Reply #6: "Tune in Rush, no thinking necessary, just soak up a couple of soundbites"

[StopTheMorans]

I agree with you 100% there, it completely absolves the individual of any responsibility to truly get educated when all they have to do is memorize the day's "talking points" and then blindly repeat them in conversation without really stopping to consider the reasoning (or lack thereof) behind them. This goes along with the whole conservative demonization of "over-educated liberals" and the way that they constantly bash universities and professors for tolerating/encouraging "free-thinking". Free thought is the antidote for conservatism. Granted, it is a much longer and harder road (the fact that 99.99% of all issues are always gray, never black and white tends to scare many people away, many cannot handle cognitive dissonance)while conservatism relies upon memorization of the party's ideology, and once this is accomplished, a fierce defense of any member of the party/party platform regardless of whether they are actually "right" or not (or whether the platform is outdated/not applicable to the current situation). People just want to be right and will take the easiest route to further this perception in their own mind; it is much easier to claim "moral clarity" than to actually engage in intelligent discourse and weigh all sides of a situation. To conservatives, there is only one side, their side, and everything else is evil simply b/c they refuse to wrap their minds around the fact that almost nothing in this world is cut and dry. my rant...

on edit: edited to correct subject/verb agreement