Sometimes it’s hard to say what I really mean without sounding preachy. For example: I would like to say that if you believe in intelligent design or creationism you should phrase omitted. Unfortunately, any way that I think to fill in that blank seems to make me no worse than the extremists who want their kids to never see a boob or get their feelings hurt in school.
It’s really hard to keep my scientist’s veneer when I don’t often have any facts to support my subconsious urges to maim when people spew sewage from their mouths all over the public.
And this is where the whole problem with moderates comes to play. The only people who seem to loudly and openly share their viewpoints with the rest of the world are the folks who sit at the far ends of the scales. And of all the people you want around for debates and arguments, they are the absolute worst choices. They are people who cannot be swayed in their opinions.
Recently, Jon Stewart had Rick Santorum on The Daily Show. In the middle of the interview Jon came to the conclusion that he was never going to get Rick to budge in his views on anything—and that was effectively where the real meat of the interview ended. You can’t have a reasonable debate if no one is willing to concede in anyway. At that point, what you have instead of a debate is a “who has the biggest reproductive organs” shouting match. People like Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Tucker Carlson really get off on this kinda thing.
What happens is that people who are willing to listen to reasonable debate, to non-extremist opinions, to civilized discourse are being drowned out and ignored by just about every talking-head that exists. It’s so bad that it’s hard to tell if anybody is actually out there who talks sensically anymore, or if everyone in the big middle of the spectrum just gave up a long time ago. The closest thing we have is Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I think there is something very important to learn about the state of affairs when the only possibility of a useful television news broadcast has to come from a network devoted to comedy.
Any time that faith intersects with science (or with anything else) you end up with a horribly exothermic reaction. On one side is a bunch of folks who are used sharing their beliefs and opinions rather vocally to large groups of like-minded individuals. On the other side you have the people who like to triple-check every number, every measurement, every fact to make sure it all makes sense; plus it doesn’t help that they are stereotypically allergic to public speaking. In that kind of contest the faith group state their opinion accompanied by fudgy or zero facts and the science folk ask for more statistics, more information to back up the faith-based opinion. After that, the discussion just becomes its own living animal until it runs out of food and it dies off—never fully resolved. Eventually someone stumbles across the emaciated creature along the side of the road, feeds it, and poof—it’s back to cause trouble.
I wish more people in the middle started yelling louder than the crazy people on the edge.
Hey, look who you rubbed virtual elbows with in my feed reader today: Liberals Are So Intolerant! The Right loves to sling this smug accusation at critics from the Left. Mark Morford has a reply
Tell me, does the two-party system over there actually allow for such a thing as a “middle ground”? Like Jon has often said, everything seems to be so much about partisanship and liberal vs. conservative; and what you call ‘Left’ would be about ‘inbetweenish’ over here and your ‘Right’ would just scare everyone a lot, but not be elected by half of the population.
…although hey, you never know. Shit has been known to hit the fan.
The really crazy thing is that Left and Right don’t correspond to the parties. Democrats and Republicans can each be Left and Right and Middle and Upside-down or whatever. Liberals and Conservatives are not parties, they are preset mentalities that you can subscribe to if you don’t want to try and form an opinion by yourself.
Now this is interesting. The result diagram of the World’s Smallest Political Quiz* has Left/Liberal and Right/Conservative as equivalents. You’re right, one is a party affiliation, the other a kind of sum of values and beliefs. But, when all is said and done, the US are still a scary, scary place, period.
* (I’m a Centrist, hah!)
There’s nothing too wrong with believing in intellegent design, but to teach it as a science is just ignorance. I find it very difficult to maintain a centrist stance, because when approached with narrow, extreme viewpoints I often have the urge to fight back by taking the opposite extreme. It’s hard to stand ground without pulling one way or the other.
Definitely liking your site. Another post I agree with. With regards faith and exothermic reactions, I have to confess I quite enjoy watching conservative christians froth at the mouth when you ask them to reconcile an all powerful, all knowing, omnipresent and benevolent God with the existence of evil in the world. They invariably blame the devil, and the fireworks really start when you point out that in their faith, God created the devil in full knowlege of the evil he was inflicting on the world. Alternatively, throw the omphaloidean heresy at them, ie ask ‘Did Adam have a navel?’, and watch them dither.
Am I a bad man? Am I?