That feeling of dismay.
I'm sure you know it. It happens when you see yet another headline saying something about "Guns in the U.S."- and you know the author is going to repeat the same agenda-skewed lies and irrelevancies you've heard over and over and over.
Yep, that's the feeling I felt when I saw this: "Guns in the U.S.".
Michael Shermer is a frightened "libertarian", just like Scott Adams. Wishy-washy and unable to stick to principles and reality. He is happy enough to embrace libertarianish reason, unless it leads to conclusions he doesn't want to face. In that case he'll embrace the "progressive" agenda. It makes him look more intelligent. Or so he believes.
What it actually does is expose him as a coward. He's frightened of your liberty and doesn't want to be responsible for his own defense. And that's sad.
I could go through the whole article and point out the bad assumptions, the way the "data" was milked to get the numbers to come out the way the anti-liberty bigots wanted them to come out, and point out what was purposely left out... but I've done it to similar misleading articles in the past, and so have many other people. And the "smart" quasi-libertarians won't listen anyway.
I'm sure Shermer would blame cognitive dissonance for my reaction to seeing his article. The reality is, it isn't cognitive dissonance; it's experience. I've been down this road too many times. And I have the ability to see through the rhetoric to the agenda beneath. Even his "additional thoughts" at the end of the piece expose the faulty conclusions of the rest of it- and yet he still stands by his position. I think there's a phrase for that...
.
No comments:
Post a Comment