Inside the mirror ball

     Some hours ago, Broduke2000 posted a story about Hate Radio® blaming everyone they hate for the Newtown shooting. The inability of right wingers to see anything which conflicts with their beliefs is well known.  The extent of the impairment is generally missed—hence Duke’s post—as normal people are unable to understand why one would actually deny the existence of reality. 

     Stephen Colbert has posited the idea “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”  This is humorous, but impossible—reality does not have a bias, it merely is what it is.  The problem is the right-wing view which sees anything with which it disagrees as wrong—and in their view this means liberal—on the one hand, and the fact that reality does not behave the way they demand it behave, on the other.  This results in them attributing “liberal bias” to the way reality operates. 

     Someone who used to be closely involved with right-wingers—Bruce Bartlett—has written an excellent essay on the subject, Revenge of the Reality Based Community, at The American Conservative.  He rather unfortunately uses the word “conservative” when referring to right-wingnuts as well as to people who are actually conservative.  This misuse muddies the water.  His essay is still worth reading. 

     Basically, what it comes down to is right-wingnuts—and left-wingnuts as well!—see only their own beliefs, as they have chosen to live inside a mirror-ball where they encounter only those who agree with them, those who believe the same distorted view of the universe.  Such a life would be terminally boring, I believe, but then:  I, too, am part of the reality-based community.  Hey, that works for Me!