Monbiot: Attack of the gibbering right-wing jizzbots

[Ebadlun]

Don't take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that "conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics". The result is a "shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology" which has "ominous real-world consequences for American society".

Lofgren complains that "the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today". The Republican party, with its "prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science" is appealing to what he calls the "low-information voter", or the "misinformation voter". While most office holders probably don't believe the "reactionary and paranoid claptrap" they peddle, "they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base".

The madness hasn't gone as far in the UK, but the effects of the Conservative appeal to stupidity are making themselves felt. This week the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits, scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and threats from other people.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/06/right-stupidity-spreads-enabled-polite-left

[11 Bravo]

1. K & R just for "gibbering right-wing jizzbots"!

[TrogL]

2. Ignorance is strength

[Lunacee2012]

3. This is from the article:

"But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the "critical pathway" from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to "rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order" and "emphasise the maintenance of the status quo". "

I've heard of other studies linking low intelligence and racism to conservative ideologies, but I didn't know if some people were conservative because of their low IQ or because of their racist beliefs. Apparently the trail goes from stupid to conservative then to racist.

The fact that disabled people are getting abused in Britain because of the way their government talks about them is a little scary. Some members of our own government talk about disabled citizens in the same exact manner. I'm about 70% blind (thank God for Ctrl +++!) and it scares me a little that the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), even though they're overseas, is getting reports of abuse. I really hope that doesn't happen here.

[rustydog]

4. Who would have thought "Idiocracy" was a prophecy?