People Who Just Can't Quite Escape the Left: Yglesias, "Misinformation Isn't Just on the Right"

facepalm

   Look, Yglesias tries. He really, really does.

   He's a smart guy. He's a reasonably serious guy. A reasonably reasonable guy.

   But in this respect, he's a type: the good boy who just can't quite shake the deep-seated attitude that left = good and right = bad.

   In fact, sometimes the crazy is more intense or widespread on one side, sometimes on the other. But it's not a contest. Just look and see.

   Currently, I actually suspect that, in the long run--and religion excepted--the right is, overall, less crazy than the left. But I'm not wedded to that--it's a sweeping, highly-qualified guess.

   But my God. Right now, you've got to be blind or nearly so not to recognize that the left is the main locus of crazy. People like Yglesias--and I know several--are heterodox to just about this extent: they will admit that the right is not evil and insane and always wrong. But they can't really get themselves to go any farther than well, both sides... And, yeah, of course both sides. But not always both sides equally. And not always the right is worse than the left. Sometimes...a lot of times, I'm sure...the left is worse than the right. And right now, the left is flat-out, batshit crazy. 

   So "the left has its problems with disinformation, too..." does not really even begin to accurately describe our current predicament.

   You know the litany of current leftist lunacy. I don't have to go through it again.

   As for "disinformation"...not only is the contemporary American left made of "disinformation." But they've so captured our institutions that they have, virtually with the snap of their fingers, created a "disinformation" industry. And 'disinformation,' in their mouths, basically means: Whatever the right thinks. It's meta-disinformation. 

   They did the same thing with 'conspiracy theory.' Just about everything the right thinks is a "conspiracy theory." Oddly, Russiagate was never a conspiracy theory... (And, of course, wide swaths of the left still insist that the fake conspiracy was real...)

   And: let me know when the right says anything even half as crazy as "some women are male." Let me know when a right-wing apocalyptic cult takes over science and public policy, turning them to their nefarious purposes, to the tune of trillions of dollars. Also let me know if a rabidly pro-American right manages to make something like America is inherently perfect something like the official view of universities. 

   Creationists basically wanted their theory mentioned in intro biology classes. Everybody lost their minds--understandably. The left has infused all of education with their panoply of crazy theories, up to and including alethic relativism...anyone who makes so much as a peep in protest is a reactionary MAGA lunatic... Don't want your daughter to be brainwashed into cutting off her breasts? You're a terrorist and the Feds are now watching you...

   It all boggles the mind.

   Look, I don't have any interest in some kind of contest between left and right. But I can say that I didn't start to see these things more clearly until I realized that I had a deep-seated pro-left attitude that basically always saw them as, somehow, no matter how imperfectly, the good guys. And the opposite for the right. In fact, not even "the right"--but conservatives. I would have thought that I had dumped such an attitude decades earlier. But I hadn't. 

   Anyway.

   I dunno.

   Read some Thomas Sowell.