Month: June 2010

Michael Smerconish looks at the media’s role in the rapid escalation of extreme opinions; radio and television ‘tombstones in the graveyard of moderate, thoughtful analysis’:

While the most recent polling and voter registration data suggest that political power lies in the middle, it remains largely untapped because it lacks the fervor of the extremes.

Why does this matter? I’d argue that the climate in Washington is being shaped by an artificial presentation of attitudes on cable TV and talk radio. To view and to listen is to become convinced that there are only two, diametrically opposed philosophical approaches to the issues. And yet, working daily in both mediums, I often think that the only people I meet who see the world entirely through liberal or conservative lenses are the hosts with whom I rub shoulders.

Either you offer a consistent, possibly artificial, ideological view or you often don’t get a say.

James Kunstler:

The American Way of Life is not so charming, but its very sprawling character may prevent a political maniac from controlling enough of a base to hold all the states and regions together in a thrall of fascism — and there are all those firearms to think about.

I maintain that the trend is down for centralized power here, in the direction of impotency and decreasing competence at anything. I don’t subscribe to the paranoid themes of Big Brother government domination, the surveillance state and related fantasies. It’ll be more Home Alone meets Risky Business — all dangerous places with no adult supervision.

Findings published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by the University of Toronto reveal that compassion and equality is associated with a liberal mindset, while order and respect of social norms is associated with a conservative mindset.

Our data shows that liberalism is more often associated with the underlying motives for compassion, empathy and equality.

Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness. This means that they’re more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure.

There are costs and benefits to each political profile and both appear critical to maintaining an effective balance in society.

Charles, the Prince of Wales, has blamed a lack of belief in the soul for the world’s environmental problems, and said that the planet cannot sustain a population expected to reach 9 billion in 40 years. He said

The Prince pinned part of the blame on Galileo. Criticizing the profit imperative behind much scientific research, he said:

This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works, and how we fit within the scheme of things.

As a result, Nature has been completely objectified — ‘She’ has become an ‘it’ — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.

The Prince said that he believed green technology alone could not resolve the world’s environmental problems. Instead, the West must do something about its “deep, inner crisis of the soul”.

It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well. Talk of an ‘environmental crisis’ or of a ‘financial crisis’ is actually describing ‘the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul’.

Update. Christopher Hitchens is livid: Where is this ‘vapid talk about the soul of the universe’ actually headed?

A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer.

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. … But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.

Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The ‘vacuum’ will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now.

One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

Now that it’s clear what the Tea Party stands for, more and more Americans dislike them.

Washington Post/ABC News poll reveals Americans who hold an unfavorable view of the movement has jumped from 39 percent to 50 percent. Who can we thank for that? Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin and Dick Armey… the lunacy goes on.

John Hempton:

I like to think you know people are not serious when they always have the same solution – no matter what the problem.

For instance there is a faction in the Republican party who think that whatever the problem the solution is to cut taxes.  If you are running too big a surplus the solution is to cut taxes. If you are running a deficit the solution is to cut taxes.  If you are fighting a war the solution is to cut taxes.  If you face global warming the solution is to cut taxes.  These people can be effective political operators but are useless at furthering the intellectual debate.

There are similar groups who think the solution is always more government regulation.

Puerile arguments exist on all sides of politics.

If dopamine inducing street drugs were not managed in a morality play of dollars and war, we may have learned a few things over the years such as this vital clue:

Our findings suggest that this compulsive urge to use cocaine and the loss of control that goes with it reflect biological differences in users’ brains…

Chris Hedges:

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment.

They need to sanctify their rage, a rage that lies at the core of the ideology. They seek total cultural and political domination. They are using the space within the open society to destroy it.

The magical thinking, the flagrant distortion in interpreting the Bible, the contradictions that abound within the movement’s belief system and the laughable pseudoscience, however, are impervious to reason.

We cannot convince those in the movement to wake up. It is we who are asleep.

The President:

We also talked about claims.  And this is an area where I think everybody has a lot of concern.

My understanding is, is that BP has contracted for $50 million worth of TV advertising to manage their image during the course of this disaster.  In addition, there are reports that BP will be paying $10.5 billion — that’s billion with a B — in dividend payments this quarter.

Now, I don’t have a problem with BP fulfilling its legal obligations.  But I want BP to be very clear, they’ve got moral and legal obligations here in the Gulf for the damage that has been done.

And what I don’t want to hear is, when they’re spending that kind of money on their shareholders and spending that kind of money on TV advertising, that they’re nickel-and-diming fishermen or small businesses here in the Gulf who are having a hard time.

We’ve assigned federal folks to look over BP’s shoulder and to work with state and local officials to make sure that claims are being processed quickly, fairly, and that BP is not lawyering up, essentially, when it comes to these claims.

They say they want to make it right.  That’s part of their advertising campaign.  Well, we want them to make it right.  And what that means is that if a fisherman got a $5,000 check, and the next time he goes in, because it’s a new month, suddenly BP is saying, well, we need some documentation and this may take six months to process, or 60 days to process — or 30 days to process, for that matter — that fisherman, with all his money tied up in that boat, just may not be able to hang on for another 30 days.  He may lose his boat and his livelihood.

So the key point I’m making here is, this has been a disaster for this region and people are understandably frightened and concerned about what the next few months and the new few years may hold.  I am absolutely confident about the resilience of this area long term, but if we can make sure that BP is doing the right thing on the front end, it’s going to make it an awful lot easier for us to fully recover on the back end.  And by the way, it may end up being cheaper for BP.