On USA's Decision 2004

An historic era of hating the stupid is upon us, friends.

No matter your political stripes, it is difficult not to be at least somewhat discomfited by the results of the recent presidential election in the United States of America. Whether you take umbrage with a wartime election being essentially decided on religious issues, with modern liberals' inability to delineate a cohesive vision, or with hundreds of thousands of youth who blogged loudly and turned up in droves to cheer Michael Moore's speeches but found something better to do on election day rather than vote, there is a world of bile choking up the throats of people all across the planet this week.

In a way, it is fortunate that The War Against Terror receded into the background as the campaign wore on -- for it is a divisive and complex issue, causing former Republicans to support Democrats, and vice versa. It's muddy. But the states directly affected by the terrorist attacks of 2001 chose to be protected by a Democrat administration rather than a Republican one -- it was the states with more pressing issues on their minds that determined the outcome.

Record numbers turned out to vote this election -- largely older voters, with over a quarter of the swelled numbers identifying themselves as Born Again Christians. Some studies suggest that up to 40% of Americans are certain that the universe was created in the span of seven literal days, and that this act took place less than six thousand years ago. To these folks, the important issues were not security or economics: they were abortion and gay marriage.

Such is the power of cohesive ignorance.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not suggesting that if you don't think the same way as the dominant liberal ethos you're automatically an idiot. What I'm suggesting is that if you miss the significance of the separation of church and state, if you misunderstand the meaning and methodology of scientific inquiry, and if you honestly trust in a commander-in-chief who condones bald-faced lies to the electorate justified by an inner sense of spiritual superiority and manifest destiny...well, you're fucking retarded.

This isn't about believing in God, or even about recognising the moral decay of the West. It's about appropriate use of power in a modern liberal democracy, put into the hands of an anti-intellectual didactic demagogue who will protect the citizenry from itself and it's own bad ideas.

You know -- bad ideas like, say, evolution.

See, when you take a mechanism as easy to demonstrate as natural selection (backyard experiments with moths will do just fine) and deny its reality, you are subscribing to a notion of a God who is out to trick you. This is a God who tests your faith by presenting you with internally consistent, logical evidence that has been planted throughout in order to fool the unstalwart into doubting the literal truth of the Word. In other words, he's an ass-hole. He doesn't want you to be saved. He doesn't want to see your sorry ass in Heaven, and he doesn't want to go to the trouble of sorting the pious from the impious himself.

That God declares that the man or woman who uses their mind and their senses in an organized, methodical, collaborative fashion should be dissuaded. That God declares that the thinking person is evil.

This is the essence of anti-intellectualism: that the things we discover through rationality are trivial compared to the things we believe because they are appealing.

Those who would mistake democracy for a philosophy (rather than a pragmatic political solution to the vexing problem of human beings butchering one another or lolling in tyranny) are therefore empowered by the ignorance of the overwhelming mass of humanity, for they are convinced a majority view equates to a valid view. This is the sacred power of the "common man" -- enemy of the elitists in ivory towers who would naysay their gut feelings.

Because, of course, it should be obvious that the gut feelings of talking apes -- gut feelings shaped through natural selection to navigate the social order of the savannah through a million years of manifold death -- are the best tools for gleaning the true nature of the universe.

It's as obvious as the fact that fags are lesser human beings.

It's as obvious as common sense.