Losing Touch With Reality

[chris_gerrib]

There are days that I think America has a real problem, namely that its citizens are loosing touch with reality. A few examples:

The Food and Drug Administration

I had a conversation via email with a PhD in economics and professor at a prestigious university. At the end of the conversation, he told me, in all seriousness, that the Food and Drug Administration was not the reason we had safe food in America. I asked about Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and was assured that, if I took the good Professor's courses, I would be enlightened about why the FDA was "corporatism."

I declined the offer. I will continue to "proudly flaunt my ignorance" as he suggested in his email.

Birthers

"Birthers" is the derogatory term for people who claim that Obama wasn't born in the US or otherwise isn't a natural-born citizen. It's easily disproved bullshit. What I found most interesting, though, was the graph below, showing the concentration of this bullshit in certain regions of the country. (Source = Political Animal blog)



In the South, the last bastion of the Republican Party, this idea is approaching common knowledge. In the rest of the country, it's lunatic fringe.

The bottom line is that it's real hard to have a rational discussion with irrational people. Maybe I should stop trying? Or is that too rational? ;-)

Comments

[jetfx.livejournal.com]

Politics for most people is more a matter of emotion than a rational consideration of the facts. I have no problem with people of different political persuasions if they can mount a decent defense of their position by appealing to the facts.