I know I'm long-winded (just under 1000 words), but if you read my "Not Quite" post, you'll find what I think is a very plausible explanation for why CK thinks as he does.

I don't think that you're a concern troll. But I can understand how some, exasaperated by the recent uptick in trolldom hereabouts, might have come to mistrust what I take as a genuine concern.

Pearl divers were my audience. Not swine. Unless, of course, they're pearl-diving swine.

Samoan sea-pigs of the world, unite!

I think that authoritarians have traditionally fared much better than they do nowadays. Sure, Ozymandius got cut down to size. But virtually all the societies were more authoritarian than not. But they had moderating elements as well that were not libertarian. It's the greater complexity and rate of change in the modern world that overloads authoritarian systems and makes them fail, when otherwise they would have survived.

I think that double-binds also fall into this same sort of analysis. It's not just the existence of contradictions that matters, but the intensity with which we are forced to confront them. In traditional societies, there are social rituals that function in part to relieve and "resolve" such contradictions. While far from perfect, they function much better when a society is relatively free from external stressors. So the more that the pace of life and interactions with outside societies picks up, the harder it is for them to work successfully.

What conservatives do is blame liberals (as well as cultural outsiders) for the increasing social failure that comes with the increased pace of change. (This was already happening in Greece several centuries before Socrates and Plato, so it's not just limited to the post-Medieval world.)

But liberals are actually just as concerned as conservatives about preserving social order and stablity. They just see that social stability requires a different social order under different conditions. It may be a more flexible, and diversified social order, but it's still a social order.

Conservatives can't see this, however, because for them the traditional social order is synonomous with social order per se. They are literally incapable of conceiving of any other social order, because the social order structures the very nature of their subjective selves.

It's happened before, repeatedly, when the right wing runs into serious trouble. It's already been noted that the John Birch Society identified Eisenhower as a Communist dupe. But several decades later, the JBS graduated to seeing Communism itself as merely a front for the Illuminati and other secret societies. (The Illuminati conspiracy was itself a right wing fabrication to explain away the French Revolution as not being the result of decades of monarchical/aristocratic misrule.)

So, now what we're seeing is not really an abberation at all. It's simply happened too often on the right. Because they need to have been right about WMDs in Iraq, they need to have some sort of explanation, and given the amount of support this story has already gotten, it bids fair to become the official wingnut version, which the 30-percenters of future generations will come to regard as gospel.

I am interested in knowing more about how her global warming denial fits into the mix. Is the IPCC controlled by China, for example? The Soviets? And once global warming becomes utterly undeniable even by them, will it suddenly turn out that it was all a plot to decieve us by presenting such phony evidence that we never suspected it was real?

farnsworth:

Can anyone believe they would choose a lie that leaves them responsible for an unjustifiable war over a lie that justifies their actions?

How much is Negroponte paying you to say that???