Alfonzo Rachel notes that liberals insist that there are no colored folks on the other side, and when it's pointed out that there are, they attack them for being there!
It's sort of like ... well, to quote another recent excellent post in my blog universe, "Hold Still While We Beat You..." from Professor Mondo.
Actually there seems to be a spate of good blog posts from my blogosphere today, starting with Van Harvey's Timelessness, on to the Nightfly's "Processed Thought-Like Substance", which then led me to Prof Mondo's post linked above.
We've got some good thinking going on.
Now if we can just get people to absorb it.
1 comment:
Thanks for the linkage!
I was actually working on something longer (egads) that would have been broken into two or three parts, but luckily the Prof spurred me to something shorter and more immediate.
One thing from that intolerable acreage of words that I will give away here: a lot of times a strength becomes weak because we rely on it when and where it doesn't apply. That's one of the biggest problems of conservatism in general, and the conservatism-lite of the GOP in particular. We do have a lot of good thinking going on; unfortunately this campaign was ultimately decided on such frippery as "Yay free stuff." As one friend at the hockey rink put it, "Romney's for the rich and Democrats are for the little guy; that's who I'm for, so I always vote straight Democrat." Thinking had nothing to do with it at all. It's like having a sprint team of weightlifters - great, they're super-strong and all, but they aren't going to break the tape first.
So we do need to figure out how to get other people thinking. But before that, we have to reach them in another fashion. Thinking will keep them around, but that's not the initial hook.
You win very sure converts to your cause when they reach your conclusion on their own - so teaching people how to think, getting them in the habit, demonstrating how thinking leads to good things, all tend to make the light dawn more surely than simply telling them what you think. We did a lot of telling, got the facts and the message out beautifully, and people still went "Eh, party of the rich, screw them."
A personal example: I scorned that odious "Vote like it's your first time and make it special" advert. I think I was right to do so. But while I and the rest of us were saying "Geez how desperate," the target audience bought in. We have to learn how to reach those folks, and thinking isn't it. They've already been taught that conservatives are unfeeling robots, so they tend to reject argument outright. Contact with us on a day-to-day basis, on a visceral level, has to hold an appeal to others or they won't listen to the best-crafted theories, no matter how true or sound or easy to understand. And we can't merely dismiss silliness because people vote for all sorts of silly reasons.
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