Thursday, May 20, 2010

What He Said


Conor Friedersdorf is a conservative thinker with whom I don't often agree, but I'd love to talk with him. He's among those rare conservatives nowadays who thinks the power of his ideas is such that they don't require lying to convince people. Like me, he points out the disrespect the RWS™, in their constant lying, show for their audience and, for that matter, the very ideas they promote. He's also been involved in the "epistemic closure" debate, for which he's earned the wrath of the epistemically closed. His talk partner, above, is the guy who first used the term.

If our political debate were on the level he tries to provide, and if the teabaggers would recognize the low esteem in which they're implicitly held by those shining them on, educate themselves (a lot of catching up to do), and think of ways to join a useful dialogue, well, maybe we'd be closer to pulling it off. By "it" I mean surviving.

Whereas it's refreshing to see at least a few conservatives call out the deceptions of the radio clowns and, by inference, the talking heads on Fox "news," and whereas it's nice to hear repeated the very things I've been saying about the disregard for truth, for their audience, for the process of democracy that the aforementioned screamers evince every day, it's also depressing. Because, on the right anyway, such voices are so rare as to round off to zero. And, pretty much by definition, such reasonableness is to teabagging as magnets are to credit cards.


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