On the loony left

The Horror! The Horror!

Over and over, they [Loony lefties] do what they claim their opponents are doing, want to do, or have done: make vast leaps of faith on almost no evidence, get carried away on large waves of emotion, build towering edifices on small collections of factoids, omit, deny, or denounce all contrary evidence, build fantastical schemes which they project on the enemy, put two and two together and get 384. People are entitled to say what they want, but it takes something other than reason to look at raging debates and discern in them fascistic oppression, to look at large Republican losses (wholly in line with a sixth-year election) and see massive fraud on the part of the losers, to look at today's South and see John Calhoun's, to draft both the Bushes (and the entire Republican party) into the Confederate Army, 150 years after the fact. Facts on the ground have no effect on their fantasies, which exist in a realm of their own.

Let's give the last words to Mark Crispin Miller, as he told the blog Buzzflash in February 2006: "That sort of warped perception comes from extreme paranoid projectivity: the tendency to rail at others for traits or longings that one hates and fears inside oneself....We're dealing with a movement that is anti-rational. It's faith-based ... it's a movement that believes what it believes, and it believes what it believes is right.... It believes what it wants to believe. If it hears contrary evidence, it comes up with evidence of its own.... This is not a movement that the rational can ever shame into surrendering by merely demonstrating its illogic to its followers.... Paranoia...is based on fear, and therefore on a kind of 'logic' that's impervious to evidence and quite incapable of learning from experience...Paranoia is an atavism, deep within us all."