Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but the Discovery Institute, that spider hole of bad science and pseudo-scientific religious apologetics, is actually just another conservative think-tank that milks rich capitalists for funding. The DI was founded by George Gilder and Bruce Chapman — Phil Johnson was just the charismatic Christian babbler who was the front — and from the beginning, it was really all about promoting conservative values, supply-side economics, and Republican politics. The creationism was the attention-getting garnish on the story, but just one side. They also have a wing that focuses on policy issues in the Pacific Northwest, the Discovery Institute Center on Wealth and Poverty. Aren’t you cheered to know that they’re going to take the same insight and detailed appreciation of knowledge that they brought to biology, and have been focusing it on economics?
Recently their representative made an appearance on Tucker Carlson (oh god the idiocy is converging) to opine on the protests in Seattle and Portland. OK, the topic is definitely within their geographic remit, but no, a far-right arch-capitalist money-grubbing institution crusted with a patina of religiosity is not the authority we need right now, even if Fox News thinks so.
But the real amusement here is to see who else is jumping in bed with them: Quillette!
Just amazing to see proponents of evo psych now plugging a creationism/intelligent design proponent think tank, absolutely nothing matters. https://t.co/Nk58eFfFOM pic.twitter.com/K9ccBc6qCg
— wombot 👀 (@colourmeamused_) September 2, 2020
Yep, the Institute of Advanced Craniometry, Phrenology, and Evolutionary Psychology, AKA Quillette, is absolutely jubilant about joining forces with the Discovery Institute’s “Kill the Poor” department to find common cause with Fox News and the poor little rich boy, Tucker Carlson. Really, I’m not at all surprised. In this hell year, it’s exactly the right little touch of flavor to enhance the whole experience.
Yes, secularism and Darwinian evolution are heartless philosophies that reduces human beings to just soulless hunks of matter–no better than the beasts of the field–resulting in the racism, genocide, and totalitarianism of Naziism and Communism.
Now that we’ve got that out the way, let’s talk about how the poor deserve to suffer and how we should dismantle the welfare state so we don’t have to tax billionaires!
You can tell this will be nonsense.
Even the title is wrong.
.1. The protesters in Portland and Seattle aren’t anarchists.
I’m sure there are a few of those.
It’s actually a coalition of BLM’s (anti-racists), antifa (antifascists), anti-economic inequality, and a whole lot of people that are fed up with the GOP/Trump/fundie xian right wingnut regime.
.2. A huge amount of the violence isn’t even violence.
Most of the time the protesters are peaceful.
.3. A huge amount of the violence is from the Portland police and the Federal thug squads that Trump sent it unnecessarily to just make the situation worse.
The Federal goons made things worse, violated a lot of laws, made things worse, and left in a hurry.
.4. I’m sure the Discovery Institute creationist crackpot will ignore anything that is plausibly the underlying causes.
Such as police that keep killing unarmed Black people who haven’t broken any laws.
Steadily rising Economic Inequality.
The current recession, largely caused by Trump/GOP incompetence.
The Covid-19 pandemic that Trump/GOP incompetence has failed to control, that has made 6 million sick and killed 190,000 Americans.
Three centuries of American racism.
The GOP continuing corruption and attacks on our democratic form of government.
A whole lot more reasons to change the status quo.
[L]et’s talk about how the poor deserve to suffer and how we should dismantle the welfare state so we don’t have to tax billionaires!
Proper procedure, of course, is to pay the zillionaries to take the cause, this rubbish, away. Chattel slaves can be worked harder, don’t need pay or holidays or sick leave, and can be sold when not needed; all that, plus what we’re paying them to take away in the first place, make it a win-win for everyone!! And it means we don’t have to bother with this idiotic voting nonsense!!!
As to the announcement tweet, spellcheck is your friend. Just sayin’…
Here’s where I obligatorily put it a recommendation for Park Avenue, a 1 hour movie that really connects the dots on the inequality crisis and shows exactly how it was a deliberately engineered massive theft from working people to kleptocrats. I learned lots from it, and wish everyone would see it. Free, and the FFA site is itself a wonderful resource: https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/park-avenue-money-power-and-the-american-dream-2012/
I’m starting to think irony should be put on the endangered species list because some people seem to be killing it left and right.
I do not understand how people who are so anti-communists anti-socialists, anti-labor, pro-free market repeatedly seem to fail to understand what a market is and how it works.
They are so amazingly short sighted. Even Henry Ford figuered it out, a market is made up of people who have money to buy things, the more people with money to buy things the bigger the market is. All of the conservative politics and policies tend to reduce the size of the numbers of people with money. How is that going to foster the prosperity they say will materialize with their policies? It hasn’t yet only made the rich richer and to poor poorer.
uncle frogy
Our current form of oligarchic capitalism has a built in drop dead feature.
What happens when the 1% have all the money and the 99% don’t have enough to do more than barely survive?
The market stops working.
Because no one has money to buy stuff with.
This shouldn’t be a hard concept to understand and in fact, a few of the 1% do understand it.
Raven@8: “What happens when the 1% have all the money and the 99% don’t have enough to do more than barely survive?”
That’s easy. The 0.001% replace everyone else with robots and let the rest of us starve.
@9
The tendency in not thinking of those other people as people and just some negative abstraction is a big part of the way of the thinking of conservatives.
People are not an abstraction they are what we all are. there is nothing preventing the 99% or some sizable portion of doing something other then just suffering in silence which it seems is what is expected. There is nothing sustainable about having a very large portion of a population that is barely surviving in poverty. Poverty means poor nutrition, it means over crowding, it leads to very poor health. It is where pandemics develop and can spread out from there to infect all of the population. Which does not require the poor to do anything.
If the progress is to robots to do the work there will still be few to make a market. i do not see how that way would not lead to a static market which by the conservative principles would be stagnate.
conservative thinking as it is today is so extremely short sighted I do not understand how they do it.
Unclefrogy,
Now what indication did you ever have that the 0.001% are interested in anything like sustainability? They’re interested in luxury and getting exactly what they want and domination.
Actually, I think it’s more likely that the next stage of human civilization will be as small groups of hunter-gatherers trying to survive in a devastated landscape and ultimately (in something like 100000 years) failing.
if you change devastated to altered landscape I think i can agree.
the hunter gatherers and the small farmer will persist for some time, the ecosphere will reconstitute itself into new equilibrium’s as it has done before advanced technological culture may fade out completely.
the one way path of dominate power and ultra competition will prove to be a dead end path
uncle frogy
“the Discovery Institute, that spider hole”
Wait, now I’m confused. Are you saying they’re good? Or bad?
I was reading too fast at the beginning and read Phil Jackson. I thought WTF.
Too much NBA news right now.
unclefrogy,
No, I think devastated will apply. After all, not all climates are equally productive, and the damage humans will do to the biosphere as our population collapses from around 10 billion to a sustainable level of a few hundred million will make past mass extinctions look like a mild storm.
Humans, in addition to being a failed evolutionary experiment, are a blight. The sooner we die off, the better for the entire experiment of life on the planet.
At least those of us who argued that the real differentiation between people was never specific ideologies per se but a general split along humanity that would match the left-right distinction in most cases but not all can crow about being right, since politics continue to make strange bedfellows as they always do.
Don’t worry, it’s slim comfort. Even knowing that consciously, I still get just the slightest bit surprised at the audacity of their compartmentalization and naked partisanship.