Monday, May 26, 2008
The Game's Afoot!
Sigh!Michael Moriarty, a moderately talented actor perhaps best known as the original prosecutor in the television series "Law and Order," is holding forth in the confines of something called Enter Stage Right, which declares itself as a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism but also declares that "religion and conservatism generally do not mix." Apparently the core statement of the group is:
We believe in real freedom. The freedom to be left alone by those who feel it is their right to impose their will on you. Who are they? Look at groups like academia, media and government.
Moriarty has written three (so far -- it has the smell of a never-ending screed) articles on what he calls "Meganomicism." Meganomics is apparently a conspiracy between government, religion and corporations(!) to rob Americans of their laissez-faire capitalist freedoms. Here are parts one, two and three, if you chose to wade through them. What caught my attention, via Google, was part three.
The correlation between his screed and that thing most of us fondly think of as "reality" is nicely summarized in the fact that, as of May 12th, Moriarty is apparently firmly convinced that Hillary Clinton will be our next president. Moriarty's bugaboos are many, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bill and Melinda Gates, Progressivism, Religion, the New Deal, the Great Society, Planned Parenthood, Feminism and, of course, abortion.
The legalization of abortion is central to the enabling of Meganomicism. This desensitization and inhumane judgment by the Court was the defining process and the scientifically veiled ruthlessness required for America's governments, businesses and religions to turn a conglomerately blind eye to Meganomicism and its bottomless greed for money and power.
If, for the sake of simplicity, we can include quantum theory and other forms of higher mathematics under the rubric of science, then, the shockingly docile acceptance, by Americans, of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion is ... as you will see … considerably less of a surprise than it ordinarily would have been.
With Americans increasingly trained to accept dogma veiled as a science and draped in a sometimes impenetrable lexicon, these terms infusing both abortion and global warming with distinctions such as "those of us who know" and "those of their ilk who don't know" … or are left out in the cold deliberately, forced never to know … one begins to recall that lofty region which the Catholic Church had placed itself in, an intellectual and spiritual realm encompassing so small a "few" that history described it as the Dark Ages.
So Moriarty's real complaint is that some people have expertise and some don't. While he doesn't use the term, the "elitism" of the educated is the claim he is making. Never mind that the academics who are supposedly part of the conspiracy have a vested interest in turning out more, rather then fewer, experts and never mind the torrent of scientific literature, both technical and popular, that pours forth every year and is kept hidden away from prying eyes in secret places called "libraries."
Knowledge only looks like dogma to those who are ignorant. Most anyone can learn enough about biology, climate change and the other major science-based social issues to penetrate the "lexicon" and make reasonably informed decisions ... if they care enough to make the effort.
The problem is not that only a "chosen few" have the expertise to understand the great issues of the day, it is that a "self-chosen many" do not stir themselves to learn. And, according to Moriarty and his pals at Enter Stage Right, that is their fundamental right -- to be left alone by those who could, and gladly would, educate them. But with that choice they forfeit the right to complain that the experts are speaking a language they refuse to learn. And their cavils do not ring true when the rest of society attempts more rational policies based on knowledge, rather than on the lack of it.
Moriarty is peddling ignorance like a patent medicine, without regard to the harm it will do to the patient or to the rest of us.
Where's Sherlock Holmes when you need him?
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As for Holmes, he thrived on intellectual challenge. This particular Moriarty does not appear to be a "Napoleon of Crime" or anything else come to that. He would most probably have driven Holmes to the cocaine he sometimes resorted to as a relief from boredom.
: 1:44 PM 
I don't know about the seven percent solution - seems too low for the dosage Holmes would need to deal with this crap, too high for Moriarty's reasoning skills.
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