Reading notes

My primary grievance against prevailing Republican doctrine is that it thrives on and promotes nonthinking and worse, anti-thinking. It’s damned embarrassing to me to see smart people fall for it.

Note that “prevailing Republican doctrine” does not equal “true conservative values.” True conservative values — like smaller government, fiscal responsibility, hell, any kind of responsibility — are often thoughtful, reasonable, sane. Prevailing Republican doctrine isn’t.

Just watch Crossfire, for example: the commentators “from the Right” spout fallacy after false inference after non sequitur, exhibiting the kind of flabby thinking and erroneous reasoning that would get them an F on every high school- or college paper I’ve ever had to write.

We’re all susceptible to faulty reasoning. But to put in software terms, seems to me that for left-leaning folks crappy thinking is a bug to be identified and fixed, whereas for right-leaning folks — especially those in charge — it’s regarded as a feature.

There are plenty of Republican people who can think exceedingly clearly but who, in this particular case, apparently haven’t thought about how thoroughly they’ve been surrounded by deliberate dimwits.

Wake up, wake up, all of us! We can do better than this. Let’s use the brains God gave us.

Gov. Howard Dean M.D. writes —

I write this week’s column as a physician.

The Bush administration has declared war on science. In the Orwellian world of 21st century America, two plus two no longer equals four where public policy is concerned, and science is no exception. When a right-wing theory is contradicted by an inconvenient scientific fact, the science is not refuted; it is simply discarded or ignored.

What does it possibly gain us to not only disobey God — as we are when we wage unjust wars, for starters — but to also disdain his gift of intelligent thought?

See also Bush Misuses Science (WaPo) and Science Friction (Washington Monthly).