Eric Hoffer Notes - "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."

James Taranto writes:

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength," the longshoreman cum philosopher Eric Hoffer once observed. Hoffer died in 1983, so he probably wasn't referring specifically to Joe Biden's performance in last night's debate. Still, the observation is fitting.

In addition to the vice president's boorishness, a lot of observers noted that he frequently smiled and chuckled at inappropriate times--even during a discussion of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. The Republican National Committee quickly put out an ad consisting of nearly a minute of such clips followed by the caption: "Vice President Biden is laughing . . . Are you?" If Biden finds himself out of work in January, he may have a career ahead of him as a Fixodent pitchman.

And:

And so he overcompensated for his weakness by acting the bully in an attempt to dominate Ryan. His behavior was not only consistent with Hoffer's aphorism but in sharp contrast with that of Mitt Romney, who actually did dominate Obama in a coolly masterful way. If Biden's rudeness was an imitation of strength, Romney's poise was a display of the real thing.

Then there is this on Biden's obviously ridiculous statement that we don't have to worry about Iran getting "fissile material":

Mediaite.com reports that even Tom Brokaw said it was inappropriate for Biden to laugh during the discussion of Iran, whose president has vowed to exterminate Israel. Reader Taylor Dinerman, a journalist who specializes in aerospace (and who also knows National Review's Rich Lowry), argues that Biden's pooh-poohing of Iran's developing nuclear capability was dangerously fatuous:

The worst part of the debate and the part that I wish Ryan had been able to counter was when Biden started in on the "They don't have a bomb to put (the fissile material) into."

This is outrageous. The hard part of building a nuclear weapon is to get the fissile material, bomb designs are a dime a dozen and anyone who has access to a copy of the Progressive Magazine from the 1970s when they published a bomb design they had dug up from some documents that were found in the Los Alamos public library can build one. The A.Q. Khan design has long been available to them including any refinements the North Koreans have made.

Making a warhead that can fit on a missile may be harder, but building a basic nuclear weapon that could be put on an airliner or a ship is easy once you have the material.

Doesn't seem so funny now, does it?

The Mystery of Eric Hoffer.

Hoffer was "Longshoreman Philosopher" of San Francisco. He was a true autodidact who wrote the True Believer on a plank in a flophouse. But where he was from and what he did before he was 35 is a mystery.

Young Eric agreed that Hoffer's account of his early life didn't add up. He thought Hoffer's case might be comparable to that of B. Traven, the mysterious German author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, whose identity is still unknown. (B. Traven was a pen name.)

But most significant was the response of Lili Osborne. She could be intimidating, and I worried that she might throw me out when I expressed skepticism about Hoffer's early life. Instead she welcomed the idea and said she had always thought of him as an immigrant. She had no definite knowledge. She did say that "all we know about his early life is what he told us." She also said that, although she had known Hoffer for 30 years, she never once met anyone from his earlier (pre-True Believer) life.

Why do they/we hate us?

Glen Reynolds observes:

JUST IN TIME FOR THE ELECTION RUN-UP: Authorities rank “sovereign citizen” movement among greatest threats. And the Southern Poverty Law Center — ever eager to help the Democrats paint the right as violent — chimes in.

Notice that there’s never any “why do they hate us?” agonizing where these groups are concerned.

Also "Dissent is Patriotic" only when a Republican is in the White House.

Here is the article that Reynolds is referring to.

People who espouse the idea of being "sovereign citizens" are loons. But, then, so are the Occupy idiots, Black Supremacists and Islamic Extremists, and, yet, the media goes in searcho of "root causes" with them, but when it comes to disaffected white crazy folks, they have zero interest in "root causes."

The root causes for all of these kinds of groups, by the way, was classically dissected by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, which should be "must reading" for anyone who wants to pretend to being "well-read."

Alibis and Achievement

"There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life."

--- Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind