The Left: A Dionysian Comparison

On my favorite blog, Sweetness & Light, an astute contributor started a thread which I thought worthy of reproducing here. The readers of Ann Coulter's blog (administered by Steve Gilbert) are a cut above ther rest:

proreason
April
16, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Has anybody noticed that every single thing said by these left wing hacks is a lie or one sort or another.
At least there is one area where The Moron is demonstrating his leadership.

englishqueen01
April
16, 2009 at 9:45 pm
It’s not lies, proreason.
It’s PROJECTION. As in, everything liberals say about us is absolutely 100% true…about them, their beliefs, their policies, and actions.

jrmcdonald
April
18, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Your both right. Ayn Rand said that people do not believe in the irrational, but they do believe in the unjust. The lefts core beliefs in the unjust are:1. Punishing the producer while rewarding the parasite.2. Mocking the moral while celebrating the deviate.3. Killing the innocent while protecting the homicidal.4. Removing the sacred while expanding the bureaucrat.

proreason
April
18, 2009 at 8:17 pm
jr: “The lefts’ core beliefs in the unjust ”
It’s a rather profound thought.

But is eq correct in saying the belief in the unjust is a projection (a generous assessment, imho), or am I correct in saying that it is a simple case of defending one’s own deviant behaviour patterns (which I summarized by just calling them liars….in fact, it goes way beyond lying to all sorts of immoral behaviours, including the one jr points out, but well beyond them as well)?

It may be a fine point, but I personally feel the left compounds their immoral and anti-social behaviours by defending them, much like children twist themselves in knots when caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

And I also believe that the core liberal beliefs arise out of their immorality. For example, the reason they defend abortion with such gusto is that they know it is murder. Another example, the reason they defend taxes in the face of the obvious failure of almost all government programs is that, like Biden, they are selfish and will give nothing to charity themselves without being forced.

Howard Roark
April
20, 2009 at 12:57 pm
I like all of the responses to PR’s original question, here. I think they all are true: projection, Rand’s thought on the unjust, immorality.

My only addition to this is my belief that we see a present-day version of what the Greeks knew of as Dionysian principles in the modern liberal Democrats.

We Conservatives are the Stoics.

25 years ago, you couldn’t have convinced me of the value of Stoicism. I called myself a Dionysian. In fact, I remember doing a class report in the third year of my Latin studies during my senior year in the public high school I attended. I passed around plastic cups of Kroger-brand fake wine to everyone, and launched into what the differences were between Stoicism & Dionysianism, and why I, (a 17 year-old immature kid) was indeed a Dionysian. After all, who could be an adolescent and turn your back on wine, intoxication, and ecstasy?

It took me nearly twenty years to understand the other component of living a Dionysian lifestyle, though: chaos. Add to that: irrational thought, insincerity, and faithlessness. I now merely shake my head at my foolish youth.

Democrats/liberals are stuck in their adolescent youth, living a life of satisfying their every impulse, especially the base ones. They aren’t full of “principles” as we know them.

Their only “principles”, I have found, are based on doing the exact opposite of what they think a Republican or Conservative would do. And they are happy with that shallow definition of their core belief system. They are chaos, plain and simple.

Some of us Christians would call them “lost”.

As much as J. Gerofalo would love to medicalize the “condition” of being a Conservative (her laughable display on K. Olbermann’s show recently saw her attempt at diagnosing all “Teabaggers” as having a limbic brain disorder of overgrowth, resulting in misfirings of the synapses in our frontal lobes, ‘natch.

Isn’t it ironic that a good liberal like her would rest the diagnosis of “intelligence” on brain size/growth? The last time cranial studies were done to “prove” intelligence,
African Americans didn’t fare too well, so we demonized those scientists, of course. But I guess you’d have to be one of those “readers” to know that. Perhaps Gerofalo didn’t get that Twitter blast.), I, like EQ above, believe that they project the neurological/brain condition on us, yet it is they who suffer from a condition of underdeveloped sectors of the brain. As the Colonel might say, “can’t prove it, just know it.”

Their brain suffers from a suite of maladies, I believe: unresolved phobias, coping problems, attention span deficiencies, irrational thought, etc. I am not trained as a medical scientist, but I see these patterns in the arch liberals I’ve encountered in my life.