Asymptote

A corollary to one of my main themes -- the dumbing down of the Republican party, its aggressive and proud anti-intellectualism, its turning to people like Sarah Palin and Jim Demint and Rand Paul -- is that it's a path to destruction. I've focused more on the extent to which it'll destroy us all. But maybe it's possible that it'll destroy them before they destroy the rest of us. A writer on a conservative site is worried about exactly that:

OK. So the Republicans might have offended some small academic elites across the country – does it matter?

I think it is too early to say whether it matters directly in terms of demographics and electoral success. The highly educated are a tiny percentage of the country, of course.

However, there is another side to the challenge: one of governance and policy. A party needs a well-educated echelon – call it an elite – to formulate policy to deal with complex challenges. Without the philosophical and academic achievements of the likes of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson, the Reagan revolution would not have been possible...

... the well is drying up. So few of the experts in any given field will in the future be Republican. That is an enormous problem. The intellectual resources directed at finding conservative answers to today’s problems are weakened year by year. If not quite critical yet, thanks to the efforts of an older generation of Republicans, the ramifications of this trend might be dramatic.

Finally, there is a question of identity: If the conservative movement – for whatever reasons – is unable to comprise those who seek knowledge, to improve their own situation and that of their community, what kind of movement is it?

I think the guy has a point. In a race to the bottom, it's possible they'll run themselves into the idealess irrelevancy of gut feelings and anti-educated beliefs before they run the country into the proverbially and recently recounted ditch. One might hope.

Meanwhile, since so many have so misunderstood so many of my points for so long, let me say once more: I rue the loss of seriousness on the right. I believe in a two-party system, and wish to hell we still had one. One comprised of two conscientious parties, each trying (as best as anyone can, however imperfectly, given the inherent paralysis that has overtaken our system) to provide actual solutions to actual (as opposed to imaginary) problems. We'd be immeasurably better off.

But now it's only the shadow of the smell of the smoke of a long-gone pipe dream.

An Entire Party...

Sure, there'll always be kooks and cranks. But a whole party?

Of the Republicans running for the thirty-seven Senate seats -- and that means a lot more than thirty-seven people, because we still gots primaries going on -- only one, ONE!!!, seems to accept the idea of anthropogenic climate change. And he just lost. To someone who campaigns against masturbation. On biblical grounds.

Now, I don't doubt there are a few Republicans who accept the concept of science: heck, even McMaverick used to, and Lindsey Graham, before they stuck their fingers into the jasmine wind. But it doesn't matter. If they exist, they're voiceless.

What matters is that the only people who can be elected by that party nowadays are the crazy ones, or the stupid, or (to put the best face on it) the shameless panderers. This is the party about to retake power. It bodes ill.

You don't get to select which science to accept. You can't take antibiotics for infections while denying the science behind climate change. Scientific method is scientific method. If you don't buy it, fine. But how can you get on an airplane if that's how you think? Surely you'd never trust GPS, or lie under my now-sheathed knife. If science doesn't work, neither do nuclear power plants, or moon shots. Deniers should live in caves. And why not? That's where they'll find their heads.

I don't know climate science by personal investigation; but I do know science as a discipline. It would be the mother of all conspiracies if, as so many on the right say, all the scientists in all the countries around all the world have colluded -- rejecting, one would also assume, a few billion dollars in incentives from oil and coal companies -- to falsify data. (The email debacle notwithstanding: it was, to the surprise of none but the Foxobeckians, a molehill.*) To what end, one must ask, would the conspiracy exist? Is it that scientists, because of their intelligence and curiosity, must all be liberals and, therefore, communists who hate capitalism? One can only wonder.

In what world does an entire party plant its flag firmly in anti-science denialism? How did science become a partisan issue, anyway? It's kind of digital, really. Ones and zeroes. Where's the politics in that? (Okay, I guess that's obvious: the liberal/conservative brain thing, once again. And, of course, the extent to which science threatens biblical literalism.)

Well, that's the way it is. We have a party with its collective head in a cave, factophobic, its mantra "I got mine, I'm keeping it, screw you." Or, at best, "Glenn said it, I believe it, that settles it." And they're winning the argument.

Simply amazing.

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*Truth be told, at my place molehills are a big deal. But that's another story. And I can now, scientifically, recommend those worm-shaped bait thingies.

Facts

Anathema to the RWS™ and to all of those who sup at their untidy table, there follow some facts about the Cordoba Initiative. As I mentioned recently, the leader is Sufi. To those who, at the urging of the demonstrably mendacious and venal Newt Gingrich, mindlessly repeat the notion that the center would be a symbol of terrorist triumphalism, I say (recognizing it'll make no difference, as facts are like rubber bullets on a mylar vest to these people) read this informative piece:

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors.

Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion.

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

It's just another example of how our mindless and simplistic approach to our problems is leading us to self-destruction. As Sarah Palin continues to laugh at thinkers, and as Newt presents his non-thinking as the Republican version of intellect, teabaggers and people like them empower their own destruction.

How sad. For letting it happen, in the case of most of our media, and for making it happen, in the case of the rest, and for our unwillingness to speak up, we deserve what we're about to get. Long since, we've abdicated our place in the world as a voice of reason, innovation, and education. It's assisted suicide.

And Rauf helped the FBI in its fight against terrorists.

And he said this.