honorentheos wrote:The antidote to this is, in my opinion, critical thinking and seeking out people who we expect will bring a balanced view and engage facts rather than just feed one another's biases. I think there are posters here who are valuable for this very reason.
I think your point of developing a population that is well-versed in critical thinking is a good one, albeit wholly unrealistic. The sheer amount of change that would have to take place in the nation-wide curriculum would be revolutionary. Also, the sheer amount of time and difficulty that developing critical thinking requires, which include political theory, philosophy, psychology, and a host of other courses to get a brain from a reactionary one to a thinking one is something that's just not going to happen.
If one accepts the premise that self-interest will always rule the day when it comes to human beings you actually have a starting point with which to work. Political theory born out of pragmatism is something approaching common sense, and through that looking glass we can then develop and preserve a democracy that is currently amorphous into something comprehensible and useful for our body politic.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
Mayan Elephant wrote:i am not a breitbart fan, but damn. that list is spot-on. the crying continues.
ain't it something that none of the reasons the democrats lost include the anointed candidate?
The problem I have with this type of scapegoating is that Clinton was, without a doubt, the most qualified Presidential candidate most voters have seen in their life times who was competed against by one of the least. She lost. It can be said there were plenty of problems with Clinton as a candidate in a media-driven world which are valid. But her resume, her qualifications were a solid plus in her column and a minus in Trump's. That most people probably couldn't accurately say three things about what it was she was proposing but could easily check boxes as to what the items on the list pertain to says something meaningful against your position here. It's difficult to see criteria related to Clinton that would lead a person to vote for Trump over her for reasons really related to what she brought to the table.
Russia didn't influence the election by rigging votes or hacking systems. They influenced the election via the use of the media and people's irrational, emotional reactions to things like her emails in a way that caused voters to completely mis-scale the equivalent pros and cons of the candidates. That should “F” with peoples minds more than it seems to be doing.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
honorentheos wrote:The antidote to this is, in my opinion, critical thinking and seeking out people who we expect will bring a balanced view and engage facts rather than just feed one another's biases. I think there are posters here who are valuable for this very reason.
I think your point of developing a population that is well-versed in critical thinking is a good one, albeit wholly unrealistic. The sheer amount of change that would have to take place in the nation-wide curriculum would be revolutionary. Also, the sheer amount of time and difficulty that developing critical thinking requires, which include political theory, philosophy, psychology, and a host of other courses to get a brain from a reactionary one to a thinking one is something that's just not going to happen.
If one accepts the premise that self-interest will always rule the day when it comes to human beings you actually have a starting point with which to work. Political theory born out of pragmatism is something approaching common sense, and through that looking glass we can then develop and preserve a democracy that is currently amorphous into something comprehensible and useful for our body politic.
- Doc
I think we need to step back from "well versed" to simply familiar with the concepts. It doesn't take extreme sophistication to teach basic concepts about bias, the realization we all are prone to biases, and the methodologies for checking them. Critical thinking begins and ends with the realization we all have biases. It could be taught at a middle school level, using the internet and simple curriculum with a few easy to demonstrate famous psych experiments thrown in to make the point realizable.
To be more fair, I think there is a very real elite bias in the idea that people on one side are simply ignorant and could be educated out of their positions. Or worse, lack the faculties to be educated out of their positions. The reality requires something more..., let's call it humble. The idea that one side is smart and the other dumb is part of the problem that brought us Trump, and frankly not justifiable. The real issue in this election is that sophisticated conservative and liberal political philosophies both lost to the gut-level emotion-driven voters on both sides. So, pragmatic and realistic also demand something that redirects the emotional responses as well.
So long as elections are driven by who can create the most disgust towards the opposing candidate, democracy is not functioning. I know of no other means of attacking that than critical thinking.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
All of those things on the list are valid, though. If you take all of those causes away, she wins a '72 Nixon landslide. But you can't simply remove those causes and a few of them are fundamentally wrapped up in who she is. People can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that when an election is lost by a razor thin margin, all sorts of marginal causes could swing the election the other way. Take away Trump's appeal to white, working class racists and Clinton probably gets the 80k or so votes she needs to win the electoral college. That doesn't mean every Trump voter is a racist, but you don't need every single one to be in order for his racist appeals to matter. Clinton is a particularly tricky case to break down because you have to deal with the fact that she lost to the most unpopular non-incumbent candidate ever. That suggests significant weakness in her as a candidate.
The biggest problem is that the mainstream media acted like she already was the winner and treated her with a profound double-standard that completely torpedoed her campaign. It's not Comey per se that destroyed her, but how the media decided to cover it. But what allowed the relentless non-scandal, scandal-mongering to stick so effectively was the preexisting perception of her as slimy. So how do you apportion the causal attribution there? Search me.
If you are someone who thinks Bernie definitely would've fared better, you should read the opposition research Republicans had lined up on him. It's amazing. They have footage of him at a Sandinista rally that was cheering for the death of Americans with Sanders, on camera, saying supporting them was "patriotic". It might make you pause and wonder if Clinton could've been destroyed with EMAILS! what in God's name where they going to do with Sanders.
What needs to be dealt with is the fact that the Republican attack machine is well-honed and the rest of cable news media is partially complicit in amplifying it in pursuit of scandal and false balance. While some Democrats might be more vulnerable to it than others, it's really hard to predict in advance who is going to get chewed up by it.
Here's a paragraph on a taste of the Republican opposition file on Sanders should he have been the nominee:
Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.
Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”
beastie wrote:I haven't had time to listen to the Moyer clip. I am a big fan of Haidt and his book The Righteous Mind. I really want Haidt's road to work. I really would prefer believing that critical thinking and seeking out contrary opinions is the antidote. But we are already so deeply polarized, and so deeply within our echo chambers, I'm not very optimistic.
Certainly I'm as prone as anyone to be susceptible to media sources that simply affirm what I already believe. I want to hope and believe Trump doesn't live up to my worst expectations. However, I'm having a hard time holding on to even the slimmest hope in the face of his cabinet picks.
The Moyer clip is from a few years ago, probably not long after The Righteous Mind was published. The discussion Haidt has below with Chris Andersen of TED is much more timely and hits on similar points in a shorter format: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haid ... erica_heal
I also really, really found this discussion at Intelligence squared facinating though to be honest I felt that Haidt misread many of the comments and questions put to him while Nick Clegg proved his political sensitivity was on point.
A lot of good discussion in the latter link that runs a bit long but if someone has the hour and a half to give I'd say it's worth it.
ETA: The last link gets into discussion of the populist movements that led to Brexit and Trump, brief discussions as to what liberalism (mostly in the British sense) ought to do going forward and why the current election results on both sides of the Atlantic do not mean liberal ideals have necessarily lost, and a kid who cuts right to the chase at the end of the Q&A which probably got the best applause line of the event.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
honorentheos wrote:The Moyer clip is from a few years ago, probably not long after The Righteous Mind was published. The discussion Haidt has below with Chris Andersen of TED is much more timely and hits on similar points in a shorter format: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haid ... erica_heal
I also really, really found this discussion at Intelligence squared facinating though to be honest I felt that Haidt misread many of the comments and questions put to him while Nick Clegg proved his political sensitivity was on point.
A lot of good discussion in the latter link that runs a bit long but if someone has the hour and a half to give I'd say it's worth it.
ETA: The last link gets into discussion of the populist movements that led to Brexit and Trump, brief discussions as to what liberalism (mostly in the British sense) ought to do going forward and why the current election results on both sides of the Atlantic do not mean liberal ideals have necessarily lost, and a kid who cuts right to the chase at the end of the Q&A which probably got the best applause line of the event.
That was an excellent video, thanks for the link.
I think Haidt has been insightful in terms of analyzing why we are so tribal, and how different the conservative and liberal minds truly are. I appreciate his work, and agree that it's important to try to view the perspective of the other, particularly in terms of how we justify our positions in a moral sense.
But my concern is this: this is the type of dialogue that liberals lap up with a spoon. I think it's the type of "elistist" dialogue that many US conservatives dismiss. So I don't see much progress being possible.
I think we're at the point where we have to be practical about saving our democracy if possible. That's why I agree with doc when he concludes that the left has to learn some lessons about communication in this era. The right has been a bit more savvy about that all along, oddly enough. They were the first to recognize the power of language in terms of labels, for example. Call it a death tax instead of an estate tax, for example. Liberals have to wise up.
We hate to seem like we don’t trust every nut with a story, but there’s evidence we can point to, and dance while shouting taunting phrases.
Here's a paragraph on a taste of the Republican opposition file on Sanders should he have been the nominee:
Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.
Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”
That's some tasty material right there.
Although I was a Sanders supporter, I was always a little skeptical about whether or not he'd have a better chance of winning. Sure, he always polled great, but that was because they weren't really focusing oppostion research on him. Clinton, otoh, seemed to have been vetted for decades. There wasn't much more they could pull out, but of course I didn't realize the extent to which other forces would come into play.
There's a book I'm going to order and read, "Predicting the Next President" by Alan Lichtman. I've heard him interviewd on NPR and he was impressive. Has anyone here read it?
We hate to seem like we don’t trust every nut with a story, but there’s evidence we can point to, and dance while shouting taunting phrases.
beastie wrote:There's a book I'm going to order and read, "Predicting the Next President" by Alan Lichtman. I've heard him interviewd on NPR and he was impressive. Has anyone here read it?
I haven't read it but I'm sure he's the professor who rightly predicted a Trump win.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
Jersey Girl wrote: I haven't read it but I'm sure he's the professor who rightly predicted a Trump win.
He predicted a Clinton win which he is taking credit for given that she won the popular vote. But he also predicted a George W. Bush win and took credit for that, which contradicts his position this time around.