``..The amazing thing about faith-based reality is how they've been able to spread the faith -- and how nothing seems able to stop them. No wonder they believe. From all the signs, something really has changed...'' Michael Pollak
``We are in the far, far reaches of epistemological zaniness for sure. To complete the cycle of incredulousness, however, I will say I simply don't believe that people don't believe the facts. I deny their denial. I hope that trying to escape their escapism this way will keep me from panicking and fleeing the country.'' Carl
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Not to bring up Strauss again, but here I think he is relevant. The key is to think about his absurd opposition between `facts' and `values'.
If you push this dialectic, there is simply no quantity of facts sufficient to overwhelm any one particular value statement. It is an epistemological impossibility.
Here's how it plays out. Given Saddam was Evil, there are no facts available to demonstrate that the US wasn't doing Good to get rid of him. Period. What possible fact could ever demonstrate that Bush was not doing Good? Images like Abu Ghraib. Yes. But facts. Never.
Similar thinking can be brought into play for all of the rightwing crap we've been suffering.
Good. Safety. Security. America. Evil. Bad. Pervert. Enemy.
This is part of the mythological machinery of mass political propaganda that Cassirer started to analyze in the Myth of State. His target was of course the National Socialists. But the same sort of nonsense is used every where, and pretty much to the same effect.
You can't really attack this sort of thinking as being non-rational, because there is a great deal of logic (devoid of any empirical content) that can be brought to bare in any argument in which some `value' laden position is set up against some fact ridden empirical argument. The logic of values with all its emotive and dramatic registers pinned to the max will always trump some tired encounter with mere facts. We know facts are stupid.
The Right discovered the effectiveness of this technique from the 60s when progressive idealists (like me) abandoned their fact laden teach-ins about Vietnam and started screaming baby-killer at Johnson.
Now the poles are reversed. So forget facts.
This is why calling Bush the Fuhrer and the US government the Third Reich works. Sure facts say otherwise. So who cares? This is mass propaganda we're dealing with.
Anybody who trumpets `American Values' is nothing but a good German at best, and more than likely a Nazis. Cheney is a degenerate corporate fascist. I know this is true, whether I can prove it with facts or not...
It would be fun to do a poster with all the Bush gang dressed in black SS outfits, like the aliens that Archer and Topal battled in the last episode. It would be nice to have a whole picture book of the Bush gang at work, standing around striking theatrical poses in their SS uniforms, or kicked back in the WH with the tight collars open and pants unbuttoned, scratching themselves. At home in the Kehlsteinhaus with their german shepherd chewing on some `terrorist' bones on the stone patio over looking Berchtesgaden. Driving in their open touring car, along a country road passed thousands of haggard, stark prisoners behind barbed wire fences---
``Social security reform seems to be working, don't you think, Sir?''
``Ah, nothing like a day in the country Hans, away from the cares of Empire.''
``Oh, yes mein Fuhrer...''
This is the expressionist world of cartoon and theater. We should have Carl Rove dressed up like the emcee in Cabaret...
Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! Fremde, etranger, stranger. Gluklich zu sehen, je suis enchante, Happy to see you, bleibe, reste, stay.
Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome Im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret...