I am not persuaded by motivated reasoning. I read the same news and hear the same media reports, yet form my own conclusions. Historically low crime statistics are irrelevant when specific crimes and accidental deaths are preventable.
In 2016, over 100 children killed themselves or other family members after finding unsecured weapons. The NRA has fought legislation mandating safety locks and secure gun storage.
The shooter worked as a security guard with a carry permit and access to guns. We also learned of domestic abuse; his former wife reported regular beatings. The NRA has fought legislation that would confiscate weapons owned by domestic abusers. Shall we ignore this point?
The shooter armed himself with an AR-15 assault rifle — the same weapon used in the Sandy Hook and San Bernardino shootings. A law banning sales of this weapon expired years ago. Yet Congressional Republicans blocked reinstatement of this law. Does cognitive bias blind us?
Furthermore, the NRA lobbied Congressional Republicans to defund research by the CDC on causes of gun deaths in America.
Finally, here is one more point buried beneath the media noise: CNN reported an arrest in West Hollywood, California, during a gay parade. Police found an arsenal of weapons including an assault rifle and pipe bombs.
Anti-gay messaging and anti-Muslim rhetoric conspire to up the ante on hate speech. Dead bodies and grieving families are not numbers. They deserve more than deceptive, self-serving soundbites and decades of legislative obstruction.
Monday, June 13, 2016
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Blood on their Hands
Nothing stops a bad guy with a gun. Not more guns. Nor the NRA. Not their stooges in Congress holding us in thrall. Nor public outrage over dead kids, dead neighbors, dead friends. Certainly not voters who have demanded common sense gun legislation for years.
Congressional Republicans, Senate Majority leader McConnell, House Speaker Ryan, 'open carry' hooligans and thugs, Christian fundamentalist gay bashers, and the North Chinalina legislature … all have blood on their hands.
Up yours, America! Land of the free, home of the knave.
Tick, Tock, Schlock and Shock
He says. She says. The sky is falling. The sky is blue. Point, counterpoint. In any discussion thread, there are no doubt strong differences of opinion. Filled with competing claims, stock narratives, and old shibboleths. Since the beginning of this election cycle, I have often wondered about what motivates people, not necessarily the motivations of candidates (who often appear as two-dimensional caricatures), but the motivations of supporters, cultists and voters.
At one extreme is a candidate with an obvious character disorder, a man who claims he will make America GRR8 with appeals to bigotry and H8. For months, we have witnessed his grandiosity, his fixation on power, his need for constant admiration, his ruthless and often malicious disregard for others, and his tendency to defame, devalue, derogate, insult, and blame. Yet, he has fervent followers who ignore these flaws (and not all followers are "idiots" or “stupid").
Here is a snapshot of politics in America today:
Cognitive bias explains why people deny or turn tone-deaf to new evidence that might change their thinking. And why they filter information that might invalidate their attitudes and core beliefs. Partisanship and politics are not necessarily about seeking evidence or truth, or distinguishing between right or wrong, but about defending our sense of personhood.
Without taking sides, here are questions we should ask ourselves: Are we willing to look in a mirror and confront our own biases? Are we willing to sift through the media noise and separate fact from fiction?
Here is the irony. At the end of this election, it is not the candidates whom we will hold accountable. Rather, we should hold ourselves accountable for the choices we make.
At one extreme is a candidate with an obvious character disorder, a man who claims he will make America GRR8 with appeals to bigotry and H8. For months, we have witnessed his grandiosity, his fixation on power, his need for constant admiration, his ruthless and often malicious disregard for others, and his tendency to defame, devalue, derogate, insult, and blame. Yet, he has fervent followers who ignore these flaws (and not all followers are "idiots" or “stupid").
Here is a snapshot of politics in America today:
Deception. Defamation. Pander. Slander. Smears and jeers. Sophistry and hyperbole. Our media is a supermarket of mendacities and sleaze.Let me offer this conjecture based on “motivated reasoning” and “cognitive bias.” Motivated reasoning explains how people cling to false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence that contradicts those beliefs.
Cognitive bias explains why people deny or turn tone-deaf to new evidence that might change their thinking. And why they filter information that might invalidate their attitudes and core beliefs. Partisanship and politics are not necessarily about seeking evidence or truth, or distinguishing between right or wrong, but about defending our sense of personhood.
Without taking sides, here are questions we should ask ourselves: Are we willing to look in a mirror and confront our own biases? Are we willing to sift through the media noise and separate fact from fiction?
Here is the irony. At the end of this election, it is not the candidates whom we will hold accountable. Rather, we should hold ourselves accountable for the choices we make.
Saturday, June 11, 2016
Pocahontas
Well there he goes again. Donald Trump keeps calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas. It's not that the daughter of a Powhatan chief, closely associated with Illegal English immigrants to our shores is someone to be ashamed of and neither is Elizabeth Warren who when compared to most of us and to Donald in particular, seems spectacular. But Donald thinks it's funny and Donald doesn't care that he looks like a bigoted oaf and blowhard and ignoramus. In fact he gloats at how that earns him the loyalty of what we used to call "the ugly American."
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Viva Las Sandanistas!
Bernie Sanders has boasted
Writes Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker. I have to wonder who he is going to fight with or for and about what. Is he going the way of many Republicans when Bill Clinton was elected and declare that she's not the "real" president, or not "his" president? Does he envision a sort of schism with two oval offices, or perhaps this is just a metaphorical statement. Might he take his guerrilla forces into the Vermont woods? Maybe it's just the kind of willful delusion I'm seeing as standard fare among his supporters. Magic thinking seems to be all the thinking that's going on.
Of course there's the possibility that Clinton will get into some legal trouble that would cause her to drop out, allowing Bernie somehow to find himself as the dowager candidate, but that may be more of a delusion than the hope I'll win the Irish Sweepstakes without having a ticket. Some of his supporters are accusing her of espionage and treason in a manner that puts Republican liars to shame - (or would if Republicans could feel shame.) I can't dismiss the idea that he really believes he can still become president without an election by somehow staging a Putsch at the convention.
Is this obstinacy a sort of Sanderista Leitmotif which plays in Wagnerian fashion behind his recent career? Is it the same kind of thinking that lets him boast about how he's going to re-organize world banking and finance and fiscal and monetary and trade policy by fiat and to declare that henceforth college tuition will be free and never mind what congress or the courts or the colleges say.
It's either deceit or delusion but we've already had one president who thought he was Alexander the Great and we can't afford another. The voters didn't just reject Senator Sanders, they dodged a bullet.
“If, on November 8th of this year, Hillary Clinton is elected President, we will have only begun to fight,”
Writes Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker. I have to wonder who he is going to fight with or for and about what. Is he going the way of many Republicans when Bill Clinton was elected and declare that she's not the "real" president, or not "his" president? Does he envision a sort of schism with two oval offices, or perhaps this is just a metaphorical statement. Might he take his guerrilla forces into the Vermont woods? Maybe it's just the kind of willful delusion I'm seeing as standard fare among his supporters. Magic thinking seems to be all the thinking that's going on.
Of course there's the possibility that Clinton will get into some legal trouble that would cause her to drop out, allowing Bernie somehow to find himself as the dowager candidate, but that may be more of a delusion than the hope I'll win the Irish Sweepstakes without having a ticket. Some of his supporters are accusing her of espionage and treason in a manner that puts Republican liars to shame - (or would if Republicans could feel shame.) I can't dismiss the idea that he really believes he can still become president without an election by somehow staging a Putsch at the convention.
Is this obstinacy a sort of Sanderista Leitmotif which plays in Wagnerian fashion behind his recent career? Is it the same kind of thinking that lets him boast about how he's going to re-organize world banking and finance and fiscal and monetary and trade policy by fiat and to declare that henceforth college tuition will be free and never mind what congress or the courts or the colleges say.
It's either deceit or delusion but we've already had one president who thought he was Alexander the Great and we can't afford another. The voters didn't just reject Senator Sanders, they dodged a bullet.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
If I Only Had a Heart
Researchers at the University of California are trying to develop a pig whose organs contain some human DNA which will make it possible to use those organs in humans without rejection. Is this good news for those who will die waiting for a human donor or who don't qualify by reason of age?
I should think so, but of course we can always count on popular superstition, fear of the new and the love of making money from it. So as soon as hope emerges, headlines pop up to dash them. "Trading Ethic for Organs" blares the article, because if your 14 year old daughter needs a heart, if your dear mother needs a kidney or a marrow transplant, you're certainly going to have too much sympathy for a pig.
And of course this pig with some human DNA is successful, it will be GENETICALLY MODIFIED, and you all know what that means! All the other pigs will die, and the bees too and if you eat bacon you'll start to oink and maybe even vote Republican. That's just before the sky falls, of course.
I should think so, but of course we can always count on popular superstition, fear of the new and the love of making money from it. So as soon as hope emerges, headlines pop up to dash them. "Trading Ethic for Organs" blares the article, because if your 14 year old daughter needs a heart, if your dear mother needs a kidney or a marrow transplant, you're certainly going to have too much sympathy for a pig.
And of course this pig with some human DNA is successful, it will be GENETICALLY MODIFIED, and you all know what that means! All the other pigs will die, and the bees too and if you eat bacon you'll start to oink and maybe even vote Republican. That's just before the sky falls, of course.
Monday, June 6, 2016
Great
Quite frankly, nobody is going to make America great again, at least not to any universal agreement. Nor is it really possible to define the word. That's why it makes such a catchy campaign slogan. Everyone has his own notions about greatness. For some it means to make America white again, for others it means to return to a day when this was a manufacturing powerhouse and assembly line jobs allowed workers to be part of a booming middle class, a time when foreign competition was feeble and public tastes preferred domestic goods. It's not going to happen and temporal dysphoria, like entropy, will increase. Short of an apocalypse, the world continues to get smaller.
Change itself , like the expansion of the universe, seems to be accelerating. By the time most people develop what feels like an understanding of how things are, it's all changed, the technology, the certainties, the requirements of social intercourse, the goals of citizens, the expectations and even the language change ever more rapidly. I doubt that even Taoists are comfortable going with this turbulent flow. I'm certainly not and it may explain my love of antiques, art and old technology. Perhaps it explains all those off-the-grid survivalist shows, the back-to-nature attempts that usually aren't very honest and it certainly explains the obsessive use of words like "artisinal," Natural, craft and Organic, one sees in advertising. Make no mistake, advertising is the soul of our culture and ours is a backwards looking one. At a time when cars are become autonomous robots, jukeboxes, internet cafe's and video game parlors all wrapped in armor, we still see ads telling us how the Lexus isn't produced, it's "crafted." We see clips of hands sanding a block of wood for the dashboard and we feel soothed even though we know it's all automated and turned out by robots. Deceit is the root of our culture although we may call it by other names, the cars we're told to worship for having 200 horsepower outsell those with 700 horsepower because we see the world through the dark lens of advertising. The way we smell and taste things owes far more to the expectations we've had instilled in us than it does to tongues or noses. Placebos are often perceived as more effective than real medicine and everyone with a cause feels justified in any level of misrepresentation to further it, it doesn't matter that a mushroom with a gene removed that turns it dark when cut simply must be dangerous to all life on Earth without any evidence just as surely as vaccinations don't work and cause Autism. You can save the planet by wearing organic hemp underwear, Reality terrifies us although we have no actual connection to it.
It's not new, the reaction to rapacious modernity, It was the industrial revolution that spawned the Arts and Crafts movement and gave most of us the wealth to purchase it. It's scientific farming that's allowed us the freedom and time to raise the hysteria and hypochondria that keeps the aisles at Whole Foods crowded and causes people to adopt the "Kale Cleansing" or Carb Counting Gluten-Free life style, or Copper Compression underwear tuned to Natural frequencies. Advances in medicine produce a distrust of medicine as do advances in most everything, including civil rights, justice, equality and freedom -- and we react accordingly. Is racism fading or getting worse? You tell me - and I'm sure you will.
Some of us resent losing the sense of White Anglo-Saxon protestant primacy we could feel 75 years ago and we support Trump. Others insist nothing has improved and nobody seems to like the way things are, the way they think things are going or their part in life. So we have Bullies for Bernie. We've had "leaders" dedicated to keeping things the way they were or we thought they were, no matter how awful it was for some and we have those who passionately hate what is and envision something altogether different and much more pleasant for them without much concern for what's possible or moral or legal. Welcome to the American fugue state.
America was once great we all agree as long as we don't have to be specific about for whom or when or in what sense that was. America's current greatness is still beyond challenge even while we complain so much about the current "disaster" or claim that everything is "broken," something we can do without any reference to a broader picture. It's enough to cite one talking point and one example real or manufactured, to support either certainty.
Is it any wonder that a candidate can base his campaign on returning to a lost greatness while his advocates insist we're the greatest there ever was? It's only a wonder in a rational world, and where are you going to find one of those?
Change itself , like the expansion of the universe, seems to be accelerating. By the time most people develop what feels like an understanding of how things are, it's all changed, the technology, the certainties, the requirements of social intercourse, the goals of citizens, the expectations and even the language change ever more rapidly. I doubt that even Taoists are comfortable going with this turbulent flow. I'm certainly not and it may explain my love of antiques, art and old technology. Perhaps it explains all those off-the-grid survivalist shows, the back-to-nature attempts that usually aren't very honest and it certainly explains the obsessive use of words like "artisinal," Natural, craft and Organic, one sees in advertising. Make no mistake, advertising is the soul of our culture and ours is a backwards looking one. At a time when cars are become autonomous robots, jukeboxes, internet cafe's and video game parlors all wrapped in armor, we still see ads telling us how the Lexus isn't produced, it's "crafted." We see clips of hands sanding a block of wood for the dashboard and we feel soothed even though we know it's all automated and turned out by robots. Deceit is the root of our culture although we may call it by other names, the cars we're told to worship for having 200 horsepower outsell those with 700 horsepower because we see the world through the dark lens of advertising. The way we smell and taste things owes far more to the expectations we've had instilled in us than it does to tongues or noses. Placebos are often perceived as more effective than real medicine and everyone with a cause feels justified in any level of misrepresentation to further it, it doesn't matter that a mushroom with a gene removed that turns it dark when cut simply must be dangerous to all life on Earth without any evidence just as surely as vaccinations don't work and cause Autism. You can save the planet by wearing organic hemp underwear, Reality terrifies us although we have no actual connection to it.
It's not new, the reaction to rapacious modernity, It was the industrial revolution that spawned the Arts and Crafts movement and gave most of us the wealth to purchase it. It's scientific farming that's allowed us the freedom and time to raise the hysteria and hypochondria that keeps the aisles at Whole Foods crowded and causes people to adopt the "Kale Cleansing" or Carb Counting Gluten-Free life style, or Copper Compression underwear tuned to Natural frequencies. Advances in medicine produce a distrust of medicine as do advances in most everything, including civil rights, justice, equality and freedom -- and we react accordingly. Is racism fading or getting worse? You tell me - and I'm sure you will.
Some of us resent losing the sense of White Anglo-Saxon protestant primacy we could feel 75 years ago and we support Trump. Others insist nothing has improved and nobody seems to like the way things are, the way they think things are going or their part in life. So we have Bullies for Bernie. We've had "leaders" dedicated to keeping things the way they were or we thought they were, no matter how awful it was for some and we have those who passionately hate what is and envision something altogether different and much more pleasant for them without much concern for what's possible or moral or legal. Welcome to the American fugue state.
America was once great we all agree as long as we don't have to be specific about for whom or when or in what sense that was. America's current greatness is still beyond challenge even while we complain so much about the current "disaster" or claim that everything is "broken," something we can do without any reference to a broader picture. It's enough to cite one talking point and one example real or manufactured, to support either certainty.
Is it any wonder that a candidate can base his campaign on returning to a lost greatness while his advocates insist we're the greatest there ever was? It's only a wonder in a rational world, and where are you going to find one of those?
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Stupid is as Stupid Does.
Many scholarly articles suggest a link between the easily disgusted and the chronic Republican voter. Reading that Donald finds windmills disgusting makes me wonder just how extreme this man is, as windmills are not typical gag reaction triggers for the party which abhors Humanism, homosexuality, pornography and most things with a sexual component. The Laissez Faire Conservative attitude extends only to the regulation of business and finance, not to how one might dress or with whom one forms romantic relationships or in what mythology one chooses to suspend disbelief. Windmills. I hesitate to hear his ideas about hydroelectric power or photoelectric panels, much less the satellites that collect global temperature data.
Indeed I have had about enough of all his ideas about race and gender and medicine and climatology: about his conspiracy theories and immigration fantasies. There's no drought in California, the planet is freezing! Rapist, Mexican drug mules are streaming North across the border and a president can, by fiat, make a major religion illegal and put a faith test on immigration laws. 11 million people in boxcars. It's certainly worth the 600 billion dollar cost to protect our dollars and daughters from people who have lived and worked here for decades and even lifetimes -- even the children raised here who know no Spanish. You know, the ones who pay taxes yet can't collect Social Security. Good think he's got a good relationship with "the Blacks." I might have worried otherwise.
Is all this cognitive chaos scarier than the fact that facts have no bearing on his opinions or the opinions of the millions of Denialists that clog the national arteries? Faith over fact, prejudice over principle: the equations of idiots and the answer is always Trump.
Compulsory cynicism and mean mockery aside, this is a man of no morals or ethics or conscience. It's not as though he is unique in this, but that our United States is unique among Western Industrialized and allegedly enlightened nation in having more than ten people who disagree with that. One thinks of Sodom or Gomorrah and weeps.
Indeed I have had about enough of all his ideas about race and gender and medicine and climatology: about his conspiracy theories and immigration fantasies. There's no drought in California, the planet is freezing! Rapist, Mexican drug mules are streaming North across the border and a president can, by fiat, make a major religion illegal and put a faith test on immigration laws. 11 million people in boxcars. It's certainly worth the 600 billion dollar cost to protect our dollars and daughters from people who have lived and worked here for decades and even lifetimes -- even the children raised here who know no Spanish. You know, the ones who pay taxes yet can't collect Social Security. Good think he's got a good relationship with "the Blacks." I might have worried otherwise.
Is all this cognitive chaos scarier than the fact that facts have no bearing on his opinions or the opinions of the millions of Denialists that clog the national arteries? Faith over fact, prejudice over principle: the equations of idiots and the answer is always Trump.
Compulsory cynicism and mean mockery aside, this is a man of no morals or ethics or conscience. It's not as though he is unique in this, but that our United States is unique among Western Industrialized and allegedly enlightened nation in having more than ten people who disagree with that. One thinks of Sodom or Gomorrah and weeps.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
When You Gotta Go. . .
I'm sure the hope that those "smaller government" patriots will get their minds and their intrusive policies out of the toilet is entirely vain, but I read this morning that the plight of transgender high school students, banned from their desired washroom is headed to the Supreme Court. The spectacle of Conservative "thought" battling with ancient demons has lost its amusement factor after all these months of our grotesque presidential rhetoric and whether or not the SCOTUS will hear the case or what decision they come to the only solution I can see is one I'm told exists in Great Britain, is the ability to have one's birth certificate modified to show the gender one has adopted.
A shorter term solution, although I'm not recommending anyone adopt it, is for protesting students to simply do their bodily functions at the door of the Principal's office and trade one disgusting act for another disgusting attitude.
A shorter term solution, although I'm not recommending anyone adopt it, is for protesting students to simply do their bodily functions at the door of the Principal's office and trade one disgusting act for another disgusting attitude.
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