Political tangent from ALDS Game 3 thread

I'm sorry if I offended you by making evangelicals (and climate change deniers) the bad guys in my little analogy. I thought some might find the idea of evangelical rather than Muslim terrorists amusing, since in reality terrorism is not exactly their style. That they believe in their agenda as passionately as the jihadists believe in theirs is, however, something that's quite obviously true, and that was part of the point of substituting one for the other.

Now, you're the one who actually brought politics into this directly, so let me state my position and then we'll be done with it. Calling out evangelicals, evolution deniers, climate change deniers, and the like as a terrifyingly delusional, dangerous and destructive element in our society is something I will never apologize for. If you had to put the reasons why things are so much worse in this country than they deserve to be in a single sentence, it's this: the sociopathic wealthy have rigged the system massively in their favor, and they've done so by convincing conservatives (including essentially all of the evangelicals) to vote against their self-interests (economic and otherwise), by selling them on a whole series of Big Lies.

I have nothing but respect for the conservative mind-set, which is absolutely necessary to any functional society -- the reason conservatives evolved (or were put here by God, if you prefer - that's ultimately the same thing in my book) was to prevent the liberals from changing things too quickly. And for much of our history we have had a reasonably functional balance between liberals and conservatives. Heck, I've got free medical insurance that is the glorious legacy of the former Republican governor of the most liberal state in the country.

Now, once conservatives make their minds up about something, they do not change them easily, and usually not at all. That's not an accusation -- that's what makes them conservatives, and in proper balance, that resistance to new ideas is good and necessary. That's how bold, new liberal ideas get properly vetted -- by cautious, conservative skepticism. But there's a massive catch here. This resistance to changing one's mind extends not just to ideas, and about the way things have been done versus the way they might be done in the future, but to facts. Once you sell conservatives on an incorrect set of facts, they'll believe them forever, no matter how much evidence or reason you bring against them. And so conservatives in this country have been sold a massive set of Big Lies, first by organized religion, and then by the wealthy elite, who figured out that if they could sell conservatives on certain Big Lies about government and economics, they could rule the country. That's what's happened in a nutshell. And while I consider the religious right to be the cancer at the heart of this country, I feel no enmity at all towards them as individuals -- in fact, I pity them. They've been duped.

And now back to pre-game warmups.