Bumper Sicker
I don't know why bumper stickers get me so riled up. I guess it's because so many of them are stupid -- and, if you've read my first post to this blog, you know that stupidity is one of my Big Three. And thanks to the U.S. educational system, there is a LOT of stupidity out there supplying grist for my mill.
When I went to high school in the 1960's the U.S. was in a "space race" with the Soviet Union to be the first to land a human on the moon (Earth's moon, to be precise). So in those days, there really was an actual incentive for excellence in high schools, and my high school showed it. We were taught Real Science in those days, by teachers who practiced and valued excellence (but a disturbing number of them retired right after they'd had me for a year!). Even more important, we learned how to think instead of what to think: we had to learn something called "critical thinking" -- a set of skills that, sadly, few of my generation seem to have mastered and even fewer of the subsequent generations. Finally, we were introduced to what is today called the "scientific method"; something that has proved invaluable to me as a bullshit detector in the current Era Of Fraud And Deceit.
Rachel Carson's infamous polemic Silent Spring was published while I was in high school. I bought a copy because science was my passion, and this was billed as a scientific book. I only got a few pages into it before I put it down forever. Looking back, I realize that my bullshit detector was working pretty well, even though there was then no such classification as "environmentalist propaganda". I didn't have to know precisely what it was in order to know what it was NOT.
We now know, of course, how wrong Rachel Carson was -- not only scientifically but morally: her ideas have led to the agonizing deaths of tens of millions of Equatorial peoples to the ravages of malaria. This is more than the total number that were exterminated by Adolph Hitler's bloody regime. But her standard formula of alarmism, disinformation, demonization and a total disregard for the Scientific Method are still alive and very well today in the radical environmental movement that her radical environmental jeremiad spawned. It has also been adopted by all of today's Left, including the officials of the Democratic Party, whom one would think would have an incentive not to engage in rhetoric that is so clearly extremist (not to mention juvenile).
So it is with some disgust that I read the current crop of bumper stickers claiming, "I think, therefore I am / a Democrat".
This is the very same group that daily invents more hate speech to hurl at a sitting President than at any time in memory; the same group that pushes Junk Science in causes from second-hand smoke to obesity to gun control to global warming; the same group that believes that "justice" means depriving producers of the fruits of their labor in order to enrich the unproductive; the same group that believes that there is such a thing as a "right to health care" (meaning, of course, a "right" to force others to pay your expenses for you) -- this group now claims to have a monopoly on Thinking.
What a steaming crock.
To be continued....
When I went to high school in the 1960's the U.S. was in a "space race" with the Soviet Union to be the first to land a human on the moon (Earth's moon, to be precise). So in those days, there really was an actual incentive for excellence in high schools, and my high school showed it. We were taught Real Science in those days, by teachers who practiced and valued excellence (but a disturbing number of them retired right after they'd had me for a year!). Even more important, we learned how to think instead of what to think: we had to learn something called "critical thinking" -- a set of skills that, sadly, few of my generation seem to have mastered and even fewer of the subsequent generations. Finally, we were introduced to what is today called the "scientific method"; something that has proved invaluable to me as a bullshit detector in the current Era Of Fraud And Deceit.
Rachel Carson's infamous polemic Silent Spring was published while I was in high school. I bought a copy because science was my passion, and this was billed as a scientific book. I only got a few pages into it before I put it down forever. Looking back, I realize that my bullshit detector was working pretty well, even though there was then no such classification as "environmentalist propaganda". I didn't have to know precisely what it was in order to know what it was NOT.
We now know, of course, how wrong Rachel Carson was -- not only scientifically but morally: her ideas have led to the agonizing deaths of tens of millions of Equatorial peoples to the ravages of malaria. This is more than the total number that were exterminated by Adolph Hitler's bloody regime. But her standard formula of alarmism, disinformation, demonization and a total disregard for the Scientific Method are still alive and very well today in the radical environmental movement that her radical environmental jeremiad spawned. It has also been adopted by all of today's Left, including the officials of the Democratic Party, whom one would think would have an incentive not to engage in rhetoric that is so clearly extremist (not to mention juvenile).
So it is with some disgust that I read the current crop of bumper stickers claiming, "I think, therefore I am / a Democrat".
This is the very same group that daily invents more hate speech to hurl at a sitting President than at any time in memory; the same group that pushes Junk Science in causes from second-hand smoke to obesity to gun control to global warming; the same group that believes that "justice" means depriving producers of the fruits of their labor in order to enrich the unproductive; the same group that believes that there is such a thing as a "right to health care" (meaning, of course, a "right" to force others to pay your expenses for you) -- this group now claims to have a monopoly on Thinking.
What a steaming crock.
To be continued....
posted by Ken | 12:10 PM
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