| Mr Khan said: I would like to broker a discussion on the American right wing and its peculiar hostility towards intellectualism. While there is a certain emphasis on values that is necessary for the American left to function (namely the value of giving the disadvantaged a leg up rather than letting the market sort things out), i do feel that the left wing in America is far more amicable to science and the pursuit of knowledge as a moral good than the right, where the pursuit of knowledge is viewed with suspicion at best, despite the fact that the party leadership on the Right is all reasonably well-educated, they tend to propound education as elitist (Rick Santorum, who was once a lawyer meaning he went through college and law school, has implied that college education is elitist). Alternatively, if you look at the most intellectual, by reason of IQ and other such metrics, these same programs that the left promotes are far and away from the programs the smartest would inact. I need to find the research done by the club (the top 0.01% of people by IQ, more exclusive than MENSA by far), but more or less, their objection to government is far more piqued than the right ever have been. It seems like the Right, in its belief that government is bad, has absorbed the idea that people who know about government are bad, and would be less fit governors, with the growing myth that the self-made outsider is better than the experienced civil servant, which one sees with the Republican Party's brief flirtation with Herman Cain, a man with zero political experience (evidenced by his ill-conceived 9-9-9 plan), as being superior to Washington types. The left also can make government out to be bad. The left generally demonizes governments that prevent people from engaging in personal activities, compared to the right which demonizes governments that prevent people from engaging in free economic choices. In regards to Mr. Cain, he was the archetect behind defeating Clinton's universal health care program. In a televised debate, Mr. Cain used his analytical skills to call out Clinton's bunk data in regards to his proposed mandate, causing him to shelf the program entirely. So Mr. Cain had some political experience, but not as an actual politician. Furthermore, many government leaders have taken the path of little involvement in office before holding major title. Herbert Hoover was a millionaire/philantropist before being drafted as Secretary of Commerce by Harding. He then (as we all know), became president after Coolege. You see it also in the rejection of fairly well-established scientific facts as well: being homosexual isn't a choice, human activity is causing climate change, and yes, humanity evolved from lower life forms. Money flowing from right-wing think tanks fund entire branches of psuedoscience to try to disprove these things, but what is more important is that the rank-and-file conservatives pick up the ideas that various branches of science are false and take them in as core conviction, and then look with suspicion on anyone who takes these facts for what they are: proven as far as empirical science is able. Alternatively, you could look at the funding leftist governments or politicians use to fund bunk sciences or bad sciences, and it'd be hard to come out with a definitive metric that would point to right-wingers promoting crap in the public sphere. Synthetic Fuels Corporation, anyone? Furthermore, you argue frame that the global warming argument is entirely sound, and framed in proper context. As per the left, they would invoke cap & trade and other measures to rectify this problem. This type of reach by government would be far, far, more destructive to the nation than all right-wing programs (Intelligent design, creationism, gender studies, ect) combined. The right embraces mythology more frequently than the left, which is evidenced by the number of falsehoods that are constantly spun out by the party compared to the falsehoods that were embraced by the left (9/11 truthers being a wacko movement that the left wing flirted with, but importantly a movement that was fairly conclusively silenced by science). At the same time as 9/11 truthing was defeated as evidence emerged, no amount of evidence can seem to shut up the Obama Birthers, or the 89% of Mississippi residents who think Obama isn't Christian, or hell, the large part of the Republican base that thinks Mitt Romney isn't Christian (of course, these are the kind of people that would likely say Rick Santorum isn't Christian either. He's "Catholic.") They know what they know, and no-one better qualified than them is going to interfere with their conviction using something as trivial as fact. You don't remember Bush being in office, and all of the false, unobjective, virotol spewed at him, do you? You assume such conspiracies are entirely right wing in their nature. They generally presist in regards to whomever is president at the time. The last point i think is important, it's that Conviction > Objectivity on the right. You don't need to know anything about a given topic, you simply need to have faith, to have conviction, similar to George W. Bush who "knew" that going into Iraq was the right thing to do, or similar to Sarah Palin, who (it is increasingly clear from people who worked with the woman) knew dangerously little about anything and seemed to be damn proud of it, and when people point out that this is bad, as it is, she and her supporters accuse them of being elitist. Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann openly embraced revisionist history on a few points, and the Texas Board of Education tried to write out Thomas Jefferson for being too radical. Money shouldn't be going to public education anyway, as its dangerous letting the state teach our children (and treasonous to ever think of giving the people entrusted with that responsibility more money), because what is the value of our children knowing anything more than how to hold a job? While the American left may try to dilute reality in the drive for political correctness, they never veer away from objective fact, merely from subjective labeling of objective fact. For Republicans, meanwhile, it's cool to be dumb, and watching the current Republican Primaries is watching an intellectual race to the bottom. Perhaps next we'll see Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum on stage smacking themselves over the head with hammers, to prove that they can kill more brain-cells than the others and thus become less of a dangerous, pointy-headed intellectual. The left is no more objective than the right. They use emotions to persuade people to their cause just as much as the right does. If you want a few dozen examples, I can pull them up. When was the last time Obama actually pitched something to the legislature and brought charts and data into the presentation? When I watch C-Span, I rarely see left-leaning members of Congress or the Senate bring in charts or data to objectively promote their agenda. Comparatively, I've seen far more right-leaning members use such devices to promote their agenda, which would totally nullify your argument that the left is somehow more fact-based. |
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
