cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/46047655
Conservatives just have no idea how research is done and think they can tell people what to research. The absurdity is that no scientific be can tell someone to research something that hasn’t been discovered yet!
The far right are a bunch of crooks and Russian agents. It’s not that they think we can progress as a society without spending money on research. It’s that they’re being paid to make sure western society collapses.
Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, whatever the knobheads in the AfD are called. They’ve all been found to receive funding from Russia. It’s not that they’re dumb enough to think this is a good idea, they’re just evil enough to profit from it.
That’s an important realisation. The people who fall for them and do their bidding might be dumb, but the people pulling the strings are anything but dumb. They are just plenty of evil and very skilled at manipulating dumb people. This is what makes the far right so dangerous.
They’re not stupid, but they’re not particularly clever either. They’re just mediocre people pumped up by our adveseries to believe they can be something important and special.
Of course, Geert Wilders believes he’s brilliant. Just like Trump. They are never going to accept to themselves that their reason for being there is that their grandiose thoughts about themselves are only matched by their mediocracy, which is the exact set of traits that makes them so easy to take advantage of.
I agree it’s dangerous to dismiss them as stupid, but it would be a mistake to assume they’re particularly clever. They’re just dangerously mediocre.