Dr. Stephen Marmer on Narcissism

Notes:

Narcissistic means they're unable to see things through the eyes of another; not happy unless their emotions constantly get fed; no lasting fulfillment. Not narcissistic means they get great happiness from seeing what they've done for others.

Real love is wishing the other well.

Narcissistic love is "I want to warm you up and stroke you and make you feel good because then you will serve me."

You are our most often guest ... eh, if I can use that word..."

Frequent guest?
The guest we invite most often.
Our most frequently invited guest.

"I love clarity"

You say this as if you're different from the rest of the world. Who doesn't love clarity? Only those people who have not thought on the issue. Once a person thinks about it, they love it too.

How about, "Clarity is so important"? instead of this self-aggrandizing "I'm so special" statement.

"The President, you have to grant him, he is speedy in his retorts"

Speedy retorts? Have you never caught him when he was taking questions? He hems and haws, and drags his thirty-second answer out to fifteen minutes with "uhhhh", "ahhhh", and again "uhhhhhh".

I'm very certain his "quick retorts" are all scripted. Take this case, where he came back right away with "That's your job." He was told to tell them "That's your job" in every case in which it was possible. He probably has six other generic answers as well.

In the case of being asked about appearing on the View, that answer very obviously was at the ready.

"Are you (A) Mormon, (B) Catholic, or (C) Orthodox Jew?"

Dennis, get with the times. There is and has been for thirty years that I know of-- and I suspect it has been a lot longer than that--a huge movement among some evangelical Christians that says "Put everything in God's hands," including the life of and size of the family. These people eschew birth control. Some even promote "evangelism through reproduction", i.e. "If we outnumber them, we win."

Since Americans and Europeans aren't replacing their own populations by reproduction, I fail to see how anyone can criticize their desire to have huge families, and yet that is what we find among the "how dare you have more than one child!" left wing. I'm sure it distresses them mightily to think of conservatives multiplying faster than leftists. Boo hoo.

"We always start out asking, 'Do you love him? or Do you love her?'"

Love (eros) is ephemeral. It is also a mood that is not subject to our control. That is why people fall out of love. They get bored with the other person, they get tired of his old jokes, she puts on a few pounds and he's ready to dump her. What's worse, if you find a person who lets you treat them badly, not only do you not appreciate that person but you grow to hate her; the "love" in the relationship is doomed to expire in short time.

On the other hand, respect, admiration, and putting the other person's well-being foremost in your life only feeds agape love. This kind of love is a decision, and practicing it feeds and builds the romantic love. We in America should try it more often.

I'm off today

Sorry, my right arm is in such pain that typing is murder. I have to take the day off.

Are there any really "Good" people?

You haven't defined your terms.

To you, I believe, "good" means "a lot more of the good than of the bad."

To the people who are saying there is no such thing as a good person, "good" means "absolutely good, can be counted on to do good in every single situation, and to have purely good motives for everything he does, at all times."

So with your definition, you are right. With the second definition, which is extreme but is valid, they are right. The two don't even contradict each other.

I'm sorry to hear you excluding any definition but your own.

The excessive use of psychology and counseling

Alan Bloom, in his 1988 book, "The Closing of the American Mind", said that one of the unsettling things about his incoming students was that practically all of them had had therapy. An entire class of people who have been told how to feel. Not just given permission to feel however they damn well pleased, but told the "well-adjusted" way to feel.

My bet is that today it's even worse. And the therapized way to feel is "I want to, therefore I will."

"I have no dreams for

"They hate us"

Yes, yes they do.

It's a visceral hatred that goes way beyond anything that "opposition to your views" would warrant in a reasonable person. It struck me this hatred has nothing to do with reason, and therefore it has everything to do with feelings.

I became convinced long ago that liberalism is based on self-esteem. "We believe this because it's good, it's good because we believe it; believing it makes us good, therefore we and our beliefs are good and everyone who opposes us does so because they are evil."

It is a matter of good and evil. Their presupposition is that all the things they believe are good and by extension (projection) everything else is evil. Rush Limbaugh and Dennis Prager, because they make a reasoned case for the opposition view, are evil. But because answering a reasoned case when all you have is your self-esteem means you're totally disarmed. There is nothing left to say but "You believe that because you're bad."

Thus they're left sputtering and fuming and raging and foaming at the mouth. When they visit their liberal bubbles everyone else inside is raging and foaming, and that's where they feed each other's rage and, worse, they validate it and certify the hatred. "It's okay that you hate Rush Limbaugh enough to want him to die horribly; I do too."

What do you tell kids today?

Prager: "When I was a kid I was always told to 'be a good man! be a good man!' What do you tell kids today if you don't believe there are such things as good and evil?"

That's the problem. Today's parents grew up on the "there is no such thing as good and evil" dogma. They can't tell their kids anything without becoming hypocrites, which is as near to their idea of "evil" as any word gets, short of "racist". And that's why our younger generation are growing up very bad.*



*Yes "bad", not "badly". It is the adjective modifying "our younger generation"; the verb "are growing up" is a copulative verb, so we get N + V + PN.

Obeying the rules makes you not good

Does anyone want to obey the rules? Many of us do, most of the time, but then there are times ALL of us would like to violate the rules.

My friend makes me mad. I want to slap her face.

I see a beautiful gem in a setting in the display case and I wish I had that thing (yes, I admit, I love sparklies, though I'm very particular and the ones I love are rare) and I would very much love to take it but I don't.

The cashier gets confused giving me my change, and can't understand she should give me five dollars and not ten. I'd love to keep the five dollars.

But in all those cases I don't. Is it because I just stupidly obey rules? What if there were a rule to carry a gun and another to shoot any Jew I see. Would I obey that rule?

It's my sense of good and evil that makes me obedient, along with a lifelong desire not to do evil.

How do you vote Democratic if you're not a leftist

It is, indeed, all emotional.

We care, we love, we want world peace. We, in contradistinction to Republicans, hate poverty. We want justice, equality, fairness. The Republicans are mean and horrible haters.

As I talked politics with my similar others, the Sixties and Seventies youth--my high school class graduated in 1971, a tad late for the Sixties activism of the hippies, more aligned with the artsy-fartsy, bean sprouts, macrame, and herbal tea crowd--who also were invariably, determinedly liberal, I learned something very important. They knew nothing about our leftism or how to defend challenges to it. They couldn't tell you anything about why they believed in redistribution of the wealth or how they thought that a system that couldn't provide its citizens with toilet paper in Russia was ever going to provide Americans with the refrigerators or light bulbs we expected.

If they ever attempted to answer such questions, they turned to feel-good platitudes. America is too rich, we have too many luxuries, we should live like the barefoot villagers in a sad, brown-skinned country named "Africa" (which they couldn't have found on a map if they had tried, though they had never tried).

We hate poverty, we hate injustice, yadda yadda yadda yadda.

Today TownHall emailed out to its subscribers its daily cluster of articles, which included this one by Prager:

NAACP Confirms Election of a Black President Made No Difference

The argument that the NAACP did nothing wrong in demanding that the tea parties condemn the racist elements in their midst, since it noted that the tea parties are not racist, is disingenuous. Imagine the (legitimate) uproar if the most prestigious organization that fights child molestation declared that while the ACLU was not itself in favor of child molestation, it had so many child molesters in its midst that it needed to publicly condemn child molestation and work to remove the child molesters among its members.

I have said before, you don't talk enough with our next generation. Yes, I realize you sit down with them and ask them questions and you do know a lot about some of their attitudes, the ones that "studies" like to quantify, such as "I do/don't believe that I will have a better life than my parents have" or "I have/have not stolen something from a major store in the last 12 months."

What you don't know is how they behave, what permissions they give themselves, how they loathe education, how they consider high school THE place to socialize with their friends, without which life is not worth living. You don't for a moment understand the enormous increase in bullying since we were kids, or how the kids who do the bullying have the permission of all our society to go ahead and bully the vulnerable because "he deserved it."

In your interviews with these kids you probably have never heard them bully people older than themselves. They believe no one has anything to teach them and that older people are stupid fools, and don't hesitate to tell them exactly that--if they think they can get away with it. No doubt none of the kids you've talked to have tried to tell you you're a doddering old moron but many of them are smiling and thinking it at the same time.

Another thing you can't understand is how illogical, irrational, and uncritical their thinking is. I think this applies to many, and the younger they are the worse it gets. Our generation actually got some training in this area, though less than it should have been. The next two generations have never been asked to critique anything.

Thus, when a radio voice asked, "On what grounds should we change the definition of marriage from one man, one woman to whatever you think it should be? What argument will you use when another person steps forward and demands we change marriage to one man, three women? or one woman, one dolphin? or one woman and her brother? or one woman and her typewriter?" then you get such idiotic responses as, "He compared same-sex marriage to incest"--mainly because the responder has no clue how he didn't compare one to the other, but also because this speaker knows that among his listeners none will be able to tell him what's wrong with his foolish assertion.

So, in your comparison, many of your readers, especially those under thirty-five, will react*, "He claims the NAACP is full of child molesters! Dennis Prager is a racist!" because these kids don't understand comparison, contrast, similarity, and dissimilarity. I could go on, and almost did, but I have made the point.

To most Americans, if any of them stumble upon your article, the comparison of events will seem to come out of the blue. They won't see that you're saying "this second event is like the first one in this way: an accusing group wishes to tar another group, and brings up a completely irrelevant charge that no one but a crazy person would think was true. Then they demand that the tarred group denounce this 'element' in their midst wherever it might be, and thus whether the tarred group reply or refuse to reply, the accusing group have scored a hundred points." All they'll see is "You called the NAACP child-molesters."

Gotta be more careful. More important, though, you need to learn how our young generation is being fraudulently educated from day 1 in school.

*not "reply" or "respond", Prager, they react! without thinking!

"We don't elect anyone to Congress to represent anyone but 'Americans'"

Look again. For two decades at least (probably three) the formerly-Mainstream Press has been pushing Identity Politics as hard as they can. Largely, I think, because they calculate that because middle-class, white collar, middle-aged white Protestant males make up such a small percentage of the population, they can further the capture of more votes by telling everyone else that they have to vote for this or that candidate because he or she is THEIR race, THEIR sex, THEIR age, THEIR economic class, THEIR sex, their religion, their ethnic background--because this candidate was going to represent THEM and THEIR interests, or at the least (if the candidate was a middle-class, middle-aged white male) would protect them from non-Democratic middle-class, middle-aged white males--anything they could come up with to peel people away from the so-called majority and scare them into voting for the Democrat.

Thus, I've heard female news anchors express astonishment that a certain woman being discussed was going to vote for a man; astonishment that any black person was going to vote for a white candidate; astonishment that Latinos didn't understand politics well enough to automatically reject the white candidate and vote for THEIR candidate, which was assumed by that news person to be the Latino.

Beethoven and the feminist obsesssion with ... well, goodness knows what

Yes, Beethoven is full of contrasts, the quiet several measures of tension that explode into magnificent, stunning release of loud volume. How does that simulate orgasm? One is normally very tense before the orgasm, not quiet and calm and under tension. Tension, yes, calm and quiet, no.

One might also look at Baroque art and announce the orgasmic contrasts between light and dark, or bright and soft, or russet and cream, or ...

In short, our feminist mothers were a bunch of self-aggrandizing idiots.

I believe that those who got fellowships at their universities--or book contracts, or editorships, or partnerships in a law firm, or positions of importance on the local museum council--still believe the junk they spewed in the Seventies. Their continued validation depends on it.

The rest of us most likely gave it up as patently silly twaddle.

"One of the only novelists who was not a liberal"

Dennis, shame on you. Please stop claiming that you are very sensitive about your use of language, because it isn't true. Say rather that you TRY to be very sensitive, and that you prize a sensitive ear when it comes to the proper use of language, because those are true.

If it was the only way to get my kid to lose weight, I would pay my kid to lose weight

I think that would probably be a big mistake, since the kid would be most likely take the most quickly discernible path to weight loss, i.e. a calorie reduction diet, which I think is a very destructive way to lose weight. Go for the quick fix, eat half as much for the next month, lose the ten pounds, collect the hundred dollars, then go off the diet, and watch fifteen pounds pile on over the next two weeks. It's a very effective way to change your set point and gain weight. I know, I've tried it. In my case it wasn't for reward money; it was to escape the nastiness and criticism I had brought upon myself for daring to gain curves during puberty. Nice job, mom.

"You'd be struck by the number of books [in my house]

Like you, I had thousands of books in my house and thousands in my garage. Many of them were collector's items, many irreplaceable and recommendable literature. I believe my ex has destroyed all of them by now, or given them to the Good Will.

I love the smell of a new book--but then, so does everyone who loves reading; and I love the feel of one. I can't imagine buying a Kindle and reading it on the bus or any place else.

What a bunch of baloney, what a completely irresponsible thing to tell a child

I agree. I have always thought that was stupid. I told my kids they should try, do everything in their power, to achieve what they wanted to do and be. Because they were very talented and smart, I knew they had a good chance of achieving what they wanted, but I never told them they were infinitely talented and infinitely capable. What a terrible thing to tell kids. Of course you want to encourage your kids to try things and to work at them. That grandmother's daughter should have told her kids, "If you want to do something, you will have to work at it for a long time; you will have to learn a thousand skills and practice them over an over, even if it's just balancing the books at mom and pop pharmacy. Here, start with memorizing the addition tables, then next week move on to the multiplication tables..."

"Six bucks a month, folks, it's not a whole, uh, big burden"

Sorry, for me it is. I haven't bought a book in two years. I haven't bought a new piece of clothing in six years. I have a pair of shoes that was bought for a funeral last year, but some kind soul I barely know paid for them. Not all of us think "six dollars a year is not a big burden", because some of us think six bucks a year is beyond our reach.

Editing to add what I didn't think of before, and didn't think of it because I would have considered it inappropriate. But yeah, just about the only thing I can do without making myself sick again is here at my desk at home. If you need someone who can do internet RESEARCH, typing, EDITING (I'm a terrific editor), PROOFREADING (one of the best proofreaders I know), bookkeeping, or any of a number of desk type jobs, I'm good for it. I need work. I also need to take frequent breaks so I'd rather punch a time clock and have flex time. It's this need to get up and move around that keeps me from taking a "time spent at desk" kind of job, which is the only kind I've seen around here. But if you need a woman of all trades, just send me an email. Thanks.

"You are married to a man."

I thought I was, too. He had a job in the Computer Science Department at UCLA. He stayed in that job for thirty years. But he's so steady and constant in his job precisely because it allows him to be a boy. He gets flex time, picks his own hours, takes a day off (with one day's advance notice) in the middle of the week if he wants. Goes in at ten a.m. and doesn't come home till eight p.m. "so I can avoid rush hour" which would make sense (his commute took him through the Westside part of the San Diego Freeway) if it didn't cover up what he was really doing--eating in restaurants with the other boys and single women from the same department, and running up the credit cards like crazy.

When he came home he never said hello to his wife, he never spent one moment with his children. Daddy time was that random weekday off, when he'd take himself to Disneyland, and sometimes take the kids with him.

When I enrolled the boys in Boy Scouts, this overgrown putz considered their pack or troop night to be his night home without the little nuisances around. It was eight months before I could successfully drag him to their awards ceremonies. THAT's when he discovered there were other adults there. They crowded round him, the father they had never met, and "stroked" him mightily for just showing up. He beamed and strutted and decided maybe there was an angle in this boyscout stuff after all.

You'll hate this part of the story so much, Dennis. His sex life. He wouldn't speak to me for weeks at a time. I think sometimes he just plain forgot my name, but it didn't matter, I didn't exist. Those other adults existed, sure, but not the wife. Then after weeks of not speaking to me, he'd want sex. You've heard women say "I feel like I'm being raped" and you've shamed any woman who would dare to think such a thing, and I'm sorry but I felt raped.

He seemed to resent it when he had to talk to me. One night I picked him up at the airport, after a week at the Apple Computers convention in San Francisco. "How was it?" I asked. "Fine," was his only answer. I managed to get two more words out of him on the way home: "Nothin' special." On the way home we picked up a friend at the earlier request of her boyfriend. She got in the car and asked the jerk how the convention had been. He launched into a stream of anecdotes that didn't stop for fifteen minutes. Such a charming man.

Did I do something that put a damper on his talking to me? My exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide was the only damper he needed for an excuse.

Dennis, settling for the easy job that is right before you is NOT the sign of a mature adult. I admit it may be an improvement on staying in mom and dad's spare bedroom and playing video games until a better-paying job presents itself, but I do think your notion that taking the first job that someone offers you is not a good definition.

Ultrasound photo of the baby

"I took one look and I saw a picture of the baby."

Yes, yes, you don't want to debate abortion. We all get it. It's because for you, the issue is settled, and therefore closed. You have chosen the liberals' "openness" and "Gee, I won't impose my will on the woman" point of view. I hope you realize what you've done.

Many many times I have heard your disclaimer, "If we call it a human being we have to call it murder and if we call it murder we have to go kill abortion doctors therefore because I don't think we should kill abortionists we can't call it murder therefore it isn't the killing of an innocent human being because we will call it something other than a human being."

You need to step back and see what you did here. You wanted a certain conclusion, so you constructed (or in one case reconstructed) your arguments to reach this conclusion.

I'm not talking about the very reasonable practice of assembling the arguments for an issue, finding one or two of them to be more compelling than the other arguments, singling out the one reason that is most compelling to YOU, and reaching a decision based on that most-compelling argument though acknowledging that other reasons do still have merit.

Sometimes people pursue that path when they ponder the reasons for and against legalizing abortion. "Well, in favor of legalized abortion, there's the issue that you can't tell a woman what to do with her body, the government should get out of regulating sexuality, it's not a human being, it has no rights till I see its face, it's just a lump of undifferentiated tissue, no woman should be forced to be pregnant against her will. Against legalized abortion there's the possibility that it might be a human being, it shouldn't have to pay for its mother's mistake, you're killing someone and calling it okay just because they don't know they're being killed."

I did this myself. Most of those arguments I could dismiss because they're answerable or refutable because they're false. But I had no answer for "A woman shouldn't be forced to be pregnant against her will." That's a value judgement I happened to agree with, so I supported legalized abortion, knowing full well all the facts about fetal development, knowing full well that it's a human being (just that our radicals choose to define it as not one), and knowing the answers to the argument that it doesn't look like a human being so we don't have to consider it one.

I was happy with my position for a few years. But finally I heard someone say "We don't have the right to kill someone just because they don't know they're being killed." I spent many months trying to refute that one. If we have the right to kill someone (and the fetus is a someone) just because they don't know we're doing it, then we could kill sleeping people, kill anyone in a coma, kill someone at a whim, just so long as we knock them out first. Besides, there is a lot of evidence that a twelve-week-old fetus knows it's having its life taken. They stop sucking their thumbs, they kick, they struggle, they try to move away from the suction. They fight for their lives.

That's when the argument that "We can't kill someone just because they don't know they're being killed" became far more important to me than "No woman should be forced to be pregnant against her will." There are answers to the latter claim, anyway, but I won't go into them.

But this not what I'm talking about.

You started with your conclusion. "If it went through a lot of mental calisthenics to get to your "It's not fully human, it's um, nascent human life" conclusion. Nascent, for those who don't know, means "just beginning but not yet arrived".

I'll finish this later.

Personal finances and happiness

It's one thing to suggest everyone try to be happy for the sake of everyone else around them--as an act of service to others. It's another to suggest people be happy in spite of the fact they're miserable. One should try to eliminate the sources of misery from one's life.

Thus, getting rid of one huge source of misery would be a wise action for anyone whose personal finance are making them miserable.

It would really be great if you'd mention a few of the better books on personal finance now and then. Personally I like Dave Ramsey: get out of debt now, stay out of debt, understand what it does to you, start accumulating wealth. Excellent advice and one of the best steps for people to take in the road to a more relaxed life.

Making decisions

You need to start referring your listeners to Dave Ramsey's books on financial independence. He's aimed at the average person with an average income and the typical amount of American debt. I hear you telling this woman to go ahead and buy "anything" (in a house) without knowing whether she has the ability to afford it and you're not advising her on anything. Send her to Dave Ramsey and help her not get into trouble by doing so.

An eleven-year-old likes to be with an older adult!

Dennis, people USED to like other people of all ages. It's only the age-segregated school system of the last 100 years that made it otherwise. Now people are dumb enough to think that "you need friends your own age" and they feel sorry for a fifteen-year-old whose only friends are 18 and 11 years of age. In the real world, that kid has two good friends. In the artificial world of a society who thinks all 15's need other 15's, that kid has no friends.

What a radical change this means for our society. You get up and barely see your parents. You get on the bus and for the rest of the day your only contacts are same-age peers. You don't relate to your teacher because she's not a parent, she's not a peer, she's been taught not to relate to you, you can't confide in her, the day is carefully structured to keep you away from teacher and not to allow a moment of private time when you might be tempted to ask her a question about bullies or request guidance on a sensitive issue. You avoid her and she avoids you. There are no other non-same-people in your day. Until you arrive home at six o'clock (you're kept on campus due to the fact that mom has a full-time job) you see no one but people who are no more than 12 months in age away from you.

Six-year-olds raising six-year-olds. Twelve-year-olds raising twelve-year-olds, and serve as their only mentors and guidance counselors. Worse, you learn your moral code from them. You learn about sex from them. You learn that picking on some weaker kid is a bonding experience for you and your two best buds.

More than any other reason, it's this same-age isolation that spurs me to oppose the public school and urge parents to homeschool, even if that means mom must quit her job.

The ACLU's Preoccupation with Rights

Are you joking? Do you really think they give a damn about rights? You could list hundreds of "rights" they don't give a damn about, and I bet I could list even more. Think harder about this.

They use "rights" as the excuse for tearing down America; they are leftists and that's what leftists want. They're hard at work creating as much social chaos as they can, because that's how you tear down a society. "Rights" is just their platform that serves as a distraction from the real issue. When they can get apolitical, middle-of-the-road America focused on how the ACLU is championing the rights of all Americans, they have achieved a public relations victory that means no one will look at their real agenda, which will enable and empower them to fight to pull down walls they could never pull down if more people realized that's what they're doing.

Dennis is on vacation still, but I can't help but comment.

And so I'm still on break. I have a ton I'd say about kids stealing and rationalizing it, and my bewilderment that Dennis is actually astonished at this phenomenon. Mainly I'd like to say why I think the percentage of thieves has increased.

But Dennis has finally got to that point himself. "You were raised by my generation," he tells a caller, "which was the dumbest generation in history." This was my generation, too, though I would say the current group of 15-to-25's is MUCH dumber largely because the education system no longer thinks expanding children's horizons is a good thing and is even actively standing against it. Then he adds, "entitlement is a given".

My stupid generation learned "There is no such thing as right or wrong" from our teachers, who were so "enlightened" they believed stupid-ass stuff like this. When my generation grew up many many of the dumbest of them became social workers (white liberals love nothing so much as "taking care" of black poor people) and teachers (the career that inferior white liberals choose most often). As teachers they amplified on the stupidity, making up new and improved intellectual garbage out of thin air, and thus "Everyone has to decide for himself what is right and wrong" was taught as a rock-hard fact with which there was no possibility of arguing. So was "there is no such thing as truth," which they would have understood as self-refuting twaddle if they hadn't been so stupid themselves.

The generation the hippies taught is now taking over the schools. Like the perfect, well-formed, utterly ignorant nitwits they have been raised to be, they're also making insane decisions about what to teach and how to teach it. Dennis has seen some of the insanity but I do not think he truly understands it, especially since the theories are so unbelievably absurd, the thinking so absent, the reasoning so vapid--in short, Americans are from Earth, their teachers are from Jupiter.

If anyone can download music for free, how will musicians make money?

If anyone can just go to the library and check out a book for a month and read it for free, how will authors make money?

If anyone can pick up radio waves and listen to music for free over the air, how will musicians make money?

Don't get me wrong, I agree that downloading music all day long and never paying for it is wrong. But your questions are far from unanswerable, and you're falling into the liberal trick of asking a question, not receiving an answer, or maybe you receive an answer but you're unwilling to concur with it, and then continuing to believe that the unanswerable question is proof that your position is right.

The recording industry will tell you that pirating and peer-to-peer sharing are costing them dearly. I sincerely doubt that. I believe most recording companies are doing magnificently. Recording artists are making platinum sales left and right. (Remember when achieving GOLD sales was rare and meant you were stunningly successful?) And the CEOs of the recording companies are living in bigger and bigger mansions higher and higher up in the Hills of Beverly.

You don't realize that 90% of the stuff kids download are songs they wouldn't buy if they had to spend the money. By definition that's not cutting into sales.

You sneered at the assertion that spreading mp3s around would get the performers bigger sales of their concert tickets, and belittled the notion that they should have to give performances to stay alive. First off, sneering and belittling are bad arguments. Second, they don't "have to give performances to stay alive" because concert ticket sales are up (except for this summer, thanks to the recession, not the stealing of mp3s). The Beatles never gave a concert in a football stadium.

Back in the Nineties I had a young friend recommend Placebo to me. I had never heard of them. So he sent me a few of their files. It didn't take me long to love their lead singer's voice and their sound. I have bought four of their albums (I would have all of them right now, if I weren't dead broke) that I never would have bought had it not been for the sharable files.

There are videos of Corvus Corax--a group of Germans who perform medieval music with wild enthusiasm--in concert on youtube now, but twelve years ago I used to have to send mp3s to get my heavy metal friends (who I knew would love them) to listen to them. I was right and now, thanks to me and mp3s "going viral", there are probably forty or fifty more lovers of medieval music than there would be otherwise. I know at least some of them, like me, have bought some of Corvus Corax's albums. And thanks to youtube, I now just send URLs to the videos. Songs do go viral and they do promote sales, regardless of your contempt for the notion.

In short--you're wrong. And the record industry is also wrong. They probably know that mp3 sharing is helping them as much as it's hurting them but the corporate selfishness you're always reminding us about is keeping them from letting go.

The Left wants America to be liked

I assume you came to this conclusion by listening to the left complain that because we're so bad and so evil and so blameworthy, the world hates us.

Dennis, it's just a talk line, a bumper sticker for pushing the real agenda.

You have to look at the underlying assumptions first. I know you have done so yourself, but I don't think you've connected them to what manifests itself as what the left really wants.

Borders are bad. Borders make some nations unequal to others. They mean one society can practice capitalism while the one right next door is an exploitative, oppressive country that keeps its poor poor and runs its government only for the benefit and comfort of the rich.

Capitalism is bad. Capitalism is bad because it means people will be unequal within the capitalist country. Some people do better than others but it is mainly through hard work, unless it is from inheriting money, which is bad. Communism is good. It is good because it means everyone is equal, except of course for the people who run the country but since communist bureaucrats deserve their better station due to the responsibility they have and their greater value to the society, it's okay.

The rest of the world is moving toward more equality for people, more equality between countries. This is good, this is noble, this is the right thing to do. The United States is resisting this move toward equality, and this is bad. We cling to our wealth and won't let anyone else have any. Bad, bad, bad. In fact, given that leftists generally think that if John has a nickel, that's a nickel that Jane can't have, then you understand why they loathe us so much. We gathered all the wealth of the world to ourselves and did it by robbing them of the chance to have any wealth.

So--Given that borders are bad, the U.S. is bad, the U.S. has too much wealth, and the U.S. won't give their wealth to the rest of the world, then the solution must be to do away with the U.S. How do you do that? Not by revolution, for the U.S. is too powerful and a popular revolution from inside was unthinkable. You must build up the popular idea that destroying the U.S. is a good thing, fundamentally transforming her is the moral thing. You use everything you have to get people's hearts to change, from telling them that capitalism is evil and Jesus hates capitalists to asserting that educated people want to spread the wealth around to calling the entire country racist. Appealing to the desire of soft-hearted Americans to be liked is only one of the weapons you use, but it's only lip service. They really want Americans to want to be like the vision the left has for us all.

"You said liberals don't create wealth"

I believe what you said was "liberalism" doesn't create wealth. In fact, you're saying it now. Hope you told that woman there's a big difference.

A guy who is a liberal who garnered great wealth did it through capitalism, that says it all.

Oh, well, maybe there is a communist like Castro who got his wealth by stealing it from everyone else (and giving nothing but oppression in return) or by taking bribes, but we do not hold either of those actions to be capitalism.

All universities are bubbles

You said "all". Yes, those were your words. Don't ever claim you never say "all".

Pinched or Pressured Nerve?

I believe the most appropriate term available to non-medical speakers is "crushed".

The government is taking away my light bulbs

And we must fight for the repeal of this stupid act and win JUST ON PRINCIPLE.

Meanwhile, switch to LED light bulbs. CFLs don't make a bit of sense but LED bulb do, in spite of how expensive they are. The price may soon take a quantum drop, as some company has announced they have discovered a way to make them cheap.

Happy birthday Ringo!

Says it all. To my favorite Beatle, Happy Birthday.

Chicago Tribune: "Downside to Teen Self-Esteem"

There is something about this generation of youth (specifically the 11 to 25 year olds) that is terribly different from any other generation in history.

Sure, every clump of "the younger generation" has thought they know everything, have thought their parents were dumb, and have assumed every brilliant thought that their generation has embraced has sprung new-born from their incomparable brains. This one is different.

Yes, this one has been told from the moment they were born (even before they were born, if mummy had a set of headphones to apply to her belly and a microphone to broadcast through them) that they were magnificent, stupendous, astonishing, and amazing--for doing nothing. Even for doing bad, they got praised or at the very least sympathized with. And while I can agree that this is hugely harmful in a way that no generation has ever had to overcome before, there is still a very nasty, very powerful distinction that makes this generation even more different.

It is our culture. The worship of children and the supreme magnificence of these spoilt brats is everywhere. Yes, your parents are idiots. No, don't listen to them. You have something to discuss, you go to your friends, never to your parents. You have a thought, don't mention it to your dad, he's a buffoon anyway. Don't tell it to your mom, she's busy shopping and she won't even look around to see what you're talking about. Telling it to any other adult is unthinkable, so it isn't mentioned, except in the case of senile old grandparents (always in their 90's if the voices are anything to go by, even though REAL grandparents start at 50) who validate the kids. Being outrageous is cool and when our senile grandparents are outrageous (and thus validate our outrageousness), that's extra cool.

Kids are magnificent and wonderful and always right and know best, above anything their stupid parents could imagine. This is in the culture. It's in their movies, their books (what few they read, they read because it's about teenagers who are smarter than the stupid adults, viz Hogwarts and all the wizarding books or all the vampire books), it's in their music. Worst of all, it's in everything they watch in their TV, not just in the trashy, unintelligent sitcoms aimed at teenagers but in the ads aimed at every kid from infancy on.

We have to get it out. But that would require Generation X, the worst parents ever to hit the planet, to get off their rear ends and start telling their children that there IS a right and wrong, there IS a good and bad. That their bad behavior will be punished, that ingratitude is unacceptable, that manners matter, and crapping on adults is right out, even if they're not your parents.

The older movies are full of bad guys, and one sure sign of a bad guy is he tells some person over fifty years of age, "Shut up, Old Man." Well, back in the Thirties it was a sign of an evil heart. Today, though, it's just standard behavior.

It's hard to believe there are ten Americans who agree with Lindsay Lohan's mother

Pfft. I'll bet half the people who read "People" magazine every month agree with Lindsay Lohan's mother in claiming that "it's not fair" for her magnificent daughter to have to do jail time, no matter how bad her behavior has been.

Six dollars a month! Cheap!

Cheap unless you don't have six dollars a month.

I'm sick and living off the charity of a nice woman who never met me before I moved in with her. She and her family live on her eleven dollar per hour income and since I drain her of grocery money and utilities (I get to tap their internet) I don't think it would be right of me to ask for money too. That's why I have never subscribed to your Pragertopia, Dennis.

"We won't have children but we'll keep the welfare state"

Europe has children. They have immigrant children. The Netherlands, for example, had to open the flood gates to foreign and former-colonial kids. Morocco and Turkey have contributed tons and tons of immigrants who LIKE children, unlike the "sophisticates" who descend from the local white people. The birth rate among the recent immigrants surpasses the replacement rate by something like three times. They have large families and they expect the Nederlanders to accommodate the old ways, the old religion, the old language. My roommate in the Netherlands was a school teacher whose job it was to teach Turkish schoolkids to speak English, which they never wanted to learn, and to try to get them a few employable skills. The kids, he said, were only interested in dropping out at age sixteen and taking up whatever their fathers did for a living, which was generally hard manual labor such as laying bricks. The saviors of the country were their mothers who were busy popping out families of four to six kids. It's a good thing for the Netherlands that their immigrants aren't part of the snooty, self-styled egghead generation who think children are a different form of cancer.

Five-year-old woman

Dennis said it best--one of the attacks on wisdom from the Sixties. Down with sense! Wisdom must die!

I'm so glad I learned critical thinking by avid reading of literature from earlier centuries than my own. My generation and critical thinking are complete strangers, mainly because they didn't read. They were also handed tons and tons of bumper-sticker lines that sounded good but which contained no wisdom, sayings like, "If it feels good, do it" and "Question authority".

Adam Bellow, ed.--"New Threats to Freedom"

just notes

The war on negative liberty

The concept of liberty enshrined in limits on the government

Demanding the gov leave us alone to do our own thing

Brooklyn applied for a ban on ice cream trucks, lest children demand ice cream and suffer the evil consequences. Mothers turned to the state to take their place and take responsibility for saying "no" to their children.

Freedom has been subtly redefined to mean "security and safety"--secure in our jobs and in our unaffordable mortgages but not in our homes, and safe from the perils of actually seeing a gun.

We had two hours of sexual harassment training. We can't have children sit on our laps.

guest: "What a shame."

Book title:
New Threats to Freedom

Ms. Christopher Norwood, pioneer in social services to the poor. After observing for decades the funneling of millions of dollars, she has decided that the true purpose of this aid is not to help the poor so much as to create new classes of dependency.

Thank God, a whistleblower. I never was sure if that was the intention of the people who fought so hard to institute these programs, but it sure is obvious that this is the effect, and this is why we who truly care about the poor would like to see these programs ended. But, sadly, those who care more about the programs than about the people the programs are supposedly helping, fight with the usual "shut up" tactics:

First, stop the opposition from talking in the first place by demonizing them with labels like "hateful", "the party of no", and always "racist". Who wants their friends to think they're racist? Who wants to be driven out of society because they're so disgusting?

Then discredit everything they might say in the future by tarring fully half the people in this country before they even open their mouths. Then call them more names. "Conservatives, as everyone knows, want the poor to starve, conservatives are racist, conservatives are selfish, rich, in it for themselves, big businessmen, conservatives hate everyone..."

"I am also a conductor of orchestras"

You love to cite your happy funtime with orchestras as evidence that you speak with authority on the subject of music.

This makes me grind my teeth. It is the same as your quoting your teaching of Torah as a symbol of your expertise on Torah.

Please, Dennis, any twit can teach the Torah, and any rhythmless boob can conduct an orchestra. I have been taught by the greatest fools on earth; some of them are called "college professors" and and they know a lot of nonsense. Some of them set themselves up as knowing a lot about Scripture and as you listen to their discourses in your Bible class, you realize very quickly that all they really know is a lot of iconoclastic hooey they learned from older hippies who decided to become teachers.

"The Bible has been copied and re-copied so many times we can't know what it originally said" is a favorite line among pseudo-intellectual fools. It makes you sound so brilliant when you pretend to know things the fifty generations that came before you never discovered. "They knew so little; the scholasticism was at such a pathetically low level; they were superstitious and believed miracles could actually happen! Now we understand so much better! We know so much! We're not bound by that crummy old Bible stuff!"

And the twaddle flows freely and abundantly from their lips.

As for conducting orchestras, I'm going to guess that you conduct with the same sense of rhythm and the same accuracy with which you sing along with your happy hour theme: you're usually on pitch, and rarely on the beat. I don't mind that and I hope you don't listen to the people who think you should quit; it actually is nice when you bop along, incompetently lagging a whole beat behind the music and blissfully unaware of it.

Beethoven had gone deaf yet continued conducting orchestras long after he could no longer hear what he was conducting. He kept beating away for his musicians, and they smiled for him, but in fact they were watching the konzertmeister nodding with head and his violin, conducting the orchestra from his chair. This had been the general practice half a century earlier, and was vastly preferable for them to follow the lead of the competent konzertmeister over that of the brilliant but now-incompetent composer. But Beethoven could also brag to his friends that "I conduct orchestras."

Dennis is on vacation

So am I.