Your thesis is that everyone that disagrees with you politically is delusional. It's an interesting position for an intellectual coward, in that you don't ever have to debate a point. I live in the real world, where even those I disagree with sometimes have points of view I hadn't considered, so the "I'm far to superior to argue with you" approach doesn't work for me.
When you grow up moonie, you'll discover that you're not all knowing, you'll find that many other people are capable of rational thought and that they often have reasonable ideas, even though you don't agree with them.
In the first place this is not my thesis but facts uncovered by scientific tests a bit of which is described here:
"There’s the old saying that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to their own facts. Well there is significant evidence that Political Conservatives don’t appear to have a problem with creating their “own facts” when reality doesn't’t suit them.
That’s bad. How do you reason or compromise with someone that exists in an imaginary reality?
Now, there were always wing nuts, on both the Left and Right, that would make stuff up or come up with things that had no basis in reality but I always considered them to be at the extremes. What Moody was saying was that this “making up your own facts” has actually become part of the Conservative mainstream. After thinking about it, and reviewing his data, I have to admit that he may be right and that’s really scary.
Now, let’s be a little careful here because “Conservative” covers a lot of ground and not all Conservatives are living in la-la land but there are clearly far too many to be healthy for the country. According to Mooney, those most likely to generate their own version of reality are those with an authoritarian bent. Unfortunately that includes a lot of Conservatives including just about every Evangelical Christian.
Worse yet is they’re organized. I remember reading that the Conservative Christian solution to the majority of biblical scholars coming to conclusions they didn't’t like was simply to “train” more “biblical scholars” at conservative seminaries. At the moment they’re apparently cranking them out in such numbers that the idea of a “majority opinion” has just about lost all meaning in biblical scholarship.
According to Mooney the same thing is happening in economics, politics and law. If you don’t like what the experts say, then create your own experts seems to be the strategy and, unfortunately, it works when the public at large just doesn't’t have the knowledge to differentiate between reality and total crap and journalism hobbles itself with a misplaced concept of “balance.”
This is where loyalty, in most cases a virtue, becomes a vice. If some of these experts realize that the conservative dogma is wrong and say so, they become immediate pariahs and outcasts. Toeing the party line is more important than the truth.
Mooney points out that while the Left also has its share of delusional types, such as the anti-vaccine crowd, these aren't’t ideas championed by the educated elite on the Left because they don’t match up with the facts. As a matter of fact, criticism from the elite on the Left is stronger than criticism from the Right.
So it’s simple right? These are intelligent people. All you have to do is show them the facts and reason with them. That’s where it gets spooky. Anyone who has had exchanges on forums or in person has realized that it just doesn't’t seem to work. As a matter of fact, the more you show them they’re wrong, the stronger they seem to cling to their delusions.
Mooney presents evidence that this is indeed the case. The psychology is such that the need to believe what they want to believe is stronger than logic, stronger than facts and, in the final analysis, stronger than truth."
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Naturally, trying to explain this to you will probably drive you deeper into denial. Your big problem is that because you want to make me suffers some kind of emotional pain by calling me an intellectual coward because it's really you that's the intellectual coward, you will not want to admit so to yourself. If you could just see that you are an intellectual coward only because you had to become one to preserve your sense of dignity, you could maybe learn to let go of it as an adult. At any rate no matter what you say, the earth goes round the sun and the conservative mind is the kind of mind that needs to escape reality. All I did was point that out to you. All I did was explain, when you tried to claim that liberals are politically delusional that the science tells us otherwise. I had to assume, therefore, that you were projecting. I chose to be generous, of course, because I assumed you didn't know the real facts and weren't out and out lying. To me that is just being scientifically logical because it's likely as a conservative that you're not so much a liar as in denial. Anyway, you have been told the facts but they won't matter to you.
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