Friday, August 21, 2009

The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists

A recent article on Time.com was entitled The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists. This may be the best notion I've seen in journalism lately, and I was impressed that it made it to the mainstream. The main point being: "they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal." I would love to see more in-depth analysis of this revelation.

On August 19th, Jon Stewart did an excellent piece on Fox News being the "New Liberals," pointing out how for eight years they have called protesters "loons" and unpatriotic. But now that the protesters are conservatives, civil disobedience and dissension are the patriotic methods. Furthermore, Fox has claimed the mainstream media is liberal and that they are the only alternative voice. So for Fox to really be liberal they would have to part of the mainstream. Of course, while attacking the major media outlets, Fox has at the same time been promoting how much bigger they are than their competing media outlets, claiming to be the most powerful - thereby cementing their "liberal" status.

Finally, to quote Seth Macfarlane from his recent interview in Playboy about Obama's liberalness, "he's a hell of a lot less liberal than Bush is conservative."

And, speaking of Seth, he also said that Carl Sagan was "an antidote to the superstition, fundamentalism and mysticism that runs rampant in this country." Recently I heard the BBC claim that America was a world of "stone-age superstition."  Of course books like The Sceptics Guide to Atheism [1] claim that worlwide theism is going up, only Western views on theism are declining due to the lingering effects of Logical Positivism.  The only truth I can discern from this position is that theism is declining in the West.  Meanwhile, America looks like it is in the stone age because of the reactionary ultra-conservative anatgonism to progress.

[1] Information taken from Philosophy Now, June/July 2009 

1 comment:

Brian McCooley said...

Of course people criticizing this article are the ones who had to look up "nihilsm", but then they're the ones who don't think a liberal arts education is a good idea