Intellectual Dishonesty

What we increasingly see from the Right is a complete lack of intellectual honesty. In place of carefully reasoned, structured, and supported arguments, we see instead a repetitious series of talking points, endlessly repeated and trotted out at every opportunity.

No sources are cited to back up the arguments made, no appeal to scholarship on the subject, or indeed to any source at all. What we get instead are bald-faced lies presented with the same vigor a missionary might witness the gospel. And this IS a gospel for these people.

And like the gospel it is a fabric of belief, not of documented facts.

If presented with a carefully researched and reasoned article, scrupulous in its citations, well-foot-noted and anchored in solid scholarship, the Right will respond with their usual blanket statement that you are stupid, silly, childish, etc, insults to answer Reason, a display of anti-intellectualism to rival anything we saw during the 2008 political campaigns.

The inability to argue rationally and to support these talking points with some scholarship makes that intellectual dishonesty breath-taking in scope. "You're wrong" is not an argument, not any more than is it's opposite, "it is." We have a right, I think, to know why something is, or something is not.

The Right will not give us this. In all honesty, they have nothing to give, but they can't be honest enough to admit it, to confess that their answer derives entirely from a dedication to ideological demands and not from anything found in an evidence-based world.

They have no actual data to back up their claims, but data is an alien concept in a world not founded in reality, where facts are mere inconveniences to be dismissed with talking points. The Right does not respond to facts; it talks PAST them. And disdainfully at that.

If it cannot be proven that 2+2 do not equal “5” then the answer will be an insult. The answer is "5" they will insist, but they will not demonstrate how this can be so. Apparently, they believe that if they repeat themselves often enough that lies will become truth.

The problem for the intellectually dishonest is that 2+2 will never equal "5." The answer will always equal "4", and the blind insistence, without evidence of any kind, that it equals "5," will never convince anyone other than other intellectually dishonest ideologues lost in a fantasy land of “should-have-beens.”

The world will move on by and leave them to their childish fantasies. And good riddance.