Artificial stupidity (Thomas Sowell)

That seems to describe many on the right including Sowell who is lazy in his arguments.

Things I have noticed when dealing with the right on internet fora.

1.) Right wingers are more apt to misread what is written than are people on the left.

2.) Right wingers are more apt to name call rather than state a disagreement.

3.) The latest thing . . . and this is a disturbing trend . . . is the right favors cutting back on many school subjects. The right has tended to hate art and music and has always wanted to cancel recess. Lately, conservatives (and not just those who oppose the idea of evolution) wish to limit the teaching of science.

You majored in recess I take it....

Ah! So typical! No facts. Just insults!

I take it they can also grow from right to the left ?

If there were a rational reason for it, yes. I don't know of any...

I "grew" from left to right. In theory I was supposed to be a lifelong liberal democrat. My parents grew up as new-dealers and were always involved in demmy politics one way or other, in fact my mother was a delegate at that hideous demmy convention in Chicago in 68, and it wasn't easy to even find republicans around where I grew up.

It took me about six or eight years of living in the real world to outgrow all of that. Walking around with nearly worthless college degrees being told I needed to be black or female to find jobs might have had something to do with it; I was able to work around that more or less. Jimmy carter DEFINITELY had something to do with it, the 20/20 thing (20% inflation and 20% interest rates at the same time), the disaster in Iran which Carter created, the fictitious oil shortages...

At that time I still figured that whatever had happened to the dems was temporary and some sort of an abberation. The point at which that ended and I started despising the fuckers was the Clarence Thomas hearings and particularly the testimony of that Texas lawyer Dogett and the conduct of Ted Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum, and then of course you had the 8-year reign of terror of the KKKlintler regime, culminating in an 80-day bombing campaign against an innocent Christian nation for the benefit of slammite narco-terrorists and savages, and now this Oinkbama regime which many figure to be worse than either Carter or KKKlintler.

I mean, it's remotely possible that I could live another twenty or thirty years starting from now, but I don't see any likelihood of me "growing" towards the left in that time.

I was always anti-authoritarian, Individualist, hedonist on the right because of the Bill of Rights.

Challenge authority.





David

First to come to mind are all these rich dudes who give away money to charity when they get older. Would you consider that an example of going from right to left ?

I have given away money, but I 've always been with Barry Goldwater and Ludwig von Mises.





David

Thus the religious right's terror of higher education. (Or any education at all, really.) Some of them are honestly convinced that there's a conspiracy to make kids into Liberals.

It would help their recruiting if conservatives had anything to offer other than foot-dragging.

Not hardly. Charity is the opposite of leftist tendencies, which amount to taking money from the middle class and spreading it out amongst kept voting blocks.

I would consider them an example of people avoiding the payment of taxes.

Are they ever! What bothers me most, as I wrote above, is their attack on science.

However, I now teach development writing at a community college. On another forum, I shared how dismayed I am that my students can not differentiate between a noun and verb. I made my despair public in large part because I wanted people to understand how important it is to make some changes in education. I would prefer that schools return to sentence diagramming. . . but that is the subject for another thread.

So, I administered a very easy test on verbs. I gave the students a story in which they had to fill in the verbs in the past tense. The present tense verbs were made available to them.

Now, because one of my students asked that he only be given one set of instructions at a time due to his ADD, I had the students hold their tests and not turn them in when they were completed.

I then asked them to circle the subject of each sentence.

Now, this is basically what would have been a fourth or fifth grade test at my elementary school.

However, the rightwingers from the forum offered two, contradictory to me, responses:

The first is that those students should not be in college.

The second is that I was unfair to ask them to identify the nouns on a test about verbs.

Charity for many if not most leftists involves giving of one's self, volunteering at public radio and television stations, working at shelters and hammering nails at Habitat for Humanity.

And I thought I was cynical...so those people who have accumulated too much during their lives and give back to the community are not doing it out of a belief of equality or sympathy ? I dont believe that....I think they do appreciate what they have achieved and it leads them to help others less fortunate. Isnt that a basic left principle ?

You have been telling this story for years. It is, I would say, a rather unexamined tale that ought to have some light shed on it. Just because your parents were registered Democrats does not mean they were liberals.

In fact, once upon a time . . . during that time . . . there were liberal, moderate and conservative wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Kennedy and Nixon were not far apart in 1960. Kennedy's death did more to champion civil rights and to transform LBJ into an icon in the history of civil rights while allowing him to remain a mid-20th C slightly right of centrist in other matters.

I would also say that you haven't learned much. You rant on and on about your useless degrees. Yet you never say what they are in or where you studied.

While you blame Carter for inflation . . . you neglect to blame reagan for the national debt that soared during his WH years.

And you refuse to look at AMerican liberalism through the lens of history. Liberals in the 19th C were ABolitionists and Suffragettes. The AMerican right is responsible for the situation revealed in Douglas Blackmon's book, Slavery by Another Name.

More recently, American conservatism prompted the lies of Condi Rice about mushroom clouds to Congress that led to engagement in the Iraq War.

Oh, and the Repubs ranted about how wrong Hilary Clinton's WH centered research on health care reform was and insisted it be done in Congress. Now that Obama is attempting reform in Congress, the Repubs say it is behind closed doors, yet, everyone in America can down load every piece of info from the internet, meaning those doors are not tightly closed!

Finally, if the Repubs had been interested in health care reform, why didn't they do something about it during the eight bush years? After all, this is a man who described himself as a 'compassionate conservative,' a propaganda trick whereby one presents himself as the opposite of what he is . . . but . . .hey! Why should anyone break down the barriers of artificial stupidity?

Your basic problem: it's harder than hell to teach grammer to people whose only known language is English, which basically doesn't have any grammar. Teach them to speak Russian or German and the problem should go away.

Then again, there's the case of the girl who right-wingers refer to as "Saint Pancake"...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2467873/posts?page=17#17

Not that anybody could call that artificial stupidity...