The American Right Acquires The Intellectual Vices of the Left

Krugman calls out the conservative war on objectivity. Perhaps we should call it the Global War Against Reality.

So in the latest offensive in the GWAR, Nate Silver has been called out for being small and insufficiently masculine by some jackass named "Dean Chambers," a fringe nut even by the standards of the fever swamps...but now he's being attacked by fever swamp central, the NRO.

Of course, trying to undermine opposing views by deploying fallacious ad hominem arguments is something that happens all over the political/intellectual spectrum. It has, however, been raised to a kind of art form on the intellectual left, where a huge percentage of discussions devolve into what I think of as "bias chess," a game in which each party tries to make up ever more baroque and implausible stories about how the other party is manifesting some prejudice or other, generally one of the Holy Trinity of biases, racism, sexism, or classism. The right has now decided that every argument that has a conclusion they dislike is unsound, and the best explanation for anyone advocating one of these unsound arguments is THE LIBRUL BIAS...as opposed, say, to a plain old honest error.

Its embarrassing to admit, but I'm even more invested in this election than I ought to be because I really hate to see stupid, intellectually dishonest people end up accidentally seeming to have been right. I know. I suck. I'm not proud of it. A better man would be able to ignore this aspect of things. I'm trying to be that better man...but am not, as yet, him.