Reply #8: K&R - and I have to post an excellent comment to the above article

[stevenleser]

Remember also, many on the Right proceed from beliefs to information and not the other way around. Facts are used to verify beliefs, not to shape them, and most certainly not to test them. Quite the contrary: if a fact appears to challenge a belief, then the fact is suspect -- even hostile -- and must itself be challenged. Thus the myth of the monolithic and all-powerful Left (which if you think about it must indeed seem huge and powerful, since these false facts keep popping up everywhere).

People who reason from fact to belief -- like scientists and other rational folk -- may consider that to be the only correct way of cognition. But to many on the Right, it is alien. Arguments based on that process, then, are likewise alien and extremely unlikely to convince.