In a post a couple of days ago, we took up the issue of heavy funding for attacks on Muslims in the US, funding emanating from a familiar source: the Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation. The money pays for a campaign to instill fear in Americans that we have among us Muslims who are determined to impose "sharia law" on the US. One commenter blames liberals:
The term, "Islamophobia" was created by anti-American Islamists who wished to discredit those of us Americans who are in fact Islam-Aware. The only phobias in play are the phobias of the Constitution hating liberals who are in an alliance with the Islamists to bring America down and create something else in it's stead.
Liberals, of course, are not just sharia-ists, but also Nazis, Fascists and "commies." We are an amalgam of incompatiable beliefs.
Paul Krugman goes after the fact-averse, citing (among others) Rick Perry and his statements on evolution, not to mention the string of idiocies laid out in connection with climate change. Krugman is not alone in spotting the same strains of fear and stubborn stupidity in the myths coming from the right.
...The deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.
Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?
Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.
Confidence is a mark of progressivism, the political choice of liberals. Fear drives conservatives. And, as we know, fear does occasionally make people jump off a cliff in order to stop thinking about the result of jumping off a cliff. The real problem is that conservatives are prepared to throw the whole country off the cliff.
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NPR this morning has a report on the appearance of "flash mobs" in the US (most notably Philadelphia) and in London and other parts of the UK. Apparently police have found outside forces -- including the old Mob -- organizing what were believe to be random, internet-driven phenomena. What they look like is what they may, in fact, be: a natural rage and fear driven by unending unemployment.
James Kwak has been rereading Rawls:
“[The liberal conception of the second principle of justice] still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents. Within the limits allowed by the background arrangements, distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune. . . . Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances.”
