Quote:
Originally Posted by betenoire
This. 
Exactly.
Now, I love the hell out of Rachel Maddow. I think she's smart. I think she makes sense. I trust her (mostly). If I ran into her on the street I'd ask her to sign my cleavage or my copy of Catch 22 or my travel mug. Or all three.
HOWEVER. Her delivery makes me feel icky sometimes. Too smug. Too much like making fun of the people that she doesn't agree with. Of course she's right, but sometimes she just seems like she's being a bit of an asshole about being right. Why try to beat the Fox-types at their own game? Their game SUCKS and I hate to see smart people with opinions that I respect playing that game.
(Mind you, I play that game. That's MY delivery much of the time - but I'm not on television. Nothing I ever say or do will be witnessed by more than a couple dozen people. She has a responsibility to reign in the neener-neener that I don't have.) |
Actually, i kind of disagree with you here. The people at FOX don't seem smug about being right. They seem smug about being dishonest. There's a difference.
IF someone insists that the Sun orbits the Earth and it is then pointed out to them that, in fact, the Earth orbits the Sun and they then go on to continue to insist that the opposite is true that person *deserves* to be shown a fool. It's long past time, our challenges both as a nation and as a species are altogether too serious for us to continue to play this game that if you espouse something that is demonstrably wrong, you deserve to have your ideas taken as seriously and given as much weight as someone who advocates something that is demonstrably correct. And yes, it IS possible to get to a close-enough approximation to correct and incorrect for it to be workable--at least provisionally until such time as better data comes along.
If you are a liberal, I ask you this: over the course of the last, say, decade precisely HOW much good has been done in giving 'respect' to demonstrably, obviously false beliefs. Imagine, just for a moment, how different things would be if the news media had done due diligence and actually followed up on the claims that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and/or had an active nuclear weapons program. Imagine how different things would be if, instead of 'respecting' that some people might believe that Iraq was involved with 9/11 kept hammering home that not only was there no evidence for any such involvement but that such involvement would mean that two groups that wanted to destroy one another (Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government) had got into bed with one another to attack America. Imagine how different things would have been if news organizations, instead of breathlessly accepting the Bush administration's lie that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material from Nigeria, actually did the research. The information was out there. (It took me about three hours, using ONLY open sources, to get enough information that I had very serious doubts about those WMD claims. Keeping in mind that at this point it had been the best part of two decades since I had done ANY kind of intelligence analysis and had no access to classified documents or officials. Is there anyone here who believes that the NYT or WaPo or CNN couldn't do a better job than little old me who was trained to do analysis against the Soviet Union?)
The overwhelming consensus of climate scientists is that global climate change is happening and the predictions based upon the models that exist are, in fact, starting to be observed. But you would NEVER know that from reading your local paper or listening to the American media. We can't afford to continue to be 'nice' and 'respectful' of obviously false beliefs because Nature is not being 'respectful' of climate-change deniers. The ice sheets are melting regardless of whether or not anyone in the Republican party believes that they are or not.
Cheers
Aj