Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Serious

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/cheney-cruz-and-the-new-911-neocon-freak-out.html

Chait does a nice job of breaking down the symptoms of acute neoconservatism.

The interesting one is "serious" combined with all the other traits.

Neo-cons refer to their political opponents as "unserious" and that "serious" people agree with them.  Perhaps a better word than serious would be severe.  Because there is little that is serious about the half-baked, knee-jerk, simplistic way that neo-cons see the world.

Neo-cons can't make threat differentiation; they can't distinguish Sunni from Shia or Wahhabist from Alawite.  All they see is "bad guys" who must be addressed with violence.

That's a profoundly stupid, cloistered way of looking at the world.

It is the exact opposite of "serious".

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