Neoconservatism in One Sentence
Reason, while at the Slamdance Film Festival (oh, aren’t y’all clever), filmed a short interview with the producers (and victims of the events) of Graphic Sexual Horror, a documentary about how Homeland Security shut down a hardcore bondage site by telling banks that it — and all such sites — was a terror front. The setup comes from someone who simply said:
Porn site operators. Funding terrorist groups. Do you think the people making that accusation actually believe it?
And the reply:
Violent pornography: tool of the devil. Islam: tool of the devil. [Seriously], think about who you’re talking about for a second. To some very special people, evil is an active entity with a single root and merely several earthly manifestations. It’s like playing spiritual whack-a-mole with the universe.
FTW. Explains a lot, no? You don’t actually have to establish that two things are connected — let’s say, purely hypothetically, terrorists in caves in Afghanistan and a secular dictatorship in Arabia — if you can assert that they are both evil. In fact, they don’t even have to be evil; one can be merely scary and poorly understood. This may actually be the worst thing that W. did to this country; he denounced the pesky reality-based community and chose to run the nation through cognitive dissonance. Americans had a poor grasp of critical thought as it was; instead of a leader challenging them to overcome it, Bush decider-ized his way through that pesky obstacle known as analysis and the general public has not grasped that that is why his presidency was such an abject failure.
This pseudo-logic extends to unrelated public policy hysterias. If you can merely assert that child molestation is more common now than it used to be (which is surely untrue but has the veneer of legitimacy because it receives more public attention than in previous times) and that teh Interwebz are all crazy somehow and getting crazier, you can get Congress to try and run MySpace out of business. This also means that anecdotal evidence (“the best kind of evidence,” ma cherie says) gains just as much legitimacy as, y’know, evidence; this, of course, leads to agonizingly painful arguments like “My baby got vaccinated and now s/he has autism so that’s what caused it!” actually being treated as viable by the gullible, Applebee’s-fed masses.
This is also how Sarah Palin will be your next president.
(Of course, this is from the guy that predicted this would be Day 11 of the Edwards Administration, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.)
(Just don’t say you weren’t warned, America. Be afraid.)
