When I was a kid, my mother was friends with a woman who was not all that right in the head. It was never discussed, but every once in a while I’d hear my father make mention of the fact that she was a nut. Even as kids we got the sense that she was a bit of a kook. At some point she went back to college to study psychology and it became her obsession. I recall she left her husband to go find herself or some such nonsense.

Looking back, the thing that was the root cause of her nuttiness was her difficult relationship with herself. She was always defining herself in some way. By that I mean every conversation would feature a section where she told you what sort of person she was as it related to the topic. As a kid I always found that to be very odd so I guess it’s why it stuck in my head.

Later in life I ran into other people like this and started to figure it out. People who are quick to sign up for the latest trends or join the latest fads are searching for an identity they can embrace. They either don’t know themselves or they hate themselves, I’m torn on the idea, but they seek to adopt an identity that they think is imbued with qualities they lack naturally. My mother’s wacko friend got into psychology looking for a cure and instead she joined a cult.

Anyway, that came to mind when reading this link I saw posted by a commenter on Sailer’s site. The post about Baltimore tells me the writer does not have any black friends as that’s the sort of thing I see from white people who love black people from a great distance. As a minority surrounded by black people, I know racism is the least of their problems.

I decided to look at his bio and that’s when I was reminded of the crazy women of my youth. These types of unbalanced people invest a lot of time in projecting their desired identity. You can be sure that within five minutes of meeting this guy for the first time he will tell you he is an atheist. After that it will be feminism, anti-racism, science! and whatever else the Left is peddling at the moment.

I have a friend that is a moonbat and he displays these same qualities. He’s mad at me for mocking his cult so he sent me a long e-mail declaring me a non-person the other day. In it he praised himself for science!, rationalism and lack of ideological fervor. Reading the Statement of Principles from that site, I wonder if my moonbat friend is one of his readers.

These guys always pitch themselves as perfect logic machines that arrive at the exact same conclusions as every other Progressive by pure reason. My moonbat friend got mad after I kept pointing out that his journey of self-discovery looks exactly like the op-ed section of the NYTimes. For some reason it is vital to the well being of the moonbat to believe they discovered these truths independently.

What I’ve always found amusing about my moonbat friend is the great gap between what he thinks he knows and what he actually knows. It’s fun to call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, and that may be the case, but I also suspect the Interwebs plays some role. My moonbat friend, like many of them, has declared himself a climatologist, sending me links from science articles that I know he never read. He thinks because he can find it on Wiki, he knows it.

This passage is a good example:

On the level of society and how best to organize it, I consider myself a classical liberal in the Enlightenment tradition. In the matter of human self-government, the only fair and feasible choice is representative democracy, which gives all adult members of a society an equal say in how that society should be governed. To safeguard the rights of minorities, however, every society should agree to bind itself by a constitution which guarantees fundamental human rights and puts them beyond the shifting dictates of popular will. All groups should rationally agree to such a bargain, in recognition of the Rawlsian argument that today’s majority may be tomorrow’s minority.

It’s clear he does not know what the terms “classical liberal” and “Rawlsian” mean, but they sound cool so they make excellent decorations. When you are pitching yourself as a moist robot, it’s important to sprinkle your personal statement with references to things you think smart people know. My bet is he thinks classical liberal is like classical music, your know, really old and stuff.

I suspect what the Internet has done for these people is make it much easier for them to get conformation. My mother’s crazy friend had to head off to college to find people she could join in a search for a new identity. Today, she would just join a Facebook group and read the array of moonbat sites on-line. David Lee spends his time reading fever swamp sites.