It really is not a dichotomous choice as stupid and evil are not mutually exclusive properties.  As you say the conservative leadership are generally evil (a few really are stupid as well).  Most of the followers are primarily stupid, but many also have a healthy dose of evil to go with it.

Wow.

Horrendous tragedy, but if you fuck, even with your spouse, you deserve to be punished with a child you can’t support b/c you should know that sex = baby.

Heaven forbid any of those dark-skinned Haitians have a moment of respite from the horror they’re living.  It’s just their just punishment for worshipping the devil, after all.

One of the problems is that there really are lots of conservatives who are stupid, or who say demonstrably stupid things. Young earth creationists are stupid, for example, and it’s easy (and lazy) to lump them all together. It’s also true that conservatives don’t have a monopoly on stupid, which leads to that comparison you built this post around, the notion that conservative=stupid. There’s also that famous John Stuart Mill quote which doesn’t help matters.

DrDick hits it right on the head.  The conservative leadership’s goal is to protect themselves from government intervention in their political, social, and economic goals.  They use the red state working class to push these goals because they agree socially without any oppression but once they agree socially it’s much easier to push the political and economic agendas by painting them as associated with the social goals.  The leadership is evil and the followers are stupid and evil.  The problem ultimately falls on the enlightened to try and teach the followers but with education now a serious point of contention it’s going to be getting harder and harder in the future.

So here’s the question for you, Amanda (and I’m pretty serious about this):  in your estimation, are Obama and Clinton evil, stupid, or both?

Can’t speak for Amanda, but I’m going with the third option: catastrophically myopic and naive. It’s not the same as stupid, and it’s not the same as evil, but the outcomes are the same.

I definitely think that there are “useful idiots” that the conservabots latch on to - Sarah Palin being the most prominent one. I truly think that Sarah Palin IS just THAT stupid - where she really believes what she says although she couldn’t actually think more than a few seconds about it before she brings up another right wing trope. I’m not entirely sure she’s evil however.
I think that Limbaugh and Beck are clearly evil - but still have a foot in the useful idiot camp. And there’s a lot of very evil puppet masters at the top of the chain who annoint the useful idiots, turn then into cash cows (really what else is the Faux News channel for - certainly not news of any sort).

If I survived that earthquake, I’d want to get it on. Thanks, Planned Parenthood!

I think Dick Cheney clearly exemplifies the notion that conservatives can be both highly intelligent and incredibly evil.  I have no doubt that the man is incredibly smart; I also have little doubt that he uses said intelligence to try to push an agenda that is pure evil.  I don’t care if I’m invoking Godwin, the man really is cut from the same cloth as Adolf Hitler… the only difference is that Hitler did a better job of being, well, Hitler, than Cheney was ever able to do.  Give Cheney the exact same amount of clout and the same political mandate that Der Fuhrer had, and I have little doubt that he would have utilized that clout and that mandate in precisely the same sorts of ways as the monstrous Austrian did.

Xer, the problem is that the voting data shows that working class voters in red states tend to vote for Democrats.  The margins of victory with those voters is smaller—-social conservatism is an effective strategy for chipping some working class voters off into the red zone—-but by and large, conservatives make more money than liberals on average.  The whining about the “liberal elites” is a strategy to make fairly wealthy conservatives preen like they’re the Real American salt of the earth.

Palin may or may not be stupid, but she is very wealthy and very invested in the cultural dominance of white Christian patriarchy fans over everyone else.  Her choices reflect that.  She’s just very silly while she goes about it.

Yet, when it comes to bad faith arguments about sex work and pornography, liberals truly excel. Exhibit A above, where “unapproved sex” is mentioned only in conjuction with abortion, birth control and sex-ed.

1)  Bernanke, as well as Greenspan, have powerful patrons who can make things “difficult” for Obama.  It doesn’t really pay to oppose them.  More conclusively, no one other than Bernanke will be allowed to be chairman by Republican and Blue Dog Senators using holds and filibusters.

2)  My impression of the stupid/evil dichotomy&NOTdichotomy;is that many people operate with heuristics based on ideology.  Many of those people are ambiguous averse to the point of doctrinaire behavior.  Also, basing their heuristics on ideology is a statement/affirmation of identity based on whatever, but often class.  Generally, the only way to make them alter their beliefs is to forcibly change their class with the further implication that they have to operate among people with a different set of heuristics that conflicts.

Yet, when it comes to bad faith arguments about sex work and pornography, liberals truly excel. Exhibit A above, where “unapproved sex” is mentioned only in conjuction with abortion, birth control and sex-ed.

Amanda was specifically discussing the public health aspects of sex, especially as they apply to Haiti after a devastating natural disaster.  Which public health aspects of sex work and pornography, especially as they apply to Haiti after the earthquake, do you want to discuss? 

Or are you just trying to change the subject because you realize that a guy who begrudges people even a few moments of pleasure after a disaster is a massive douche so we need to change the subject away from the assholishness of sneering at PP sending condoms for Haiti?

FW = Stupid and Evil…

This idea of Democrats that Republicans are evil and stupid is why they repeatedly both fail to connect with the American voter even when they have the facts on their side, and that their opponents sometimes are, more than they think, and also WHY they fail to recognize that this is what is happening. it is also how the repeatedly impugn American voters, which makes them skeptical, non defensive, and non receptive, at the very same time. And it is also why they don’t realize that the America voters are this way (along with the idea,that “everyone knows what we do, and if they don’t, then they are stupid or evil and can’t be reached.)

A classic letter on this point, to one of the better writers and experts on the web today, entitled, “Communication, not Presumption or Disdain, Moves the Debate.”
...

So the question is: is FW stupid or just pretending to be?

Actually, Democrats do connect with voters.  The 37 most liberal Senators represent 51% of the population of the U.S.  Republicans hold more control than they should for two reasons: they represent business interests and they dominate rural areas that have disproportionate amount of representation.

I agree that rhetoric is a big part of the problem, which may also reflect what you are trying to say here, but when you say:

“But part of the reason that this happens is because conservatives don’t argue straightforwardly for what they want” please consider that this is actually a bigger problem with Democrats, in that they DO ARGUE, instead of show, they don’t sell, they tend to tell, to conclude, and most importantly of all, they often tend to presume that others “know” or “think” and thus as a result they dont repeatedly show to voters what it is they want, and more importantly WHY.

Let’s take the enormous example of health care, for example. Where has this message gone? Where has ANY cohesive message gone?, one that doesn’t simply presume.
...

Where has the straight forward case been repeatedly made by Democrats regarding THIS?

What a maroon. The Republican party makes ANY Democrat look like a damn rookie in the disdain department. In fact, that’s what they run on. Pure, unfiltered disdain.

More projection than a multi-plex.

In any case, to give my answer to Ben above, the problem really is the common assumptions and benchmarks that we use in our society. And for better or worse, most people use the same benchmarks. Things like the Dow, or GDP growth, or “unemployment” (the fake one, not the real one”, or whatever. Things that are best, amoral, or besides the point of making a better life for most people.

Bernake is a good caretaker for those indicators. The problem is that those indicators themselves are stupid and/or evil.

And yes, even us “radical” liberals use those indicators much more than I’d like.

The problem ultimately falls on the enlightened to try and teach the followers but with education now a serious point of contention it’s going to be getting harder and harder in the future.

A serious problem for the conservative elite - a population which is uneducated is easier to manipulate, but at the same time less capable of performing well.  The solution, I think, is to concentrate on supporting narrow technical education and deriding the liberal arts (i.e. “unprofitable”) and using certain fields as distractions (such as climate science and evolution).

A better way of looking at Amanda’s “evil” as a characteristic of Conservative leadership is to consider this as a desire for a type of feudalism, with them at the top, naturally. Society must be ordered, the masses must be pacified and distracted, and anyone questioning this must be neutralised.

As the descendent of Irish peasants, and as a librarian - a professional in the only public institution dedicated to enabling true democracy and uplifting all without fear or favour - I know where I stand on the subject of feudalism.  There’s a quote from a science fiction game which all librarians understand in their hearts:

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Watch the Conservatives as the attempt to distract from, poison and pollute, and even overtly censor information. Watch even the subtle censorship - such as ceasing to publish M3 statistics (*).  It’s the best indication of whatr they fear and how they intend to control society.

(*) Notice the string of bubbles - internet, stock market, housing?  A bit like an increasing excess of fake created money sloshing into one sector or another in search of real returns, isn’t it? But we wouldn’t want people to start asking questions like where that money is coming from, who is creating it, and what the result will be, would we?  So…

Leadership?  By and large evil.  Some research on neocon strategy should make that clear.

But the conservative grunts?  I think calling them willfully evil is giving them too much credit, maybe far too much.  The first quoted comment is something I could easily find myself saying, in large part based on experience as a clinic escort.  It’s astounding how deeply some of the loonies out there believe what they’re selling.  Is the effect evil?  Yeah.  But they’re basically foot soldiers, following the orders of their chosen leaders.  There’s just no sign of real critical thought amongst them, which pushes the needle much closer to stupid.  There’s a generic desire for control, but even then I’m not sure they realize why they’re trying to control it.  (Disclaimer:  A few very clearly know what they’re doing.  The majority I’ve seen do not, or at least show no reasonable signs of such.)

The second comment is foolish and disconnected, but I find it far more likely that the commenter’s mindset just doesn’t perceive of sex as a human reality.  He (I assume he) probably has difficulty thinking that people have sex at the best of times, and can’t even imagine that they would want to do it in the midst of tragedy, as opposed to holding a conscious belief that these people should not fuck.

I’m not so sure, Spiffy.  They are so nasty and so mean that I can’t help but conclude that they are motivated by their nasty meanness.  You don’t really have to be brilliant to argue in bad faith.  In fact, a lot of not-so-bright ones ape arguments that are essentially bad faith arguments, but they haven’t stopped to consider that very deeply.

The anti-choice protester handbook I got my hands on emphasized over and over—-without coming out and saying it—-how critical it was to argue in bad faith with people.  They demonstrated techniques to hide your true opinion and ways to distract someone who is hitting too close to home.  This doesn’t mean they don’t have convictions and we can’t sense those convictions.  It’s just that the arguments themselves are made in bad faith.

Gay marriage is a really great example of how this works.  I do think that conservatives believe that gay marriage is a threat to “traditional marriage”.  The bad faith argument is they try to say that actual straight marriages are in danger from gay marriage, and let people fill in what they think this means.  (Which is something along the lines of “If gay people marry, then straight people will not marry/get divorced.”)  But that they’re being coy and dishonest doesn’t mean their fear and anger aren’t real—-they really do think that gay marriage will be the death knell for patriarchal marriage, and they aren’t necessarily wrong that it shoves us in that direction.  Just, you know, it’s a good thing.

Anti-choicers have been practicing their disingenuous arguments for 37 years.  They have them down to a science.

I’ll add that even people who struggle putting together a coherent argument for why they believe how they do still aren’t stupid.  So like the crazy anti-choicer who can’t really explain why sex bothers him so much—-or who really can’t conceive of why someone might have it even in the midst of a tragedy—-still is basically acting out of anger and the desire to control.  And his actions are very effective at reaching his goals.  Most of our thinking doesn’t happen on a logical level, no matter how smart we are, so using logic as a measure of intelligence might be a bit of a red herring. Effectiveness is a more interesting measure.

I think it’s possible for someone to be “smart” in an overall intellectual sense yet, when it comes to political arguments, be “stupid.” The fact is that adherence to the Republican party’s set of beliefs requires one to mouth a set of platitudes and get agitated about a specific set of issues that are “stupid” and lacking in any logical coherency or require any critical thinking.

One is perfectly capable of figuring out how to design booster rockets to put satellites into space while also spending one’s time non-sensically ranting about ACORN and screeching “but Clinton fired all the US Attorneys in 1993!” as a response to Bush’s US Attorney scandal. It’s that once you’ve decided that your beliefs and the social rewards you’re seeking align with mouthing right-wing talking points, you’ve dedicated yourself to being “stupid.” But the people who feed these talking points to the rank-and-file are doing so self-consciously in order to promote an immoral agenda.

Talk about proving my point:

Here in showing how much Disdain is exhibited by Republicans you exhibit disdain for someone on yor side, and call them a moron:

“What a maroon. The Republican party makes ANY Democrat look like a damn rookie in the disdain department. In fact, that’s what they run on. Pure, unfiltered disdain.
More projection than a multi-plex.
In any case, to give my answer to Ben above, the problem really is the common assumptions and benchmarks that we use in our society. And for better or worse, most people use the same benchmarks. Things like the Dow, or GDP growth, or “unemployment” (the fake one, not the real one”, or whatever. Things that are best, amoral, or besides the point of making a better life for most people.
Bernake is a good caretaker for those indicators. The problem is that those indicators themselves are stupid and/or evil.
And yes, even us “radical” liberals use those indicators much more than I’d like.”

yes, that is how Republicans are able to often connect with the voters, despite being more radical, more extreme,more"stupid,”“more “evil” and less of the factson their side.  by exhibiting disdain for everyone else, particularly voters, whom the constantly impugnunlikeDemocrats, right?

Here’s some more food for thought for ya.  Where are the people making that point,rather than presuming that it is already known. Or this one,  speaking of “disdain.”  and disdain for what? the same that you exhibit; for any point that suggest that Democrats play just as much a role in what is goin on today by allowing their opponents to control the debate,and constantly coming up with excuses,as anybody else?

Well what’s to be done about it? Assuming liberals haven’t turned blood thirsty while I wasn’t looking you aren’t going to shoot all of them tomorrow so they will still be there next week. I mean if you assert something in good faith and then someone says “yah well, no because x, y and z” but x, y and z are brought up to waste your time, confuse the issue and irritate what can you do?  In regular life you can say “cut the shit buddy” and move on but in politics that doesn’t seem to be a legitimate move. Especially if you refute x,y and z but the same shmuck is bullshitting some other poor fool five minutes later.

So, do you attack the beliefs and real reasons they are saying what they are saying? And what happens if you do that? They just accuse you of being a crazy person who is attacking something they never mentioned and then drop the phrase ad hominem because it makes them sound educated.

I get what you’re saying, Amanda, and I pretty much agree with it.  What some people said above about there being some of each involved is absolutely true.  I guess, to me, “stupid” is not a question of logic or intellectual capacity- it’s the lack of willingness to apply any critical thought, ie. they’re “being stupid”.  Like I said, there is absolutely an aura about these people to control others- that’s the one aspect of protesters I would readily ascribe to evil.  And it’s very likely most of them would just find some other cause to control if abortion wasn’t available.  But the fact they can’t explain themselves, they use rote talking points devised by others, techniques on argument devised by others- it means their effectiveness is not of their own design.  To me, that makes them a very low level evil motivated by a high degree of stupid.

In a lot of ways this is splitting hairs.  Maybe the only difference on how we view this is that I readily ignore protesters (the ones here don’t attempt physical contact, so I can do that more easily) because I view them as mostly irrelevant to the greater issue at hand.  An irritation, essentially.  Were this a place where they did have to get beaten back with sticks, I couldn’t ignore them, but they would still be the mindless effect, not the cause; in short, if those specific people weren’t out there, someone else would be, and it would make no difference.  It seems likely you take a different view of them.  And maybe you’re right- I’ll think it over at work tonight.

“yes, that is how Republicans are able to often connect with the voters, despite being more radical, more extreme,more"stupid,”“more “evil” and less of the factson their side.  by exhibiting disdain for everyone else, particularly voters, whom the constantly impugnunlikeDemocrats, right?”

Yeah!  If we just pretend to think “conservative” voters are the only Real Americans™ (just like Republicans do), and treat their every utterance (placed in their mouths by Rush and Glenn and Faux) as if it were the received wisdom of God (and of course change our progressive values so they aren’t progressive anymore), then Democrats could be winners just like Republicans!  Sounds great!!!...

I get what you’re saying for sure, Spiffy.  But I think basically they use talking points because they have been carefully constructed and refined to shut down discussion.  As for splitting hairs—-it seems like it, sure, but I think these hairs are important.  If you assume people are stupid or ignorant, you put more of your energies into educating and informing.  If you assume bad faith and relatively normal intelligence, you have to rethink your strategies.

With protesters, though, I do think the best strategy is to ignore them and treat them like an irritant.  That’s one reason I support “evil” over “stupid”, actually.  Someone who is stupid invites discussion and education.  A stubbornly evil person is not someone you’re going to win over, and you have to go around them. 

That’s what got us into this health care debacle, honestly.  I think Obama favors “stupid” over “evil”, and because of this, he mistakenly thought he could chip off Republican votes for a health care bill through education and argument.

Ha- stupid people are the ones I think I’m not going to win over, and I have to go around them.  Maybe that makes you good and me an elitist prick?  :D

Off to deliver some pizzas (how’s that for elitist).  Thank you for the conversation.

I think it’s possible for someone to be “smart” in an overall intellectual sense yet, when it comes to political arguments, be “stupid.” The fact is that adherence to the Republican party’s set of beliefs requires one to mouth a set of platitudes and get agitated about a specific set of issues that are “stupid” and lacking in any logical coherency or require any critical thinking.

Check out this post from Balloon Juice.

Kristol agrees with this view. “There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

“Amanda was specifically discussing the public health aspects of sex, especially as they apply to Haiti after a devastating natural disaster.  Which public health aspects of sex work and pornography, especially as they apply to Haiti after the earthquake, do you want to discuss?”

Really? Are you kidding me? Do you know anything about the issue, or are you just faking it? Nevermind I already know.

Is there some reason that you don’t think there are any prostitutes in Haiti? Or do you think that they magically survived? If they did, do you think they have the same access to medications and assistance as others? 

Do you know about the anti-prostitution pledge that HIV activist groups had to sign? Do you know the rate of HIV/Aids among Haitian prostitutes?

Are you kidding me?!

http://www.carisma-pancap.org/what-we-do/reaching-out-to-commercial-sex-workers

And yeah, if you think liberals are making any headway on abortion unless they finally pull out and start supporting SEXUAL rights and not just REPRODUCTIVE rights you’re going to have a long wait.

I’m serious, look at it… no support no mention no demands for sexual rights,.... it’s ALL about reproduction. Sounds like a conservative christian to me. Yeah, I know, the liberals I’m talking about, like Amanda and too many others, they aren’t conservatives or christians - which is why it’s so monumentally fucked up.

Ya know the rumours you’ve heard about the country slowly being shifted to the right until we don’t even remember how “left” we used to be? Yeah… that…. sexual rights.

Here’s history, from an entirely different natural disaster:

““Phuket wouldn’t have recovered without sex workers, Mam told Women’s eNews through a translator. But when it came time for the government to hand out recognition and small grants to help residents rebuild their lives, sex workers and their advocates say women such as Mam missed out.

“Sex workers especially have been invisible in the whole of the recovery and considering how much tourism money they bring in they should have been given some consideration,” Hilton said.

Sex work is criminalized in Thailand so there are no reliable estimates of the numbers of sex workers in Phuket. Nationwide the government estimates there are 200,000 but, as Hilton points out, “I think they haven’t counted.”“

““The plight of tsunami-affected sex workers and other women in the service industry has indeed received little attention. Empower estimates that about 2,000 sex workers lost their lives when the walls of water hit, but they’ve never been reported.”“

Many of those 2000 women had children…. “healthy, happy women and children” my fat ass. 

I wish it surprised me that people don’t give a damn about “those” women.

@ Felagund - Hell yes you’d wanna get it on! Remember the week-long blackouts on the East Coast that occurred with Hurricane Isabel hit, and the corresponding crop of babies 9 months later? Or the rash of babies with names like “Kati” and “Trina” in the coastal South?

Condoms to refugees is a great idea for about ten different reasons. Number one: they’re cheap as hell, and prevent further future expenditures on behalf of relief programs already struggling to care for many orphaned and abandoned kids in disaster situations. Number two is of course a harder sell: sex is natural, particularly in stressful times where little else is “normal,” and people everywhere deserve pleasure and comfort without fear of STI’s or pregnancy.

I swear, if we could just convince some wingnuts that sending condoms to developing (or recovering) nations would stop the evil spread of the black/brown populations that they fear so deeply, we could probably convince them to foot the bill. Good in the name of evil: still good.

* refugees should = displaced populations

Wow, FW.  I’m glad you care about the issue, but that’s not what this post is about.  There is exactly zero reason to think that supporting STD and unintended pregnancy prevention for Haitians in crisis is somehow anti-sex worker.  I’d say the opposite, in fact.

I’m really deeply offended that you think because I wrote a post about conservative bad faith and didn’t mention prostitution, that I don’t care.  Indeed, I have to point out that because you wrote about this and did not write about traffic safety, that must mean you want people to die in car accidents.

It’s not that FW doesn’t have valid points. But I’m left scratching my head as to her hostility to Amanda’s post. It’s not like Amanda said “They should all have condoms—except for sex workers.” Yet reading FW you might assume that.

One of the basic methods of advocacy is to find allies to ones cause, not alienate them…

Probably not, Seize.  Not to give FW’s freak out any more fuel, but in fact, keeping people diseased and having to care for more children than they want is a perfect weapon for keeping them down.  Many women who are caught up in prostitution who want out can’t get out because they have children they must feed.  So, to use that example, if you want to keep a population of women desperate enough so they are stuck in abusive sex work situations with no hope of getting out, you want them to keep having children against their will.

There are different kinds of smart. A lot of leading conservatives, including many conservative economists, have lives that simply don’t touch the world as the rest of us know it. Everyone they know has jobs with good insurance (or doesn’t dare tell them otherwise), everyone they know is smart enough to avoid predatory business practices (or too embarrassed to say anything, and definitely not willing to chalk it up to capitalism in general), and they live in places that are properly taken care of, with occasional travel through unkempt areas during which they keep their eyes on their reading material.

And their priorities are different. This is one place, btw, where Krugman’s opinions have undergone an important change. He used to be a classic free-trader, arguing that “free” trade was good because the overall gains it produced were more than enough to compensate the people who lost jobs or capital as a result. Slowly he’s come to the realization that it’s not enough for the gains to be sufficient—you actually have to have the structures in place to do that compensation. For a lot of economists, the fact that the policies they advocate could lead to better outcomes for everyone are enough to get them off the hook. The smarter you are, the better you can be at being wilfully blind to the consequences of your actions.

Hey, it was FW who claimed that the category “women and children” somehow leaves out prostitutes and their children.  Since I have often claimed otherwise, I’m going to have to point out that she made it up and who knows where that came from?  Indeed, I’ve always been against moralistic crusades that leave the needs of sex workers out of sexual health outreach, which implies that prostitutes don’t deserve their health.  But then again, I automatically assume that the category “women” includes these women.  All women, actually.  No one left out.

I’m standing, agape and astonished, at the concept of someone who holds that liberals are against sexual rights, while conservatives are for them.  How . . . how does that work?

Well, some men seem to think that the liberal notion that women have autonomy and their consent matters impinges on their sexual right to fuck whoever they select, as long as she hasn’t been claimed by another man.  Maybe that’s where that comes from.

Um, so Ben Bernanke shouldn’t be reappointed because conservatives are anonymously trolling Salon with condescending bad-faith comments? Maybe Bernanke is neither stupid nor evil, just wrong. Who would you prefer as Fed chair? Summers? Volcker?

Amanda never talks about sexual rights.

Speaking specifically of “the grunts” here, my opinion is that many Conservatives at the base level are not evil or even necessarily stupid (well, on every issue/aspect) so much as I think they are people who are lazy thinkers and, often, ignorant—ignorant in that they live in some very sheltered, “traditional” style amongst a bunch of likeminded traditionalists. I remember Amanda did a post on “White-opias” once, and I think that post covered the kinds of communities I’m talking about. I think that’s the reason rural areas are often more Conservative than cities (as well as why higher education increases liberal thought). Once you get out and see things existing beyond a vacuum, you become more liberal, I think.

And that’s the thing. For a lot of people with Conservative views on issues, I think they are analyzing within that vacuum. Abortion is wrong to them because they have warm fuzzy thoughts over the idea of conception (remnants of religion/beliefs in souls, or religion) and they can’t see the big picture of women’s rights. Gay marriage is wrong to them because “the Bible said so” and they cannot imagine a reason to question it and have possibly never even met a real human being who would be disadvantaged by the lack of gay marriage rights. They just can’t wrap their minds around the human side of diversity, even if they think they accept degrees of it on paper.

(At least, these are my experiences with Conservatives in small-town kind of areas where people still balk at the idea of interracial marriage.) But as to the stupid or evil question again—well, I guess you could say all this ignorance ends up being evil because it promotes evil ends. Evil like malicious, though? I’m not always so sure about that. I think it probably varies greatly and, as another poster said, isn’t always either/or (like a stupid idea that is enhanced by some subconscious malice/bias which the owner can’t acknowledge).

Sorry DTG back @ #9 Hitler has Cheney on charisma - hands down.

And thanks to Planned Parenthood for sending all those condoms to Haiti after the quake.
I’m sure that’s exactly what they want right now. Food and water are SO overrated!

And why do I suspect that this person would not have a problem with a mass shipment of Bibles?

Fun fact about the Donner Party; at the fork in the road, when it became clear that they were running out of summer time, the group grownups decided to hold a vote to decide whether to take the longer (yet safer) Oregon trail, or the shorter (yet untried) Hastings Cut Off.  Most of the women voted for the former, while most of the men voted the latter.  If the women’s votes had been counted, then they would have gone the Oregon way and we’d be saying “Donner what?” today.  However, the men in charge decided that women didn’t deserve a vote and the men were the only experts, so the train took the Hastings Cut Off, and the rest is gruesome history.

I’d say the lesson of the Donner Party is “Count the women’s votes.”  But then there wouldn’t have been the snow packed cannibalism to edify David Frum, so the conservatives would still discount women’s ballots.

Actually, the long-term impact of the Donner Party disaster was to induce people to act like liberals:

The memory of the Donner disaster prompted Californians to fund relief teams during the gold rush. They sent men eastward along the trails to take food and water to overland emigrants, saving many lives.

Wiki Link

Speaking specifically of “the grunts” here, my opinion is that many Conservatives at the base level are not evil or even necessarily stupid (well, on every issue/aspect) so much as I think they are people who are lazy thinkers and, often, ignorant—ignorant in that they live in some very sheltered, “traditional” style amongst a bunch of likeminded traditionalists.

This seems less like a rebuttal of the stupid/evil hypothesis and more like a lot of stupid, evil shit gets done under the banner of tradition.

Conservatives aren’t stupid, just self-centered. Frankly, I think many of them have taken Marx to heart and believe that religion actually is the opiate of the masses, and thus promoting it is a really good idea to maintain social order and allow the conservatives to concentrate wealth without social unrest. There definitely seems to be an attitude that if a person can’t see through the mental fog projected by the media, from TV preachers to talk radio to Fox, that they don’t deserve success and that ignorance is their deserved fate. Is this evil? I don’t think they think so. Spreading wealth to the undeserving—now that’s evil, a betrayal of their fellow conservatives.

Rand was, of course, the most naked example of this style of thinking, but I don’t think that one has to be an objectivist to drink deep from this particular flavor of koolaid…

(Oh, and nice table)

Conservatives aren’t stupid, just self-centered. Frankly, I think many of them have taken Marx to heart and believe that religion actually is the opiate of the masses, and thus promoting it is a really good idea to maintain social order and allow the conservatives to concentrate wealth without social unrest. There definitely seems to be an attitude that if a person can’t see through the mental fog projected by the media, from TV preachers to talk radio to Fox, that they don’t deserve success and that ignorance is their deserved fate. Is this evil? I don’t think they think so. Spreading wealth to the undeserving—now that’s evil, a betrayal of their fellow conservatives.

...actually, that sounds like a pretty good description of evil, if you ask me.  The fact that they don’t think so actually makes it more evil, not less.

Maybe y’all know fewer leftists who haven’t read anything about the World Bank since 1999 and won’t stop moaning about how they wish they were hunter-gatherers

Actually, I have never heard liberal politicians say those things, nor have I ever heard a bunch of talking points being spread by the democrats to get liberals to argue anything to that effect. But you hear the conservative form of that kind of crazy talk from the top levels pf the party and the republican senators all the time. And the purpose is to encourage the right to speak the same way and say the same things.

Part of it is a matter of solidarity. Small business owners don’t have a personal stake in being global warming deniers, but the deal being made is that if the Chamber of Commerce can leverage their small business partisans to rant against climate change and spit put vituperation against Al Gpre, this will help the CoC’s coal and oil patrons, and in exchange, the CoC will support tax cuts their other members want. And it binds their allies together by telling them, “you’ve already embraced the kool aid. You can’t leave us now.”

As paul already alluded to above, I think part of the real problem is our faulty assessment of what intelligence means. In American culture (and probably in many others as well), there’s a definite bias towards designating only one kind of capability as “intelligence,” namely, the ability to perform certain technically complex tasks involving math, science, and technology. To be sure, those are important and useful skills, but they are not the be-all and end-all of being smart. I’ve met plenty of physicists who were unable to follow simple philosophical discussions, as well as mathematicians who were moral incompetents. Were those people stupid? Yes and no. No in that they obviously possessed a good amount of reasoning ability when it came to moving from premises to conclusions in a formal setting, but yes in that they often seemed unable to follow complex discussions full of ambiguity. You find a lot of people like that in the sciences. Even liberals, sadly, tend to fall into this trap; if I had to take issue with anything Amanda is saying in the OP, I would say that the characterization of Bernanke as smart is kind of beside the point. Bernanke is good at a certain thing: being an economist. That makes him competent at certain tasks, but it’s far from an assurance that he has any kind of moral intelligence, or philosophical sophistication, or anything else that we might consider relevant to evaluating smarts (of course, he may have those things but we just don’t see them).

I’m reminded of Gilbert Ryle’s example in The Concept of Mind where he talks about how we evaluate performance. That is, when we say that someone is a good tennis player, what we mean is that we have observed him winning a lot at tennis. Ryle of course is doing this in service of a completely different conclusion, but nevertheless I find the idea useful and germane to this discussion. What we can say about Bernanke is that he is a good economist, for some suitable definition of “good” and “economist,” but inquiring into whether he is “smart” is an essentialist question that I don’t think is really worth asking. Is Dick Cheney “smart,” as some people have argued above? He certainly was good at achieving his nefarious goals, so who cares if he was “smart” in some abstract sense or not? I guess in the end, I’m much more interested in evaluating people’s actions with regard to what they do or don’t achieve than I am in assigning abstract descriptors. That’s just my two, possibly derailing, cents.

The American Right has had to lie about its policy positions for nearly as long as it’s existed.  Maybe back in the 19th century, the American Right could say clearly what it stood for, but ever since the last Progressive movement, the Union movement and especially since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, the Right has ALWAYS lied about what it stands for.

They lie because if they told the truth about their positions and their consequences, they’d never win another election.  Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Shrub, they ALL lied up, down, and sideways about what they really stood for, in order to get elected.

No member of the American Right could ever win an election by telling the truth.  Well.  Maybe down in South Carolina they could.  And maybe in a few of the really profoundly regressive congressional districts in the country they could.  But national elections?  Nope.  Can’t win.  So they lie.

By now the lying is so deeply ingrained that the most adept practitioners of it—the Right’s national politicians—are extremely good at it, to the point where they themselves do not recognize that they’re lying.  That’s when the going gets weird, and when we start to see things like we’re seeing now.

I would say that the characterization of Bernanke as smart is kind of beside the point. Bernanke is good at a certain thing: being an economist. That makes him competent at certain tasks, but it’s far from an assurance that he has any kind of moral intelligence, or philosophical sophistication, or anything else that we might consider relevant to evaluating smarts (of course, he may have those things but we just don’t see them).
Jerry Vinokurov

This would be true if economics were a science.  However it fails to categorize economics as a philosophy.  Economics can’t be measured scientifically due to lack of being able to isolate factors, lack of control groups and, as Phoenician in a time of Romans pointed out, the constant elimination of statistical processes without adequately replacing them with more accurate or refined methods.  What we see in economics is philosophical moving of goal posts so the data matches the preconceived notions.

This was why when I found out that Candidate Obama was from the Chicago school of economics in his philosophy I began to worry about how his proposed policies would be implemented.

Conventional economics isn’t so much about moving the goalposts as about declaring what most people would think of as goals to be irrelevant. Everyone agrees that people act to maximize perceived utility (in fact, it’s pretty much tautological), but it’s impossible to do useful math when everyone has their own definition of utility (as most of us do) and many of the definitions include things like feeling good about ourselves or just the right smell of eggs and butter in the morning. So the economists decreed that utility would be measured in terms of money, and intangibles would be measured in terms of how much people would be willing to pay to hold onto them (rather than how much they would ask to be paid to give thoe things up, which messed up the math because people might ask too high a price). Then that didn’t work either, because utility appears to be some weird nonlinear function of money, where having a little more makes you a little happier, but having a lot more doesn’t make you a lot happier. So they (for the most part) ditched that too and decreed that for purposes of making mathematically tractable models (like physicists ignoring friction) everything would just be measured in money, and utility be damn. Then whenever they see someone making decisions that can’t be explained by maximizing money, economists (OK, not all of them) complain that actual human beings are “irrational” or “economically illiterate”, with the implicit conclusion that they then deserve whatever is coming to them.

As a matter of interest, at what level of disagreement does someone become stupid or evil exactly? Liberals often accuse right-wingers of either or both (although I’ve noticed Amanda is just as quick to add insanity to the list at times) but they’re often just as quick to label people to the left of them as naive or misguided.

Personally, my politics are pretty far to the left, though there’s some range according to topic, but I can engage in discussion with someone without judging them an arsehole for thinking differently. I guess what I’m saying is that things like the table at the top of the page where people are told why they have certain opinions always tend to rub me the wrong way. Conservatives are equally quick to ascribe left-wing views to naivete or some kind of unholy desire to sink society into corruption but in any situation, attempting to pathologize those on the other side of a debate from you is a fairly straightforward sign of insecurity.

felagund (8):

If I survived that earthquake, I’d want to get it on. Thanks, Planned Parenthood!

I would.

And no Planned Parenthood shipment could force me to use a condom if I didn’t want to. And Planned Prenthood sending condoms doesn’t prevent so much as a μl of food or water from getting to someone who needs it. So it’s a ridiculous thing to complain about, if one is sincerely supporting efforts to help the Haitians.