Segregation From Reality

This has been a Southern/Confederate speciality literally for centuries. Facts and reality too painful to face? Just ignore them and cling to the myth. 

Political Animal:

David Roberts’s analysis of the American right’s self-segregation from reality, though written before the Moore news broke, nevertheless explains why Moore will likely win in a landslide:

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.

The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.

But the right’s institutions are not of the same kind as the ones they seek to displace. Mainstream scientists and journalists see themselves as beholden to values and standards that transcend party or faction. They try to separate truth from tribal interests and have developed various guild rules and procedures to help do that. They see themselves as neutral arbiters, even if they do not always uphold that ideal in practice.

The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were.

SNIP 

Moore win would be the least surprising development in modern American politics. There are millions of Americans, in Alabama and elsewhere, who walked away from facts, truth and reason decades ago. They will never come back. They are wedded to the vision of a permanent 1950s where women, African-Americans, members of the LGBTQ community and anyone who isn’t a straight white Christian male knows their place and knows their role. They regarding voting Democratic as a sin, not what Moore allegedly did to those young women. There is no bottom to the American right, no limits to its loathsomeness, no cap on its cruelty. When it comes to viciousness and venality, it’s fair to say that right-wingers just can’t get enough–and only want Moore.

Our Anti-Fact World

Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette:

How do we come to terms with the fact that we are moving towards a society in which a large segment of the population would take the Weekly World News seriously if it were to come back into print? Where actual facts are met with more suspicion than bizarre speculations based on no evidence whatsoever? The people who believe in things like Pizzagate are supposed to be wearing sandwich boards and too many sweaters and hollering at you while you wait for the bus, not on the nightly news. But here we are!

Agreed

Divine Irony:

boldatheism:

Finally something we can agree on.

Repug Alternate Reality

This is not new with trumpy.  It's been common since at least ronnie "tree cause pollution" and "welfare queens driving cadillacs" ray-guns.  Not to mention ol' "if the president does it it's not illegal."

Political animal:

Steve Benen accurately notes the Republican’s “alternate reality.”

GOP leaders said Obama’s auto rescue wouldn’t work; his Recovery Act wouldn’t end the Great Recession; his health care reform law would crush the job market; and his tax increases would push the economy towards another recession. None of these things happened in reality, and Republicans managed to get the entire story backwards.

But instead of explaining how and why they were wrong, Pence and Ryan have decided to simply make up their own story, claiming that the job market has been “crushed” and “killed” by White House policies.

Chances are, they’ll continue to embrace their own alternate reality because the electorate has rewarded their failures with complete control of federal policymaking. It’ll be the first time Republicans have enjoyed such dominance since the Bush/Cheney era – which also happens to be the last time Americans saw a healthy economy deteriorate into an economic catastrophe.

Your Feelings Are Irrelevant

Via Divine Irony:

The Clever Concept

Divine Irony:



confrontingbabble-on:

Every con-man…fraudster…and religious proponent, says…just trust me, blindly…

Bye-Bye Jamie: Acknowledging Obamacare Just Killed Comer's Gubernatorial Chances

You've drifted into Reality World, my boy, and the conservatard base will declare you UNCLEAN!

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

While proclaiming President Barack Obama's health care law "the worst piece of legislation in my lifetime," Kentucky gubernatorial candidate James Comer unveiled a health care policy platform Monday that assumes "Obamacare" will be the "rule of law" for the next governor.

Two of Comer's opponents — former U.S. Senate candidate Matt Bevin and recently retired state Supreme Court Justice Will T. Scott — have said they would end Kentucky's state-run health insurance exchange, Kynect, on their first day in office.

Although Comer described Kynect as a "tool to greatly expand Medicaid," he stopped short of calling for its demise. Doing so probably would increase costs for Kentucky taxpayers, the state's commissioner of agriculture said at a news conference packed with health care executives.

Ah, there it is:  "packed with health care executives."  The ones whose profits depend on the Affordable Care Act surviving and thriving.  The ones who will not be writing campaign checks to candidates who swear to destroy Obamacare.

But can even corporate money overcome Comer's apostasy?  The primary election is May 19.  Stay tuned.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/03/30/3776393/comer-breaks-with-field-on-obamacare.html#storylink=cpy

Things It's Hard to Believe Most People Don't Understand

Yeah, I'm a liberal elitist and so are all my friends.  You know why?  Because we know what's true.

PZ Myers:

Here’s a great list of 9 things many Americans just don’t understand — I’ve distilled it down to just the main headings, but you should read the whole thing.

1. Universal Healthcare Is Great for Free Enterprise and Great for Small Businesses
2. Comprehensive Sex Education Decreases Sexual Problems
3. American Exceptionalism Is Absolute Nonsense in 2015
4. Adequate Mass Transit Is a Huge Convenience
5. The Bible Was Not Written by Billionaire Hedge Fund Managers
6. Learning a Second or Third Language Is a Plus, Not a Character Flaw
7. Union Membership Benefits the Economy
8. Paid Maternity Leave Is the Norm in Most Developed Countries
9. Distrust of Oligarchy Is a Positive

You know who doesn't understand these obvious things, and you know why they don't. So what do we do about it?

Coincidence

Divine Irony:

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

Isaac Asimov (via whyallcaps)

↵ Originally from whyallcaps

↵ Reblogged from whats-out-there

# coincidence

The Conservative Cult of Optimism

It's poisoning not just public education, but issues from pollution to foreign policy.   They really think if you don't call attention to a toxic mess, it will go away - or at least the people complaining about it will go away.  They really think if you just keep proclaiming America is the greatest nation ever, that will make it true.

Rick Perlstein:

But there is an even more crucial factor at play here: American conservatism’s historic addiction to the power of positive thinking.

“It doesn’t emphasize any positive things,” said Jane Robbins, a fellow at something called the American Principles Project. “History class, echoed Julie Williams, the leader of the Jefferson County School Board’s three-member conservative majority, should predominantly concern “present positive aspects of the United States.”

And that, above all, is what pushed conservative buttons the hardest.

The cult of optimism in education is an old impulse on the right. In 1967, the target was the eighth grade text Land of the Free by the esteemed African-American historian John Hope Franklin. Pasadena’s “Land of the Free Committee” said the book’s “negative thought models” would give our children a “guilt complex.”

SNIP
Acolytes availed themselves of a clause in the Supreme Court’s anti-pornography Miller v. California decision giving municipalities the right to ban expression violating “contemporary community standards”; thus armed, a Ridgefield, Connecticut, school board banned Mike Royko’s biography of Mayor William J. Daley, Boss, explaining that it “portrays politics in an un-American way and we don’t want our kids to know about such things as corrupt politics”—a particularly neat example of the right-wing tendency to confuse patriotism with burying your head in the sand.

SNIP

Liberals—including those who might not even self-identify as such, since a vision of patriotism that insists on civic self-criticism is indeed ineluctably liberal, just as the conservatives charge—counter with the civic value of history that provides “a full measure of truth about our promises and our problems as Americans” (the president of the California Council of Social Studies, speaking in 1967), asking questions like, “Does that mean we’re going to eliminate slavery from class discussions, because that wasn’t a particularly positive time in our history?” (Jefferson County’s PTA president, just last month).

SNIP

But the underlying war will continue. Because whistling past the graveyard has become as much a part of the right wing’s political religion as, well, religion.

Which is funny. I thought conservatives were supposed to believe in America. Don’t they believe it’s strong enough to teach our kids how to think like grownups?

That's the conservative weakness liberals can't seem to exploit: the pants-shitting fear of everything and refusal to face facts.

Society

ummagumma.co:

(Source: yesimanatheist)

When Reality Proves You a Liar, Lie About Reality

Liberals suffer from the curse of honesty.  We just can't get away with the blatant lies that repugs and conservatards spew so blithely and effectively.  Maybe we just respect reality too much.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

Conservatives have the problem that reality continues to be punishing to their worldview. Abstinence education doesn’t prevent teen pregnancy; tax cuts don’t generate revenue; climate change is real; supply-side economics doesn’t create sustainable growth; etc.

Their usual answer to be battered by the way the world actually works, is to spend oodles of money telling voters convenient fantasies. Dynamic scoring is just another way of inserting their self-serving and misguided wishful thinking into the reality-based budget system.

QOTD

Charlie Pierce:

It doesn't matter how many people vote for the anti-gravity party, you still can't flap your arms and fly to the moon.

What It Is

ummagumma.co:


(Source: homecomingqueen)

Not Wanting to Know

ummagumma.co:

Happy Atheist

ummagumma.co:

(Source: skepticalavenger, via willwriteforchocolate)
 

Temples

ummagumma.co:

(Source: atheistjack)

           

Think for Yourself

ummagumma.co:

Difference

Ummagumma.co:

(Source: atheistjack)

What You Gain

ummagumma.co: