Why Conservatives Usually Sound Like Complete Idiots: Because they are

[MrScorpio]

Phil Agre:

Conservatism has opposed rational thought for thousands of years. What most people know nowadays as conservatism is basically a public relations campaign aimed at persuading them to lay down their capacity for rational thought ...

Conservatism has used a wide variety of methods to destroy reason throughout history. Fortunately, many of these methods, such as the suppression of popular literacy, are incompatible with a modern economy. Once the common people started becoming educated, more sophisticated methods of domination were required. Thus the invention of public relations, which is a kind of rationalized irrationality. The great innovation of conservatism in recent decades has been the systematic reinvention of politics using the technology of public relations.

The main idea of public relations is the distinction between "messages" and "facts." Messages are the things you want people to believe. A message should be vague enough that it is difficult to refute by rational means. (People in politics refer to messages as "strategies" and people who devise strategies as "strategists." The Democrats have strategists too, and it is not at all clear that they should, but they scarcely compare with the vast public relations machinery of the right.) It is useful to think of each message as a kind of pipeline: a steady stream of facts is selected (or twisted, or fabricated) to fit the message. Contrary facts are of course ignored. The goal is what the professionals call "message repetition." This provides activists with something to do: Come up with new facts to fit the conservative authorities' chosen messages.

The Article

[Perry Logan]

1. All wingers are idiots. And they all think they're brilliant.

[Ivan Sputnik]

2. message repetition

"A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth." - G. Goebbels

[spanone]

3. meanwhile the 'idiots' have had a death grip on reality in this country

with no end in sight