American Politics: The Domination of the Stupid

Well now we know--there's research to prove it--that people of lower intelligence are drawn to simplistic ideologies that answer complex question of existence and ethics by spewing out easy answers in the form of slogans.

The sad thing about this finding is that it ought to be emabarrassing. In contemporary America the fact that the stupidest among us lead under the slogan of "good old-fashioned morality" seems almost to be a badge of virtue. Recreating history and blabbing non-existent "facts" has almost become a rite of passage. Media lap it up because it's good for controversy--and, presto, we have candidates for public office who are stupider and even less informed, not to mention hypocritical, than those who support them, or at least these people are pretending to be (if by saying that I don't give more credit than they are due).

I guess you've got to show your bona fides--lack of education and intolerance in order to appeal to those carefully undereducated to be incapable of looking benearth the surface presentation of sloganeered morality.

But what the heck are these "morals." Scratch the surface of Michelle Bachman and Santorum and you will find bedrock "values" flying counter to the Jesus they insist on flaunting and complete lies enough to make a worm puke. Instead of being exposed, this crap is being lauded. The majority should rule, Bachman says piously. God help us if they ever do. That's how we got the Holocaust. Hasn't she ever heard of the "tyranny of the majority?" I suppose not since she attended a religious (evangelical) university, which has selfish reasons (power and money) to want to monopolize people's minds.

At this point, I must admit I fail to understand why anyone would send their children to religious schools and then reinforce in the home the dogma fed to close their children's minds. That's amost child abuse. I can only suppose it has to be with parents wanting compliant children and imposing the fear of a god and hell to reinforce their authority. How puny.

I am all for taxing religions just like any other corporation since they meddle in politics now and since they seem to believe they are people. All this flap over whether the government should force religions to cover contraception in  medical plans offered to their employees (many not of the same religion) needs to be turned around. How dare these religious hospitals impose their religious beliefs on their employees? How dare they presume to judge women who terminate unwanted pregnancies when they deny the services that would prevent these pregnancies in the first place? How dare they impose their religious beliefs on people coming to their hospitals when there often is no other choice in the region that they serve? Shall we now justify female mutilation by saying it is a religious practice and the government has no right to regulate it? How about cannibalism? Is that a religious right? It has been so in certain cultures.

Freedom of religion means freedom from persecution not freedom to do anything they want, including making scads of money and paying no taxes for the nation's common good.
As a woman, I am sick of supposedly celibate old men trying to regulate women's bodies. What is it about a woman's body that so fascinates them? Are they jealous? Are they afraid they missed out on something that they threw away in their younger years?

I can't say that only unintelligent people hew conservative these days. The smarter ones are using it to their own benefit and catapaulting into or maintaining themselves in the 1% where all the wealth is. If the wilfully uneducated are the true believers, the smarter ones are the cynics. They've figured out to use the others. As one of my commentators put it to me: you can't fix stupidity. I would add, particularly not when being or pretending to be ignorant is a source of pride and social cohesion.