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"Team Sports Politics"
How can people be so stupid? We ask ourselves this question every day when we hear people repeat the most ridiculous lies and otherwise attempt to mislead people. This is especially true in politics and there is a reason for all the lies, manipulations, distortions, and, in some cases, even self-deception.
The mentality you're seeing in politics today is "team sports politics." It includes not only willful ignorance, but the purposeful adoption of a blind sort of loyalty to an ideal whose advocacy necessarily precludes critical thought.
I know whereof I speak since I used to be of that team sports mentality when much younger. Some people enjoy such a mental exercise but I never did. It is a very stress-inducing state of mind to have to struggle to explain how everything your team does is right and everything the other side does is wrong.
That's a simplified explanation of the process--there are plenty of people who do not go quite all the way in using such tactics. However, the explanation is literally true of some of the most die-hard members of whatever team they happen to affiliate with and rabidly support.
I finally gave up this us vs. them game years ago. I realized what a fool I was falling into those mental boxes created by others to manipulate and control the political conversations which were usually devoid of facts but always appealing to the baser emotional reactions rather than people's common intellectual sense of right and wrong.
Emotion is used in team sports politics as much as possible to cover over the plot holes of the grand epics written by the participants. The story they have created is a narrative fiction provided as an explication for their kindergarten-level philosophies. All the protagonists and antagonists are clearly defined and canonized or vilified respectively. The tactic for them is to constantly refer back to this background story to place whatever arguments against them in the context of this great struggle that they have heroically joined to save the planet, poor people, or whatever the reason they put forth as their good intention.
Promotion of the back story is both a long term strategy and a battlefield tactic. As a strategy, it puts forth the false dilemma and their false solution which would result in their actual socialist goals being achieved in the long run.
As a tactic, it places the purveyor of such dribble in the role of hero and it puts all those who disagree in the roles of fools, agents of evil, innocent flock that must be converted, etc. It's a handy method especially considering that when being torn mercilessly apart in an argument, the socialist can stretch out first his left arm and then his right, cross his legs and tilt his head to one side as, in his mind, he's being nailed to the cross of the noble cause he's devoted his life to. He cannot lose in his mind and in the minds of his allies if the motivating fiction is to save the planet or cute polar bears or whatever.
These people have figured out that if the goal is made overpowering enough in people's perceptions, they can use the fiction they've created to justify cruelties and injustices on the scale of the Spanish Inquisitions if necessary. They are just as zealous and just as religious as those who have perpetrated evil in the name of the church throughout history (in violation of the Biblical commandments they pretended to revere). This attitude among the socialists is despite their resentment of modern religion which, to them, probably presents unwanted competition for the intrinsic emotional needs for faith and belonging possessed by each individual.
Team sports politics reduces everything to an either/or false dilemma. There is just one enemy rather than many with such a tactic. That's why you frequently hear "both sides" rather than "all sides" when people talk about such conflicts. The focus for the players is limited to being against whoever is being currently targeted in the "big game."
And it's all a game. There's no real attempt to include the truth in any self-examinations of the team's motives. The truth is irrelevant. The rules of the game and what you can get away with are all that matter. Their goal is to win the game at all costs even if everyone, including themselves, loses everything in the end.
The best recent example of team-sports politics is the mass socialist/fascist movement wrapped up in the "global warming" scam promoting cap and trade of pollution dispensations. All you have to do is to look at who is benefiting in order to figure out the big players and the motives of those excreting their green tyranny.
It's not just the politicians who would profit passing cap and trade. The ironic thing is that these socialist tree huggers become the useful idiots of the mega-corporations who intend to, again, but on a much bigger scale this time, steal money from citizens through the tax system. The socialists have allied themselves with those entities they pretend to be arch enemies with: big business.
Of course, the socialists and the mega-corporations see where the real power is and gravitate to it, infiltrate it, and manipulate it at every chance. The government's ability to tax is the biggest monopoly in the country. Naturally, the greedy, bureaucratic mega-corporations have dollar signs flash in their eyes. The socialists, of course, want money and power, too, and use every bit of bureaucracy possible in order to impose their obsessive religion of order and "social justice" on reasonable people.
The marriage of fascist corporate welfare advocates and the environmental movement is an unholy union and presents the multiple possibilities of real catastrophes that could happen as easily as they have happened on those many occasions in the past.
The false dilemma solutions offered up in the near future may sound wonderful and necessary for the "emergency" as they then define it. Keep one thing in mind: while they may sound like just a bunch of different economic systems, fascism and other forms of socialism are really defined by levels of control so powerful as to control the economic and social behavior of individual citizens. This level of control is the same amount of power needed to herd citizens into concentration camps and death chambers.
The solution is to take responsibility for changing all these abuses going on around you. Get off the couch and get into the faces of these politicians.
Or be a sheep. It's your choice.
Your descendants, however, if you're allowed to have any, will judge you very harshly if you fail them.
Here is (yet another) great example of what I've been talking about that I just happened to have stumbled upon:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-taylormiesle/bullies-and-bystanders_b_459932.html
Here you will find the noble heroine struggling against all odds. The narrative fiction is now fixed in her mind and she presents herself as the martyred victim fighting on despite all the evil in the world. Verily she is another Jeanne d'Arc!
What a fairy tale she's concocted! She must be very proud.
Certainly the richly textured fantasy life she lives in is worthy of sharing in a longer form for all the children of the world to enjoy. After all, J. K. Rowling has done it and Mrs. Taylor-Miesle's story is no less outlandish nor less believable than the Harry Potter series.
Another interesting feature is Taylor-Miesle's inclusion of references to past abuse that is also typical of another outlandish story teller: http://www.thepinkflamingoblog.com/
There seems to be a need among such bloggers to combine political mythologizing with improvised group therapy (assuming anyone reads their tripe).
wtc
2-13-10
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