# Resolved: America is a dystopian shithole. Also, leopard hijacks

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-america-is-a-dystopian-shithole-also-leopard-hijacks/1022330
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [August 20, 2025, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-america-is-a-dystopian-shithole-also-leopard-hijacks/1022330 "2025-08-20T17:47:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 155

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### Author: ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)
#### Post date: [September 5, 2025, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-america-is-a-dystopian-shithole-also-leopard-hijacks/1022330/155 "2025-09-05T21:04:32Z")

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Leopard hijack getting too interesting. Move it here.

> [@Surprises coming for voters for the Leopards-Eating-Faces Party](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/surprises-coming-for-voters-for-the-leopards-eating-faces-party/1010166/4533):
>
> That’s faith. This is _exactly_ what the skeptic community warned people about for years; that constantly playing up faith as something good and desirable meant we were creating a population that would proudly deny reality when it’s right in their face, because they’ve been told all their lives how _that’s what good and virtuous people do._ Changing your beliefs when the facts contradict them is weak and sinful. Only wicked people like scientists do that.

Noah Smith, quoting the facile Douthat of the NYT: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” Once you strip away religion (and religious authority) what you are left with is conspiracy theory. Noah, “Conspiracy theories have replaced Christianity as the animating cosmology and purpose-giving belief system of a whole segment of American society.” He links to a Rawstory article: " Fox’s new Jan. 6 documentary implies 9/11 was a false flag."

This doesn’t exactly conflict with Der’s POV: it’s more in the way of elaboration. Substantively, we are left with a knotty causal problem for social scientists: “To what extent does religion _cause_ an anti-scientific mindset and to what extent does it merely reflect pre-existing non-scientific views of a slice of its followers?” These sorts of questions are not statistically unanswerable in general, but they do require careful specialist analysis.

> [@Surprises coming for voters for the Leopards-Eating-Faces Party](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/surprises-coming-for-voters-for-the-leopards-eating-faces-party/1010166/4533):
>
> Also, they’re wrong. _Factually_ wrong, about basically everything they believe. They _have_ to avoid or deny reality in order to continue to be conservatives in the first place. If people were somehow magically forced to only believe in things that are real, conservationism would pretty much evaporate overnight. Underneath the lies, there’s no there _there._

Change-skepticism would remain though, appropriately. Your claim applies to American conservatism, sociologically/electorally speaking, but not center-right politics of the other-high-income-democracies variety. The latter wouldn’t be affected much more than center-left politics, again outside of the US. IMO.

Again, by way of clarification. Conservatism is an ambiguous word, much more so than other ideological characterizations.

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