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| -Land of the Free |
| Kurt Schlichter: Stop Dooming |
| 2023-09-07 |
| by Kurt Schlichter It must be a conservative thing to willfully embrace the most pessimistic possible outcome with a sense of smug satisfaction in the hopelessness of it all. It’s not universal, though. Ronald Reagan didn’t do that – his sunny optimism revolutionized conservatism in America. But the right’s tendency to always look on the dank side of life has not been thoroughly exorcised. It’s still there, right now, demoralizing and demotivating our people just when morale and motivation are exactly what we need. It's understandable why Republicans often doom. After all, conservatives do not believe in the perfectibility of man, but rather that man is fallen. This often leads us into believing that whatever bad can happen is definitely going to happen. But the reality is that the worst case scenario rarely happens. It can, but it’s rare. A defeat is rarely total, a set-back is usually just that instead of a permanent failure. Dooming fetishizes the inability to succeed. It repeats exactly what our enemies want to hear from us. Yet its practitioners often consider themselves edgy, posturing themselves as the only ones willing to make the hard choice for cynicism. Baloney. Dooming is tiresome. It gets exhausting to hear people willfully ignoring and downplaying any hint of success so that no gleam of hope pierces the darkness of the hopeless future they anticipate. Yes, in any operation you always have to count on things going to hell and be ready to deal with that. But the fact is that things don’t always go to hell. In almost every case, things are not as bad as they seem. Dooming makes you forget about the fact that the other side in this cultural struggle has its own problems. We conservatives are not facing geniuses. We are facing a bunch of narcissistic halfwits who are not a tenth as brilliant as they believe they are, and who inherited their cultural positions instead of creating them. We’re not fighting a bunch of cunning Darth Vaders. We’re fighting a bunch of pronoun-obsessed dorks, many of whom can’t even do a push-up. And all the while, we got 400 million guns. Read the rest at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #7 Consider "Dooming" as a Churchillian technique to wake people up to just how dire the situation has become! Sometimes, it is the darkest just before the lights go out completely! Voltaire's epic Candide, is illustrative: ..." Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss.[8] The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes Candide with, if not rejecting Leibnizian optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide |
| Posted by: NoMoreBS 2023-09-07 13:52 |
| #6 We conservatives are not facing geniuses. We are facing a bunch of narcissistic halfwits who are not a tenth as brilliant as they believe they are, and who inherited their cultural positions instead of creating them. We’re not fighting a bunch of cunning Darth Vaders. We’re fighting a bunch of pronoun-obsessed dorks, many of whom can’t even do a push-up. And all the while, we got 400 million guns. Well, yeah, that is encouraging. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2023-09-07 13:36 |
| #5 See. That's what I mean. Some things really aren't worthy of any positive expectations at all... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-09-07 11:38 |
| #4 Seems like no matter how low I set my political expectations I still end up bitterly disappointed. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2023-09-07 11:32 |
| #3 Frank Zappa said, "I'm not a cynic, I'm a realist." I try to live by the dictum that I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than bitterly disappointed. That's accomplished by managing my perspective and expectations. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-09-07 10:40 |
| #2 Surprise is seldom a friend of human survival. "Worst casing" helps eliminate surprise. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-09-07 10:19 |
| #1 He's right. |
| Posted by: EMS Artifact 2023-09-07 10:05 |