Bookworm has a wonderful post about a conversation she had recently that really just sum’s up the left’s denial of all things fact related:
If you’re wondering why discourse in this country doesn’t move forward, get a gander of this conversation I had with someone.
ME: I’ve been reading this fascinating book called “Freakonomics,” [see sidebar]. It had this one section about conventional wisdom and how often it’s wrong. For example, the book points out [pp. 149-150] that the conventional wisdom is that the most unsafe thing you can do for your child is to send him to a playdate in a house with a gun. But he points about that, in a year, 1 child drowns for every 11,000 residential pools, while 1 child is killed for every 1 million guns. In actual numbers, about 550 kids drown in backyard pools per year, while 175 children die from gunshots every year.
FRIEND: I disagree.
ME: You disagree? These are just statistics; they’re numbers.
FRIEND: No, with a pool, you can assume that people are going to do stuff to make it safer.
ME: But the whole point in the book is that it’s not safer.
FRIEND: No, it’s just not right for one child to have that kind of power over another.
ME: Huh?
The conversation gets even more interesting after that. Book then goes on:
What the conversation demonstrates, aside from a visceral dislike of guns (which, frankly, I share), is the fact that actual information cannot move dialogues forward if the person in the conversation has a strong bias. In the face of this type of bias, facts are meaningless. Given the Left’s antipathy to Pres. Bush and its intense hostility to “Bush’s War,” no information about a strong economy, or about progress in the war effort, or about the fact that there haven’t been terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, will have the slightest effect on the Left’s thinking.
Book hit the nail on the head here, something many of us have had to discover over the past few years unfortunately. We had to discover the total disconnect the left has with reality.
See author page