Yes, "progressives", College Liberals and Fashionable Leftists love to make fun of the Creationists; and the creationists certain deserve to be made fun of. But be wary who you're mocking when you have a ridiculously huge log in your own eye.
And that's the thing, so, so many "progressives" believe the dumbest bullshit. They mock creationism, but they believe that a little drop of a molecule strained 30000 times through water will retain magical properties. They believe in aura healing, crystal power, and the magic power of essential oils to cure your cancer. They don't believe that Jesus made the world 6000 years ago, and find that ridiculous because its 'unscientific', but they certainly do believe that if you have a "paleo diet" it will miraculously allow you to escape the very clutches of death; never mind that real historical "paleo" people died pretty horribly, and that there's no good evidence that the "paleo diet" really resembled what they ate at all. They believe in dolphin power, and that vaccines cause autism and white-light meditation cures it, or a vegan diet, or a $47 bottle of juice of some fruit extract from the rainforest; because they think the Rainforest is a magical fairy land.
Even the more rational ones will still believe that somehow labelling something "organic" will make it magically better and much, much healthier for you than something that has been through the process of the Green Revolution's Advances, so that a spotty and slightly wilted organic carrot is certainly going to be better for you and is worth the extra $4 it costs compared to a bunch of evil "GMO" ones, even if the "M" in that only consists in making a healthier carrot.
More terrifying is what they don't believe in (or rather, what they believe is evil): Western medicine, Science (except when being used to make fun of conservatives, but its definitely evil, for example, when its being used to design a new type of rice that will stop millions of children from going blind), any technology developed after the 13th century, and western civilization.
With rare exceptions, both sides believe idiotically stupid things; the only real difference is how the religious conservatives are less hipster about it. They're both equally righteous (just check out any raw food vegan condemning another vegan about eggs), they're both equally smug to those who aren't special like they are, they even both have the same judgmental sense of exclusivity. For example, and getting to today's link at long last: witness how Whole Foods is a temple to Bullshit, and how the way hipster progressives handle organic food can only possibly be compared to the most ultraorthodox of kosher/halal religious taboos ("I must cut bread with a separate knife, one that has never touched non-organic bread or there will be contamination!!").
RPGPundit
Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Solitario Volcano + H&H's Beverwyck
Guess its a waste of time and electrons to say that I am a "progressive" and I do not "certainly believe" any of the clap trap you want to smear me with above. Perhaps the fact that you start out with "so, so many" as a qualifier should excuse your later hyperbole, but it reads to me as more of a fall back in case someone objects. I am sure there are progressive anti-vacine folks, though most I have met have been Christian conservatives, and I am sure that there are kaballah liberal hipsters, and a dozen other far-left groups that you can freely mock. But lumping the entire Progressive movement (how do you define that anyway? Political? Social? Anyone more left than you) with these groups is as absurd as confusing the Christian Right Conservatives with the Pro-Big-Business Conservatives with the White Power Conservatives.
ReplyDeleteHe just hates hippies. Wait a second, I have to rearrange my chakras. Is your living room already Feng Shui, Pundit?
ReplyDeleteI get you. I don't like this hippie stuff either. I don't like conservative religion as well. I don't like extremes and it's always good venting your emotions.
A lot of the stuff you're talking about is pretty even among the political spectrum, for example anti-vax idiocy cuts pretty cleanly across various political groups hitting new agers and fundies alike. A lot of the other ones you mentioned are more popular among apolitical types than politically involved people of any stripe.
ReplyDeleteBut even granting your main idea, what's annoying about Creationism isn't so much that it's wrong but because it has an impact on public policy. Except for opposition to GMO, none of the stuff you mention has had any real impact on public policy that I can think of and it's very very very very rare for elected officially to publicly espouse the stuff you're talking about (except GMO) while you get all kinds of politicians being creationist.
David: the core demographic of the anti-vaccine group, while it does stretch out to encompass some anti-government conspiracy-types that could be defined as "right wing", are middle-class inadequately-educated Soccer-moms who are consistently "democrat-liberal" in ideas and imagine themselves 'spiritual' in the new age sense of taking community-hall yoga classes and reading Deepak Chopra books.
ReplyDeleteIn response to your comment and some of the others, certainly not everyone who self-identifies as liberal believes in all or even any of the things I mentioned above, but then again many people who identify as conservative don't believe in creationism either. And the problem is that liberals generally want to imagine themselves as so much smarter than the right-wingers while largely ignoring this sort of Woo-bullshit in their own circles. Even among those who don't personally fall for any of this crap, with the exception of a very tiny minority, there is hardly any attention or condemnation of this nonsense.
As for public policy, I would say that thanks to the influence of post-modernism, cultural relativism, Frankfurt-School Academia, etc. a great deal of these idiotic ideas have infiltrated our general culture AND public policy in very dangerous ways. It encourages a fundamental lack of confidence in objective truth, in the possibility of being able to determine things through reason and proofs, and thus undermines not only science but also the foundations of our entire culture.
If Creationists taken to their logical conclusion want to force us all back into medieval Theocracy, then the gaia-worshippers and relativists on the left want to try to force us all back to an imaginary pre-industrial barbarism. I find both equally dangerous.
I read the Whole Foods article yesterday with amusement. You are right, it is the same thing as creationists. The only thing good I have to say about Whole Foods is they have this spicy Thai-pepper potato chip that really good.
ReplyDeleteI will admit that I will go into creationism/religious debates with all guns firing and endless needle them on their stupidity. But I give the Woo types a pass because I see (or have seen) them as "mostly harmless". I know I am applying a double standard and I have been working on fixing that.
RPGPundit: nope, anti-vax affiliation cuts across the political spectrum pretty damn evenly. http://prospect.org/article/vaccine-fear-mongers-are-wrong-theyre-not-ideological
ReplyDeleteSure there's plenty of po-mo bullshit in certain quarters but a lot of that is noisy academics who don't have much demographic weight or political power and I don't think the demographics you're talking about are as much to the left as you think, I'm sure there are plenty of rich people who buy organic food and voted for Romney.
Well done, Timothy! As for David, I'm sure there are right wingers that go for crystal-healing or organic carrots, but we're talking about ideas embraced by group ideologies. Just like the right in the U.S. runs the limited gamut from actively being religious fundamentalism to making excuses for the same, the left does the same for insane new-age anti-science anti-civilization gibberish. You see some of the worst of it in environmentalism, which is another case of a very real effect of putting up with this bullshit. I would suggest that the "we should take away everyone's cars and indoor plumbing and make them discover the wonder of worshiping Mother Gaia" assholes are just as big if not a worse problem as the "we don't need to take care of the planet because Jeebus is coming soon" crowd. Because we all know the latter aren't environmentalists, while the former claim to represent some kind of serious movement dealing with serious problems and proposing serious solutions, as opposed to the insane Noble-Savage fantasyland they're really living in (one where science and technology, innovation, genetics, and civilization are somehow the Enemy). I think they do MORE harm to any real environmentalist causes than the religious freaks could possibly dream of doing, because people reject them and in the process reject the very premise of doing anything at all about some real and serious problems, just on the basis that doing so would seemingly mean having to let these assholes be in charge.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's strictly the fault of the Left for not denouncing and rejecting these fuckers for the nutcases they so clearly are.
ReplyDelete