The GOP War On Facts

I read a great blog post I read earlier today, someone pointing out that much of the Republican party seems to have gone away from "how do I work the facts into my world view" to "if the facts contradict my world view, I must find a reason to dismiss them."

It is evident in the common GOP response to climate change (it's a liberal conspiracy), to polling data they don't like (it's biased, here is what the unskewed* numbers show), and in a number of other areas.

I think you really do yourself and everyone else a disservice if whenever your philosophy or belief structure disagrees with observable reality, your first instinct is to find a way to discredit observable reality. And I don't mean in terms of verifying results, I mean in terms of saying "Well, this disagrees with what I believe, so it must be wrong." and then finding ways to justify that.

It's why I could have supported Jon Huntsman, but so few other GOP candidates: Until they stop with this "evolution isn't real, climate change isn't real" mantra, I don't trust them. If you're not willing to take the facts as they come and then fit your world view to them, then how can I trust you'll do a good job in other areas, if something comes up that contradicts your world view?

(Like, for instance, the increasing evidence that "trickle down" economics simply does not work.)

This is, by the way, a problem I have with some religious people as well. If you're religious, but are willing to make the effort to modify your beliefs to fit with observable reality, that's fantastic, and I know a lot of people who do this. "A day to a being like God might be eons, so the 7 days in the Bible isn't necessarily 7 literal 24-hour days" or "Who is to say that God doesn't have a hand in directing the path of evolution, perhaps that's the way He works".

But when you start coming up with what seem to outside observers to be insane examples of pretzel logic in order to discredit observed reality where it disagrees with your beliefs ("Fossils were created by Satan to tempt us not to believe", "Evolution can't possible exist, even though we've seen species adapt and change in labs", "The Earth is only 6000 years old, and no amount of scientific evidence will change my mind on that", "The sun goes around the Earth, and I'll throw Galileo in jail for daring to suggest otherwise.", etc), that's... your business, actually, as long as it's your own opinion.

But when you want to start making real policy decisions affecting me and the rest of the world, that's the point it becomes a problem. Like the times in history when, to "make the math easier", laws have been passed setting the value of Pi at 3. You can believe it's 3. You can want it to be 3. But if you insist that I use 3 in my calculations, you don't make things better, you just make it so that every one of my calculations relating to circles or spheres will be off by some amount.

* A reference to "Unskewed Polls", a site run by a conservative who, claiming all of the polls showing Obama in the lead were tainted with bias, put up a set of polls he claimed had been "unskewed" and giving Governor Romney a landslide win... even though in the end those "biased" polls turned out to be extremely accurately predictive, while the "unskewed" poll numbers were just the wishful thinking of a deluded mind.