Right-wing pundits sound a lot like the Unabomber! (quote from yesterday)

[LoZoccolo]

Yesterday I posted a quote without telling people who said it, and asked people to guess who they might think it was:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1901829

As you can see, without knowing that it was an excerpt from Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski, people found that it did bear a striking similarity to right-wing pundits like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Joel Klein, and Charles Krauthammer (though the person remarked that it still didn't sound nasty enough to be him). Their words could come straight from the screed of a terrorist!

[thereismore]

1. Nice. nt

[neoblues]

2. Very Interesting...

At least that's what their words sound like to those of us whose thinking tends toward the liberal end of the spectrum. The link between conservativism/republicanism and dogmatism has been researched ("motivated social cognition"**), and the results indicate it's not just our imagination.

**

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

* Fear and aggression

* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

* Uncertainty avoidance

* Need for cognitive closure

* Terror management

Edit: added excerpt...

[Kurovski]

3. Thanks, neoblues. Very, very interesting.

It reveals how deeply troubled many on the right are, and how their particular psychological problems actively and consciously intrude in the lives of others.

I thought LoZoccolo's thread was a great idea.

[DireStrike]

4. Please remember when you consider this:

Comparisons like these are what Colbert makes his money with. They sound sensible on their face, make one side smile, and the other side glare.

Remember that just because a terrorist thinks or says something, it does not necessarily mean that the meme itself is terrorist in nature. I'm sure we can argue that this is or isn't, and frankly I'm not interested in that argument. I'm just saying that when you read something like this, the little traffic cop in your head should flag you to slow down a little and pay attention.

[LoZoccolo]

7. Point taken.

In a way, I'm making fun of when they do that to us too.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

5. What I always found to be interesting was how the media tried to paint

him as a leftist gone bad.

The reality was he was neither a leftist nor in anyway supported the "hippie" culture as was once implied.

[ComerPerro]

6. I, like most people, didn't post in your thread yesterday

because I just had to google and find out who it was right away. I couldn't help myself.

But, I wanted to say yesterday that the rantings sounded like Ann Coulter, trying to sound more pompous and arrogant than she usually does.

[many a good man]

8. Ted Kaczynski changed my life

I recognized the citation right away.

I'm a little embarassed to admit this, but I was an anti-establishment, communist college drop out when I read the Unabomber's manifesto in the Washington Post. I seethed at Reagan, Washington, capitalism, etc., and refused to support the system in any way. After reading his screed I realized that I wasn't helping anybody so I went to grad school, got a good job and now I donate my time and money to work for change.

I know his manifesto contains a lot of horse shit, but that one section describing flaming radical leftists turned on a light for me and changed my life for the better. I'm probably one of the only people in this world his life could be said to have helped. Ironic, isn't it?

[LoZoccolo]

9. The thing I noticed about it when I read about it...

...is that he uses a lot of proof by contradiction like the proofs we were using in a theoretical computer science course on computability theory I was taking at the time, so I thought he sounded a lot like a mathemetician...and it turned out I was right!