The Best of Glenn Beck

This is a comic strip sent to me by a friend several years ago, with the explanation that it reminded him exactly of me.

Dilbert is getting ready for a date, and asks his little dog companion if he has any advice.  After a moment’s consideration, the dog says to him, “Try to be less like you.”

“Hmm, less like me, less like me---that just might work”.

The next panel is of Dilbert at the girl’s door giving her flowers.  Both are happy and smiling, and thing are going well.

As they are walking down the hallway she says to him, “I collect crystals.”   Dilbert gets a pained look on his face.  “I don’t know that they have any healing powers or anything like that, but it is my belief that they do.”

You can just see the strain on Dilbert’s face trying not to react, but helpless not to.  “And when did ignorance become a belief?”

In the next panel they are at the restaurant looking over the menus.  Behind her menu, she looks absolutely furious.  Behind his menu, Dilbert is mentally smacking himself in the head.  “too much like me, too much like me!”

 I really, really, really shoudn't do this!

I can not help myself----the best part of Glen Beck ran down his momma’s leg.

Now that that is out of the way consider this---what epistemological model do you think governs the “concepts” running around in Beck’s head?  Look at the hierarchy and the opening to objetivist epistemology

“1. The “extreme realists” or Platonists, who hold that abstractions exist as real entities or archetypes in another dimension of reality and that the concretes we perceive are merely their imperfect reflections, but the concretes evoke the abstractions in our mind.  (According to Plato, they do so by evoking the memory of the archetypes which we had known, before birth, in that other dimension.)

            2. the “moderate realists,” whose ancestor (unfortunately) is Aristotle, who hold that abstractions exist in reality, but they exist only in concretes, in the form of metaphysical essences, and that our concepts refer to those essences.

            3. The “nominalists,” who hold that all our ideas are only images of concretes, and that abstractions are merely “names” which we give to arbitrary groupings of concretes on the basis of vague resemblances.

            4. the “conceptualists,” who share the nominalists’ view that abstractions have no actual basis in reality, but who hold that concepts exist in our minds as some sort of ideas, not as images.

            (there is also the extreme nominalist position, the modern one, which consists of declaring that the problem is a meaningless issue, that “reality” is a meaningless term, that we can never know whether our concepts correspond to anything or not, that our knowledge consists of words—and that words are an arbitrary social convention.)” 

 and tell me how an avowed theists’ so called thinking can be admired by anyone who believes in the objectivist method.  True, if you set a thousand monkeys to banging away on keyboards for a thousand years, one will type out a Shakespeare sonnet, (or at least some Kerouac) but it’s still a fluke; the monkey has no real idea what it is doing.

1)  I said I really shouldn’t do this.

            2) when I was working on my profile here the other day, I was asked whether I was an objectivist (in the broadest sense of the word).  I took that to mean—do I accept reality as objective and as the final arbiter of what is true?  Yes I do.  I think this is probably true of Einstein and Jonas Salk.  One does not spend ones life trying to understand reality, and not believe in it. (god [I read as existence] does not play dice) I have a sense that Scott Adams is such a person as well.  I do not get that impression of Glen Beck.  I get the impression from him that he would say anything so long as it furthered his/his employers goals.

            3) but it would be crazy to ignore the fact that on the level of political activism he has done more to move our culture towards a rebirth of freedom than Tom Paine did in his time.  Yes, he has done so much to assure the equal rites of gay humans, the privacy rights of women, and the alleviation of hatred of atheists.  A real champion of freedom all right.

            4) The man is a political commentator and should be judged accordingly.  Yes, that is exactly what I am doing.  As a political commentator I find him to be a stone thrower of the worst sort; the kind who doesn’t really care where the stone lands or who it hits, so long as he looks good to his audience.  In a nut shell, otherish.

            5)  "Progressivism" versus "Small Government and Free Enterprise."  Just exactly  what do you mean by “progressivism”.   The fact that you put it in quotes seems to indicate that you mean “what everybody indicates when they say it”-- see my last post as to what epistemology that fits with.  As far as "Small Government and Free Enterprise" are concerned a) same answer, and b) there are reasons further up the hierarchy that are the reason objectivists believe in it.  I do not think the reason Glen Beck, or his employer, desire small government has anything to do with those.
            6)while I have some problems with Piekoff, I will reference the fact that at the end of Objectivism The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, he—a) stated that objectivism is a progressive philosophy, and b) gave an explicit warning about neo-cons and how they camouflage themselves to look like objectivists. 

Progressivism is a political and social term for ideologies and movements favoring or advocating changes or reform, usually in an egalitarian direction for economic policies (public management) and liberal direction for social policies.

... American progressives tend to support interventionist economics ...

Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that emerged in the United States of America, and which supports using American economic and military power to bring liberalism, democracy, and human rights to other countries. ...

In economics, unlike traditionalist conservatives, neoconservatives are generally comfortable with a welfare state; and, while rhetorically supportive of free markets, they are willing to interfere for overriding social purposes.

SEKULOW: The real question here is who decides what the laws are in the state of California and what their constitution is going to be.

BECK: OK. That's the difference. Correct me - I mean, Jonah, jump in here. Correct me if I'm wrong. That's what America has going for it. That's why we don't - for instance, prohibition - we put it in there. That's why we don't take it out. We leave the scars of what the people have done to the Constitution for a reason.

Jefferson people will come - they can change the Constitution. But things will change and they'll come to their senses and they'll repair that mistake and change it back. When did we turn into a country where the people don't have control of what they want in the Constitution?