What it IS, what the term really means are lies, and deliberate aversion from known facts, because the facts and the truth are NOT what the adherent to post-truth politics wants to hear. It results in an entire political party on the right - the GOP and their subgroup, the Tea Party - making the deliberate choice to disregard fact in favor of fiction, and to make legislation and to raise money instead on bigotry, superstition, and fear mongering ideology. It is wrong, it is bad, it is hateful. It is unpatriotic, it is divisive, it is the worst possible development for our nation.
We live in the real world, the objective and fact-based reality, not their quasi-religious hate-based fantasy world. This video clip of a larger show presents an excellent view of the problem.
Let me be clear - if you follow the fact checkers, you will find them faulting the left as well as the right.
But the difference is, the way the left errs will be a number might be off, or a statistic might be out of date, or they just get something wrong as an honest mistake. The overall intellectual structure in which they act is fact based; there are negative consequences for being wrong, there is a push to be accurate, and to engage in factual information and legitimate ideas.
That is not equally the case on the right - as I noted yesterday in my post on the anti-science bias of Republicans chronicled by science writer Chris Mooney in his books Republican Brain, and his book The Republican War on Science (part of the larger culture war against reality and the people who live in it in spite of right wing ideology).
In that context, I offer you the example of a Louisiana School, with the approval and permission of the state education regulators, teaching that the Loch Ness monster is real, as a means to justify that creationism is correct and Darwinism is not. It should come as no surprise that southern schools typically score less well in metrics relating to education than less backward, less faith driven curriculum states. They WORK at being stupid, they live it, they teach it, they vote it, and they get very angry when their alternate universe is challenged by the real, objective reality world. People like this will ensure that we continue to slide in relation to other nations, and will continue to create an accomplishment disparity between regions of our nation.
I recognize that there are some conservatives who aren't birthers or truthers or the other conspiracy theorists; their are conservatives who aren't drooling fundies. But the problem is, the right has embraced and encouraged them, and has pandered to them for money, and has legislated for them in order to gain numbers. The right has embraced the stupid, the ignorant, the bigots, and the racists, and in the process they have sacrificed their morals and their ethics and their values and their principles.
It was too high a price to pay for what they got in return.
There have been places I have traveled that were dangerous for Americans; I have stopped short of denying my nationality, but in those places as a matter of prudence, I have also not made it a blatant point that I am an American. I have allowed people to mistake me variously for a Brit, a Canadian, and a white South African. Those were instances where discretion was the better part of valor. That was a case of being careful to avoid the kind of incident from which my country might not be able to protect or save me.
These people simply make me ashamed of my country and my fellow citizens and their blatant and offensive ignorance.
From the HuffPo:
Louisiana Private Schools Teach Loch Ness Monster Is Real In Effort To Disprove Evolution Theory
Some students at private schools in Louisiana are being taught that Scotland's fabled Loch Ness monster is real, a claim that is then held as evidence disproving Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the Scotsman reports.
Thousands of students across the state are eligible to receive publicly funded vouchers to allow them to attend private Christian schools where textbooks published by Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) claim the monster was actually a dinosaur that existed at the same time as man, an assertion which conflicts with the theory of evolution.
The Times Educational Supplement, a British publication for teachers, published an article in 2009 that included an excerpt from Accelerated Christian Education's Biology 1099 textbook, which was published in 1995:
Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the `Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? `Nessie,' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.
Could a fish have developed into a dinosaur? As astonishing as it may seem, many evolutionists theorize that fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles. This gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis. No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all."
Loch Ness monster tour guide Tony Drummond, 47, told the Scottish Sun the curriculum is "ridiculous propaganda."
And Bruce Wilson, a researcher specializing in the American political religious right, told the Scotsman that one of the texts also claims "dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons."
"It has little to do with science as we currently understand. It’s more like medieval scholasticism," Wilson told the paper.
According to Scotland's the Herald, one of the textbooks also provides a somewhat controversial look at the Ku Klux Klan.
"The [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross ... In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians," the textbook reads, according to the Herald.
