Felt bunnies with powder-puff tails and hearts adorned with silver sequins -- hand sewn by Sissy way back when -- will soon help turn a Nova Scotia fir into a Christmas tree to remember. But don't tell that to the cheerless persons of the left who want us to hold our tongue when it comes to all things Christmas. They are desperately trying to "maintain the circle dance."
"We all want to dance in a ring, to a certain extent. It's wonderful to be part of a coherent movement, a whole that makes sense, joined with others working for the same goal and sharing the same beliefs," writes our dear blog friend neo-neocon, in her ongoing heroic attempt to account for the justification of "self-proclaimed progressives on the side of preserving totalitarian regimes." Her recent post on Ramsey Clarke's anti-American fascination with criminals comes tantalizingly close, but no cigar. Here's what she has to say about "How the left lost its way":
But there's a price to pay when something challenges the tenets of that movement. When that happens, there are two kinds of people: those who change their ideas to fit the new facts, even if it means leaving the fold, and those who distort and twist the facts and logic to maintain the circle dance.
We were naturally reminded of our own "He knows if you've been bad or good" post of last March, where we pondered the persistence of belief in the face of scientific progress:
"If you look at three-to-five-year-olds, when they do something naughty, they have an intuition that everyone knows they've been naughty, regardless of whether they have seen or heard what they've done," says anthropologist-turned-psychologist Pascal Boyer. His tests on children "go some way to proving our natural tendency to believe."
This segues nicely into Dr. Sanity's "Command Hallucinations" post of a few weeks back re the "triumph of false perceptions over reality":
The American public is hearing voices. And like auditory hallucinations experienced by psychiatric patients, these voices whisper continual doom and gloom. They tell the American consumer that prices are too high. That the economy is tanking; that poverty is on the rise; and that everything is bad bad bad.
These voices are persistent and continual. They are unrelenting. They are often frightening. And like the command hallucinations that torment many of my patients, they are completely and totally untrue. You are bad. Life isn't worth living. They are trying to hurt you. Don't try, it's not worth it.
But back to the desire to dance in a ring, to be a worthwhile member of a worthwhile group. "Is consciousness the same as spirit," blogged here two summers ago, makes the case:
We favor Dr. Peter F. Rowbotham's explanation, in his 1992 essay "The Importance of Being Noticed" (not available online but referenced in earlier posts here and here), where he is talking about the unorthodox bonding rituals of Hell's Angels and British soccer fans as examples of a "system of honor that is an alternative to mainstream moral orders":
Could there not be certain parallels with the peacock's display and with hierarchies of animal dominance and subordination, and with factors affecting sexual selection? . . . The argument here is that expressive activities are a solution to a basic problem embedded in human nature, the problem of reconciling self-interest with the conflicting interests of others. We advance individual interests by acquiring Geltung, fundamentally because it increases our inclusive biological fitness, and more generally because it brings pleasurable rewards. But the giving of respect and honor is also the way that "society" shapes our behavior to be less self-serving, and sometimes even to be sacrificial. As such, it is part of a complex social web of checks and balances. It is the way that the biological interests of others are protected and advanced.
For us, Darwinian theory explains everything, from Tiny's and Baby's predatory behavior to the self-defeating antics of Islamofascists and Democrats blindsided by Bush Derangement Syndrome.
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