As the world climate change meet is going on in France this epic take down by the Daily Show of the insane Republicans in the United States House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology should be watched again…
[QUOTE=Ishizu montoya commenter in YouTube]
I think they should rename themselves [the Republicans] to "the house committee against science, space and technology"
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Shortly after the death of Abraham Lincoln.
As a scientist, I can tell you that among scientists you can very safely discuss politics among colleagues even if you don’t know their political affiliation; the odds of a scientist being even moderately Republican are pretty low.
“Most scientists identify as Democrats (55%), while 32% identify as independents and just 6% say they are Republicans. When the leanings of independents are considered, fully 81% identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 12% who either identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP.”
The US is a centrist country. The majority are just left or right of center. Because many conservatives have a complete lack of political understanding and absolutely no common sense, they cannot see that the demographics do not favor an extremist candidate. Trump’s numbers don’t grow in a general election like someone who could steal some moderate liberal support. Sure he may be able to win a primary but he is unelectable by a national population
How far the Republicans have fallen. If there’s any doubt about how far they’ve moved into the loony bin, here are some of Richard Nixon’s domestic accomplishments, the leading Republican of his time:
[ul]
[li]extension of the Voting Rights Act[/li][li]the Clean Air Act[/li][li]the Water Pollution Control Act[/li][li]establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)[/li][li]establishing an Office of Consumer Affairs[/li][li]expansion of the National Parks system[/li][li]the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act (OSHA)[/li][li]the creation of Amtrak (Rail Passenger Service Act)[/li][li]the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act[/li][li]ending the draft[/li][li]increased funding for cancer research[/li][li]increased spending on the arts[/li][li]increased spending on public broadcasting[/li][li]increased spending on Social Security and Medicare[/li][li]health care reform similar to the PPACA (that Ted Kennedy blocked, and later regretted he had)[/li][/ul]
Refusing to acknowledge that the basic facts of modern biology and geology are scientifically superior to the unsupported speculations of “creation science” is not “normal” for a rational, intelligent educated person’s worldview.
Nor is pledging to pass a constitutional amendment to deny equal rights to same-sex couples.
But all of these are positions that major Republican elected officials and/or leading Republican presidential candidates explicitly support.
Do you consider Ben Carson, for instance, a “normal Republican” who only “looks crazy” when viewed from the extreme left? Is it “normal” for an intelligent, highly educated, well-informed rational person to claim, as Carson has publicly done, that
All these things (and many more just as crazy) may be believed by typical Republicans, but they are not normal beliefs for intelligent, well-informed people to defend.
If you think that that kind of mindset is “normal” for Republicans, that’s just further evidence of the current crazification of the Republican Party.
Very briefly:
Nixon’s Southern Strategy - pick up the racists in the Deep South who split with the Democratic Party over the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
That’s when the old-money WASP party invited in their beer-swillin’ Southern Baptist cousins.
I think we have now seen “Speaking in Tongues” from some of them. Up Next: Snake Handling.
Reagan is starting to sound absolutely liberal.
Hyper-pedantic nitpick, but the Queen’s and King’s chambers are actually well above ground level.
Seriously, superb post, zeroing in on the dangerous insanity that has taken control of the modern Republican Party.
One might add: holding thirteen investigations and hearings regarding Benghazi. In 1983, when a suicide bomber killed 200 U.S. Marines in Beirut, there was one hearing, conducted in bipartisan fashion, and its recommendations were put into place. The Benghazi hearings have been admitted to be political hay-making (or muck-raking.)
Also, voting fifty-one times to repeat the Affordable Care Act. If insanity is defined as doing the same thing again and again, expecting a different result, this is one of the apex examples of it. (To be fair, I don’t actually hold with that as a definition of insanity.)
Yeah, it’s unfortunate that with two main political parties the right has absorbed the Christian fundamentalists.
You work at a university? Or do you work in the real world and produce something?
As crazy as Carson sounds, I’d much prefer governance by those who will further curtail the growth of the federal government than that of those who believe that if we federalize everything we will have an utopia. I don’t believe that the economic and social policies of the left are good for the strategic growth of our country. They are great for the strategic growth of our competitors though. I for one, look forward to an ascendant China. Hopefully, it will reignite a fire in the West.
This thread is not one whit different from all the “Crazy Libtards Are Destroying America” threads on more right wing forums. Enjoy your circle jerk.
Good point! Nitpicking the nitpick, though, I note that some pyramids other than the Great Pyramid to which you refer do lack above-ground chambers altogether, such as the Pyramid of Khafre. I was going to write “mostly solid stone except for some (frequently underground) chambers”, but I sacrificed precision for readability, which I should know by now one can never get away with here at the Dope. 
In any case, images such as this vertical cross-section of the Great Pyramid indicate just how minuscule a percentage of the interior space is accessible even for pyramids with above-ground chambers. The notion that anyone would build a structure like that for grain storage is ludicrous (even if we ignore the standard chronology that places construction of the pyramids at least several hundred years before any of the events described in the story of Joseph could have taken place).
And the fact that somebody who would not only publicly assert such a notion but continue to express support for it even after its absurdity had been publicly pointed out is nothing but crazy.
Well, good news: those people don’t exist. There’s nobody in the US government today who supports the latter stated position here. Nobody even comes close. The closest you can get is Bernie Sanders, and he’s still not even close to what you’re describing. Oh, and by the way: his position is based on the incredible success of such policies in Canada and most of Europe, so it’s not like there’s no evidentiary basis for their success.
But it’s not just the Christian fundamentalists. These attitudes have spread like a cancer throughout basically the entire republican base, and identity politics rule the day. And it’s not just science. Basic fact-checking is not a thing any more. It doesn’t matter if the media corrects a candidate on an obvious lie; the media is not considered trustworthy by most of the republican base, so the correct strategy for the candidate is to just keep repeating the lie until people believe them. This is not good for anyone except the republican candidates.
Oh? What sort of things get brought up there? No, seriously, you seem to know, so I’m curious - what evidence is there that the “Crazy Libtards” are destroying America? Because at this point, simply saying “Both sides do it” ain’t gonna cut it. MSNBC has a liberal bias; this does not mean it is in any way analogous to FOX News; FOX News really is that bad. Similarly, numerous rather serious problems with the republican party are on display here, most of which simply are not matched by the democrats (a wholesale rejection of science, awful budget politics where they cut short-term and end up costing themselves long-term, wholesale rejection of reality, fact-checking, and the media, extensive and blatant racism, homophobia, islamophobia… for fuck’s sake, Donald Trump is a fascist and he’s leading in the polls!), so if there really is some analysis on how the democrats are crazy, please, enlighten us! Like, looking at this thread, most of the reasons listed are either complete strawmen or totally fucking wrong - not positions held by the left, or positions the left is correct to hold. But please, by all means, enlighten us.
Or, you know, just drive-by and offer absolutely nothing of value to the discussion. Your move.
The growth of China which is a dangerous strategic competitor and the demise of much of our manufacturing industrial base is the result of the US pricing itself out of low skilled labor in the global economy. That is one of the great flaws of modern liberal thought. I’d vote Democrat if they weren’t in such a rush to hinder the American economy and destroy the inner cities for a vote. At least the right claims to support economic freedom.
Who actually believes that, though? Can you name even one prominent Democrat who explicitly supports the ridiculously irrational sentiment that “if we federalize everything we will have an utopia”? Show us where they actually made any such claim.
This sort of completely unsupported false-equivalence hyperbole is merely further evidence of the reality-rejecting crazification of the conservative side.
Conservatives have leading Presidential candidates who openly assert that the Egyptian pyramids were biblical grain silos, or that they saw footage of thousands of New Jerseyites celebrating the 9/11 attacks, or other thoroughly debunked fantasies. We’re talking factually discredited outright untruths here.
And they try to pretend that this isn’t pathological by making up exaggerated hyperbolic claims about similarly absurd alleged liberal positions which mainstream liberals do not in fact support.
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I don’t believe that the economic and social policies of the left are good for the strategic growth of our country.
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That is actually a rationally defensible position, and there are many reasonable arguments in favor of it (though personally I happen not to find them very convincing). But it is orders of magnitude removed from your unsubstantiated claim that proponents of liberal policies “believe that if we federalize everything we will have an utopia”.
Except, as octupus just illustrated, the people who complain about the “Crazy Libtards” are making up things they pretend liberals are saying and doing.
The people who complain about “Republican insanity”, on the other hand, are looking at the things that prominent mainstream Republican leaders are actually saying and doing.
Aha, an actual argument. Maybe next time, skip the nonsensical hyperbole and jump straight to this? Unfortunately, it’s not a good argument, because to put it bluntly, I don’t think most Americans would be happy with the economic conditions in China. Seriously, how do you think we price ourselves back into the global labor economy when over there, they have people willing to work 12-hour shifts under backbreaking conditions for a pittance? What you seem to be advocating is a race to the bottom until we can compete with China, and that seems like a fantastically terrible idea. I don’t know what else could possibly allow us to compete, save for protectionism, which ain’t gonna fly.
I think the general tendency of the GOP to perfidy is closely related to today’s bipolar partisanship. Parties will differentiate themselves based on whatever the great issues or themes of the day are. Today, those themes include belief in science, domination of politics by the super-rich, and greed versus humanitarianism. Obviously the party which opposes science, and which puts vested interests ahead of voters, will resort to deception and appeals to emotion.
A key underlying question is: What led to today’s extreme polarization? Fifty or sixty years ago, the Democrats were on the “left” and GOP on the “right”, but both parties were big-tent parties in which moderates could feel comfortable; consensus and compromise were the norm; legislators’ voting often crossed party lines. This page has a nice graphic depicting the prevalence of cross-party voting in the House of Representatives. You can see that the fracturing began about 1983 and was almost complete by 1993.
This graph shows polarization among citizens rather than legislators.. (Click Animate.) You can see the median Democrat and median Republican come together after 9/11, then drift apart again especially during Obama’s terms.
One major cause of the polarization is the rise of Internet and cable TV. People now exchange ideas primarily with those who think like themselves. Leftists debating only with leftists became more leftish. People with prejudices will have their prejudices reinforced by their Internet or cable-TV experiences. Before the Internet one’s acquaintances were a diverse group united by the happenstance of geography. Now we ignore the neighbor who doesn’t think like us and find bloggers or TV pundits we like; this accentuates our own prejudices.
No, the Democrats had the House until 1994.
