Celebrity Culture Dampens Reality

If Lady Gaga is more important to your life than the price of gas, taxes, liberty, education or a job, give your head a shake.  Unfortunately there are a lot of people who hang on every word of a celebrity, whose only qualification for celebrity is the ability to play guitar, sing or act.  Sometimes they really don't even possess those skills.  Via PJM : Col.Allen West and the hipster doofus-ification of America.

Celebrity does not equate to moral authority.  Their voices on issues outside their area of talent at best should be met with skepticism as to their knowledge of the subject they are speaking about.  Unfortunately in the real world, celebrity equates to influence.  When real heroes - doctors, soldiers, engineers, pastors, factory workers, firefighters, police, scientists, etc.* - go mostly unheard.

By the way, there is nothing hip about progressivism.  The word progressive is a contrived way to make their ideas sound like progress.  Typically when they say progress, they mean social progress. But:

• Social progress is not the same thing as technological progress.  Progress in fighting cancer is a good thing.  Progress in granting government more power at the expense of individual liberty, is a bad thing.
• Social progress is clearly not always a good thing - for example legalizing cocaine might be considered social progress but really it's devolution. 
• Some areas of society do not require improvement.  While improvements are always possible, many things work very well and do not require full changes, where tweaking, at best, is required.  Taking away the Second Amendment is a full change that isn't desireable, enforcing existing gun laws is a better option but that wouldn't qualify as progress in the eyes of progressives.
• Social progress is uni-directional.  Not only do progressives not want to go back if their ideas fail (indeed they will argue we didn't go far enough), often society cannot go back once a new social policy (e.g. gay marriage) has been enacted.  A can of worms once opened cannot be closed. 
• Progressives put their agenda ahead of consequences.  If they can't prove their ideas represent an improvement, they just shout louder than those who question their agenda and call them names in order to denigrate their opposition.  Real debate is not possible.

*I'd add teachers to that list if there weren't so many of them who were hipster doofuses.  Teachers deserve respect, but they also require better vetting.