Fantasy Quotient

From the House of Eratosthenes who compares the way IQ is measured to a new quotient:

The more news I see about this healthcare.gov fiasco, the more I learn about how it came about, and the more observations I make about how ObamaCare proponents see the situation, and draw their inferences about what it all means…the more value I see in measuring what we could call the F.Q., the Fantasy Quotient. This would be the weight of everything that contributed toward your final opinion about something, divided into one hundred times the influence of your first-impressions. So travel back in time a few years, Obama and crew say something about health insurance for the first time and you go — cool! Maybe. You get inspired, the inspiration creates a fantasy. The fantasy creates a prejudice. The prejudice, by definition of the word, feeds into the final judgment, even if it has to withstand an onslaught of subsequent and contrary experience. How much or how little the subsequent and contrary experience diminishes that original impression, says something about you, and that something is reflected in the F.Q.

A good software-testing engineer has an F.Q. approaching zero. A healthy F.Q. might be somewhere in the twenties, maybe down in the teens.

If your F.Q. is a hundred, you’re pretty much incapable of ever learning a damn thing, and that’s a widespread problem we have now. Pavlov’s bell rings, people slobber, and their minds are made up at that point. We’ve got a lot of people walking around right now, as free to live and vote as you and me, with 100 F.Q.’s. They live in fantasy. ObamaCare is still just as wonderful for them as when they first heard about it. I really don’t know how this happens, I don’t get it. Maybe it’s their way of dealing with disappointment? Just don’t deal with it?

It isn’t just ObamaCare. These so-called “researchers” probably have very high F.Q.’s.

Nelson Mandela is a saint, or something. Barack Obama is a holy prophet, or Messiah, or something. Raising the minimum wage will actually raise wages. Gun control will stop gun violence. Trees must be saved. But babies are nothing more than “tissue.” We must be suffering because of something called “unfettered capitalism.” Everybody has ADD (hat tip to Maggie’s Farm). We can condition and shame men into not looking at pretty women anymore. And, my personal favorite, everyone who sees a problem in Barack Obama must be motivated by skin color.

These people can’t apply tests. Not really. Sure, they can run tests on things, but they can’t learn anything from the results. Their minds are already made up. You won’t see them revising an opinion about anything, nor do they have any stories to tell about ever having been compelled to change their minds about anything.