Metaphor For GOP Thinking
Andrew Sullivan posted this on The Daily Dish the other day.
From Sullivan and Wikipedia:
An ant mill is a phenomenon where a group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations.[1] This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, and this will work until something goes wrong and an ant mill forms.[2] An ant mill was first described by William Beebe who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.[3] Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.[4]
Sullivan remarks that this is a great metaphor for the long-term effects of “epistemic closure”.
The term, appropriated from philosophy, means (in terms of the political blogosphere) the tendency for conservative media to become untethered from reality — accepting no new ideas or entertaining or discussing in any meaningful way ideas which they disagree with.
Sounds about right.
-Chris
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