Mass Intelligence, 1982, 9-21-2014

Busy Days Precede a March Focusing on Climate Change - NYTimes.com:

Lack of perspective and hubris, two hallmarks of humanity that are often starkly displayed in the large -- hundreds of thousands of agitated, morally certain, angry, self righteous humanity displaying their certainty that the mob has to be right.

The linked article about the Global Warming (GW) march in NYC scheduled for this Sunday mentions a couple of times that this is expected to be the largest march since the nuclear freeze march in '82.

I was very alive n '82, it was my 4th year at IBM. There were people at IBM "10%?" that were VERY afraid of the "Reagan the madman" ... some had "bug out shelters" in NW WI, most were just afraid, honestly afraid. The HATRED of Reagan and Thatcher in the early '80s for a large segment of the population -- close in size and even more vocal than even the GW segment today was significant. Reagan was maligned by the press and intelligentsia worse than the Tea Party today -- there was no Fox News or Talk Radio to defend him.

"Reagan was going to get us all killed". They were CERTAIN of it. They were ABSOLUTELY certain not only that the USSR was going to be around "at least as long as the US, and likely longer", but they and NPR, NYTs, etc had a good deal of glowing coverage of life in the USSR -- free education, free medical care, total equality for women, abortion on demand for free ... only the "closed minded" in America could not appreciate the many advantages of their system. Daniel Ortega, Marxist dictator of Nicaragua was a cool celebrity -- a modern Che Guevera. He hobnobbed with Bianca Jagger.

All those 100's of thousands of people marching were absolutely certain that things like the MX missile, and any sort of missile defense system, "Star Wars" or other would absolutely get us killed! To think otherwise showed delusion, a total unwillingness to understand reality as it actually was. Intellectual weakness -- having been brainwashed by the evil Reagan and the "Military Industrial Complex" -- the elite in "The Party" (D), education and the MSM all KNEW that Reagan's proposals COULD NOT WORK. The USSR was (in their view at the time, thankfully) with us forever -- we would be better to learn from the many good points of their system than to malign it and pretend that it could be defeated as the idiot Reagan proposed.

So here we are today. Some of the same people that organized that march, certain then, and STILL certain -- their ability to question their predictions has not changed a bit in over 30 years. They were certain that folks that disagreed with their World View and predictions then were "stupid, deluded, not willing to see the real world, etc). They feel the same way now, and I'm quite certain they, and their intellectual offspring, will be just as certain on a new front 30 years from now.

There is a reason that our founders distrusted democracy and founded a REPUBLIC. Hubris and lack of perspective would be two of those reasons.

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