- kik2dagroin
- Mar 23, 2007
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Use the anger. Use it.
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quote:RUSH: ... It's just that these kind of circumstances -- I am perhaps a genuinely colorblind person. And I resent, as you know, politics of identity. Racial politics, group identity, victim politics, all this, I just despise it. We're all human beings and we're all Americans and we all ought to be treated and approached and dealt with that way. Instead, we are divided or we divide ourselves into groups. The Democrat Party has come along -- which runs this town, by the way. They may not want to hear it. St. Louis is run by Democrats. So are a lot of other cities with these kinds of urban problems.
It's just a shame that while all this is going on the president's busy vacationing in Martha's Vineyard, 'cause otherwise he'd be able to solve this. I mean, he was elected to make sure this kind of thing didn't happen. It's what they hoped. A lot of people voted for Obama thinking that his election, the election of the first black president, would bring an end to this. And, sadly, it has not. So we will keep a sharp eye on this.
The looting is going on. So much of it doesn't -- in one sense it's understandable. You have people fanning the flames of this to keep it alive because the race business is profitable, and it makes people very powerful, and it keeps them in the public eye. That's another sad element to this.
So we'll just have to wait and see. The FBI is in. The attorney general, Eric Holder, is getting involved in this, which is -- well, we'll just wait and see. It's just a tragedy.
...
And that's the sad thing: Nothing's changed. Despite this apparent historic election. This is the man who campaigned on the basis that he was the agency of this change, and he had this phrase "hope and change," that people genuinely bought into. A lot of people. Millions of people voted for one reason: To end the racial strife that exists in this country. They believed!
They believed that the election of the first black president would facilitate this move to a postracial society, and it hasn't happened -- and, of course, it couldn't happen. No single election is going to fix problems like this. An election of someone of a specific race is mere symbolism when stacked up against problems that are entrenched as deeply as this one is in this country, but yet so many people hoped.
And the recipient of that hope knew very well that millions of people were investing that hope in him, and he parlayed that. He used it. He told them they were right to make that investment. He told them that "hope and change" was real, that it was gonna happen. They were gonna get rid of all this horrible stuff in the past. No more Iraq wars, no more recessions, no more world hating us, no more rising sea levels.
You know the drill. No more hatred. People were gonna come together in a new commonality. He rode it all the way to victory, and it turned out that this president's no different than any other in this regard, and may be somewhat worse. Here is another sound bite. It's from CNN last night, Don Lemon on CNN Tonight (a different show, not Anderson Cooper 290).
He's speaking with a CNN correspondent, Jason Carroll, about the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and Lemon says, "Take us inside, if you will, Jason. Take us right there. Take us, if you will, to the crime scene. I understand that you went there today to the crime scene. What did you learn, Jason?"
CARROLL: I was speaking to a young man. He said, "I go to school, I obey the law, and yet when I come in and out of my community I'm constantly stopped by the police," and this is a theme that I heard over and over again. And basically what everyone was telling me is that what happened to Michael Brown was really the tipping point for many members of this community, when this happened to him. That is why you heard so much anger which had been bubbling for quite some period of time. What I really got a sense of is this feeling of distrust between the police department and the community here.
RUSH: Well, I mean, we heard that during the OJ trial. We heard that during the Rodney King trial and event. We heard that back in 1967 with Watts. We've heard sound bites like this, complaints like this all of our lives. You take that sound bite from last night and you could put it back in 1967. It would sound right on the dime.
You take that sound bite, put it back in 1992/93 with Rodney King, same thing; you wouldn't know. Nothing has changed. We have not gotten this postracial America we were promised after the election in 2008, and we're not finished hearing this report. This report's gonna happen over and over again, because the sad thing is that I think these situations have actually been exacerbated and made even more tense.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: These calls are about Ferguson, Missouri, and I want to take them now since they are very close in proximity from when we discussed it rather than an hour from now or whatever it would be when so much time has passed.
We'll start in St. Louis with Susan. Great to have you, and welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thank you for having me on.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: First of all, I want to say, by no means am I condoning what happened with the shooting. I think this has gotten so pushed in front of the media, and it's, you know, an isolated incident, to come back and now we have Trayvon Martin's attorney over here. This rioting and everything, what you were just saying about President Obama and what you have said so many times about the entitlement. These rioters and these people that are inciting the riots and are loitering and robbing and stealing and pillaging their entire community in which they live, they live in this community, they are stealing from the community.
They are stealing from the people that employ them, and they are burning down their own communities because they feel so angry and they are entitled to this. They have a right to go crash through windows and steal. They have a right to crash through more windows and steal phones. And then they're putting it on Facebook. They're putting it Twitter, on Craigslist. They're proud of what they're doing. They're proud of themselves. Two weeks ago or a week ago, the big news here in St. Louis was a grandmother who was gunned down in the road with random bullets, a drive-by shooting. She was walking back with her grandchildren. The NAACP didn't come then. It was a shooting against --
RUSH: The NAACP has yet to show up in Chicago, either.
CALLER: Right. They're just here. I was so appalled yesterday because they showed the mother of this child. When it first happened, Saturday, the news was there, everyone's so upset because this boy was left in the road for four hours. Well, they couldn't get to him. They couldn't process the crime scene because people were rioting then. The police came in and were trying to do their job, and they wouldn't let them. It's a matter of respect. Until people respect themselves, and what they're doing, and want to work to better themselves, it's not going to change, no matter who's in the White House.
RUSH: Well, do you believe the old adage that behavior is learned?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You do?
CALLER: Yes, I do. And this is a learned behavior. Yesterday on my way home I was listening to the KMOX person there --
RUSH: That's good. That's good. KMOX is a great station.
CALLER: Exactly. And I was listening to the speech from, I believe it was the lawyer that is now representing them, the family of Michael Brown, and they were talking about the angry black man. And I'm like, you're angry? I'm like, I get angry, too. I get angry sometimes a lot.
RUSH: Here's the thing, though. The reason I asked you if you believe in learned behavior, because there are two ways to look at this. Pick any left-wing, well-known person in the world that you know, have 'em sitting here next to me, just get whoever you want to name and I could tell you what they would say to me in explaining this. They would say it's justified because this is the tradition that they have known since this country was founded, and they'd trace it all the way back to slavery. They would say that this is one of the original sins of this country, and we're just gonna have to understand the rage. We're gonna have to understand it, that this kind of thing is, what do you expect. That would be the liberal argument here, because --
CALLER: No.
RUSH: -- the country is flawed inherently, which is what leads to this, and therefore there is an excuse. There is an excuse that they accept to explain this.
CALLER: And I think that's terrible. That's disrespectful. I think these people deserve more than that. Than excuses? And they deserve more. You know, don't make excuses for your poor choices, for your poor judgment calls --
RUSH: They don't think they have any other choices.
CALLER: They do have choices. They choose to go and improve their lives, and no one is going to make that happen until they decide to make that happen.
RUSH: They don't think it's possible.
CALLER: It is possible.
RUSH: That's what happens when you put people in a group and then call them victims.
CALLER: And they're not victims. They're victims of themselves.
RUSH: Doesn't matter. They think -- (crosstalk)
CALLER: They're victims of Obama.
RUSH: Wait a second. Al Sharpton tells 'em they're victims. Jesse Jackson's told 'em his whole life they're victims. The Trayvon Martin attorney is telling them they're victims and the Trayvon Martin story tells 'em they're victims. That's why I asked you about learned behavior.
CALLER: It is a very learned behavior. It is a cycle that has continued for generations.
RUSH: Precisely. This is why I -- you know, I know a lot of people, "Come on, Rush, can't you do any better than talk about Obama?" No, no, no. Don't say that to me. We had a presidential race in 2008 where we were assured that if we elected the right guy, this kind of stuff wasn't gonna be happening anymore, or it would happen much, much less because we were gonna go post-racial and we were finally gonna make a statement that we're no longer racist 'cause we had the ability in this country to elect, with a majority white population, a black president. It was supposed to say something. And look, it hasn't made anybody happier. It hasn't made anybody less victimized. It hasn't changed anybody's outlook on their future at all.
CALLER: No. And I think it's created a lot more social distress and unrest among these black communities, because their lives are not better. What has happened has not improved their lives, and they're still stuck in the same cycle.
RUSH: Look, I know what you're saying. What you're saying is very close to the point -- and I've tried to make it many times, and I really tried to zone in on it when I made that speech at CPAC, when I defined the people in what I considered to be my first address to the nation, what we as conservatives are, who we as conservatives are. And it's the truth. We don't see people as members of groups, and we don't want to. We don't want to be forced to, we don't want to have to. We don't want to be told the first thing we have to notice about something is what makes 'em different.
We don't want to be told that what makes America great is its diversity and that's defined by skin color. We don't want to believe that. We're all human beings! We're all people! And I can speak for every conservative I know: We want the best for everybody, and we want this kind of stuff brought to a screeching halt. This isn't good for anybody. The problem is incidents like this are good for some people. That's the problem.
We all know who we're talking about here. There are some people who do not want these kinds of incidents to ever go away because that means a problem solved, and if the problem solved then there's no need for these people anymore, and that's just a crying shame.
The route out of poverty or disadvantage, the route out is hard work. The route out is self-belief. The route out is self-respect, all these things, but these are learned behaviors as well. And when you mention things like that, when I mention things like this, liberals and Democrats get very snarky and say, "Well, that's easy for you to say."
I say, "Why is it easy for me to say? What's wrong with what I'm saying? Will you stop trying to characterize? You know, what's wrong with what I'm saying? What's wrong with having some self-respect? What's wrong with loving yourself? What's wrong for realizing you live in America, the land of great, free opportunity. What's wrong with everybody realizing that?"
We've all got obstacles we have to overcome, some worse than others, but people from every group in this country have shown it can be done, it's possible. I think what we're dealing with here ultimately is what's been called the soft bigotry of low expectations. We as conservatives want the best for everybody, and we have the expectation that it's possible, and that's not pie-in-the-sky. We believe it because we're Americans. And in America that's possible, and that's why, by the way, so many of us are so distressed with the election of Obama, because Obama does not see America that way.
Obama sees an America where only 1% have a chance, and the game's rigged for the other 99%. It's not true! The soft bigotry of low expectations. When you tell people from the youngest age that the deck is stacked against 'em and that they don't have a chance because the game's rigged, because the power structure is such that people like them will never be admitted, then you are...
It's a sad thing to tell people you don't expect them to amount to anything. That's horrible! It's an absolute... It's a near crime. We all ought to have the highest expectations of ourselves and each other. That is far more rooted in reality. I just cringe at the modern definition of "reality" as doom and gloom and pessimism, because that's easy. Anybody can be a pessimist. You don't have to work at it.
Anybody can be negative. The problem is that we have way too many people that profit personally and exploit low expectations and doom and misery rather than using the power they've acquired to try to inspire. We, as conservatives, try to inspire on the basis of human characters and expectations and traits, not surface characters like skin color, sexual gender or orientation or any of these things that end up dividing us.
The very people that claim to be able to unite us because they are the ones that have all the tolerance have the least tolerance and the lowest expectations, and in no way know how to unify anybody. There isn't any profit in it. There is profit in promising it. There is profit in suggesting that you can do it or that you're going to try, but there's no profit in actually accomplishing it.
That's why incidents like this trouble me because they happen and they're going to continue to happen. No matter how perfect or how good everything gets, human behavior is such that we're gonna have all kinds of examples of it, the good and the bad in any population or circumstance. No matter how advanced, educated, or what have you. But it's just the whole notion that I've got to loot because it's the only way I can pay back the discrimination.
I've got to loot because it's the only way I can show how angry I am at the way I'm treated. I've got to do this and do that because it's the only way I can get noticed." It's just sad, to me, and it's pointless and doesn't do anybody any good, and it never accomplishes anything in the end. Anyway, Susan, I appreciate the call. I really do. I understand your frustration. I feel it myself.
quote:RUSH: Well, I wish you could have been here during the commercial break, ladies and gentlemen. The Official Obama Criticizer, Bo Snerdley, jumped in my chili, and I am the boss. As soon as that segment was over, my IFB (that's the interoffice inter-staff intercom) came to life, and he said, "They're not looting because of any profound thoughts! They're not looting 'cause they're saying, 'Hey, notice me, and I'm angry!'
"They're looting 'cause it's a chance to get free stuff." Is that what you said? (interruption) "They want to steal and they're taking advantage of the situation to go steal things they'd like to have, and that's all it is." That's all the loot...? (interruption) "The looting is not, 'See how angry I am.' The looting is not, 'This is how I feel disenfranchised, and this is why.'"
This has nothing to do with anything like that? This is pure...? (interruption) Okay. The looting, according to the Official Obama Criticizer, is simply, "Hey, there's a riot out there. Let's go steal a phone! We've got a great opportunity 'cause they've already busted down the windows to the store, so let's go steal one." (interruption) Okay, then I misspoke. Then what I meant to say was that the anger..
Forget the looting. I think the anger, the looting or the civil disobedience, what have you, you is the mechanism by which... It's a learned behavior. I mean, who leads marches? Who does this kind of stuff, folks? It all... Look, there's an explanation for everything. It's just that many people do not want to hear the actual, real explanation for many things.
Here's David in North Miami Beach. You're next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: ... Rush, I'm trying to say, we had a situation here recently. There was anti-Semitic graffiti on a couple of shuls in the neighborhood, swastikas. "Hamas" was written, and in that same neighborhood last weekend, a rabbi was approached on the street and murdered in cold blood, shot dead, and you don't hear a word from the Justice Department. I mean, such an obvious hate crime. And, not only that, it's being treated -- get this, Rush -- as a robbery. But here, there's not even the suggestion that there may be a hate element involved when a rabbi gets gunned down on the way to his synagogue on Shabbos --
RUSH: Look, you're a smart guy. I know the incident that you're talking about. You know why they're different. You know why nothing happens when the rabbi gets shot and why something happens when an 18-year-old kid gets shot in St. Louis. You understand why.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here's Doug in Charleston, South Carolina. Welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, it's an honor, Rush to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you. Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: I'm calling in regards to this young man being killed in St. Louis. I had some thoughts about that, so I looked up some statistics on the CDC, and although black people represent 18% of the over all population, they represent fully half the murder victims in the entire country, which makes them six times more likely to be murdered than white people. Now, of course it's the leading cause of death for young black males between 18 and 24. The big stat is that 96% of blacks that are murdered are murdered by other blacks --
RUSH: Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah! You're not supposed to point that out.
CALLER: (chuckles) That's the inconvenient truth, isn't it?
RUSH: Well, no, it's just you're not supposed to... (sigh) Well, inconvenient? I don't... That's just politically incorrect. Shortsighted? It's shortsighted, it's insensitive, and it's irrelevant, according to the experts.
CALLER: Where are the black leaders? Why aren't they talking about this? They're out marching. If this young man was actually murdered, then that hopefully will come out and justice will be served against the police officer who murdered him. But the real truth is that that is a drop in the bucket for young black males being killed on a daily basis by other black males. Why isn't this being talked about?
RUSH: Well, what do you think? I mean, look at Chicago. The murder rate in Chicago is off the charts. It may be safer in Central American countries than in Chicago.
CALLER: (snickers)
RUSH: I mean that seriously. That is same race-on-same race crime, and the statistics are about all you see. The number of deaths this weekend and the last three day period or whatever. But there's never any corresponding anger, not like you have here in the situation St. Louis or with Rodney King. When you have police officers involved, that feeds Bull Connor. That all can be traced to civil rights movement.
One of the reasons for it was the cops who turned water hoses and dogs and billy clubs on blacks crossing the bridge. It turns out they were all Democrats doing this, but nevertheless that's the root. So there's a police officer involved here, which has historically traceable roots of discrimination, bias, all of that. That serves a purpose for certain people in the race business. That's why I said...
Look, I get your point. This whole thing bothers me as much as it does you. A, that it happened. It's just tragic. It is just absolutely tragic. You just wonder: Why did this have to happen? Could something else have been done instead of pulling the trigger? You would hope that people who are cops would understand what the ramifications are gonna be, that the last -- absolute last -- choice you would make would be to pull the trigger.
But in this case, it happened. So it's gonna feed what it feeds. In addition to the tragedy contained within its own identity here, what is also tragic about this is that it is going to feed a stereotype that is going to prevent others escaping circumstances that they have no business being in, and it's just not necessary. The whole thing is not necessary.
But there's nobody inspiring people. Instead, we have the soft bigotry of low expectations, which comforts people in their misery and blames other people for it, explains it away. And it's just such a loss of human potential. It's just an absolute diminishing and loss of human potential that is not necessary. I wish it weren't the case. Doug, I appreciate the call.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here's Doug in Alexandria, Louisiana. Great to have you on the program, Doug. Thank you for waiting. You're next. Hello.
CALLER: ... Well, the occasion for calling right now is to give some added evidence to the Snerdley Doctrine. Even before you were dumped in the chili, an expression I'd never heard before, it occurred to me that these looting and rioting acts were not narrowly tailored, as the courts would say, to the issue at hand. And call to mind the fact that even when a sports team across the country is victorious, the people in the home city will riot and loot just because there was a victory. And you might think there's some excuse if they lose. Of course there really isn't. But the fact that they riot and loot when their sports team across the country is victorious indicates even more so that there is a disconnect between their behavior and the incident. It's totally disconnected.
RUSH: Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. The leftist psychiatrist would tell you there's a totally understandable reason why, traceable to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, as to why people whose teams win nevertheless go out and loot and pillage and all that, and it's because of the failed promises of the Reagan and Bush administrations. And people still are suffering. And here they are in the midst of euphoric happiness, and then they realize the victory doesn't mean anything, 'cause they don't have any more now than they did before they won. And so it's time to fix that, take matters into their own hands. And if the Bush and Reagan administrations had been fair economically, there wouldn't be any need to loot, you see.
It is interesting that teams who lose, rarely do their fans loot. It's only the winning team. There are occasions when losing team fans go berserk. But in many cases, you're right, it is winning teams who loot, and in a legal sense, there is a total disconnect. The looting has nothing to do with the winning, and the Snerdley Doctrine here is that in St. Louis the looting has nothing to do with the incident. That's the Snerdley Doctrine, the Official Obama Criticizer here.
...
But the Snerdley Doctrine is it's just a chance to steal and get away with it. So, as one who has never looted, I will admit that I'm making an educated guess in my analysis. I should really ask Spike Lee. He knows. He's made movies about it, right? (interruption) No. No. No, no, no. I take that back. I got in trouble for saying -- never mind. No need to relive that. Remember the TV show? Spike was doing seminars, and I said, "You know, you forgot to teach 'em --" oh, yeah, hell to pay for that. It's one of those instances of being so right on the money that you should never say it. And so, yeah, that's what that was.
But the looting on the part of sports fans whose teams win -- and, by the way, it's not just looting. They set cars on fire, and it usually happens in a neighborhood near the stadium. And it always happens when the winning team -- not always, but mostly it happens when the winning team wins on the road, is out of town. 'Cause there's not a security presence at the stadium. Well, not nearly the security presence and police officers that would be there if the game were at that stadium. It's an interesting observation.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Somebody said to me, "Hey, Rush, I can prove this guy's point even more. Look at the looting in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That wasn't about anger." Au contraire. It wasn't about anger? You got Wolf Blitzer, you got Shep Smith, you got what's-his-face, Anderson Cooper down there, they're all asking, "Where's Bush? Where's FEMA? Where's help? Where's fresh water? Where's Bush? Bush isn't here! FEMA's not here!" Wouldn't you loot? What do you mean, there wasn't any anger? There was anger at Bush. There was anger at Brownie. There was anger at FEMA. Hell, Bush steered the hurricane in there. Everybody knows that.
Remember my friends that I, your humble loveable fuzzball, don't engage in identity politics 
quote:RUSH: In regards to the looting in Ferguson, Missouri, or the looting in any circumstance like this and the politics of it. Do you remember Occupy Wall Street? Occupy Wall Street was a contrived, made-up, artificially created protest group to counter the Tea Party. The Tea Party came into existence as far as anybody knows in 2010. The Tea Party, just average Americans fed up with fear and anger over what they saw happening to their country.
The Tea Party originally was animated by the rapidly accruing debt and the oncoming Obamacare. The Tea Party was made up of people who were afraid of their kids' and grandkids' future, that the country was gonna go into such debt and that federal spending was gonna consume so much, that their tax rates would be so high that they would never have a chance to have a better life than their parents had had, which has always been part of the American dream.
So the Tea Party was just a group of citizens. There was never any leader. There was never any particular candidate. It was people that had never been formally involved in politics before, showing up at Town Hall meetings. And because there was no leader and because there was no Washington tie, the official Washington establishment became petrified and paranoid, scared to death of the Tea Party.
The left, which is totally consumed with PR and image and buzz because they have to avoid the substance of what their beliefs are, they cannot dare be honest about what they really believe. So they rely on substance and image, lies about their beliefs and their philosophies. Occupy Wall Street was an artificially created, made to look like another grassroots movement that had sprung up to defend Obama and Obamacare and the spending. Occupy Wall Street was specifically created by wealthy Democrats behind the scenes to make it look like it was genuine and spontaneous, as an answer to the Tea Party.
Now, one of the animating features of Occupy Wall Street -- and it's still around, by the way. It's dormant, but there's still people in it, still living in shantytowns and so forth. Occupy Wall Street is where Elizabeth Warren came from, essentially. Elizabeth Warren with the, "You didn't build that! You don't own that! You didn't make that happen! You factory owner, you business owner, you didn't make that happen. Why, if we hadn't all banded together to build the roads and put in your sewage system for you, you could have never become rich. So you didn't do it yourself. You didn't do it on your own. You didn't build that." And Obama picked it up. Well that became the rallying cry of Occupy Wall Street. And if there was a seminal, or a central, foundational belief in Occupy Wall Street is that work is not how you got things, because even that deck was stacked.
Occupy Wall Street was originally aimed at the 1% on Wall Street, rich bankers, investment bankers, investment people on Wall Street, all these various financial houses. And the Occupy Wall Street people basically attempted to convey that things, the stuff that you get in life does not come from work. That that's a fool's errand, and people who buy into the notion that you have to work to get your stuff are victims of a big con game. The 1% never worked. They have all the money and they share it only with themselves, and it's all a giant trick to get everybody toiling away for meager wages to benefit the already rich 1%.
It was built on resentment of capitalism, anger at the unfairness of the distribution of resources and all of that crap. And therefore, any act of civil disobedience was justified because they were fighting injustice and unfairness and unequal distribution of resources in a rigged game. This was made to buttress Obama, and this is, I guess, I say where Elizabeth Warren sprang up, because the "you didn't build that, you didn't make that," is directly traceable to the same kind of convoluted perverted thinking in Occupy Wall Street.
Well, I think, using the Snerdley Doctrine, when it comes to explaining looters, I think looters have much the same kind of thought process. That stuff, things, houses, cars, what have you, that work is not gonna give you those things, 'cause it's stacked deck. If you engage in work, you're just working for the man. You're working for the 1%. You're toiling away to make him richer, but you ain't getting any of it. You aren't seeing any of it. And, indeed, social justice pretty much teaches this exact thing. And, therefore, social justice tells people who don't have things that they are entitled to take whatever the hell they want when they can and when they want it because they are entitled to it, because it's being purposely denied them.
So when an opportunity springs up, such as the unfortunate shooting in St. Louis -- or when your sports team wins, whatever it is -- you make a beeline, because it's all about justice. It's all about getting even. It's all about finally being able to grab some of what people are not letting you have. This is the belief system -- and, by the way, this is not just Occupy Wall Street.
This is pretty much the left in general, and the reason for their anti-capitalist stance. It's rigged, it's unfair, and all this labor (i.e., their jobs) doesn't get them anything. It doesn't get 'em health care, it doesn't get 'em a TV set, doesn't get 'em whatever. It gets all that for the boss. The boss and the owner. That's the guy that gets rich, and he's out playing golf every day or having three-martini lunches or whatever. He's not working. Ho-ho no!
He didn't build his business on his own, either. That's the latest scam to be revealed. No, no, no. He didn't build that! The same duped laborers, who toil away for embarrassingly low wages, made the business owner's business. They built it. They made it possible. Yeah, and some of these Occupy people actually believe, "What do you mean, go to college? I go to college, I go into debt, and my first job is at McDonald's?
"What a rigged game! You mean I'm not gonna get 80 grand out of college? You mean I'm not gonna be living in Shaker Heights right out of college? I'm not gonna be living in Pacific Heights right out of college? I can't move to the Upper East Side right out of college? I'm not gonna have a house in the Hamptons right out of college? Well, what a rigged game!" So it's this entitlement to stuff that is purposely being denied.
Right there is the soft bigotry of low expectations and how successful it has been. They look around and they see all the evidence that they're wrong. There are success stories all of this country. People started with nothing and have however they define success. It's all around 'em. But yet they don't want to get rid of that victim status. It's just too comforting, and it explains their failure as being somebody else's fault, not their own.
That's the politics of all this.
This was probably the funniest poo poo I listened to in a while
quote:RUSH: The Dunning-Kruger effect. Why low-information people do not know that they are low information. Or another way to say it: Why the incompetent don't know that they're incompetent. The Dunning-Kruger effect. I have a story here. Dr. Jeremy Dean is a psychologist and the author of something called the PsyBlog, P-s-y, Blog.
He says: "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."
That quote comes from the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Psychological research has now shown he was right.
Let me run through that again. "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid --" You know what that means, don't you? It means somebody that thinks they're dead right all the time, closed-minded and not open to other ideas and therefore is an idiot. Whereas those with any imagination and understanding, who ought to feel like they're the smartest people around, are actually filled with doubt and indecision. And he says everything's reversed here. The stupid think they're the smart ones, and the smart ones don't know they're smart. That's what Bertrand Russell said.
Now, there are exceptions to this. I, for example, am one who feels certainty, and I ain't dumb. But Bertrand Russell thinks that people who feel certainty are stupid. Well, I feel certainty, but I'm not dumb. Snerdley feels certainty, and he's not dumb. So this doesn't work all the time. But the gist of this is that everybody that thinks they've got all the answers is really the idiot and doesn't know it, and the people who are more capable of acquiring the truth don't have any confidence. They don't think they can.
"The Dunning-Kruger effect is the finding that the poorest performers are the least aware of their own incompetence. The effect has been: '… replicated among undergraduates completing a classroom exam, medical students assessing their interviewing skills, clerks evaluating their performance, and medical lab technicians evaluating their on-the-job expertise."
That's what was studied. Now, the reason why the incompetent don't know that they're incompetent is because they do not learn from their mistakes. Therefore, it would follow, the low information don't know that they're low information 'cause they don't know they're low information. People that don't know anything don't know anything, and they don't know that they don't know anything because they don't know. Unlike the ugly, who definitely know who they are. But that is a different discussion, usually held in concert with feminism.
So if we take this, why the incompetent don't know they're incompetent and transpose it to the low information, we get to the proposed solution. What is the solution for being incompetent or the solution for being low information? Well, the psychs say that the solution is, "the incompetent should be directly told that they're incompetent." And low-information people should be told that they're low information. Well, let the people know that they're wrong.
Unfortunately, the problem is, incompetent low-information people have been getting that kind of feedback for years, and they didn't listen to it, or they didn't notice it. Now, here is an example. How about people who fail exams, they mess up at work, they irritate other people, and they still don't know that they're incompetent. The guy never gets a promotion. The guy who's always irritated. It's always somebody else's fault. It's never the fault of the incompetent, in the incompetent's minds.
Socrates even once said, "The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing."
Well, that's not the low-information voter, because the low-information voter doesn't know he doesn't know anything. That's why I know when I'm talking about low-information voters on this show, not one of them thinks I'm talking about him or her.
"But even this can go too far. It turns out that people with real talent --" this is the real rub of it here "-- tend to underestimate just how good they are. The root of this bias is that clever people tend to assume other people find things as easy." Talented people think everybody else is. Accomplished people think everybody else is. Talented people think, "Hey, I can do it, everybody else can do it." Talented people think it isn't that big a deal to be talented. Talented, competent people, intelligent people, knowledgeable people, don't think it's anything special 'cause everybody can do it, they think.
Therefore, they don't allow themselves to think positively about themselves because they don't think what they can do is special. And so these guys think that we are suffering from a major, major inversion. Low-information people tend to overestimate their level of information. They fail to recognize how other people know much more than they do. They fail to recognize just how little they know, even when they're confronted with it. And, on the other hand, the real talented people, the real accomplished people, oftentimes don't think it's any big deal because they think everybody can do or is as good as they are.
Does anybody come to mind describing any of this? Anybody spring to mind immediately when describing somebody who's constantly wrong but will never believe it, doesn't know it, and thinks so highly of themselves that they could never, ever deal with the truth? (interruption) Very good. Snerdley, "It sounds like sounds like our president." You can't tell him anything. He doesn't know how little he knows, 'cause he doesn't know he doesn't know anything. He doesn't know that what he knows is wrong. Joe Biden hasn't been right in 40 years in Washington, DC, and doesn't know it.
And, by the way, Obama, who thinks he's very talented, he has a knack to it, he told Harry Reid. "It's a gift, Harry." Obama's one of these guys who thinks he's greater than anybody else and nobody can do what he does. It's just an interesting little bit of analysis here, folks, 'cause the low-information voter, in many people's minds, is the key to turning the country around. And they may be, but it may be a lost cause to try to turn 'em into high information. The key may be getting around them somehow.
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Aug 13, 2014 08:25
) parents had trouble just having one of me and my brothers in trouble at a time. If one of you was in trouble it was just too hard to treat the other ones normally. Not like we got beat up or anything, and I'm sure one day I'll understand, but it's still pretty funny that you mentioned it.
