The Pot Calling the Snowflake Black
Yesterday at precisely 1:30 pm, my ironometer blew up. Sparks and shattered glass everywhere. I had insulated it as well I could from the incredible levels of irony generated in blogdom, but clearly some blogpost or comment had seared right through my number nine filters and blown the irony gauges catastrophically off the scale.
Fortunately I track the sites scanned by the ironometer, and was able to find the comment that killed it. Here it is, from Halls of Macadamia:
Blogger Justin Hoffer said…
You know that some top psychiatrists believe liberalism is a mental illness?
Got that? That’s Justin Hoffer, suggesting that liberalism is a mental illness.
That would be this Justin Hoffer. Remember, the guy who announced that “sometime in the next year” he was going to move to Israel and join the JDF, but who decided one day later to join the Canadian reserves instead, except that they wouldn’t accept him because of his – errr – personal problems, as demonstrated by his dramatic online breakdown, diagnosed as a problem with his antidepressants?
Yeah. Liberalism is a mental illness. So far I’ve heard that view espoused by Justin, the barely coherent Scenty, and Wendy “Get Me Back Home to The Land Of Free Antipsychotics So I Can Bitch About Canadian Healthcare” Sullivan. While I certainly defer to their in-depth knowledge of mental illness, I think I might tend to be a bit more circumspect about branding my political opponents that way – especially given the apparent preponderance of clinical cases on their side of the fence, and the relative dearth on ours.
Justin, you owe me an ironometer. You too, Neo.
Note to readers: I don’t normally mock the mentally ill. But when assholes publicly label my beliefs “mental illness”, they become fair game.
Bravo, Balby — guess we’re all crazy
The rightwing neoCon ReformaTories lie. They lie. They lie. They lie. And then they lie some more.
I’m willing to concede that some of them, particularly the ones with a fragile hold on mental health, are projecting their own fears and/or merely parroting the gross prevarications that their political peers have concocted.
Liberalism being a mental illness, it should be easy for these guys to find nominees for our contest. Come on dudes, let’s go. Bring on the libcrazy!
Turnabout is fair play. Or, if you prefer, everyone is crazy except us inmates in the asylum.
deBeauxOs, did you know that one of the classic symptoms of liberal mental illness is an inability to grasp the meaning of the verb “to lie” and to use the word to avoid the irksome need to actually debate and defend positions? However, I admit the parasite seems to have escaped its host and has mutated into a non-partisan plague.
Really, Peter?
I thought that the inability to grasp the meaning of the verb “to lie” and to use the word to avoid the irksome need to actually debate and defend positions was a classic tactic of the Karl Rove school of dirty political tricks.
Heh, you’re good.
The word “lie” is seldom truly appropriate to the occasion. There’s spin, exaggeration, obfuscation and dumbness, but a lie is an outright falsehood told with malicious intent, and I think it’s rare on both sides of the political divide. We interpret things differently based on our experience, that’s all.
It’s genetic:
Every little boy and girl
That’s born into this world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or a little Conservative.
an inability to grasp the meaning of the verb “to lie” and to use the word to avoid the irksome need to actually debate and defend positions?
I don’t think of it as a lack of ability. I just think of it as a short-cut; a signal to one’s interlocutor that one has no more time for his (and it’s almost always a *he*) tedious bullshit.
Admittedly, there’s a cultural difference here. I’ve noticed that, in my experience anyway, North American anglophones have a suspiciously-exaggerated reaction to the accusation of lying. In other cultures, those less tolerant of the anglophone North American’s worship of being tediously indirect, the accusation is usually just a challenge to substantiate one’s assertions or to admit one is talking out of one’s rectum (or alternately, an invitation to shut up…another locution that’s used far less often among North American anglophones than it should be).
If someone refuses to provide any kind of explanation involving either logic, reason and/or additional evidence, it’s just common sense to conclude that that person is, at best, ignorant but in all likelihood, being dishonest.
I’ve made this point before; 99% of these discussions would be greatly improved if we could somehow force “conservatives” to respond to one single question: How do you know that? That question, almost always, is simply met with deafening silence.
On a more positive note, the English language is wonderfully gifted with a variety of ways of describing dishonesty, as JJ points out. My favourite is “being economical with the truth.” But the real downside is that it creates an atmosphere where one is accorded the benefit of the doubt long after it’s prudent to do so and ensures that credulousness is valued more than healthy skepticism.
And thats how the LIEberals got their name! At least its better than how the CONservatives got theirs. Butt, lets not talk about POT as in some cirlces, its still illegal.
So, what explains “Dippers”?