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Showing posts with label cognitive dissonance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cognitive dissonance. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

What I Wish Would Happen, What Actually Happens

What I Wish Would Happen: 
 
-Facts are presented. 
-People change their minds based on reality. 
-People are more enlightened and humanity progresses 

What Actually Happens: 

-Facts are presented. 
-People experience cognitive dissonance and feel personally attacked. 
-People dig into their beliefs, refused to be enlightened and we don’t progress.

Sunday, May 07, 2017

Complete Cognitive Disconnect

The father of my son's baseball coach is a die hard Trump fan. We had a lot of great discussions last year and this year looks to top that. What amazes me the most about Coach Dad (that's what the kids call him...which is awesome) is how little regard for reality he has, especially when he starts spouting
virulent and irrational wordy squirts about communism.

With May Day just passed, he was going on about how we all dodged a bullet with Bernie Sanders. I informed him that Sanders was a democratic socialist, not a communist. His response?

"Same difference."

I then proceeded to inform him that many countries in Europe (Denmark. Finland. Netherlands. Sweden. Norway. Ireland.) and Canada were largely democratic socialist in nature. I wondered why all of them never had this problem.



He just laughed and had no response.

I continued to press him on Trump's connection to Russia. He said it was "fake news." Finally, I asked him if he saw the irony in supporting a Russian puppet on the one hand while foaming at the mouth and lying about Senator Sanders. He told me stop watching CNN.

My first thought after this exchange was how prevalent his views were. Was it fringe? The best place to check that was Kevin Baker's site, The Smallest Minority. Not surprisingly, I found this.

I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog. This is the seventh time I have put it up. Since Bernie Sanders made a credible run for the Presidency last year, obviously we've not learned a fucking thing from history.

Seriously. What a fucking moron. Bernie Sanders=Communist. Donald Trump=Victim of Fake News. This, despite EVERY intelligence agency stating that Russia interfered in our election and tipped the scales, via propaganda, to Trump. The same fucking intelligence agencies that Kevin believes were accurate on WMDs in Iraq. Now, of course, it's all some sort of liberal plot...

But Kevin and his fellow intransigent adolescents are invariably in the minority. What about the rest of the country? Here's an interesting graphic.





Most Americans don't hold the same rosy view of Russia that our current president does.

Interestingly, all the right wing news sites offer breathless examples of how Americans are more approving of communism these days. Move outside of that nonsense (while noting that they are so irrational that they think that socialism and communism are the same thing) and we see that most Americans overwhelmingly like capitalism more, even when compared to mere socialism.

So, what do we do with the Coach Dads and Kevins of the world? Their views are so incredibly driven by irrationality and the need to be right all the time that they aren't thinking clearly. People that don't think clearly make bad decisions that those of us who are rational have to then clean up.

Medication? Maybe. A padded cell? Getting there. Many more of us registered to vote and running in every election no matter how local? That's the ticket. In fact, let's do that to such a degree that we end up with more people who want drastically alter our nation's gun laws.

They only win because more of them turn out to vote.



Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Getting What They Deserve

Paul Krugman put it best recently when he noted that Republicans are getting the candidate they deserve in Donald Trump.

Donald Trump as a political phenomenon is very much in a line of succession that runs from W. through Mrs. Palin, and in many ways he’s entirely representative of the Republican mainstream. For example, were you shocked when Mr. Trump revealed his admiration for Vladimir Putin? He was only articulating a feeling that was already widespread in his party…

What is consistently felt, Krugman notes, is bluster and belligerence as substitutes for analysis, disdain for any kind of measure response, and the continued dismissal of inconvenient facts related by the "liberal media." This isn't anything new. This is what the GOP has been training their followers with for the last 15+ years.

Why on earth do they seem surprised now that Trump is the likely nominee?

The Obama team has it right when they say that the GOP is getting what they deserve. I've been saying all along that being an adolescent is what they party is all about these days and they are incapable of behaving like rational adults. Hilariously, many pundits and prognosticators are saying that when the GOP gets their ass kicked (again) this year, they'll finally see the light.

No, they won't:)