Well, when the idea of "Hitler = Republican" shows up yet again, "butt-ignorant" is the first term that comes to mind. I'm sure something more flowery and academic would occur to me if I thought it was worth the effort. Hitler called his regime socialist. Take it up with him.

One big difference between engineers and social scientists is that in engineering, dumb-ass ideas tend to smack up hard against reality very quickly. You cannot talk an I-beam into bearing a load it is not designed for, no matter how many big words you use.

Social and economic ideas tend to take longer to hit the fan, and social scientists (who are never held to blame for the "imperfect implementation" of their ideas) seem to be utterly immune from the learning process. Frankly, I think academic discourse would be greatly improved if more people were willing to point out that someone is as full of shit as a Christmas goose.

If an engineer stood up and proposed putting honey into gasoline to make car exhaust smell better, the rest of the engineers would just tip him out the third floor window and go on with the meeting. Yet social and economic equivalents of this idea not only get applauded, but often, to the detriment of society, enacted into law.

When Robert Reich proposed indexing the minimum wage to inflation, he should have been beaten into insensibility by his fellow economists. Nobody blinked an eye. There are many other examples.