One of the minor sources of fun on the internet is finding out that many of the widely quoted quotes and attributed attributions are more urban legend than accurate. Even the ones so common that when you find out they're either fake or wrongly attributed, you've got a suspicion that you've spread those yourself. Yeah, there's that little fun around, these days. Trump is in office, Nazism is reviving and the world's gone to hell.
But the reason that some of those aphorisms spread is because they're true and they describe reality. The one I'm going to briefly go over is that one about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Whether Einstein or Freud or Rita Mae Brown said it, it's obviously something that happens a hell of a lot. I think one of the longest programs of futile and hopeful repetition is found in the secular left's century and counting of hoping for some of the stupidest things anyone could ever come up with to hope for.
Revolution, to start with. Revolutions have an abysmally awful record, there is hardly one which, if they didn't usher in a government worse than the one before, it will produce one at least as bad. Most often it brings one in that has a mixed record, one of getting rid of a few bad features of the previous regime often replacing those with at least as bad if not many times worse. Those revolutions that the English speaking, secular left values the most, the French Revolution, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, various smaller ones, have been uniformly horrific bloodbaths that murdered many thousands and millions of those who the revolutionaries - generally from the educated elite - claimed their revolutions were brought on to save. That is a record which started to be amassed with some of the largest bodies of accurate information possible, in the late 18th century. Yet the romantic view of that uniformly failing method of making change for the better has prevailed from that time till our own.
If the American revolution deserves to be included in that record, perhaps setting off the fashion is well worth asking in this time of "original intent" and whatever else the fascists of Harvard Law and the U. of C. are calling it. The government that resulted had to give the poor and non-rich farmers the aristocrats gulled into fighting it for the stated ideals a measure of equal rights, endowed by The Creator. The aristocrats wouldn't have survived the resulting revolution brought on by those demanding what they were promised. But as soon as those poor folk started to demand equal, equal rights, the aristocrats rigged up the Constitutional Convention and made sure that democracy wasn't going to be the result of their revolution. I will get back to typing out more of Wendell Phillips book on that topic, probably once the hard frost sets in.
The American revolution and its aftermath saw a hardening and expansion of the slavery which was the most obvious lie the Founders told about equal rights under law, the continued program of genocide and land stealing, some like Jefferson aspiring to steal the entire continent from the original inhabitants was a second. Women certainly saw no expansion of their rights, nor did even white men who didn't own property, all of those groups had to fight against the regime the revolution brought, an action in which the present day Republican-fascists are succeeding in destroying as much of the progress towards equality as they can, using the very Constitution that revolution brought, to reimpose an even grosser form of inequality than reigned before the end of the Civil War. That is something which has been an aristocratic project in progress since the 1870s.
So, revolution is one of the most seriously stupid of romantic delusions on the part of the secular left.
Related to that is the idiocy that their scheme for bringing about their glorious revolution - which the dopes always believe they are going to win, even today when the Nazis and fascists are armed like few armies in the history of the world - of making sure the worst of the worst get into power. That has been one of the biggest selling point of that massive idiocy of third-parties which never win elections, which never even gain a toehold in office and which inevitably fail and are replaced by the next lefty-magazine promoted-reported third party effort. Buying third parties would be like buying seeds from a catalog that is universally known to have never sold a single viable seed but which has nice envelopes. And hoping that the next package will result in an abundant harvest.
One of the stupidest things about the play left, especially the anti-religious, atheist part of the play-left (most of it) is the idea that insulting people is a way to get them to do what you want them to do. That's something that hasn't worked since forever. And it's always been, not only a uniform failure but a means of the opponents of the left to rally those who resent the insults to their side. Regional resentments, class resentments, resentments on the basis of whether or not you or your family have college credentials, have the right fashion sense, whether or not you eat the right kinds of food, have had access to adequate dental care, the list of ways in which play lefties have practiced that stupidity and then whined when the people they love to feel superior to don't vote the way they want them to is all the proof anyone needs that the secular, play-left isn't nearly as smart as they think they are and the never tire of announcing themselves to be.
The secular left isn't alone in doing that but since their pretense is that they favor the rights and dignity of all people regardless of their position in life, it is the stupidest thing in the world when they do it. And even stupider is when they get played by billionaires, domestic or foreign, to do it. The support for the Putin connected hack Jill Stein and her ship of fools, the Greens was part of it but I'm afraid that that is being repeated in the fevered dream that that one seat that the Democratic Socialists will likely win in New York City is going to bring about a wave of such successes within the Democratic Party, something which is far more likely to lose far more votes in far more places, certainly in this next election. And when the Democratic Socialist candidate wins, two things will happen. The play left will demand that she be given far more power than her position warrants and when she inevitably starts in the business of making laws and supporting them, the play lefties will get pissed off at her and a good part of them will turn on her. If there's one thing you can depend on it is that faction of the play left who don't want any lefty in power except the one in their imagination who will always do exactly what they want, even changing that when the play-lefty either forgets what it was they thought they wanted or when they change their mind out of some petty pique when THEY feel insulted.
I can see no evidence that the secular left has ever learned anything from its history of making the same claims that doing the same things that they've done before will, finally, work this time. There are reasons for that but it's a holiday and I know this piece won't get many readers as it is. I've learned that much from the twelve years I've been doing this. Nor am I under any illusion that play-lefties will read this and change even the most obvious point in it, the one about the futility of insulting people into agreeing with you. But I don't expect they won't because they feel insulted, they wouldn't have if I'd flattered them, either.
Anyone who wants to keep on with the play-left that does that is hoping that doing the same thing for another century will have a different result than the past century of them doing the same thing. The only thing that has ever worked wasn't the conceited, atheist, play-left. And it wasn't any kind of instant, super-duper revolutionary change. It was hard work whose success depended on convincing people who weren't originally in favor of equal rights and justice that they had a moral obligation to favor equality and justice. Even for those they didn't like those they didn't respect, those they felt smarter than and nicer than. As soon as fashion and life-style snobbery entered into it, that failed. A lot of that came in in the late 1960s and, especially, the 70s, it was one of the ways they put a stop to the possibility of change in the 1960s. Yeah, the hippies were actually part of that. As were the campus radicals, that turn from the religious left and the congress of 1964-65 to that shut it down. I remember how stupid it got as soon as the focus went to fashion.
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