Good Words

From George Will...

Donald Trump is just one symptom of today’s cultural pathology of self-validating vehemence with blustery certitudes substituting for evidence. Another is the fact that the book atop the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions. Because of its vast readership, “Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency” by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and his collaborator Martin Dugard will distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could.

My bold emphasis above perfectly epitomizes today's conservative...especially the right wing blogger and the right wing blog commenter. Blustery certitudes, indeed:)

Republicans Take Ball, Go Home

In a not very surprising move, the GOP has suspended its relationship with NBC due to the poor questioning at last Wednesday night's debate. In short, they are taking their ball and going home.

Although, home ain't what it used to be. Similar complaints were aired about Megyn Kelly and Fox News after the first debate. CNN also received a a laundry list of beefs. Essentially, if it's not Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin, Republicans don't have the balls to face anyone who is even remotely contrary to them.

Once again, we see The Adolescent in full play. Whining about fairness...blaming others (the media, liberals) for their problems...tantrums...shutting out reality. They don't want any sort of pesky facts like...oh, the fact that the USA ranks #1 in the world in terms of economic competitiveness...getting out there.

Perhaps they should have a debate exclusively run by conservative media. I think the United States should get unfettered access to life inside the bubble.

I don't have much else to say about the debate. No one really "won" or "lost" in my opinion. All I heard was the same wacky, ideological nonsense combined with fevered predictions of doom and gloom. The media is saying Rubio, Cruz and Christie won and Bush lost. Who really cares?

I Promissssssss

The Republican Brain Part Six: Political Personalities

Getting back to Chris Mooney's book, The Republican Brain, we now turn to "Political Personalities." Recall that Mooney has now firmly established that when people, especially conservatives, here something that causes cognitive dissonance, they feel like they are being physically attacked. So, they experience dis-confirmation bias and furiously hunt for "evidence" that proves that what is causing them physical discomfort simply can't be true. In short, they tell themselves a nice story.

There are many studies to back this up and they are detailed extensively in the first 50+ pages of the book. Now, however, Mooney details the study that blew it all open: The American Psychological Association's study from 2003 that found links between political ideology and personality traits. The psychologists sought patterns among 88 samples, involving 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers. The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies.

So what did they find?

Conservatives are dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, fear death, less open to new experiences, less "integrative complexity" in thinking and have more need for closure. Essentially, everything I have been saying on here for years...now backed up by peer reviewed science.

The reaction from conservatives was not surprising. The denounced and condemned the study as "left wing rhetoric." They deluged lead researcher, Stanford's John Jost, with emails that were "incredibly aggressive, obnoxious and threatening." Jost remarked, "Ironically, they epitomized all the things they were trying to deny."

Since their report was released over a decade ago, there have been a myriad of studies which have affirmed the report. So, this report, which was  based on 88 different peer reviewed studies, now has just about as many studies, according to Jost. His study has been cited over 800 times since its publication. The science is solid: conservatives have different brains than liberals. It's not merely a matter of philosophy or environment. The way their brains are wired lead them to be dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, fear death, less open to new experiences, less "integrative complexity" in thinking and have more need for closure.

In a great number of ways, this explains why we have so much trouble progressing in this country. We certainly have made great strides since Barack Obama took office but we could be so much farther if it weren't for this brain type holding us back. Perhaps we could start by helping conservatives deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in a better fashion. As Mooney notes, dealing with the grays of reality depends on how you fall in the "Big Five" traits of human personality.

He goes on to describe how open minded people (mostly liberals) tend to congregate together. Close minded people (mostly conservatives) do the same thing. So, what tends to happen is that patterns are reinforced that strengthen a person's resistance to objective reality. And the places where each group hangs out is also different with open minded people and close minded people with the latter going to the same, comfortable places all the time. Open minded people tend to try new places to go and are more open to new experiences. It's no wonder conservatives react like they are being physically attacked when they are confronted by new facts. They are likely also in some sort of new environment that makes their cognitive dissonance even worse.

In putting all of this stuff together, it's easy to see that conservatives are in a great need for cognitive closure whereas liberals have a need for cognition. We want more complex problems and don't necessarily see open ended and ongoing issues as the end of the fucking universe. As I tell my teenagers (children and students), that's life. Deal with it. Money offers the example of abortion as a great example of this dichotomy between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives see this issue as very black and white. It's a child life and it's murder. They don't take into the complexity of child birth from an evolutionary standpoint nor do they consider the rights of the mother. Liberals, however, see that there are many factors to consider and the ultimate conclusion, while most definitely not perfect, is that abortion should be safe and legal.

Near the end of the chapter Mooney states

Authoritarians are very intolerant of ambiguity, are very inclined toward group think and are distrustful of outsiders. They have a need for order.

This really sums up today's conservative. They look at our changing culture and are completely horrified. In five years, white people will not be in the majority. Gay marriage is legal in all fifty states. A black man has served as president for the last two terms and a woman is likely to win the next term.

Their entire world is falling apart.

Thank God.

Enter: The Gestapo!!

If there were any doubts about how low the Republicans are these days, the ELEVEN HOURS they spent today grilling Hillary Clinton pretty much illustrated how sadistic they are. They treated her like some sort of evil traitor to our country and why?

Because Obama got bin Laden and made them look bad. What a bunch of fucking assholes!!

Seriously, why didn't they just put on the rack and shine a spotlight on her face while water boarding her.

Still Too Moderate!!

I Don't Think They Understand That They Are In The Tiny Minority

Today's piece in the Times on the mess in the House has made me wonder....does the Freedom Caucus understand that they are in the tiny minority? I get that they want to have more power (who doesn't?) but if they are able to get the committee assignments they desire, that means they drive the agenda. This translates into moonbat crazy on display nationally and I don't think their brains are ready for the cognitive dissonance.

There's a reason why Boehner did what he did. He knows that if the wingnuts get unleashed so more than just the political junkies like me get to hear and see them, their party's demise will be hastened.

Here's another eye opener from AP that shows just how rudderless the GOP is at present. Just like a blog comments section, all they are capable of are personal attacks. They have no real position of their own...other than the trifecta of hate, anger and fear.

More Good Words

Adolescent Temper Tantrums

Well, it looks like the GOP is in a complete state of disaster. Kevin McCarthy has withdrawn his bid for House Speaker. John Boehner will stay on until a replacement is found. The Tea Party and far right conservatives have thrown their tantrum, tearing down the house (literally:)) that gives them a home...just like the teenager rebelling against mom and dad who thinks that their adolescent dreams of anarchy are preferable to the status quo.

Does the conservative base, who has nothing but hate and bile for their leadership, understand exactly what they are doing?

"We Are Answerable..."

"We are all answerable..."

The president summed up, in this one line, why I am not a conservative. We are indeed responsible for things that happen in our culture....ALL of us...especially something as horrendous as the now regular mass shootings.

Pretending that it's not our problem is incredibly adolescent.

Nosy People

Now that we have all discovered that Hillary Clinton's emails are going to be recovered in their entirety as they were not wiped from her server, conservatives everywhere are popping boners. One thing I've noticed over the years about the Right is they LOVE them some TMZ shit. Generally speaking their lives are so dull (hence all the bitching) that they need to live vicariously through others.

Add in all the anger, hate and fear and PRESTO! They really, really, really want to find some personal dirt on her that they can parade around inside their bubble. What age group...I'm trying to think here...also behaves in this way?

The Donald's People

A new poll of people that support Donald Trump isn't really as surprising as the media is making it out to be.

Our new poll finds that Trump is benefiting from a GOP electorate that thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born in another country, and that immigrant children should be deported. 66% of Trump's supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim to just 12% that grant he's a Christian. 61% think Obama was not born in the United States to only 21% who accept that he was. And 63% want to amend the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship, to only 20% who want to keep things the way they are.

So, at least now we know what happened to the Tea Party. This sort of severe xenophobia, one of the key traits of the American Taliban, simply can't win a general election any longer. Their demographics are shrinking which explains why they behave as they do. They are old and afraid. They are bitter about life and see the country progressing without them. Rather than embrace the change, they are pitching a fit.

And The Donald is tapping into that rage...

I Rest My Case

From a recent conversation on Quora...

I don't know how anyone who has ever played a videogame in their life can look someone else in the eye with a straight face and say a gun can't have saved you. While a game is not reality, the basic concept of being able to end a threat with deadly force remains the same. It's obvious to most 10 year olds.

Pretty much sums up everything I have ever said about the Gun Cult.

Stupid And Ugly

I was all set to write a piece about Donald Trump and how it's entirely possible that he could: a) win the GOP nomination and b) win the presidency. Of course, that's the emotional side of my brain working, not the rational and more cold side. It's being a cynic. He would not be able to break the Democratic wall of 246 given his comments about Hispanics and women that any Democratic nominee would win.

But Matt Taibbi's recent article in Rolling Stone more or less beat me to it. Quite accurately, he describes the Trump voter and more.

People are tired of rules and tired of having to pay lip service to decorum. They want to stop having to watch what they say and think and just get "crazy," as Thomas Friedman would put it. Trump's campaign is giving people permission to do just that. It's hard to say this word in conjunction with such a sexually unappealing person, but his message is a powerful aphrodisiac. Fuck everything, fuck everyone. Fuck immigrants and fuck their filthy lice-ridden kids. And fuck you if you don't like me saying so. 

Those of us who think polls and primaries and debates are any match for that are pretty naive. America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, no matter who wins in 2016.

The cynic in me agrees with him yet I think he's putting this stuff out there to shock people into reality. Imagine how our country would be viewed around the world if Trump were president. We'd lose a great deal of respect and our enemies would run the table on someone so naive. In so many ways, Trump is the adolescent that is illustrative of the GOP base today.

A higher level analysis shows that the GOP is doing the same things to themselves they did in 2012. They are going as insane as insane dictates to win a primary filled with anger, hate filled fear mongers that are completely irrational. It didn't work in the general last election and it won't work now.

The GOP Legacy

Force. Period

The Confederate Flag came down today in South Carolina and I'm certain that plenty of people out there are taking it as some sort of victory. It's nothing of the sort. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the way conservatives argue. They set the battle line somewhere on the 5 or 10 yard line on the right side of the field and then "compromise" at the 35 yard line on the right side of the field. Sorry, fuckers, but that ain't gonna cut it with me.

The simple fact that it was up this long is an absolute insult. The Civil War was won 150 years ago and the people that are keeping the Confederacy alive (see: the current form of the GOP base, the Tea Party, Right Wing Bloggers, Gun Rights Douchebags) should be considered in a state of insurrection and in violation of the Constitution. Their constant whining and adolescent rebellion requires what every child throwing a temper tantrum needs: a firm hand.

I'd start with cutting off federal money to the areas of the country that bitch the most about the federal government. The Deep South is a start followed by Texas and Arizona. Cut off their fucking allowance and, like teenagers, see how long they last. In addition, I think that the people who claim they want to improve the gun laws in this country should change their tactics. You can't bring a limp noodle and milktoast to a gun fight. The Gun Cult are assholes and they're armed. How has America dealt with people like this in the past?

Force. Period.

After all, isn't that exactly what they preach when it comes to countries like Iran or Russia and groups like ISIL? The only thing militants understand is force so begin to apply it. The next time there is a shooting at a school, the next group of families that have to suffer as a result of assholes' insecurity and control freak/power syndromes should park a tank on the steps of the NRA headquarters plastered with photos of all their dead children. They should pool their resources with other families who have lost loved ones to gun violence and hire a Blackwater type security team to fuck with gun rights people...in the same way they fuck with Islamic extremists. I'm sure Michael Bloomberg has the money:)

It took the deaths of 9 people in a massacre to pull down a stupid ass flag. Given just how giant of assholes these people are, it's going to take a lot more for serious and substantive change. I mean, we didn't ask kindly with the Nazis, now did we?

Politically Correct Fire Fighting Gear

The 411 On The Clinton Foundation

The attacks and childish taunting against the Clinton Foundation have gotten pretty silly of late. The right wing bubble has been spinning some pretty ridiculous yarns (see: lies) about the organization so I think it's way past time we examine the objective reality.  A good starting point is the foundation's site itself. Follow any of the links above the top banner and you can see all the work that they do in the world. It's pretty impressive and helpful to a lot of people...which is exactly why conservatives hate it as much as they do. As one begins to dig deeper into the foundation, several things become apparently quickly-all of which torpedo the myths about the organization we have heard so much about from the right wing bubble.

First, this isn't a personal, family organization. It is a large not-for-profit philanthropic entity that solicits contributions, establishes and runs programs and serves as a vast convening vehicle to mobilize other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government and private corporate assets to efficiently solve heretofore unsolvable, major world problems.

Second, Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with many other people, work for the foundation. It's not their personal organization. It's a communal one...something conservatives always have had trouble understanding:) They earn zero income and receive no benefits from the foundation. In fact, they donate much of their own personal money to the foundation along with many Democrats and Republicans as well as putting in many hours to ensure that objectives in helping people are met.

Third, contrary to the lies being told about the Clinton Foundation's lack of transparency, the organization is very open about the source of its contributions. Even though they are not required by law, the still post the contributors to the foundation. This is a great illustration as to exactly what happens when you are more forthcoming with information. They basically make shit up. No wonder she doesn't want to release her private emails.

Fourth, 88% of the monies collected by the Clinton Foundation are spent on programs and direct activities that benefit people in need in this country and around the world. Between the Foundation and its subsidiary organization, the Clinton Global Initiative, more than 400 million people in 180 countries have benefitted from its activities since its inception in 2002 - again: that's 400 million people! It has been committed to meeting a number of major world challenges and has active programs addressing climate change, economic development in some of the world's poorest nations, health, including the deliver of HIV/Aids medications at low cost to victims in the world's impoverished countries, general health and wellness and improving opportunities for women and girls. The Foundation has had a major impact on improving the Haitian economy both before and after its terrible earthquake.

This runs contrary to the mostly false statement that the Clinton Foundation spends very little on actual charity. The foundation is not set up like a regular charity that farms out its aid to other workers. They hire workers in house and pay them a salary. That's why their administrative costs are so high. As is most typical of right wing blog commenters, the wordsmithing and monkey word games are hauled out in the hopes of a "gotcha."

I'm wondering if this is going to backfire at some point, though. The continued attacks on Hillary Clinton will inevitably increase the image of her as a victim.

Secession Talk=Crickets

Like the adolescent who bitches about the roof over their heads, they all end up crying to mom and dad for help.

The Republican Brain Part Five: Smart Idiots

The next section of Chris Mooney's book, The Republican Brain, is called "Smart Idiots" and it's honestly one of the most depressing sections of the book. It begins with a study of why motivated reasoning, which we talked about last time, occurs in individuals. Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, has a classification system based on how people reason with their moral and political values. Imagine a Cartesian plane like this one:

Now, imagine that the X Axis is a measure of individualism on the right and communitarians on the left. With the Y Axis, imagine egalitarians on the bottom and hierarchicals on the top. Broadly speaking, Kahan discovered that US conservatives are in Quadrant 1 (individual, hierarchical) and US liberals are in Quadrant 3 (communitarian, egalitarian). It's important to note here that individuals are really scattered all over the place and we're just talking about general groups.

Still, this explains so much to me personally. I've always wondered how a group of people who are so obsessed with individual rights are also so authoritarian. Now we know. They believe that a chief organizing principle for society is hierarchies, with the "right" people at the top. With so many US conservatives from the South, this clearly goes back to the Antebellum and all of its mythical structures.

So, how do these classifications apply to the issues of the day? One of Kahan's studies took groups of people and had them imagine helping a friend make a decision about three important topics: whether global warming is caused by human beings, whether nuclear wasted can be stored safely underground, and whether letting people carry guns either deters violent crime or worsens it.  The study subjects were then shown fake excerpts from a variety of "experts" on each topic.

The results were very telling. Only 23% of individual-hierarchicals agreed that any of the experts knew what they were talking about while 88% of communitarian-egalitarians accepted the experts as being knowledgeable and trustworthy. Right here is that instant and most adolescent reaction to people who are in authority and knowledgeable of which I always speak. Why? I simply don't get it. Are they that insecure about themselves?

What tends to happen in examinations of these issues is what Mooney calls the "My Expert v Your Expert" battle. Even worse....

When they deny global warming, then, conservatives think the best minds are actually on their side. They think THEY'RE the champions of truth and reality; and they're deeply attached to this view. That is why head-on attempts to persuade them usually fail. Indeed, factual counterarguments sometimes even trigger what has been termed the backfire effect: Those with the most strongly held but clearly incorrect beliefs not only fail to change their minds, but hold their wrong views more tenaciously after being shown contradictory evidence or a refutation.

This is very key information to have when having a discussion with a conservative these days. Remember, they feel like they are under physical attack. If they have very strongly held views, it will be worse due to the backfire effect.

Now, what's interesting about the backfire effect is that applies to conservatives only. Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of Georgia State found that when conservatives were shown more and more evidence that Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs and that tax cuts do not increase revenue, they were MORE likely to believe the claim than before. I can personally attest to tax cut-revenue BS sadly being valid. Yet, when liberals were shown evidence in the same study that refuted claims that George W Bush "banned" embryonic stem cell research (he never did), liberals didn't backfire. They weren't more likely to believe the claim and, in fact, wavered more given the new information.

What this tells us quite simply is that liberals are generally more reflective and tend to be more open to new information. Consider the basic definitions of each word in objective reality

liberal: not opposed to new ideas or ways of behaving that are not traditional or widely accepted

conservative: not liking or accepting changes or new ideas

I'm always willing to accept valid, unbiased and verifiable data regardless of whether or not it supports my ideology. I am speaking of information that the cold and rational part of the brain can analyze. I haven't seen any such data from conservatives on most of the issues I discuss and quite honestly dismiss nearly all of it as wacky, ideological nonsense. Speaking of which...

The split over whether Iraq had the touted

 "WMD," and whether Saddam and Osama were frat buddies, represented a true turning point in the relationship between our politics and objective reality. In case you missed it: Reality lost badly. Conservatives and Republicans were powerfully and persistently wrong, following a cherished leader into a war based on false premises-and then, according to these studies, finding themselves unable to escape the quagmire of unreality even after several years had passed.

The "cherished leader" line echoes what I have said previously about President Bush and conservatives. He was their savior...their white knight... yet, on his watch, we suffered the worst attack on our home soil in history, a city fell into the sea, and the economy collapsed. By any metric in objective reality, he was a colossal failure. Much of the anger toward Barack Obama comes from the massive cognitive dissonance occurring within their brains.

At this point, we come to the most depressing part of the chapter and the origin of its title. Mooney posits that there is a "smart idiots" effect when it comes to many of these issues. One would think that the more educated a person is, the easier it is for them to accept objective reality. In fact, the opposite is true. It is because they are extremely intelligent that they can come up with intricate counter arguments and employ confirmation bias to convince themselves that their belief system is solid. Never was this more true than with global warming.

Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the "radiative" properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation would otherwise escape into space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place,  but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can't explain what we are seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and smokestacks.

This is a great example of objective reality and thankfully one that is more reliable than people, especially the educated ones. Pew polls over the years have shown that Democrats accept this objective reality and Republicans do not. Worse, the more educated a Republican is, the more likely he is to reject the theory of man caused global warming. Astonishing...

Mooney offers further explanation of why this is the case. Even smart conservatives, for example, chiefly consume conservative news sources like Fox News. So, like anyone else, they are being conditioned. The more intelligent they are, the more resistant which does hold some good news for the rest of us in objective reality. We can, at least, attempt to persuade the less intelligent conservatives because the studies and the data show that they are easier to persuade.

What's even more vexing about this is that Kahan's studies sprinkled in other questions that were scientifically based but not very political. Nearly all respondents, despite their cultural background, answered the question with their colder and more rational System 2 brain. In fact, those who scored higher on the non political scientific questions but were individual-hierarchical distrusted climate science in greater numbers. Stunning!!

One big takeaway from all of this is the liberal line of "educate more people" needs to be retired. Becoming more knowledgeable will actually make it worse so the old idea about converting people with more education needs to go away forever. It won't work. They will just get worse.

In wrapping up this first section of the book, "Politics, Facts, and Brains,"  Mooney warns...

Motivated reasoning poses a deep challenge to the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, which assumes that voters will be informed about the issues-not deeply wedded to misinformation. We're divided enough about politics as it is, without adding irreconcilable views about the nature of reality on top of that. 

Add in all of the new media of the last two decades and it truly exacerbates the problem.

The next section of the book is called "The Nature Hypothesis: Dangerous Certainty." It looks to be an even deeper explanation of the problem which is sort of a drag. At this point, I'd like to get to some solutions on how to go forward!