The Nutty Left in Yet Another Nutshell: Paul Rosenberg/Jessica Calarco, The Left is Rational, but Can Win by Making Up Fables Like the Evil Right Does...or Something...

What a giant, steaming pile of bullshit that...to mix metaphors...spins out of control like 1/3 of the way through. The left is still stuck at like Phase II of getting your ass handed to you politically: they're still more interested in representing their most recent electoral loss as noble and good than they are in winning the next election. This Calarco person does clearly want the left to win--she's a sociologist at UW-Madison, if that tells you anything (yes, it tells you something)--but weaving a tale of the left's superior virtue and reason seems much more important to her. The left, you see, is logical--virtually pure logos! The right is all mythos. Bad right. Stupid right. Irrational right! The left has the science! The left has the stats! All the right has is some terrible fables that scapegoat the downtrodden...oh and they also have tax-cuts for the rich. Boooo... hissssss...

   If only the left were as good at the irrational part as it is at the rational part!

   If only the left were as good at the irrational part as the right is!

   If only the left weren't so smart and good and rational and clear-eyed and....oh, curse the left and its rationality!!

   How will the rational faction ever win when Americans are so stupid??

   

   There is just no reason to engage with any of this on a serious level. It's fantastical, self-serving bullshit.

   But I can't resist two points:

   Calarco says that conservatives see government as the problem, whereas lefties recognize it as a/the solution. 

   Well, there's your problem right there.

   Government is sometimes a problem, sometimes a solution, but, per Sowell, most often a tradeoff. Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it, sometimes not. These tradeoffs tend to look better to lefties because each one IS more likely to be beneficial to them. Expand government to address problem P, you're basically handing power and money to the left. Because lefties tend to populate government, thus tend to agitate for more expansion. And, as we've seen, they use that position to shower money and contracts onto their comrades. Expending government is basically expanding and empowering the left.

   Note also that Calarco can't even decide among her crackpot pro-government initiatives. UBI or universal health care? Just one won't do it! We've gotta have all of 'em....  Something something intersectionality or something!

   Currently, the left seems to think that the solution is to eliminate the vital functions of government--defense, law enforcement, border security--and expanding emphasis on functions it shouldn't be doing in the first place--paying people not to work, brainwashing and sexually mutilating children, censorship and indoctrination, enforcing racial preferences...and on and on and on...

   Er, what was that other thing I wanted to complain about...?

   Oh yeah, maybe it was: I am SO SICK of this "narrative" shit. First, that's a paleo-PC term. It caught on and now even conservatives use it without so much as cringing. And the whole point of the term "narrative" was/is to blur the line between falsehood, theory and established truth. It's all just a story, you see? Not even explicitly theoretical, hypothetical, tentative but aiming, fallibly, at fact. No...it's just a story...but not a story you should even think to question. We just say stories at each other... They don't even rise to the level of hypotheses... We don't even want you thinking about whether it's true or false. Don't think--just accept. Thinking is reactionary, bigot. So are truth and falsehood.

   It's all just story.

   There is nothing outside the text...

   Unfortunately, the "text" pushed by the left looks more and more like 1984...