Surprise: Someone Manages To Link “Climate Change” To Charleston Murders

You just knew someone had to go there. In this case, it’s David Niose in Psychology Today. Niose is the author of Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason, a far left “secular-progressive” screed against Republicans, Conservatives, anyone on the political right, and, of course, religion.

Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America

The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.

America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof’s actions on America’s culture of racism and gun violence, but it’s time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation’s culture of ignorance.

In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president, it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.

It’s obviously a tenuous link to “climate change”, but the fact that it is even mentioned in a discussion about Roof, a hardcore racist conspiracy theory nutjob shows just how far gone the Progressive left is.

In considering the senseless loss of nine lives in Charleston, of course racism jumps out as the main issue. But isn’t ignorance at the root of racism? And it’s true that the bloodshed is a reflection of America’s violent, gun-crazed culture, but it is only our aversion to reason as a society that has allowed violence to define the culture. Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn’t possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.

Interesting. What of the culture of violence in Islam? If all of America can be blamed as a violent, gun-crazed culture, why can’t Islam be blamed as a whole for their violent, jihadist, throw gays from building tops, stone female adulterers, whip women who’ve been raped, suicide-vest crazed culture? Of course, that’s not what anti-Jihad bloggers and pundits are doing, they are simply blaming a segment of Islam, called Islamists. But, Leftists like to paint with a broad brush for certain things.

Likewise, why can’t we use that same brush on Blacks? You have a segment of the US population which is just over 13% of the total, but accounts for 50% of those murdered, and most of those murders are carried out by other Blacks, to the tune of 93%. Blacks accounted for 53% of the homicides committed between 1990-2008. Does all this mean, in David Niose’s mind, that a majority of Blacks are “anti-intellectual”?

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What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the hyper-patriotism that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world? Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world.

So, being patriotic, despite the throw it against the wall disclaimer, is anti-intellectual. Back to climate change

Fundamentalist religion is also a major force in denying human-caused climate change, a phenomenon that the scientific community has accepted for years. Interestingly, anti-intellectual fundamentalists are joined in their climate change denial with unusual bedfellows: corporate interests that stand to gain from the rejection of sound science on climate.

Nice! Blaming religion while invoking climate change! A two-fer!

BTW, since he also includes consumerism as an evil in his post, did David write his book (which is doing very well, congrats!) with a corporate made computer, or pen and paper? The same book that was published by a big corporation and is available on the biggest consumer website in the world. Oh, right, can’t forget, has David given up fossil fuels and gone “carbon neutral”?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

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