Is There Anyone Stupid Enough To Believe This, Take Two

Below, I asked the question, in regards to outrageous assertions by the far left that we don't have a "spending problem," Is There Anyone Stupid Enough To Believe This? Two blogs, Legal Insurrection and Big Lizards, have jointly answered the question. The former tells us that yes, there are millions who believe things of this ilk, and the latter explains how that is possible.

From Legal Insurrection, in a post looking at how a far left webside is reaching low information voters with pure memes:

I previously wrote about how BuzzFeed Politics has combined “the culture” and savvy crafting into a highly effective tool for undermining Republicans with subtle and not-so-subtle mockery. “Look at the goofy cat, look at the goofy celeb, look at the goofy Republican” is more dangerous to us than a 5000-word article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

To follow up on that theme, I happened upon a website called Upworthy, which had one its posts run at HuffPo, Elizabeth Warren Asks The Most Obvious Question Ever, Stumps A Bunch Of Bank Regulators.

The post was so wrong on substance, I just had to click over to the source.

And therein I learned what millions of very low-information young liberals already knew — there is this website called Upworthy which is one giant liberal activist social media machine which creates viral social media memes in the cause of liberal political activism.

The far left crafts the message they want their viewers to adopt sans critical analysis. So, yes, low information voters will bite on what they are told to bite.

Dafyyd at Big Lizards, in an insightful post, explains how the left can, on some level, believe the most blatant of falsehoods. Their world is ruled by symbolism as an affect of "socialist truth.".

[I]t's not just Barack H. "You didn't build that" Obama; the entire ironical, metrosexual, sensation-seeking, Progressivist world has devolved into a surreality of signifiers without signifieds, arrows pointing towards nothing; words without meaning, but treated as if the word was itself the meaning. . . .

The creepy Left demands a life not of the mind, nor of phenomena, nor even of reality, but a life of pure symbolism -- messaging, imagery, false front, bravado, bluster, and bluff. Image isn't just everything, it's the only thing.. . . .

When all is merely sign and signifier, map and menu, indicator and imagery, then there is no difference between reality and wishful make-believe. . . .

An admirable list of magic words, like "open sesame" (or more appropriately, "Avada Kedavra") that lefties use in place of actually, you know, doing anything. Fiat obscurum! Thus what we on the Right see as braggadocio (before the fact bragging and braying) or lying in one's teeth (after the fact pretense that all went well) is not so seen by Progressivists; for they have a different metric for truth and falsity, the neologistic oxymoron of "socialist truth."

Socialist truth can be defined operationally as "that which advances world socialism," while socialist falsity is that which retards it, prevents it, or ridicules it (like this post); the literal truth -- lefties would say infantile truth or unraised consciousness -- never enters into the equation.

We just saw an election where Obama was voted into office despite his policies being utterly devastating to his strongest supporters, the young and the blacks. I have been mystified since November how this could happen. Irrespective of how poor a campaign Romney waged, no rational person other than a unionized public sector employee could have pulled the lever for the grossly incompetent Obama. But I really think the posts above go a long way to explaining it. Yes, people are stupid enough to believe this, and its because they are not applying any sort of critical thinking that would allow them to distinguish between "reality and wishful make believe."

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Symbols Of Our Socialist Overlords

Here are two stories, one from the U.S., one from Britain, with an interesting parallel. It seems that the UK has recently been fined a very hefty sum, £150 million pounds, for failing to prominently fly the EU flag at the location of projects that receive some of their funding from the EU. Similarly, in the U.S., Obama has ordered that, at every project funded by his stimulus, a symbol needs to displayed showing the source of funding for the project.

This from the Daily Mail:

Our masters in the European Union are apparently fed up with our insolence and ingratitude. They are fining us £150 million for failing to display the EU flag with sufficient regularity, prominence and enthusiasm.

The Eurocrats provide grants for assorted regional development projects – usually with matching funds from the British Government – and it is true that these grants amount to big money.

But our apparent lack of appreciation should not be all that hard to fathom. We are paying £10.2billion a year to the European Union – and less than half that sum comes back to us.

We have a situation of the EU giving us back some of our money and telling us how we are allowed to spend it (often on some wasteful project). They then foam with indignation that we fail to parade our allegiance to the EU. . .

And whilst that is occurring in the UK, we have on this side of the pond:

There's no better definition of government waste than the estimated $192 million President Obama is forcing cash-strapped state officials to spend on road signs touting his failed stimulus program. Even so, with a critical congressional election coming in November, Americans will see a proliferation of these politically self-serving signs in coming months as Obama tries to convince voters who think his "Recovery Summer" is just an economic Potemkin village.

. . . [S]timulus fund recipients they must display the newly designed ARRA logo. According to the memo, the logo is "a symbol of President Obama's commitment to the American People to invest their tax dollars wisely to put Americans back to work." Instead of "symbol," a far more appropriate word to describe this would be "propaganda."

The memo is wrong on both counts. It's not a wise expenditure of tax dollars when government spends as much as $10,000 apiece for propaganda signs, especially when unemployment remains near 10 percent. And the president's stimulus program has not put Americans back to work, as the latest jobless figures make starkly clear. A bunch of expensive road signs won't change the fact that only 6 percent of Americans believe that the Obama stimulus program has created new jobs, according to a New York Times/CBS poll.

. . . Meanwhile, here's another sign, this one from Tea Partiers who are sick and tired of government profligacy, that has a more accurate description of Obama's policies: "Central Planning: Destroying Human Prosperity Since 4000 B.C."

Actually, I think that last sign would apropos on both sides of the pond.

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