A word about Palin
Or, actually, four words.
Happy Dumb Evil Driven
AG reminded me, this morning, of our collegiate-era system for classifying behavior patterns. It was based on the Keirsey-Bates schema of
Introvert / Extrovert
Sensing / Feeling
Intuitive / Rational
Judging / Perceiving
To some extent, this system was useful for self examination. But that quickly lost it’s sheen. Our new system was an outwardly directed classification system, like the scrolling list of targets in the Terminator vision.
This new system was, itself, outwardly directed. “I don’t care about you or me. But what about that guy over there? What’s his deal?”
We came up with
Happy / Sad
Smart / Dumb
Good / Evil
Driven / Lazy.
In the Keirsey system, the largest split between types occurs between the second duality, between those who rely on their sensations and perceptions, primarily, as opposed to those who rely on a sort of, well, forgive me, apperceptive intuition. They just feel it, before, and beyond their knowing it.*
There’s no defending our system. The best I can say is that it is a system for the moment. The Keirsey system was designed to find solid ground under the temporal fluctuations of a personality. Only the first term was expected to allow for change over time.
Perhaps due to the realization of our own elasticity as college-aged individuals, our system allowed a lot of breathing room in the first three terms. This was by design. For us, at the time, and for me, still, the true bright line of discrimination is the last term. And even here, it was temporal. One could be Sad, Smart, Evil, and Driven in order to ruin the campaign for your ex-best-friend’s run for student government (if your school had a student government). But no one expected this Moriarty-like genius-gusto to last.
Even Bush. Dear, dear George W. Bush. That dumb SOB made my eyes well up when he announced we were dropping food (as well as bombs) on Afghanistan. I had never been confronted by pure, driven, ignorance. Until now. Over the weekend, Palin tried to malign “government spending” by attacking the scientific study of fruit flys.
Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.
This is the purest evil I have ever confronted. Palin tried to malign “government spending” by attacking the scientific study of fruit flys. That blogger put it better than I can:
This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community. You damn well better believe that there is research going on in animal models — what does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and chop up baby brains for this work? — and countries like France and Germany and England and Canada and China and India and others are all respected participants in these efforts.
Happy Dumb Evil Driven
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