"People Today Increasingly Feel Free To Believe Whatever Suits Them" - Which Explains Much

[hatrack]

EDIT

People today increasingly feel free to believe whatever suits them and there are still some who believe the world is flat, the moon landings were faked and smoking doesn't cause cancer. But there is no excuse for so-called leaders to exploit such gullibility.

Rank-and-file Republican voters take their cues from above. It's hard to believe that Scott, Pruitt or even Trump are uninformed as all that. More likely, it reflects Trump's false promises to coal miners that he would restore jobs lost to natural gas, not environmentalism, and to the Republican Party's financial alliance with the Koch brothers and other extractive energy industry profiteers.

Many Americans wonder how so many of the nation's founders and other otherwise decent people were able to rationalize slavery. By the light of their times, though, there wasn't anything wrong with it and they could not envision prosperity without it.

Today, the same profit motive underlies the great immorality of climate science denial. Two centuries from now, in a world made more inhospitable to life as we know it, surviving people will again wonder, "How could they?"

EDIT/END

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/editorials/fl-op-editorial-hurricanes-climate-change-20170919-story.html

[zipplewrath]

1. Faith based reality

I call it faith based reality. People decide how things "should" work, and then take it as an article of faith that this is how things actually work, despite any evidence to the contrary.