would go off about those American heroes, the pioneers. Presumably they traveled to “Wisconsin, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Oregon, California and Colorado” in high-speed Conestoga wagons….?

It’s nothing but one long, loud, Maudochromatic screech.

[UPDATE: we're up to hatred of civilization itself.  From mere hatred of humanity

anti-good neighbor, cynical misanthropic political views of any Tea Partier/Remnant GOP/self-proclaimed libertarian

we have progressed to

Yes, Amtrak loses money — all public transportation does. Roads lose a lot more, but we amortize it a little better. Other costs are higher (though EPA finally seems to have done away with the lead-poisoning side effect).

If one counts the massive federal giveaways to get the transcontinental rail routes built out, those railroads are still losing money and always have.

Civilization isn’t free.

Wooo!!!!  I'll keep you posted, but I think we're about to enter the realm of the metaphysical -- what's left to hate, other than "the concept of existence itself?"  Which I'm sure conservatives are also against, because this whole line of "argument" makes so much sense]..