Short and not so sweet this evening, since 3CM is much too lazy to write anything with any sort of imagination on his own, taken from posts on a British website that always has a good time finding sources of conservative/anti-intellectual/generally right-wingnut all-American stupidity to wail upon, namely The Guardian. The posts in question are about:
(1) the Disneyland-related measles outbreak
(2) wingnut embrace of American Sniper
Your assignment: read both articles, and then take the poll here. (No "all of the above" option; you must choose one.) More (well, not really) below the flip.....
In the case of the measles story, Rory Carroll notes a curious aspect, citing Matt Zahn, medical director of Epidemiology and Assessment for the Orange County Health Care Agency:
'It is a strange first-world irony that wealthier, better-educated parents are the ones reducing infant vaccination rates, said Zahn. “Many people in this country have never seen a case of measles,” he said. “We’re a victim of our own success.”'
Modest proof, I suppose, that better overall education doesn't necessarily mean better education in all areas (e.g. science), or that greater wealth doesn't automatically correlate to greater smarts. But that's not the only culprit, as Carroll briefly notes in his article:
"The outbreak has triggered recrimination towards an eclectic group of activists who are accused of sabotaging immunisation campaigns by peddling medical myths."
That's an old story, of course, sad to say. However, if I had the bandwidth, I could probably find DK diaries that perpetuate the false vaccines-autism link, so that anti-science and anti-intellectualism isn't just confined to the right.
Disdain for facts and historical accuracy is par for the course on the right, however, as witness to their embrace of American Sniper, noted by Lindy West in her blog post. (Disclaimer: I have not seen the film, so I cannot comment on the film itself, and will not do so.) West points out the less-than-admirable aspects Chris Kyle's character, which evidently wouldn't make for a good war movie, but which find their replicants in wingnut-land American style, who show their viciousness and bigotry gleefully and without remorse (kind of like the real-life Kyle, come to think of it).
While it's not clear whether West chose the exact title herself for her blog entry (one would assume, but one can never be sure), her question of "Why are simplistic patriots treating Chris Kyle as a hero?" is rhetorical, and I'm sure she well knows the answer. The answer, of course, is that it's been long proved that the Iraq invasion was based on false premises and was a disastrous blunder that we, as a nation, collectively got suckered into. This movie allows the right-wing to grab at minimal straws to justify that disastrous invasion, and ignore how the invasion actually led to the emergence of the revolting monsters known as the Islamic State/ISIS. The Islamic State/ISIS and the US right-wing mirror each other in their intolerance and fanaticism, although the former bury the needle when it comes to physical acts of brutality. But it's a sad thought to postulate that, as awful as Saddam Hussein was, if we had left Iraq alone back then:
(1) They would have been a counter-balance to Iran.
(2) No Islamic State/ISIS.
But then, of course, we don't know what would have happened regarding Mubarak and Gaddafi. That's one difference between history and experimental science. In experimental science, you get to do experiments, and if things don't work or you find out new fact, you can do new experiments or tweak the conditions of the old ones on a relatively short time scale. But in history, you can't go back and repeat an "experiment" if it goes wrong. You get one chance, and have to live with the consequences of the results of that one chance.
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week......