Just when you think right-wing intelligence can't be any lower, it is -- they don't know the meaning of "choice"

Dint ol' Ronnie Reagan hisself promis us we dint hafta beleeve in no stuff we dint wanna like no Big Bongs which anyways is just a big bell or somethin' in Inglund?

by Ken

Do you know what the word "choice" means? What it means to choose between options? Yes, you say? You do? Then I'm sorry to have to tell you that apparently you have just been disqualified from being a right-winger.

We'll come back to this in a moment. Meanwhile I want to commiserate with Daily Kos blogger LaFeminista, who yesterday found herself banging her head up against the limits of right-wing intelligence, in a poignant post called "Breaking: Americans Find Something Else Not To Effing Believe In."

Evolution is so absurd but the idea of humans walking with dinosaurs is quite interesting.

Climate change is a liberal commie Nazi plot

Now we have the Big Bang

WASHINGTON, April 21 (UPI) -- In a new national poll on America's scientific acumen, more than half of respondents said they were "not too confident" or "not at all confident" that "the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang."

The UPI "Science News" post in question, by the way, is headed "Majority of Americans doubt the Big Bang theory."

This leads our author to wonder, "What is the basis of their opinion/lack of confidence?"

Oh right.

The same as everything else when faced with complicated theories.

suggesting more respondents are aware of the science than originally suggested -- they just don't believe the science.

I don't believe. WTF?

It has come to the point where all debate is reduced to belief, that is all well and good when debating about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

What annoys the crap out of me is that it has become the lazy way of getting around having to study and think.

I don't believe the science, yada, yada plus vacuous anecdotal evidence; fairy dust.

Well fuck you then

Show me some bloody data or just admit that you don't know.

Yes indeed, "it has come to the point where all debate is reduced to belief," and as I note frequently, to my mind this is the most enduring and profound (measuring in at a tiny fraction of a micron deep) of America's folksiest sage, Ronald Reagan. Professor Reagan taught Americans that they didn't have to fear or even entertain doubt in the face of unpleasant reality. In reality, he told them, reality is only what you want to believe. (The corollary, which wasn't actually part of the Reagan doctrine but has since been intuited, is that if anyone tries to force you to believe stuff you don't wanna, well, isn't that why God gave us guns?)

I COULDN'T HELP THINKING OF THIS POST IN
CONNECTION WITH A THINKPROGRESS ONE

Why on earth shouldn't Chelsea and Marc be happy?

It's a piece by Tara Culp-Ressler called "Why Chelsea Clinton’s Pregnancy Is So Baffling To Abortion Opponents." The post begins (links onsite):

Last week, the news that Chelsea Clinton is expecting her first child inspired its fair share of headlines — even fueling suggestions that it was somehow carefully timed to benefit her mother’s potential presidential run. The announcement also made the rounds in the right-wing blogosphere, inspiring several op-eds attempting to highlight the apparent contrast between the Clintons’ stance on reproductive rights and their daughter’s decision to have a child.

Now this too kind of floored me when I belatedly heard about it. This goes beyond the usual category of "You can't make this stuff up" to "Why would anybody try to make this up?" There is supposed to be some conflict between being "pro-choice" and choosing to have a baby? Huh? What am I missing here?

Abortion opponents expressed confusion that the Clintons would refer to Chelsea’s unborn child as a “baby” and not a “fetus,” suggesting that’s wholly incompatible with their support for legal abortion. “When it’s their own grandchild, it appears the Clintons see things differently, with their words most definitely betraying their true feelings on the matter. No talk of a non-person fetus, only of a child,” a Christian Post editorial noted, declaring that the Clintons must actually believe that life begins at conception.

The insinuation, of course, is that the people who support abortion rights must always opt for abortion over pregnancy. But that’s an incredibly black-and-white view of reproductive rights that doesn’t actually reflect the reality of Americans’ experiences — including the women who have chosen to end a pregnancy at some point in their lives.

Although the issue of reproductive rights typically separates people into two camps, either “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” there’s increasing evidence that those labels don’t accurately capture Americans’ complex relationships to abortion. Many people identify as both, and say their attitude about the procedure depends on the situation. Some people who tell pollsters they’re “pro-life” don’t actually support overturning Roe v. Wade. It’s possible to believe you are carrying a baby and choose to end the pregnancy anyway. Many times, personal experiences with abortion fall into what’s known as a “grey area” between the two political camps.

Tara goes on to make some excellent and interesting points about the actual attitudes of actual people on the subjects of pregnancy and abortion. It's a fine piece, and I encourage you to read it.

But I found myself still stuck back at ground zero, this supposed incompatibility between being pro-choice and choosing to have a baby. Until it finally hit me that the supposed pro-lifers, who as we know are only in favor of a few very narrowly defined forms of life, and are in fact enormously hostile to most others, literally do not know the meaning of the word choice. And possibly, it occurred to me, they have no concept of the mental process of choosing, of arriving at the best possible set of alternatives in any given situation and then, using all your developed mental faculties, making the most informed possible choice among those alternatives.

It is, in other words, the basic, essential process by which everything that can be accomplished by these minds -- with which we were endowed by some sort of creator -- is accomplished. And of course the process includes accepting responsibliity for our choices.

Which takes me straight back to "what annoys the crap out of" LaFeminista: that this business of reducing all debate to belief "has become the lazy way of getting around having to study and think."

Yes, it has. It's not only the groupthink mentality's way of protecting its Borg-like nonthinking collective from any necessity or even impulse to think. It's the groupthink mentality's front line of protection against the danger of anyone outside or inside the collective who may be infected with such an impulse.

Ladies and germs, I give you, on a platter, the Right-Wing War Against Science. Just because people were once able to get along with dinosaurs doesn't mean we have to subject ourselves to scientific silliness like evolution and climate change and now these damn big bongs.

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