Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong.”
we secrete delusion
Perhaps there is a journey about ourselves here:
“How our brains secrete religious and superstitious belief.”
Yes. Michael Shermer uses the word ‘secrete‘.
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies.
How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.
Religions and superstitions may stem from the brain’s ability to spot patterns and intent…
…
And as Frank Schaeffer notices, “The countries in the world that are the most fundamentalist and religious, and/or those whose identity is most religion-based, are the world’s greatest troublemakers. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Vatican City and the state of Israel come to mind.
“The delusion is this: ‘We’re chosen, special and enlightened, and only we have The Truth’.
mall cattle
Personally, I am glad that the middle-class is being ground into economic dust.
They are the bovine majority after all, who invented leisurewear, vote for politicians, and sign petitions to prevent others from doing things that they don’t understand.
It is incredible that anyone as mean-spirited and as greedy as the middle classes can point an accusing finger to even the most avaricious of tycoons.
We are all accessories to economic crimes, of course, but only they plead innocence.
refeudalized
“Can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?”
“Thomas Paine could walk out of his front door in Philadelphia and find a dozen competing, low-cost print shops within blocks of his home.
“Today, if he traveled to the nearest TV station, or to the headquarters of nearby Comcast – the dominant television provider in America – and tried to deliver his new ideas to the American people, he would be laughed off the premises.
“The public square that used to be a commons has been refeudalized, and the gatekeepers charge large rents for the privilege of communicating to the American people over the only medium that really affects their thinking.
“Citizens are now referred to more commonly as ‘consumers’ or ‘the audience’.”
sweet daddy obalma
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WPtEGOp5rI
don’t ask don’t tell
Sgt. Maj. Barrett has a long military resume, including combat service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he doesn’t need a microphone to get his point across.
And to drive the point home, he produced a pocket copy of the Constitution.
“Get over it,” he said. “We’re magnificent, we’re going to continue to be. … Let’s just move on, treat everybody with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let’s be Marines.”
shame shame shame
The professor wrote a book, ‘Why Leaders Lie‘.
We’re nuts if we don’t know.
This book is many citations of whopping lies throughout history. Of course this is a good book.
Slate says it’s ‘willful falsification’. When character refuses worth, says me.
Leaders lie to their own people more than they do to foreign audiences, says Professor Mearsheimer. He’s taught at the University of Chicago for 28 years. His video interview on C-Span is fun. He adds color, insight, charm. He’s convincing.
Sociopaths lie. Leaders lie. Detestable.
We know far too little about leaders.
We are damaged by our ignorance.
groin profiteering
At present, in contrast, the dismal air is signed with the scandalous tweets of a congressman’s undergarments and the concomitant, predictable howling from the hectoring ghosts of U.S. Puritanism, conjured from their graves by the contrived spectacle and its promise of anonymous arousal intermingled with the blood sport of public shaming.
By finger wagging and sneering, carnal desires can be lived out vicariously in the Puritan/Calvinist imagination. In this way, petty moralists can ogle what they claim to condemn.
To Puritans, all the problems of life can be traced to the genitals…true, but only their own problems.
How many times do the prigs, ninnies, and scolds of the U.S. have to repeat this sort of inanity before they grow up and realize that human beings have strong libidos? Libido propels both creativity and contretemps, and it is wise to aver that “the issue of character” should best be evoked and debated, as a general rule, when the situation involves hypocrisy.
A more profound ‘character issue’ here would seem to involve that of the representatives of mass media news gathering organizations, in particular — their greed for ratings.
who’s voting for crazy & nuts?
Where on earth do people like Michele Bachmann get their wacky ideas from?
Frank Schaeffer says, “I’ll tell you.”
snippet:
“It is not only our duty as individuals, families and churches to be Christian, but it is also the duty of the state, the school, the arts and sciences, law, economics, and every other sphere to be under Christ the King. Nothing is exempt from His dominion. We must live by His Word, not our own.”
invisible hand is a myth
I’m not a libertarian, although at one time I was. I believe in liberty, but I also believe we need to have a collective consciousness that isn’t completely insane. I think we’re driving off a few cliffs, others do too, and what are we supposed to do? Keep our mouths shut? Permanent link to this item in the archive.
I think the difference can be traced back to what Adam Smith called The Invisible Hand. It’s a beautiful idea. One that Ronald Reagan picked up on, and marketed very well. So well, that I voted for Reagan twice. I liked what he was saying. Trust in the goodness of people and the Ouija board of self-interest, and all will be good. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
That doesn’t work because the world is too complicated, and I didn’t appreciate that at the time. As a very young person, I hadn’t experienced much of the complexity. That’s part of what’s so great about being young. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
Self-interest was a very good thing to depend on when the world was simpler. When global warming wasn’t an issue. Or nuclear weapons. When the collective insanity of the American people didn’t lead them to the conclusion that the economy works like their household budget. Yet a lot of people, including apparently a lot of our elected officials, do believe that. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
They also doubt evolution. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
I’m fairly pessimistic about this system’s ability to kick out the right answers. Permanent link to this item in the archive.
arguing the bottom
“This is where a “serious conversation” on health-care costs would start — with what has worked, and what we can learn from it.
“Instead, it’s where our conversation about health-care costs never quite goes.
“But that’s the choice we’ve been left with: a plan that has never worked or a plan that’s never been tried.”
The issue today is whether man shall govern himself or be governed by a small, self-interested elite. – Jefferson
not surprised?
a steady increase in U.S. military capacity to conduct social influence campaigns at every level
This ongoing “revolution in military affairs” (Metz & Kievit, 1995, p. iii) has precipitated, among other things, a steady increase in U.S. military capacity to conduct social influence campaigns at every level of the modern world’s information environment: in local, national, regional (or “theater”), and global spheres; in domestic and foreign populations; among individuals, groups, organizations, and governments (Department of Defense, Joint Publication 3–13.2, Doctrine for Joint Psychological Operations[DOD JP 3–13.2], 2010). It has, at the same time, renewed the need for psychologists and other social scientists to reconsider the optimal relationship between social science and war, and between influence and democracy.
undearth the earth
Dana at this link:
Every generation’s politics is based on economics. In every generation we find new ways to organize ourselves to create more productivity, more progress, more wealth. We still farm cotton, we still build Fords, and we still have offices.
But the way to greater wealth lies in combining the vast computing resources created in the last generation with minds which can do what computers can’t. It’s man and thinking machine, working together, that will build the Abundant Society our children will live and work in.
If you are not learning, if you’re not constantly trying to think outside the box you live in, you’re no longer part of the future, but the past.
==========================
The most used Dylan text is, of course:
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
fashion craps our mind
Go ahead, Republicans, make America dumb:
At a certain point, public universities will have ceased to exist. We will only have a variety of private universities, some of which will be subsidized a little bit by tax-payers. Depending on where you draw the line, the University of California might already be at that point — student tuition now makes up a larger portion of the UC’s budget than state funding — but the long-term trend is undeniable: since 2004, the amount of money the UC has gotten from the state of California has been cut in half, and has continued to decline, every year, with utter and complete reliability. And where the UC and CSU systems are now, every other public university will soon follow. This is not a trend that’s going to end tomorrow. This is a trend that ends with the end of public universities. It just depends on where you decide to draw the line.
sloppy sloppy sloppy
via The Guardian:
Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, discusses the ‘extraordinarily thin evidence’ used to hold prisoners and the ‘nonsense cooked up’ by a group of serial informers to get privileges.
The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called “worst of the worst”, many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment.
The 759 Guantánamo files, classified “secret”, cover almost every inmate since the camp was opened in 2002. More than two years after President Obama ordered the closure of the prison, 172 are still held there.
The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence. Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim.
he basically quit life
The article states he had been dealing with “survivors guilt” and frustrated by a difficult disability claim process from wounds received in Iraq.
This difficulty cannot be overstated, and it’s been going on for decades. Someone very special to me is a Gulf War veteran who recently hit rock bottom in his life. He’s been out of battle for nearly 20 years and seemingly fighting against the tide since then. He was not seriously wounded in war except for maybe some form of Gulf War syndrome caused by all the shit they were injected with. But his biggest problem is the PTSD. He never thought he had that – he thought other people, the ones you could tell were in bad condition just by the way they looked, were the ones actually suffering. So he kept his problems to himself as much as he could, but they’d force their way out anyway.
It took him losing his maybe 20th job (from falling asleep at work, since he hadn’t been able to sleep in days due to constant nightmares), going broke, getting evicted and ending up in a homeless shelter to finally go to the VA to see if they could do anything for him. This happened in December. Turned out, with his symptoms he could’ve been receiving disability payments for years. He was surprised to learn this. No one had ever told him that.
So of course he goes to fill out the necessary paperwork, and that process has been an absolute nightmare. Just getting his forms and proof of service from the various departments all around the country that deal with this has been an ordeal. Call this place, they say this other place has it. Call the other place, they say no, these other people have that. Wait weeks to get the papers to fill out. Send them back and wait more weeks, only to find out there are still more things to fill out or something was filled out wrong or someone sent you the wrong thing, wait more weeks to get the right thing. Get diagnosed with severe PTSD by a VA-approved therapist but still have to wait months for the government to officially approve the diagnosis before you ever see a dime.
Meanwhile…
John Lennon: It is knowing, it is knowing
That ignorance and hate may mourn the dead
It is believing, it is believing
But listen to the color of your dream
It is not living, it is not living
it’s the ratings, stupid
How the Media Undermine American Democracy
Pernicious effects of broadcast television on democracy.
Among the phenomena he examined were the relentless trivialisation implicit in soundbite politics, the obsessive insistence that every political issue – no matter how complex – has only two sides and the tendency to treat every political controversy as if it were a football game and every election a horse race.
…disturbing trend – towards market-driven news: that is, news agendas that are driven not by some professional assessment of what’s important and relevant, but by research into what viewers like and respond to.
Ratings.
Put crudely, such an approach leads to news programming that plays down politics and economics in favour of coverage of crime, celebrity and sport. News-U-Like, as it were.
eating your seed corn
The rich enjoy skewing taxes so the poor pay for the government.
What has to happen next is that the rich battle one another, and some of them fall, until there’s only one left standing. That’s the way capitalism works. Unchecked by any outside force, it moves steadily toward monopoly or a closely-held oligopoly. More and more of each industry held in fewer-and-fewer hands.
The word for that isn’t freedom.
evolution seems to vote
via Aussie Science
Study finds political views hard-wired
Scientists have shown that the brains of liberals and conservatives are built differently.
How can I or anyone comment on such a finding except to hope these studies continue?
suggesting facts
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105
Dead civilians never seen. No profit in it.
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
It’s no use pretending that what has happened has not happened.
bell not lost we
reconciling cheese
1) Across the board humanity is at risk of losing the fruits of hard fought battles for human advancement. Over the past 300 years progressive and liberal thought and action have largely ended monarchy, slavery, and achieved equality, human rights and voting rights for much of the world.
2) Globally we are all witnessing political and social implications of collapsing ecosystems, resource scarcity and economic inequities.
3) In the United States some 400 individuals possess more wealth than the 155 million Americans in the bottom half.
the we party
The powers-that-be (in both parties) should see a rainbow force coming together:
…organized workers, business leaders, veterans, students and youth, faith leaders, civil rights fighters, women’s rights champions, immigrant rights defenders, LGBTQ stalwarts, environmentalists, academics, artists, celebrities, community activists, elected officials and more—all standing up for what’s right.
Defending—and Defining—the American Dream
to govern torture and spying
On MetaFilter, users share alarm:
Protestors have found torture devices that confirm the stories of Egyptians tortured by the security services, evidence of massive state surveillance, and even a room full of sex tapes for blackmailing famous people…
Among the secret papers published thus far, there is software and training to hack into Yahoo, GoogleMail and Hotmail mailboxes, record Skype calls, and spy on people through their laptops’ built-in microphone and camera…
standing in the way
The best investment a company can make?
Try lobbying. Returns can exceed 20,000 percent.
What’s standing in the way of democracy might just be politics — parties, Congress, lobbyists, the whole glad-handing, schmoozeful K-street shebang, which seems to exist mostly to subvert the will of human people, and replace it with the wishes of corporate ‘people’.
Is prosperity being restricted by sluggish dinosaur institutions?
“It’s a world where yesterday’s tired industrial age assumptions and practices have been thoroughly challenged, and found wanting — and yet they live on, like weeds”