Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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This one I mean in all seriousness. Lots of conservatives complain that the Republican Party has taken to spending as lavishly as the Democrats.
Want a theory? For three quarters of a century, ever since the New Deal, Republicans campaigned on the theme of fiscal responsibility, and got nowhere. Some fights they deserved to lose. Social safety nets are here to stay. But in any election that pits people who stand to gain from fiscal restraint against those who stand to gain from special programs and benefits, the result is a foregone conclusion. A nation swamped in credit card debt, where people argued seriously that being forced to repay debts was cruel, just doesn't care about fiscal discipline.
So beginning with the Reagan era, I suspect Republicans decided to max out the credit cards on things that appeal to conservatives: defense, business subsidies, tax cuts. If taxation is already at the limits of the politically possible, and the Government is spending on conservative agendas, there's nothing left for social engineering or income redistribution schemes. And if the Republicans push through tax cuts for the wealthy and business, who would dare try to hike taxes on the middle class?
If you can deny the existence of the Holocaust, why not the Gulag?
I'm almost scared to put this one out, except I'm barely ahead of the pack on this one. There are nut-case whites who seriously want a race war. There are nut-case blacks who bought into the idea that the circle K on food products meant that the company was owned by the Ku Klux Klan. (It actually means kosher. The circle U probably stands for uebermensch and means the company is owned by the Nazis, and Pareve probably means the food is infected with parvovirus. Both labels are stricter degrees of kosher than the K, in case you're wondering.)
So it's only a matter of time before we see somebody saying the levees were blown as part of some ethnic cleansing plot to move blacks out of New Orleans. There were already people saying it during the hurricane, there are people alleging Katrina is the result of weather modification, of failure to heed global warming, and God's vengeance for various sins. There is absolutely no nutball theory you can invent that won't be surpassed by someone proposing it in all seriousness.
Conspiracy theories are all about blaming somebody else for your inadequacies, so it's a cinch we will never see conspiracy theories catch hold that require people to re-examine and change their own priorities. Still, these might be fun ways to counter somebody else's conspiracy beliefs.
Every innovation, and I mean every, runs into opposition from people so stupid and gutless they think it will damage their property values if it's anywhere within a hundred miles. What could be better than a renewable, non-polluting energy source? What opposition could that possibly create? The nuts are out in force against windmills. They look funny, they kill birds (true), they make noise (you have to stand right under them and listen hard) and the flickering of the blades can cause seizures. What better way to stagnate American innovation than to encourage these people? Let them speak at city council meetings, publish their moronic letters to the editor, give them their day, week, month, year, decade in court. Meanwhile China is charging ahead with dirty but effective industrialization and India is fast becoming the world's largest producer of technically educated people.
In Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money -- That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!, Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter point out that a home is not an investment - it's a liability. Millions of Americans too dumb to figure this out buy oversized, overpriced houses, count on appreciation to make them rich, and then lack the courage and the integrity to understand that investments can sometimes go south.
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In the May 2001 issue of the Institute for Creation Research's Acts and Facts, President John D. Morris wrote about two high school shooting rampages, both within a few miles of ICR and within three weeks of each other. Of course, he traced the root cause to evolution and its erosive effect on traditional moral values.
Or could it possibly be that creationism causes high-school shooting rampages? Two shootings within a few miles of ICR headquarters and only three weeks apart. If that's not evidence for a causal relationship, what is?
Think about it. If you really wanted to undermine Christianity, what would be good way to do it?
If that's not a perfect description of creationism, what is?
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Created 12 October, 2005; Last Update 24 May, 2020
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