I don’t like Huntsman. I wasn’t going to vote for him.
But it was refreshing to see a man stand up on the right and publicly state that he accepts the scientific evidence for evolution and climate change.
I give him a ton of credit for that. However, it was not the way to win the Republican nomination because the conservative base doesn’t accept these things. In fact, they believe that these things are the enemy. They believe that science is the enemy.
That makes me sad.
Now, we only have Republicans who publicly state that they don’t accept the scientific evidence for evolution or climate change – or anything else scientific, for that matter. And whether it’s because they are trying to become accepted by the most inbred, lunatic, racist, paranoid, deluded bunch of idiots in the country or whether they actually don’t really accept science as the fundamental way of discovering the way that the universe works doesn’t really matter much to me. The fact is that the right is utterly devoid of the ravages of intelligence.
I find this to be incredibly sad. I blame dogmatic jingoism and religion for this. For years, Americans have been told, over and over again, that they live in the “freest” nation on earth, the “best” nation on earth, and the one “blessed by god”. And now that their little rustic world has come crashing down around their shoulders, all that they can do is retreat further into the fantasy which they have been taught.
If you want to be elected as a republican today, you have to state that you believe in bronze age magical, superstitious, ignorant thinking, or you will never, ever, be elected.
Republican candidates today, including Ron Paul, are simplistic, divisive, paranoid morons. And it does matter a great deal if you accept science or not. A person’s beliefs do matter. The goal of going to school for decades isn’t to teach us to make decisions based on our fantasies, but to make decisions based on acquired knowledge which has taken centuries to collect. We don’t sit in class to learn matters and subjects based on “a feeling” which we get when we close our eyes and just robotically “believe” something to be true.
We go to school to learn how to process information, accept science in a variety of subjects, and then build our own thoughts upon it so that we may lead more educated and enlightened lives and, perhaps, to one day contribute to that body of knowledge ourselves as well.
Not everyone is a scientist by profession, but everyone is supposed to be a scientist in our daily lives. Even when we drive or cross the street, we don’t just blindly turn or cross because we “feel” that a car isn’t coming the opposite way. We learn to observe and process data.
Somebody who publicly states that they don’t believe in this process is not worthy of my vote. In my view, they are not even worthy of much in the human discourse.
And they are certainly not worthy of running this country; of fixing complex problems which require deep thinking and problem solving. They have missed the entire point of what it means to be educated.
I’d rather vote for a village idiot who understands that you will never, ever, be able to fly by simply thinking very hard and wishing it were true.
Summer Seale 