On the Urban Front Lines

What follows is an amalgam of responses in the thread Double Down at the Belmont club.

WWS/168:

I’ve finally won the global warming argument with 3 “true believer” relatives.

That's 2 extended family members better than me on AGW. Congratulations.

It took years of them believing I was a whacko and then climategate and then a really cold winter they could see before they finally lost the faith.

1 of them actually switched and will say he doesn’t believe it any more, the 2 woman simply say they never want to hear anything about global warming either way ever again. But since they used to preach the evils of what mankind was doing to the planet, that’s as good as a win in my book.

And of course there’s the biggest benefit is that if I can break their belief in one thing the snake oil peddlers are selling, I have gone a long way towards breaking their beliefs in *everything* the snake oil peddlers are selling.

But don’t shoot too high on these conversion efforts – realize, politically, that the *best* possible case for former leftists may be that they simply become so disgusted with politics that they never vote and never contribute to anyone again. [emphasis added - PF]

Normally good advice, but hell, don't tell a man on the front lines to retreat unless it's time to surrender.

Oh, and I too got a concession on AGW from a family friend a couple of nights ago. However, he still thinks the ends justify the means “because look how clean the air is now.”

After I hope I suppressed an eye-roll, I lacked time needed to get him then to concede the two issues are not the same. What he’d done was casually switched the argument to the old demagogic sophistry that liberals like clean air and conservatives like filth -- quite symptomatic of his state sponsored Incremental programming.

Your two women may have done something similar, only they didn’t let on to you (cuz they didn’t wanna talk anymore). IOW, you may still need to sonar for that evasion (delicately) to sustain your success.

One of the reasons urbanites, even those in the middle class, vote in large numbers for the Left really seems to be something akin to Stockholm syndrome. The urbanite still believes s/he's liberal even as his candidates are openly fascist, or conservative and his candidates prove to be worse than merely spineless. Demonstrated inconsistency are met with everything from shifts in subject to violent denials, and only conceded in the manner you describe -- "I don't want to talk about it!"

Voter fraud is close to a sacrament here, committed by radicals who use illegal aliens, protected by Incrementals who claim any crackdown is racist (Dems) or could appear to be (GOP).  Nobody should forget how over-the-top both Schwarzenegger and GWBush reacted to the Orange County GOP candidate who ran against Loretta Sanchez's voter roll padding. We will never get a super-majority of any sort of conservative movement as long as the Sinisters can steal enough congressional seats to form a troublesome bloc.

What is that [Proper name] rule that any institution not conservatively anchored must eventually turn Left? Giving up on large areas of the country WILL sustain that rule for sure, and today's win will be but another forestalling of the inevitable end of this great republic.