Tag: know-nothing

Angle won because she looked relatively credible, appearing not to be the Wicked Witch of the West.

Jon Ralston puts yet another shiv of ignorance into our already dying state. This is the same meaningless horseshit brew of absurdly low expectations that gave us W Bush, two eternal wars, and a nearly complete economic collapse. Apparently the View from Nowhere just won’t be sated until those few of us left are all living on the riverside and trading skins with whoever floats by.

Watching Christine O’Donnell debate Chris Coons last night, we were struck by how sensible a person like O’Donnell can seem, given our brain-dead political norms, if she has been prepared in a few modest ways. O’Donnell tossed off familiar claims about “supporting big government,” “raising taxes” and “supporting the special interests” (along with a few specialized inanities about having once been a “bearded Marxist”). But our discourse has been so dumb for so long, it truly sounded, by American norms, like she was making real statements.

Bob Somerby, getting it exactly right.
You want an existential threat to Our Republic (as the GOP so frequently labels everything, large or small)? This is it. Until somebody in the media goes to work on raising the level of discourse that is allowed to pass for debates and serious discussions in this country, and then continues working on that same issue for a decade or more, we’ll be one downturn, one election, one heartbeat away from utter disaster. Nobody else can do it, and nobody but nobody in the MSM seems at all interested in taking up the cause, even for an hour a week. Oh look, a shiny penny!

I’m left fearing the future of America’s leadership on the world stage of science and technology.
This leadership, as any historian will tell you, drives the economic strength and security of nations. The fall is not from a cliff. More like a slow, downward slide – almost imperceptible from day to day. But as the years pass America will have descended from leaders to players to merely followers as we fade to insignificance, at best hitching a ride on the innovations of others.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History. This is indeed what the far right know-nothings are toying with every time they make temporary political hay on their various anti-intellectual screeds; sadly, Tyson points to an outcome as predictable as it is inevitable. The wages of this sort of systematic denialism of empirical reality are secondary and tertiary status in research and, by extension, our national economic output and potential. Please do check the trend lines of global academic citations of North American science vs. Western European if you doubt me.