Hello, Internet! Due to a combination of technical difficulties, final exam stress, spending quality time with my family, and the recent death of my grandfather, ModeRadical has been offline for a while now. I am happy to tell you that this blog should be getting onto a regular schedule now, including a couple of guest writers if they send me anything. Now, recently, I have noticed something a bit disturbing about American culture, as I have started watching the news again. As an aside, when looking for news, go to Al Jazeera America or the BBC. They have neither the gibbering racist ignorant lunacy of FOX nor the smug, self-righteous, self-satisfied, equally ignorant leftist dogma of MSNBC.
Now, anti-intellectualism. Our culture today is rabidly anti-intellectual. I grew up an intellectual, so I'm quite familiar with this effect. People use "nerd" and "geek" as insults, but they're just terms for people who are smart or particularly obsessively familiar with something. These should not be insults. It should not be commonly accepted practice to insult someone by calling them smart and good with technology. That's just idiotic and backward. It would be like wallowing in a septic tank and then insulting someone for not smelling like human feces. Yet that's basically what we do. Not only do we do that, but we actually glorify stupidity and ignorance.
Let's take a moment to pick on reality television. Specifically, let's pick on a show called Swamp People. The premise is to follow the carefully scripted lives of a bunch of people who live in the swamp without the benefits of technology for no discernible reason. Why are we glorifying this lifestyle? If they lived in Africa or South America, we'd be sending them aid money, but here in the US we give them their own reality TV show. What?
Think about that one for a minute. If you think this isn't a problem, consider the fact that there are people out there who really, genuinely believe that vaccines cause autism, based on the fact that the people supporting this position publicly have roughly the same intellectual capacity as tree slugs, while vaccination supporters all use big words like "inoculation" and "clinical trials". We are so anti-intellectual that some people would literally rather let their children die of smallpox than accept that someone might be smarter than they are. Does it sound to you like those people should be running the country? I could say the same thing about the anti-GMO movement, global warming deniers, those people who believe video games are the gateway to Satan, the abstinence only movement, or pretty much any other reactionary movement that looks at progress and starts shrieking "Bad! It burns! Hissssss!" and trying to pass legislation to send us all back to the Stone Age.
Some people in those categories I listed have legitimate, researched reasons to believe them. If you do, then good for you, and I say that without an ounce of sarcasm. Send me an email explaining it, I really would like to know and I really would like to be able to have a reasoned discussion about it. But supporting a position because you don't understand the other side and defending your position with the argument that if it were right it would make sense without explanation is so far from logic I'm pretty sure anything smarter than tree slugs can see how wrong it is. Don't be like the tree slug. If you don't understand something, learn about it. Form whatever opinion you like, just make sure that opinion is based on facts, not fear of them.
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