An Observation
Monday, May 01, 2006
by Red Angel @ Empires Fall
Those of you who have been around for a while may have noticed something about the conservative blowhards on the net. I'm not just talking about the ones here, but in general. A great example is guns-and-gear forums, which swarm with the kind of person I'm talking about.
The observation?
These people aren't much for the written word. They can't spell. They mangle grammar and syntax to varying degrees, sometimes to the point where they're almost unintelligible. And the worse the problem is, the more vociferous they are about supporting George Bush.
What do I conclude from this?
I conclude something we've always suspected. I conclude that Bush voters aren't very bright.
There's political theory that holds that people tend to vote for candidates who are like themselves.
When Gore talks, he makes a great deal of sense. The problem is, the ideas he expresses are complex; it's not easy to encapsulate him in a ten second soundbite. Same with John Kerry.
Bush, on the other hand, just makes statements. Simple statements. He doesn't bother supporting them. He doesn't bother explaining why. He just pronounces.
And I think Bush is very reassuring to a lot of people who aren't very bright, and for whom the complexity of modern times is a little bit scary. People like that would like to return to the halcyon Mayberry days of an idealized 1950s with black and white televisions, baseball on the radio and the good old Sovs to hate and fear.
Nice and simple.
This is what I was talking about a few days ago, about the needle sweeping downwards along the IQ curve. As Bush's popularity ratings sink below 30, we're going to see more and more malapropisms, misspellings and misunderstandings of the English language.
They're going to get louder and more belligerent, because now the needle is descending into serious bellicose obstinacy territory. See, stubbornness, inflexibility, lack of ability to adapt to changing circumstances, inability to change one's mind even in the presence of overwhelming evidence-- these are characteristics associated with the state of being... well, not being very bright.
Let's face it: How smart do you have to be to not see the glaring facts that Bush is gutting the constitution, selling off our security and our national savings to foreign interests, and spending like a drunken sailor in a Bangkok whorehouse?
