Knackered

A British term for being so tired that ones eyes hang off the end of long ropes. That's how many progressives and liberals feel these days, I bet. I do, anyway, because so much of my time goes into refuting inane claims that have been refuted many times in the previous decades and centuries. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, we are pedalling backwards, furiously.

Just think of the fact that we are arguing evolution again, that we are seriously demolishing all social welfare nets and that we are slipping and sliding back into a time before the Enlightenment. Now, the Enlightenment wasn't quite as wonderful as it may have been written up as but it sure was an improvement over the Dark Ages. Yet it seems that the wingnuts pine for the darkness of those ages. Not only that, but they wish all of us back there with them. In a Santorum-land, most likely.

What makes me say all this doomsday stuff? Mostly what I read on the net. For example, David Ignatius tells us that the Democrats don't have any consistent alternative to the Republicans' plan of apocalypse now rather than later, and that it is the Democrats who have the problem. Then the New York Times gives us a long article about Intelligent Design and how its proponents are a politically active group of scientists. Rather than scientifically active group of politicians, which would be closer to the truth. You see what I mean? It is us, the sane and the rational, who must defend our positions by digging up all those defenses that have been used successfully in the past. Somehow the fact that we won on the issues has been forgotten. Now all must be fought again, and this makes a goddess tired. Also the jet lag, of course, but that ruins my rant.

The terms, "reality-based", and its opposite, "Wingnuttia", are relevant here. In a reality-based world one tests theories against evidence, and one keeps science separate from religion, because religious concepts can't be tested using the scientific method. In a reality-based world one studies history to learn from it, and one tries not to make the same mistakes over and over again. In Wingnuttia the rules are different, it seems. And now we all live by the Wingnuttia rules, which means eternal vigilance in a more concrete sense than ever before. For example, any minute now gravity will be declared as heresy. And then chocolate will be declared an illegal drug. NO!