You have to truly be a blind ideologue to proudly post something this blazingly stupid on social media.
Let’s begin with the pairing of a trans pride flag with the Palestinian flag…the poster is irony-challenged. Jade then pronounces conservatives incurious, a contention that she doesn’t bother to support. I, for one, am curious how dedicated progressives continue to maintain scientific, legal and economic nonsense despite year after year of being embarrassed by their policies.
Then the tweet really gets rolling. Thoughtful people and ethicists believe abortion is “bad” because it involves ending a human life for the convenience of another human who is more powerful. The act would still be the same—homicide—if the Bible had no perspective on the matter at all. Similarly, we don’t believe theft is wrong because the Ten Commandments say so, but because civilization couldn’t exist if it weren’t prohibited.
It is something of an accomplishment that each of the three declarations is more moronic than the one before. “Immigrants are bad because Fox News said so” is a masterpiece of dishonesty and confusion. First of all, no one among conservatives says “immigration is bad.” Presumably Jade means illegal immigrants, but is so addled by the deceitful rhetoric of the Axis of Unethical Conduct that she doesn’t know the difference. I’m surprised she isn’t curious about that.
No, illegal immigrants are bad because they are breaking the law, and breaking the law is almost always bad by definition. Fox News doesn’t need to say so: statutes say so, court opinions say so, experience and common sense says so, Kant says so, Dostoevsky says so, and Hammurabi says so.
And yet the last line still wins the Ignoramus Blue Ribbon. Capitalism is good, not because Ronald Reagan said so, but because capitalism has, over the last 250 years, made the United States of America the richest, most productive, most influential and most creative nation on Earth, with the highest standard of living, the most innovation and the greatest number of contributions to civilization over that period.
You can’t argue with someone who posts nonsense like this. Well, you can, but I won’t. Jade complains about conservatives being incurious, but is so doctrinaire that she doesn’t have enough curiosity herself to check facts and history to find out if she knows what the hell she is talking about.
And she doesn’t.
Ethics Alarms 
FYI, it’s the transgender flag, not that it changes your conclusion. It’s one of the easier ones to remember because it’s got blue and pink for boys and girls on it.
It would be more fair to call it a “pride flag” than specifically a gay pride flag, because it has nothing to do with being gay or not.
ARRGH! Yet another reminder not to write posts after midnight! I not only knew that, but there is one of the damn things flying within sight of my office window…
Quoth Samuel Clemens: “Never argue with stupid people. They’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” Social media exacerbates and encourages stupidity—a sad truth borne out daily.
I have another live “X” account, and this is why I have yet to post anything, including post links, on it. Its a necessary reference source now, especially since news organizations no longer reliably report the news, but having any presence at all is like the scene in “Walking Dead” where “the Governor” ended up in a room with wall to wall zombies.
Everything that follows the first sentence is idiotic, but maybe the first sentence deserves some consideration.
In the realm of making things happen, you need different personality types. Here I’m taking a cue from Pat Lencioni’s 6 Types of Working Genius model, where he breaks business success into 6 mindsets, in which people will thrive in two of the mindsets, be functional in two, and find the last two utterly against their nature. The six mindsets are: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. People who wonder are people who tend to look at the way things are and ponder if things can be improved. Inventors come up with ideas. People with discernment act as gatekeepers, evaluating ideas as either worth pursuing or not. Galvanizers work to get people interested and motivated to work on an idea. Enablers work to clear roadblocks. Tenacious people are the ones that thrive in fine details and aren’t satisfied until the project is 100% complete, all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. To have a successful team, you need each of those geniuses.
While Lencioni doesn’t envision his model in terms of politics, I would hazard that one would find that liberals tend toward Wonder, Invention, and Galvanizing, and conservatives tend toward Discernment, Enablement, and Tenacity. In general, Academia then tends to exist in the realms of Wonder and Invention, whereas your trades and engineering schools are probably more in the Enablement and Tenacity. To that end, I think it is actually fairly natural that Academia would lean more liberal, and to an extent, that’s fine.
What is problematic is when any of the geniuses are missing, and I feel that Academia has worked to jettison Discernment and Tenacity. Academics for some time has not wanted to be told any ideas they dream up are stupid or unworkable, and I think the replication crisis in research papers shows a lack of Tenacity. After all, thoroughly evaluating the work might mean the conclusions are flawed, and no one wants to hear that. But losing these geniuses leads to an environment where no one is willing to challenge a narrative that gets established, and no one wants to pass on results that contradict the narrative.
I don’t want to oversimplify the issue, and I certainly don’t want to downplay the very real, deliberate exclusion of conservatives from university faculties, or the harassment students receive if they don’t agree with, and even show enthusiasm for, the official narrative. I also don’t want to gloss over other complicating factors, such as conservative self-exclusion from academia, the over-promotion of going to college rather than pursuing trades, the way universities have adapted their business plans to milk federal dollars being laundered through student loans, the deliberate work of Marxists working up through the ranks and hiring other Marxists once they are in power, and so on.
What I’m more interested in is the thesis that Academia naturally attracts someone with a more liberal mindset, and the thesis that we need both liberals and conservatives working together to make a functional society.
So as idiotic as Jade’s tweet is, maybe it can be a decent conversation-starter for the broader issues it hints at. Thoughts, anyone?
Valid point. I do not think “incurious” is an accurate word to describe conservatives, especially from a scholarly perspective. But it is true that a mark of the progressive mind is “there’s always a better way,” and the conservative motto is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Or “New and different doesn’t automatically mean ‘better.'”
To build on this, I think it was one of the great conservative thinkers (Sowell or someone similar) who, in my opinion, perfectly encapsulated the difference between the left and the right. The left sees government (and to an extent, all exercises of power) as potential solutions to problems. The right sees government action as trade-offs.
I think this ties in nicely with Ryan’s comment, as the Wonderers and Inventors and Galvanizers don’t usually focus on the ramifications–they just come up with the ideas.
People who can’t define a woman, think queers for Palestine is coherent, ignore all of history and support communism, believe in discrimination against all white people, and think mass migration of Muslims poses no issues of cultural assimilation, and believes child sacrifice is female empowerment displays such a lack of curiosity that the joke writes itself. You cannot hold any of those positions unless you are young and inexperienced or a fool.
I can’t believe you expend the time an energy you do being rational and patient with people such as these. Doing so seems pointless to me.
After I posted a couple comments in reply to that nonsense post by @shimmerjade, I scrolled through the posts by @shimmerjade and to be honest this account looks like it might be a bot.