Birthers and sceptics

You’ve also missed the impending pivot on the global warming issue from conservatives, as signalled by Jonah Goldberg, in which the truth or falsity of global warming is irrelevant because Earth is going to be hit by an asteroid.

Alas, I think Lincoln got it right: the war was necessary to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” If the US had fragmented into two weak and hostile countries after less than a century, probably with at least one of them dominated by a European Great Power, it’s hard to imagine that the republican experiment would have looked like a success.

@Matt #6:

That’s a perfectly reasonable rationale, i guess. Saving face being worth more american casualties than were to be seen in what, a century?

anyway, speaking as a former southerner forced by circumstance to live again in the south after a blissful hiatus of several years, i think that now, since we’ve demonstrated the success of the democratic experiment to some degree, we can let them take their ball and go home. hell, maybe we can even get rid of some of the anti-abortion extremists, flypaper theory and all that.

Don’t you think that one could dig up similar silliness, at least as far as the birthers go, among Democrats?

No.

To clarify – some individuals, undoubtably. Half of them? See above answer.

Some people thought he was qualified to be President?

Not Democrats.

I appreciated the comment pointing out that it’s white southerners who live in a world of denial and delusion.

Non-whites in the south appear to have a reasonable connection to reality.

Maybe more pigmentation would help?

Then there are Green objections to GM foods, but these aren’t particularly salient in the US.

From what I’ve heard, many aren’t particularly anti-science, either.

One example of an unhinged conspiracy theory that used to float around on the left was the Truther movement: the people who believed not just that Bush was warned about the 9/11 attacks, but that the whole attack was staged. (Not that you usually ever heard it expressed so baldly. One way in which they’re similar is that you hear a lot more dark insinuations, “If they don’t have anything to hide then why…?”, than actual direct arguments.)

Both movements have their own documentaries, their own facts, their own mound of minute and possibly accurate detail. The Birthers who lecture you about fonts in postwar Hawaiian public records remind me a lot of the amateur metallurgists who step you frame by frame through the towers’ collapse.

The difference, of course: the unhinged conspiracy theorists in the Birther movement include big-name TV and radio stars and big chunks of the Republican leadership. At what point do so many people believe in an insane idea that you have to start calling it the lunatic mainstream instead of the lunatic fringe?

There is a difference between having stupid people among your ranks, which is inevitable in any group of millions, and going full bore for the stupid demographic, as the GOP has done since the Southern realignment.

It does rather challenge GK Chesterton’s observation. These people seem to be able to believe in God, Jeezus, and almost anything else…

Satan Mayo at 21 is right about the “truthers”. That’s a mix of “far left” types like Lydon LaRouche followers, and far-right anti-government types. It really has no support at all among the “mainstream” left or the democratic party. That seems not to be so of the Birfers.

Matt: ?
LaRouche is no more far left than Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Matt: I’ve been handed LaRouche literature at various times and places from say the late 70s to the 90s, and it was always obvious they were far-right and appealing to rightwingers. IMO, he differs from Pat Buchanan mostly in incidentals.

Does he present himself as on the left? I don’t know–where’s your evidence? Does he have a lingering belief in Marxist ideas? Since the only people who know much about Marxism are Marxists and former Marxists, I would certainly expect him to believe some things that are good markers for Marxism–the same for Whittaker Chambers, the same for the large number of 30s-era Communists who are now hard-line Republicans and Weekly Standard subscribers. I suspect saying he’s on the left is mostly a way for rightwingers who want to be reasonable to reject some of their own camp followers.

Alex @25

I’m not really so troubled by the misconceptions about plate tectonics, which I think is about par for the course of scientific ignorance in the US. It seems like about a medium hard question from the Pew survey of science understanding, for which only 10% of the Americans surveyed got all twelve questions right.

The thing that I find so fascinating about the birther issue in the south is that it is clearly a manufactured ignorance, not an ignorance from not paying attention. That’s just different from not understanding about continental drift. The contrast even with white republicans in the northeast, midwest, and west is quite extraordinary. Can we really explain it just by too frequent attention to Dobbs, Limbaugh, and the like, or are there powerful local effects that “force” people to misunderstand?

I’m not really so troubled by the misconceptions about plate tectonics, which I think is about par for the course of scientific ignorance in the US.

But look at the crossbreaks. All the groups got it right except for Republicans, and the three highest scoring groups were Democrats, blacks, and Latinos, who all got an absolute majority of Yes, and more importantly, only between 13 and 19% who got it explicitly wrong.

My point is that the Republicans in the survey were marked out by the fact they chose NO rather than DON’T KNOW; they were either unaware of their own ignorance, or else they were positively advertising it.

Lyndon LaRouche is a revealing test case. It turns out that the political spectrum is stitched together at its batshit extremes, and one’s political leaning can only be measured to modulo (2*batshit). Thus, when LaRouche passed the batshit threshold of zero on the Left, he wrapped around and acquired a batshit number of 1.999… on the Right. Hope this helps.

As to plate tectonics, I didn’t realize that Kos had done the poll, and that the question was phrased “Do you believe that America and Africa were once part of the same continent?” Cleverly done.

Instead, my first guess was that John was talking about Joe “Boxx of Roxx” Barton. If you follow the exchange, you’ll notice that Barton seems to be driving at something:

Isn’t it obvious that at one time it was a lot warmer in Alaska and on the North Pole? It wasn’t a big pipeline that we’ve created from Texas and shipped it up there and put it under ground so we can now pump it up?

Dumb like a fox, eh? OK, a really, really dumb fox, but still.

john theibult @33: In the 2000s the LaRoucheites were very anti-war and very anti-Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. The latter distinguished them starkly from Buchanan.

Buchanan was anti-war, anti-neocon (the paleos being among the most vocal critics of the neos) – and wrote at least one article about it.

As an aside (coincidentally I was just going through some notes on this stuff a short while ago), in fact he was such a credible opponent (i.e. one from within the Rep fold) that he attracted the accusation of anti-semitism:

One-time Presidential candidate and CNBC commentator Pat Buchanan, in a just-published article in the American Conservative, blames the conflict with Iraq on the State of Israel and a ‘cabal’ of neoconservatives, the majority of whom are Jewish and supporters of Israel*. Among Buchanan’s vitriol: “We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords.”
What is truly frightening is the fact that this anti-Israel, anti-Jewish rhetoric is not coming from the lunatic fringe. It is now creeping into the American mainstream — helped by bigots like Buchanan and Rep. James Moran.

*note that this gloss is added by the guy who authored the piece – and isn’t part of the accusation Buchanan makes. Here “Jewish and supporters of Israel” is used as though the two are part of a single, indivisible phenomonen cp. “this anti-Israel, anti-Jewish rhetoric”.

Tim,

The LaRoucheite literature I remember seeing in 2003/2004 was explicitly anti-Bush/Cheney (not that I saved any of the flyers that were being handed out at the Patco line so that I can be 100% sure of my recollection). I don’t recall Buchanan launching any sustained attacks on Bush and Cheney. Indeed, the whole point of the article you link to is that Bush is being “lured into a trap” by the neo-con cabal. I knew that he was anti-war and anti-neocon. And I don’t doubt that the LaRoucheite movement is suffused with similar anti-Semitism.

LaRouche started out on the far left, realized that there’s not really a sustainable market for far left politics in the United States and switched his associations to the far right. He’s crazy enough that you can still find mixes of crazy theories from both the far left and the far right.

“Then there are Green objections to GM foods, but these aren’t particularly salient in the US.”

Yes, and you can also here survivalist fears of GM foods if you listen to AM radio, since commericials for non-GM “survival seeds” can be heard during the breaks of programs such as Savage Nation. Of course, I believe the paranoia has a bit of truth to it since GM producers do come up with ways to f_ck over farmers with terminating seeds and what not.

Preferring to deal with realities on the muddy street rather than guessing from the Ivory Tower, i recently witnessed two LaRouche followers camped in front of our local post office as they interacted with some hapless locals. Friends, these guys are about as crazy as you can get walking around upright without a strait jacket.

In the 2000s the LaRoucheites were very anti-war and very anti-Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. The latter distinguished them starkly from Buchanan.

Really? Judging by Buchanan’s work at amconmag, his anti-war stance wouldn’t exactly “distinguish” him “starkly.”

So that plate tectonics question is going to be an interesting date point for St*v% S&^l#r to chew on. Looks like Black and Latino folks are smarter than white people. Too bad they didn’t sort out Asians or Ashkenazi Jews.

Somebody needs to create a diabolical (or perhaps it would be angelical?) IQ/standardized knowledge test, full of questions where movement conservatives who refuse to accept the truth will drag down the white average dramatically.

OMG STANDARDIZED TESTS HAVE BIASES WHO KNEW???

I don’t think the “same continent” question can be interpreted as nicely as we’d like to interpret it. It’s true that Southern whites answering “no” are probably, in many cases, ignorant of the science and guessing based on irrelevant prejudices; but the same is probably true of many Southern blacks and Latinos, whose irrelevant prejudices, in this case, are more likely to match the truth. A huge number of both right and wrong answers probably come from people who don’t know the science and are following their vague memories of what they’ve heard and gut instinct.
Also, seeing the question on the survey probably makes people think it must be a controversial issue; and then your answer is likely to depend on whether you think this is the sort of thing that would more likely be wrongly invented or wrongly covered up; that the liberals are trying to trick us into thinking we’re all the same race, or that the white power structure is trying to invent a separate identity for blacks.
Now if you asked something like “Geologists claim that America and Africa were once part of the same continent; do you think they are right?”, that would do something to separate the nuts from the merely ignorant.

But is there a parallel?

Yes there is a parallel.

Republicans disbelieve all bad things about themselves.

This is exactly parallel to believing all bad things about Obama.

WEST ALLIS, Wisconsin — Texas Gov. George W. Bush acknowledged Thursday that in 1976 he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol near his parents’ home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/02/bush.dui/

A conversation between Bush and an old friend, author Doug Wead, touched on the subject of use of illegal drugs. In the taped recording of the conversation, Bush explained his refusal to answer questions about whether he had used marijuana at some time in his past. “I wouldn’t answer the marijuana questions,” Bush says. “You know why? Because I don’t want some little kid doing what I tried.”[16] When Wead reminded Bush of his earlier public denial of using cocaine, Bush replied, “I haven’t denied anything.”[17]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_substance_abuse_controversy

Whatever the case, even though his superiors knew he’d blown off his duties, they never disciplined him. (No one’s ever been shot at dawn for missing a weekend guard drill, but policy at the time was to put shirkers on active duty.) Indeed, when Bush decided to go to business school at Harvard in the fall of 1973, he requested and got an honorable discharge — eight months before his service was scheduled to end.

Bush’s enemies say all this proves he was a cowardly deserter. Nonsense. He was a pampered rich kid who took advantage. Why wasn’t he called on it in a serious way during the 2000 election? Probably because Democrats figured they’d get Clinton’s draft-dodging thing thrown back at them. Not that it matters. If history judges Bush harshly — and it probably will — it won’t be for screwing up as a young smart aleck, but for getting us into this damn fool war.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2446/did-george-w-bush-go-awol-during-his-time-in-the-national-guard

John (at #13), I am genuinely puzzled as to why “Green objections to GM foods” would be similar to anyone’s rejection of plate tectonics or global warming, or Obama’s US citizenship.