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Fear

It is a commonplace on the Left that the Right deals in FEAR.  Fox deals FEAR.  Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and etc and the other one deal in FEAR.

But who owns the Global Warming scam, now?  Who fears second hand smoke so much they act like little children when people light up in public?  Who is terrified of mercury poisoning, and overall environmental catastrophe?  Who panics when they find out there is aluminum in their deodorant?  Who fears families and overpopulation?  Who needs there to be racists so badly that they manufacture them out of whole cloth when needed ?  Who needs there to be a conspiracy of the rich to keep the poor down?  Who invokes fear CONSTANTLY?  Well, among others, the Left.

Fear propaganda is easy.  It is used on both sides.  Where and when it is appropriate really depends on the context–some of it is justified, on both sides; some not, again on both sides.  But to say that the Right has a monopoly on it is, like ALL left wing propaganda, very intentionally misleading, and injurious to sane, rational, goal oriented discussion.

And obviously the Left invokes “Science”, as if that were a thing, an oracle, a sort of All Knowing Being, and as if the manufacture of alleged consensus constitutes fact, when it obviously doesn’t: not in theory, not in practice.  Phrenology anyone?  Do you remember that the German universities were the best in the world (the American Ph.D system is taken from their model) when the Fascists took over, and that their BEST biologists by and large bought into Hitler’s use of Darwinian Natural Selection to justify and amplify his racism?

The Right invokes History, which is the same thing. It is the science of human behavior, which has to be understood as a matter of probabilities, and interests, both conflicting and aligned. One can see patterns happening, over and over, and can explain how and why reasonably accurately, if one is not trying to shoehorn data into a predefined conclusion.

Both Science and History can and have been perverted.  Both have uses.  Their utility depends on the goodwill and honesty of those using them.