I can't stand it.
Not so long ago I complained about this kid I grew up with starting a Facebook fight with me over my non-SOTU commentary. Nevermind that every pundit out there, even the Republicans, agreed that Bobby Jindal was a disaster. Anyway.
He keeps arguing. This time at least by email, but it started with a question of "why are people bigots if they don't think gays should get married?" Easy enough, and in my best, patient, even parental, maybe-he-just-doesn't-know tone I explained, at length, fundamental equal rights and exalting love and commitment over gender. Deep breath.
Then he sends me some crap WSJ editorial about the stimulus and how it will be the end of all things great and American and we're overtaxing the rich and not supporting business and we might as well get a hammer and sickle and start calling each other "comrade." Which I read. And again, with calm and even tone, discussed the purpose of taxes (turns out they pay for things that people need) and how I never saw one inch of tax relief under Bush but would be getting it for the first time under Obama, how complaining about not taking a second vacation is kinda bullshit when people have real problems like not having enough food, and how if we are going to socialize the losses (which we already have) then the taxpayer ought to get something out of it by socializing some of the profits.
To which he replied that he works hard and isn't greedy and rich people should get to keep whatever they make and tax cuts are the end-all be-all.
Really deep fucking yoga breath. Ok, buster brown, but tax cuts sure as hell haven't helped lately and rich people pay most of the taxes because they make most of the money and nobody is against hard work but we are against hoarding your profits at the expense of everybody else in the world and by the way there are other things like changing immigration laws so that people who go to grad school here can work here which would also have a dramatic affect on the economy. And then I sent him this Paul Krugman article about the stimulus.
Which he refused to read. Because he already knows that Krugman is a "partison" [sic].
And that, I simply cannot stand. Not the partisan part, the refusal to read.
Nevermind that Krugman has a Nobel Prize in economics which I think counts for something, at the very least the man deserves a modicum of respect for being voted at the top of his field by people in his field. But refusing to even look at it? What kind of an intellectually bankrupt, willfully ignorant, uncurious, uninterested, uninvolved, idiot actively says to someone they know that they refuse to even look at an article because they think they probably already disagree with it.
What kind of piss-poor educational system teaches that critical thinking includes sticking your head in the sand? Who the fuck thinks it's a good idea to just not look at stuff so that you can pretend it doesn't exist? How the hell do you learn anything that way?
This is the problem with Republicans today. Sarah Palin and her anti-intellectual, anti-education, pro-idiot bias. Their simple answers to complicated questions, ignoring all implications and simply repeating, glassy eyed, "um, uh, no taxes," as if that is all they have ever learned to say.
In fact this is the problem with alot of America and is the very reason why things are so polarized and partisan at all - people's self-imposed insulation from anything that they might possibly disagree with. On the internet, in their neighborhoods and among their friends, people are less and less likely to come into contact with different ideas, until even the idea of something different is so scary that you can't even look at it.
That is truly idiotic.
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