Perhaps this should be called the “Ben Carson Phenomenon” – education plus ideology makes you stupid:
The researchers looked at two sets of questions about the Iraq War. The first involved the justifications for the war (weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda), as well as the perception of the war outside the US. The second focused on the role of the troop surge in reducing violence within Iraq. At the time the polls were taken, there was a clear reality: no evidence of an active weapons program or links to Al Qaeda; the war was frowned upon overseas; and the surge had successfully reduced violence in the country.
On the three issues that were most embarrassing to the Bush administration, Democrats were more likely to get things right, and their accuracy increased as their level of education rose. In contrast, the most and least educated Republicans were equally likely to have things wrong. When it came to the surge, the converse was true. Education increased the chances that Republicans would recognize reality, while the Democratic acceptance of the facts stayed flat even as education levels rose. In fact, among Democrats, the base level of recognition that the surge was a success was so low that it’s not even clear it would have been possible to detect a downward trend.
The same held for climate change and evolution. Educated Democrats got the facts right, educated Republicans did not.
The results are in keeping with a number of other studies that have been published of late, which also show that partisan divides over things that could be considered factual sometimes increase with education. Typically, these issues are widely perceived as political. (With some exceptions; GMOs, for example.) In this case, the authors suspect that education simply allows people to deploy more sophisticated cognitive filters that end up rejecting information that could otherwise compel them to change their perceptions.
Buddy H
Well, it’s not so surprising. When these educated conservatives get their news from a news organization that has been caught providing false and distorted information, again and again… This is no accident.
Mike in NC
Dubya the Decider famously ‘went with his gut’ and we all know how great that worked out.
Bobby B.
Ben Carson? The black guy? When he gets kicked out of the GOP country club he’s got a job waiting at MSNBC. Oh, I mean run, Ben, run.
aimai
I’m one of those “educated democrats” who don’t give a flying fuck about the surge because whether it “reduced violence” or not wasn’t the way it was sold to the public. The Bush/army people argued that reducing violence by throwing extra troops at it was nearly identical to “winning” the war when in fact it was an obvious stop gap measure, costly in every way, aimed at slowing down the rate at which we were losing the peace. I was indifferent to the surge, and did not consider it any kind of “success” because it didn’t change the trajectory of our massive clusterfuck at all. It was nothing but a blip.
So am I correct or not correct? How can you tell? Sometimes assenting to a poll question is really assenting to an entire proposition behind it. The more you know the more likely you are to have trouble giving a yes or no answer.
C.V. Danes
I would change your tag line to say that education plus ideology makes you willfully stupid.
And what is the correlation here: the ability of “educated” people to identify the truth, or that the Democrats are just plain more truthful?
Jacks mom
That’s why it is so frustrating and useless to try to argue with a conservative/republican. If they won’t accept or acknowledge facts then what else is there?
C.V. Danes
@Jacks mom: I admit that I find
debatingarguing with conservatives to be uniquely frustrating, but I have had my fair share of frustrating conversations with die-hard liberals, too.The problem on either side is how devotion to ideology can cloud one’s ability to seek and admit the truth.
dubo
Am I the only one who has a major pet peeve that these “ideology studies” always use TEH SURGE as the thing libruls are “wrong” about? Yes, during the surge sectarian violence decreased, but it was decreasing BEFORE the surge, and there’s a lot of debate over whether the surge had significant causation in further decreases. Secondly, the “point” of the surge wasn’t that things would stabilize while the troops were on the ground, but that they would CONTINUE to stabilize after they left.
So “the surge reduced violence” and “the surge was successful” are FAR from being factual statements. But this is probably just proof that I’m an educated biased liberal
Lavocat
A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest …
La plus ca change:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzUEL7vw60U
BGinCHI
@aimai: You beat me to it.
The surge “worked” because it was a short-term covering over something that could not be fixed. Like reducing crime in a neighborhood by giving everyone a bodyguard.
C.V. Danes
@dubo:
I think they continuously use that because basically that’s all they got.
bemused
@Jacks mom:
A MN blog I read has a conservative commenter who is fond of calling a statement of verifiable fact a canard.
MattF
My view on the ‘surge’ was that it was a way for GWB to get the hell out of town while handing over the mess in Iraq to his successor. So, the surge ‘worked’ in the sense that, in fact, GWB got the hell out of town and the mess was handed over to his successor. I”ll admit to being highly educated– does that mean I confirm the hypothesis?
kindness
Obviously Republicans believe in edumacation. They just believe in a different on than the rest of us.
Maybe we should require an asteric after every Fox News episode:
* – This Program Does Not Contain Any Actual Data.
Lee Rudolph
@aimai: I was preparing to write something similar, and now I don’t have to. Thank you.
Kryptik, A Man Without a Country
@aimai:
Even in studies, the need for ‘both sides same thing’ persists.
Lavocat
@Jacks mom: A punch in the face.
Belafon
Let me throw a different one at you folks: Katrina. I am part of CERT, and one of the things we deal with is government responses to disasters. It is a truth among the conservatives in the group I’m in that the governor of Louisiana failed to ask for help from the federal government and that is what kept the Bush administration from responding. Is that true? And remember, the federal government CANNOT respond in a state’s emergency unless the state asks.
Southern Beale
It’s the Fox Effect. The most and least educated Republicans all get their news from the same source: Fox News.
aimai
@Lee Rudolph: Hi Lee Rudolph! Guess if LGM is going to slow down we have to start posting here! This “surge worked” thing really pisses me off for the same reasons everyone else here has mentioned: it seems like its become some kind of weird shibboleth or faux “fact” that gets dragged up every time this kind of question arises: which of the two partisan affiliations leads to stupid denial of reality? The correct answer to that question is definitely: Republican affiliation leads to a denial of reality, misunderstanding of basic facts, false histories, and illogic. Democratic affiliation doesn’t. It could–but it doesn’t. But the media just can’t admit that because it would be so harsh and then they’d have to stop reporting things Republicans say as at all factual or as a counterbalance to Democratic statements.
Krugman just had a column up about the death of public intellectual right wing economists since the right wing can now pay any buffoon to say what they want to hear and have it published as “economics” without going through the academy at all. If expertise, intellect, and academic honesty are not required to be a pundit on the right then the paymasters won’t pay for it. Why should they? They can get convenient lies printed in the paper and repeated on TV and no one will call them on it because “both sides do it” even though they don’t.
Kylroy
@Kryptik, A Man Without a Country: Exactly. They had to find *something* factual that Democrats wouldn’t want to hear, and the only thing they could find was a temporary state that happily was true at the time they were conducting the survey. Since Democrats couldn’t successfully parse the surge, at the time, as a measure that momentarily reduced violence while accomplishing nothing in the long run, they are just as bad as climate change deniers and people who think Saddam ordered 9/11.
I can’t remember where I heard this statement, may have been the Daily Show, but it neatly sums up the issue here: The problem with our media is not that if GW Bush declared the world flat that Fox News would declare anyone supporting “Round Earth Theory” a terrorist commie traitor, it’s that CNN and every paper in the country would run the story “Shape of the Earth; Opinions Differ”.
Kylroy
@aimai: “Republican affiliation leads to a denial of reality, misunderstanding of basic facts, false histories, and illogic. Democratic affiliation doesn’t. It could–but it doesn’t.”
This precisely. You can find people on the left and right saying equally ludicrous things, but the lefty will be someone who was kicked out of Occupy for extremism and the righty will be a sitting Representative.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Belafon: No idea. But I can tell you this; I was in the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, and Bush #1 was in power then, and shit got handled, from the city to the state to the feds, they didn’t miss a beat.
What I saw during and post-Katrina still has not been remotely explained to my satisfaction, but was obviously not a failure of the Feds alone. They were merely the diarrhea icing on a shit cake. The stumblefuck that FEMA had obviously turned into would have been punished with Michael Brown’s execution on live TV in quite a few nations.
Woodrowfan
whenever I get too cocky about all the idiots being on the right all I have to do is read a thread on Raw Story or the DU about vaccines or 9/11 and I remember that our side has a few as well. (ahem, BiP anyone?) The righties have most of them, but not all. and, as Kylroy noted earlier, theirs are in Congress!
Kryptik, A Man Without a Country
@Kylroy:
I believe that was Krugman who coined ‘Shape of the Earth: Opinions Differ’.
And even then, the problem is still more the proliferation of ‘Both Sides, Same thing’ with the constant corollary of ‘But Democrats are always worse’
Amir Khalid
@Lavocat:
Ahem. It’s plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
And you should go with this live performance for the verse with the line
Rob in CT
As an educated Democrat, I have always said that The Surge was not a success because it failed to satisfy the criteria by which it was sold: it was supposed to create space for a political deal that would result in a more or less functional Iraq. The Surge did create some space via reduced violence (though I also think burnout after several years of low-grade civil war was a factor), but the political breakthrough didn’t happen. Ergo, the Surge didn’t really work. It exists, IMO, between success and failure. It was a okish idea cooked up in an attempt to salvage a total clusterfuck. It always had low odds of success (as the political deal in question was always a dicey proposition).
The idiocy was on the part of the people who went around trumpetting success, success I tell you! We win!
boatboy_srq
@Belafon: I can’t speak to that, but I can point out that when the Charlie/Frances/Ivan/Jeannie quartet hit FL the year prior to Katrina, Jeb handled the recovery with FL resources and FEMA was not engaged. There’s significant scuttlebutt amongst the FL state Dem caucus that the two reasons for this were: a) FL emergency response was better than the Federal equivalent, and showcasing what a trainwreck FEMA was under Heckuvajob Brown in an election year was a recipe for disaster for the Bushes; and b) that by keeping the FL disaster confined to the state level and keeping it out of the national news, Shrub stood a better chance of a second term, and Jeb’s reputation would survive what his brother’s could not.
Barbara
I don’t think it has much to do with education. I think it has to do with psychological strength and how much of a risk-taker you are when it comes to new ideas. It’s really, really hard to accept something as true when it goes against everything you believe, and a lot of people just don’t have it in ’em.
It’s a long story, and it doesn’t translate well, it’s one of those you-had-to-be-there things, but I once had a moment of complete cognitive dissonance. It was at a PTA meeting, of all places, and the subject was school funding, and I realized that something I deeply valued wasn’t true. Anyway, the room spun around me and I was so dizzy and nauseous that I had to put my head down on the table in front of me.
And then there is certain someone I used to be friends with; I would try very gently to convince her that social security wasn’t a Ponzi scheme, or that the reason her father got better care in the Jewish nursing home than her father-in-law did in the private, for-profit one, wasn’t because the private one ran on government funds and the Jewish one didn’t (as if! Of course the Jewish one has staff dedicated to making sure everyone gets their full allotment of SS and Medicare and Medicaid, they couldn’t run that place without that money). Because she just knew that if it had to do with the government, it has to be bad.
I would watch her face and it would be calm and accepting until I bumped up against an invisible wall and I could see in her expression that her brain had snapped shut. Eventually her son went on to help start the local Tea Party branch and I told her one Yom Kippur that I couldn’t be friends with her anymore.
But the memory of seeing in her eyes that an alarm was going off in her brain lingers. I think that is one of the reasons the education “deform” movement stresses test prep over learning, the fewer people who can freely think critically, the better for the MOUs.
Also want to add, that’s not to say that there aren’t people on our side that are just as closed-minded but I can’t worry about them.
Geeno
@Belafon: As I recall from stories at the time, she tried several times to call, but couldn’t get through. That led to accusations in some quarters that Bush and company contrived to make things horrible. I personally don’t ascribe to malice that which is all too readily explained by incompetence.
Jacel
@aimai: What you say about the surge is how is how I thought of it. At that point, nothing was going to fix Iraq in the long term after the chaos our invasion created triggered the descent into sectarian conflict. A less-stupid counterinsurgency approach was already being taken by the military, and the additional troops and resources added to the comparatively positive results. But nothing could come close to healing the situation as much as getting the US the hell out of there would have.
Kylroy
@Rob in CT: Yeah, in order to come up with anything to ding Democrats for, they had to define the “success” of the surge so narrowly (“Violence is down at the moment – chalk it up in the win column, let’s move on!”) that it’s more a matter of trivia than meaningful history.
I idly wonder what bullshit random factoid that Dems would wish weren’t true they’d have to dig up to run the survey today.
Repatriated
The fact that The Surge “worked” is true enough on the tactical level. On the strategic level, it demonstrated that we hadn’t sent enough troops in the first place (because we didn’t have them without overextending our forces).
WereBear
She didn’t “fail” to ask for help. She declared a state of emergency three days before landfall, and was calling for Federal help prior to the storm. The ineptness didn’t matter until the levees broke… and the Bush administration asked for her to sign something that would federalize the Louisiana National Guard. She wasn’t even sure it was legal. She refused.
constitutional mistermix
I agree with people complaining about the surge question — they cast it as a narrow question of fact when the broader understanding that the surge didn’t work (i.e., didn’t change the course of the war) is a better understanding of the situation. The questions about evolution and climate change were more clear-cut and showed the Ben Carson phenomenon more cleanly.
Violet
Feature not bug. Republican Party of Texas platform in 2012:
Can’t let them think about things for themselves. Might challenge authority.
Rob in CT
@Repatriated:
Yes, and that’s not even the half of it. Even if we had sent “enough” troops, there are still the divisions between Sunni and Shiite, Kurd and Arab, the question of how the oil wealth of the nation is to be shared, how the army is run, and so forth. Even with “enough” troops, it’s a hell of thing, nationbuilding in such an environment (especially when the effort is led by grifters and true believers who fundamentally disdain nationbuilding). What a mess.
Amir Khalid
There was something I found on the Intertubes not long ago, The Debunking Handbook. Among other things, it explains that a frontal assault on a strongly-held but wrong belief never works; all it does is make the misbeliever dig in their heels and become even more emotionally invested in that belief. An educated person has more intellectual resources which with to defend such beliefs. And having thus successfully defended them, wouldn’t they be more convinced than ever they were right?
WereBear
Our esteemed blog host is an example of what happens when they DO open their mind and accept an uncomfortable fact… the dominoes start to fall. If you accept one “liberal” fact, others will follow.
They know it will collapse their entire worldview. That’s why they refuse to listen.
bemused
@Kylroy:
It was the brilliant Paul Krugman in 2000. “If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline: Shape of the planet, both sides have a point.”
Repatriated
@Rob in CT: Good point., Perhaps with “surge-like” force levels all along, we might have been able to keep things together, but even that might not have been adequate.
It seems to me that the only way it would have worked would have involved keeping the Iraqi government mostly intact, but substituting our chosen leaders (at the time, Chalabi) for Saddam and the highest ranking officials. If we’d actually found WMD, nobody would care enough to dispute that they were the “democratically elected” government of a “free” Iraq.
When that didn’t happen, we were forced to create an actual democracy from scratch to justify the war, and for the most part failed.
Rob in CT
@Amir Khalid:
Right. While I take issue with the specific example (The Surge in Iraq!, The Sequel), the basic premise is fine. We can all do this, and the sharper arguers/better educated are actually better able to do it. Being smart/education != being open-minded.
The trick is knowing what beliefs to hold lightly. I mean, there are things one really should be “open minded” about (vaccination, for example).
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
There’s probably some of that, but don’t ignore the extent to which testing figures into it. A key tenet of the education “reform” movement is that we need to base everything on solid, quantitative data, which means we have to test, test, test to generate that quantitative data. Unfortunately, they aren’t willing to put real money into the testing side of things, so we rely excessively on mechanically gradable multiple choice tests, which are relatively easy targets for rote, test-prep teaching.
Kryptik, A Man Without a Country
@WereBear:
Unfortunately, I’ve seen the opposite happen far too often, and far too quickly compared: someone gets to a point of ‘I’m a liberal, but they have a point’ and turn full blown winger within the year to where they were unreachable, with no ‘relapses’ back to any kind of liberal thinking.
Repatriated
@Roger Moore: Not to mention the profitability of selling both the test materials and the test-prep materials tailored to the test… especially when without the latter, draconian penalties for low test scores kick in. Nice racket, that.
BGinCHI
@bemused: It’s like climate change: “It’s cold so it doesn’t exist” = “It’s flat in Kansas so it’s flat in a way”
It’s simplistic thinking. Even children know better than that.
The biggest problem with conservatives is that they believe authority without question and think that they don’t.
Kryptik, A Man Without a Country
Christ all, just looking everywhere else, it’s like the debate is already done, how this proves that Obama is the worst most terror-coddly, Muslim loving, horrible tyrannical ineffectual tyrant-coward in the history of fucking ever.
The right-wing narrative wins every single fucking time before a word can be put in edgewise.
How do you fight this shit when you’ve lost before you’ve even gotten a chance to speak?
wvng
@dubo: I agree. Everything I’ve read about the surge and the antecedent conditions indicate violence was decreasing before it took place, largely because we bought off people to be on our side. And that the surge was a tactical move to support the strategic objective or creating the conditions for stability.
Lee Rudolph
@Rob in CT
Say what?
BGinCHI
What the hell is wrong with white people? I fear a genetic mutation in the Paranoid region of the hippocampus.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/white-genocide-billboard-appears-alabama
Roger Moore
@Rob in CT:
Sorry, you lost me there. There are well known problems with the preparation of vaccines, which is why they ask questions about things like egg allergies, but there’s no scientific evidence for any of the broad anti-vaccination claims from the anti-vaxxers.
EconWatcher
I don’t know, I know “both sides do it” is a punchline here, and in some areas it should be, but I do see a lot of misuse of anecdotal evidence by, yes, both sides.
Case in point, I recently saw an article by Senator Merkley discussing the important issue of why we still have relatively few young women majoring in the hard sciences. As the dad of a 7 year old daughter who seems to be a bit of a math whiz, I’m interested in this. Sen. Markley attributed it to girls still being culturally discouraged. If this is still going on in a big enough way to account for the large disparities, I sure want to know where, how, and why, not least so I can protect my kid from it. But the only evidence he cited was the sale of some talking girl’s doll that says, among other things, “math is hard.” This in prepared remarks. Come on.
Or, if you were to listen to Republican anecdotes, the main victims of the “death tax” are family farmers trying to hang on to the old homestead. Come on.
I agree that their side is worse, but ours could up its game.
The Ancient Randonneur
Yes, yes, yes … but that was YESTERDAY’s failure. How has Obama failed us TODAY?
SoupCatcher
@Amir Khalid:
Sara Robinson, in a series of posts over at Orcinus, had some suggestions on how to communicate with authoritarian followers. Here are some section headings from one of the posts on discussion tactics: Save Your Breath, Avoid Ambiguity (yourself), Affirm Ambiguity (in them), Focus on the Family, Make the World Bigger, etc.
The two series are titled “Cracks in the Wall” and “Tunnels and Bridges” and reference John Dean’s book (which in turn references Robert Altemeyer’s research). Still feels very relevant today, eight years later.
Belafon
@BGinCHI: Their sense of entitlement is being threatened. That’s exactly the same as genocide, obviously.
//
Think about what these people are going to do when whites become 49.9% of the population.
Repatriated
@BGinCHI: Consider the inverse of that billboard’s statement — what, then, is uniformity?
Rob in CT
@Lee Rudolph: SHOULDN’T!
Typo alert!!
rlrr
@Rob in CT:
I hate when that happens…
Rob in CT
@Roger Moore:
Just a typo. One should not be “open-minded” about vaccination.
My point, which the typo ruined, is that we all probably have beliefs that we should hold lightly and be willing to change, but it’s hard to know which ones.
Then you add in a 24-7 propoganda mill such as Fox and it’s… unhelpful, to say the least.
aimai
@Barbara: Great description of that moment when cognitive dissonance gets to be too much and people start looking for a way to make their sums come out “right.” You might enjoy a book I read last year “Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me” which is all about the ways people rationalize their prior belief systems when they come up against contradictory information.
andrew
I’m an educated Democrat and I will happily eviscerate anyone who thinks that the reduction in violence was due to the surge, being as how 1) most of it occurred in Anbar due to diplomatic overtures and 2) the rest is explainable by the natural drawdown in ethnic violence that comes as the process of that violence completes the segregation of the areas in question.
aimai
@SoupCatcher: I remember that series and also how bowled over I was by Dean’s book and Altemeyer’s when I read them during the Iraq war. Explained so much.
scav
@BGinCHI: Weeeellll, we’ve all heard about Birmingham recently haven’t we? Totally a no-go zone. Full of Religious Zealots, hunting people down in the streets, enforcing their religiously-founded laws.
aimai
@Roger Moore: This is actually backwards. The reason why they emphasize testing is that its a technocrat’s idea of how to make sure that the problem (low scores, poorly prepared students) is correctly evaluated so that you can “fix” the problem cheaply.
If you really wanted to know how kids were doing and why you could just ask their teachers to evaluate them without punishing the teachers for acknowledging that the children aren’t doing well. Then you could ask the teachers and the communities what is needed to bring test scores up. But they are going to tell you that the situation is 1) bad, 2) needs lots more money thrown at it and neither the government nor the reformers want to hear that.
Testing brings the issue to a national level, which has some good things about it if you think that localities actively want to segregate and harm some kids by giving them substandard educations (which in some cases is true). But testing alone simply reveals a problem, it isn’t and can’t be a solution. And the solutions are all expensive: more teachers, smaller classes, intensive remediation, sports, dance, art, music, health care (glasses, hearing aids, asthma meds mean nurses in school full time), college prep, foreign language training, ESL training, tutoring. All the things that middle class kids get in and outside of private schools plus extra for ESL students. Its just going to cost money.
The way I talk to people about it when I’m talking about raising taxes to pay for better schools is simply this: good education costs a lot and it should cost a lot. The highest quality schools are expensive to maintain. But we don’t expect that the money lasts forever. Just because you paid for a school fifty years ago doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep paying for education anymore than the fact that you ate breakfast yesterday means you don’t have to eat breakfast today.
Villago Delenda Est
@aimai: This.
“The surge” was bullshit from start to finish. A bandaid on a totally unnecessary gushing wound. Sort of like throwing another few divisions into Stalingrad because once a German soldier takes a plot of land, he never retreats from it.
bemused
@BGinCHI:
Conservatives believe their personal flavor of republican, conservative, tea party authority without question. The rest are not real americans.
Villago Delenda Est
@Repatriated: Which is why Neil Bush is right in the middle of it.
Rob in CT
@aimai:
I think also that many if not most teachers would point out that the primary obstacles to better-educated kids are really foundational: the lives of their students at home, before the teacher even has a chance to educate. Concentrated poverty. Hopelessness (with good reason). And, of course, discrimination (legacy of the past + present). Addressing THOSE things would not only require significant investment, but also an acknowledgement of things that many simply reject.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Rob in CT:
Open minded in what fashion? Will you elaborate?
Villago Delenda Est
@Violet:
In particular, authority based on an invisible sky buddy darning you to heck.
Turgidson
@Rob in CT:
When you’re, say, John McCain and you’re supposed to be a foreign policy heavyweight, yet the Surge is the only thing that’s happened in the last 20 years that you can claim with any credibility whatsoever that you weren’t 100% ass-backwards wrong about, well, you go with the lies and half-truths you have, not the record of wisdom you’d like to have.
catclub
@aimai: I agree.
I also agree that things were definitely getting better after the surge. But that was because: 1) things had gotten very bad and could hardly get worse.
2)sectarian separation had progressed enough that Bagdahd was less conducive to more sectarian fighting. 3)We paid the guys in Anbar not to fight and as long as we paid them, they did not. However, this was not really sustainable and the Shia PM did not sustain it.
Villago Delenda Est
@C.V. Danes: And it’s utterly bogus in the first place.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Rob in CT: I feel much better after the typo alert. Thank you.
Rob in CT
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Once again, a really unfortunate typo.
catclub
@scav: Birmingham, AL 1964? Right?
bemused
@aimai:
Great book. Recommend it highly too.
Tractarian
OT: Cuba has completed the release of 53 prisoners it promised to free as part of the agreement to restore diplomatic relations with the United States, American officials said on Monday.
Obama got robbed, I tells ya! Robbed!
scav
@catclub: Variance on the exact date is unusually wide I believe, so quite possibly entirely correct.
Amir Khalid
@catclub:
As it happens, no: it’s about the original Birmingham.
Just Some Fuckhead
Education isn’t a values system. Where most people fail at political ideology is in not developing political values, which is basically a moral framework from which to accept or reject political calculus. As the most educated person can still be an immoral bastard, so the most educated person can still be bereft of political values.
catclub
@Amir Khalid: I knew that. Also note the TPM item on Birmingham, AL, TODAY.
Cervantes
@WereBear:
Yes, Blanco invoked the state’s emergency plan on August 26, requested and began receiving Federal help on August 27, and asked for more help on August 28. She also asked neighboring governors for help and they each seconded a National Guard contingent as requested.
A few days later Bush offered to help by taking over the National Guard operations. Blanco did not want the latter federalized at the time because doing so would have precluded the Guard from being used in policing operations — which were perceived to be important at the time.
Barbara
@EconWatcher: The few times I’ve actually heard someone mention family farmers in discussion of the estate tax, I’ve just said, “Yes, I agree! Establish exactly what constitutes a family farm, carve out an exemption for them, and let them keep their farms.”
Throws them for a loop but as we’ve already established on this thread, their balance is quickly regained.
Calouste
@Amir Khalid:
I don’t think many people have been called a complete idiot in public by a British Prime Minister.
Rob in CT
@Calouste:
Few are the times we get to smile and agree with David Cameron. Let us cherish this moment, brought to us by wingnuttery.
Kryptik, A Man Without a Country
@Calouste:
Alas, the true measure is going to be how many Americans are convinced of the whole ‘total Muslim takeover’ of Birmingham. I expect that number will be depressingly high, regardless of international mockery.
Roger Moore
@Rob in CT:
I guess I would be even a bit more open minded than you are. I think almost all of our factual beliefs should be held with at least some willingness to abandon them. Ideally we would have an idea of what level of evidence we would need to convince us to change our minds, but the key point is that we should be willing to change even deeply held beliefs in the face of sufficient evidence. The key, as the old joke has it, is that you should be open minded but not to the point that your brain falls out.
Barbara
@aimai:Thanks, I will look for that book — it’s long been an interest of mine, what allows/prevents people from changing their minds.
I am usually reluctant to discuss my moment of acute cognitive dissonance because it comes out like a mystical experience. If you hear someone describe the moment they realized that it IS true, the universe is one, or God is love, or whatever, it always sounds so pedestrian, and you’re left wondering what they think is so profound.
xenos
I took the “surge” as a bald admission that Shinseki wad right and every last neocon was full of shite. It did not make me feel like celebrating… I would much prefer that Bush was right and everything turned out peachy.
Rob in CT
@Roger Moore:
That’s really what I mean. But vaccination is one of those things that is both: a) well-supported; and b) important (life & death). I picked it to illustrate that just saying “be open-minded” isn’t a good answer.
Agreed. The bar might be higher for certain beliefs, of course, and therein lies the rub: which ones? Some might be like the vaccination thing, due to the seriousness of disease. Others might be elevated because they intersect with core values. And there it can get really tricky.
Cckids
@Jacks mom:
This. I Asked my wingnut sister-in-law why she called Pres. Obama arrogant (of course I know why) & she mentioned the number of executive actions he’s signed. When I pointed out that it was less than any President since the 60’s, she said “Well, I don’t believe that.”
Its a fact, a number, not a belief!!!”
There is no debating, no arguing with people so sure of an incorrect reality. And they vote.
Makes me SO tired.
Calouste
@Rob in CT: Cameron doesn’t particularly like right-wing morons. I suspect it’s a class thing, but it makes for some entertaining comments sometimes, like when Romney criticized the London Olympics before his visit and Cameron replied: “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”
Punchy
Uh….um…..no.
Barbara
@Just Some Fuckhead: But school is our best bet for exposing most people, who aren’t by definition, immoral bastards, to how to think about political values.
I can give you a pair of quick examples. When I was in 7th grade, my history teacher explained to us that the reason rich people should pay a higher percent of their income in taxes was that they had benefited from “the system” so much more than others (or, as we might say today, They didn’t build that”); contrast that with the worksheet my kid brought home from his 6th grade history class, where “Public Good” was defined as “A business run by the government.”
Rob in CT
@Punchy:
Typo. Meant the opposite.
@Calouste:
Yes, I’m sure it’s at least in part a class thing. Moreso a British thing. Tories are basically what we vaguely recall as “New England Republicans.” Liberalish on many things but right-wing on economics.
Villago Delenda Est
@xenos:
This misadventure had Charlie Foxtrot written all over it from day one.
Every last assumption made by the malassstration was terribly, terribly wrong, and there were no arguments or facts that could persuade them otherwise.
Paul in KY
@EconWatcher: I think the cultural stuff happens when they get to puberty & comes from other girls (and guys too). From their ‘peers’ then.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Rob in CT: Ahh, but that’s the one thing teachers CANNOT point out, nor administrators nor school board members, because they’ll be crucified by the community if they did.
If there is one thing that parents in today’s society have totally abrogated, it’s any responsibility for their child’s success or failure.
Paul in KY
On the answering questions thing, I think a lot of Republicans just lie. They know what the truth is, but they also know what the Republican position is, so being the good little troopers they are, they just answer in the manner that agrees with the current Republican position, facts be damned.
Roger Moore
@aimai:
I don’t see how your point contradicts mine. We seem to agree that tests are designed to give reformers data. You describe it as “a technocrat’s idea of how to make sure the problem is correctly evaluated”, which seems awfully close to my comment about wanting quantitative data.
And I honestly think that a lot of the problem with the testing is that we’re doing it backward. The ideal design starts with a curriculum and works forward to tests. That’s problematic because the best way of testing higher level thinking skills is with hard to grade questions like free answer sections and essays. It can be done, but it involves some level of subjectivity and requires a lot of effort. Instead, we design tests that have definite right and wrong answers and thus give hard numbers and are easy to grade but do a bad job of testing higher level thinking. Then we work back from those tests to a curriculum that inevitably skips out on the higher levels of thinking because they aren’t on the test.
Villago Delenda Est
@Punchy: IT WAS A TYPO.
Meant to be “shouldn’t”
A very unfortunate typo.
Violet
@Kryptik, A Man Without a Country: No, what will happen is that people will admit the guy exaggerated a bit, but continue to think he has a point and is right in general. Muslims are taking over Europe, the UK, here. The specifics aren’t relevant. Their belief is what matters. Especially if it confirms their fear.
Villago Delenda Est
@Paul in KY: War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. Freedom is Slavery.
John Redford
You could also take this whole study as an attack on education period. If greater education doesn’t lead to more accurate beliefs on issues facing the country, then the whole concept of “informed citizenry” is meaningless. That’s cited as one of the values of a general education. Why should the country support it if it doesn’t give the results expected?
Yet the study result is nonsense. As many have noted, they picked a bad issue to demonstrate liberal blinders. The answer isn’t clear, and the event was 8 years ago. It’s such a bad question that one doubts the motives of the test designers. They could have asked about other issues that have more clear-cut answers, such as whether vaccines cause autism, or whether the radiation from US nuclear power plants does actually kill a lot of people, but they didn’t. Maybe they’re after the Liberal Arts ideal overall.
catclub
@Violet: In some things the right wing is on the leading edge.
On One of those right wing cruises, perhaps the one where they got to meet Sarah Palin, so 2007 or earlier,
that was written up in article that was probably titled ‘Ship of Fools’, the big thing was that Muslims were taking over Europe. Seemed crazy then. Still does.
Rob in CT
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Well, see, now I wouldn’t necessarily go with a blame the parents line there. But yes, it’s tricky to point out that homelife matters a great deal without parents hearing “you suck!” and responding defensively. After all, rightwingers use it in just that way to blame the (non-white, typically) parents in order to make a “whaddya gonna do, they’re hopeless” argument against doing anything to help. It’s a difficult needle to thread. Basically, some kids home lifes are screwy because their parents lives are screwy, which may or may not be the fault of the parents. Could be the factory closed down, dad lost his job and shit spiralled. Could be a lot of things. And fixing those things is no easy task. It’s easier, in fact, to suggest higher school funding, which honestly I don’t think will do all that much.
Paul in KY
@Villago Delenda Est: Keep that up and you’ll be in Room101.
jl
@aimai: Thanks for comment. I think the question on the surge was ill advised, since, apart from the issue of how it was sold to the public, its causal role in reducing violence is unclear. And I don’t think there is even a consensus on whether violence was reduced at all in the areas where the surge was concentrated, the surge was merely contemporaneous with urban ethnic cleansing and redistribution of the population. Some even say that the surge, in its initial stages facilitated the urban ethnic cleansing. (Edit: just looking at summary statistics over time, the surge looked like it worked at reducing violence since the urban ethnic cleansing, which was well underway when the surge started, was finished by the time the surge ended.)
I think the survey writers did have a problem with getting a balance of questions, because it is difficult to find a high profile issue since Bush II was elected, where a high profile conservative policy position has not been something between a confused hash, and a patent abject total failure. So, maybe the researchers were desperate, but they should have done some more research and come up with a better question.
terraformer
…and Bertrand Russell’s seminal quote still rings true:
“The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”
smintheus
The “clear” reality about the surge was neither clear nor reality.
The plain fact, carefully obscured by the Bush administration, is that the sectarian cleansing continued unabated in Baghdad under the surge until it was completed, at which point the extreme violence naturally died down. Ending the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad was one of the main goals of Bush’s policy; the other was to give all the factions in Iraq a chance to negotiate a permanent agreement, and that never happened. So educated Dems were not mistaken in treating the surge’s supposed success skeptically.
Villago Delenda Est
@jl: Or, they were so desperate for the “both sides do it angle” that is DEMANDED by the utter scum that is the Village that they had no choice, it was the best option available to them, one that can only be discussed at some length as to why it’s ridiculous.
catclub
@jl:
You do realize that this is exactly the ‘intelligent rationalizing’ that the article was pointing at. You are just at the point of saying ‘I don’t care if the violence and death rate went down, it did not go down for the right reasons.’ Which is a very small step from simply denying that the death rate and violence went down, in opposition to the facts presented.
How do I know this? I do it too for surge case.
Roger Moore
@Rob in CT:
Values ought to be kept separate from facts; they’re about deciding how to translate facts into actions. Letting your values affect which facts to accept means you’re deciding first how to act and then picking facts that let you reach your desired action. That’s the essence of closed mindedness.
Rob in CT
@Roger Moore:
It’s often very difficult to manage that separation.
I’m not saying you are wrong: you’re not, you’re right! I’m saying it’s hard. It requires constant struggle.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rob in CT: The most fucked up children in this country are the children of Christianist Fundamentalists.
Many of them grow to realize, as they mature, how fucked up they are, and rebel against it. Exposure to the terrible ideas of “godless liberalism” is one of the ways that the scales are driven from their eyes.
Therefore, education must be rigidly controlled to prevent this. Actual critical thinking skills are anathema to the fundies.
jl
@Villago Delenda Est: Maybe. I guess not enough people keep up on health policy to make a “hey, how ’bout that Bush II electronic medical record policy’ question feasible.
Like I said, how may high profile conservative policy positions since Bush II have been unambiguously successful for there to be a consensus of people who have studied them?
Roger Moore
@Paul in KY:
It continues long after that. Women have a higher attrition rate at every step along the STEM ladder, and you can be damn sure that’s because of social factors.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub: The problem is, what is the cause of the effect?
Saying “The Surge” is responsible is at very best muddying the waters. Stop thinking so hard, libtards, and accept that John McCain was right!
john fremont
@Belafon: I’m in CERT as well, and I recall that too.
smintheus
@catclub: Or perhaps you don’t realize what went on in Baghdad during the surge? Some of our troops at the time thought that they were overseeing rather than preventing the final stages of sectarian cleansing of the city.
Villago Delenda Est
@jl: Health policy in the Village is one of those MEGO things that get in the way of cocktail weenies at Sally’s house.
Rob in CT
@Villago Delenda Est:
If one reads Love, Joy, Feminism (and I have, a lot), one gets the sense that it’s not really exposure to “godless liberalism” that does it. It’s more “exposure to real life” and “noticing that these people are lying to me.”
catclub
@smintheus: I had a great ETA to my post that timed out and was lost. I will try again.
I was giving credit to this line in the post that the core article refers to real facts, such as death rates or recorded violence levels, rather than ‘facts’ such as ‘the surge was a success’.
.
The core article is locked up $35 for the pdf. So i am not reading that one right now.
sfHeath
Democrats only got the surge “wrong” because we refused to accept the absurdly short time window that Rrpublicans insisted the surge be judged by. If the metric was “a safe and stable Iraq for the foreseeable future” I think events over the last three years, easily predicted from the state of things in Iraq in 2006-7, have proved the Democrats right on that too.
jl
@catclub:
The wording of the question clearly assumed that the surge had a causal role.
” and the surge had successfully reduced violence in the country ”
If the question has been whether violence was lower when the surge ended than it was when the surge began, then you would be correct. And I would definitely answer ‘yes’ to that question. I could not answer ‘yest’ to a question that asserted the surge had a causal role in reducing the violence.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: I agree that it is (sadly) an on-going process.
catclub
@Belafon: I thought it was equally common knowledge that the Bush admin did all it could to kneecap Blanco, in Louisiana, while shovelling as much money and aid as they could to Haley Barbour in Mississippi. She was a Democrat, so perfectly fair.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rob in CT: I would say that liberalism is pretty much something that takes “real life” into account with its though process, which is what Bertrand Russel was saying in other words above.
Thoughtful utilitarianism might be another catchphrase for it.
catclub
@jl: Until somebody gets the article that this post is based on, we won;t know for sure. (The link just goes one level in, we need the next level.)
Villago Delenda Est
@jl: One could argue that “The Surge” was really cover for, as smintheus comments above, the ongoing sectarian cleansing that actually reduced the violence because….we got rid of the Sunni slime that was besmirching Baghdad. After they were driven off, of course the violence went down. We no longer had to fire off AK 47 rounds at the Sunni slime across the street!
Roger Moore
@Rob in CT:
You say “tomayto”, I say “tomahto”. Everyone knows that reality has a strong liberal bias.
Rob in CT
@Villago Delenda Est:
My point was that a lot of the deconversion stories I’ve read in the comments had nothing to do with encountering liberals or liberal viewpoints, even. Some did! But others did not. The rigidity of the fundamentalism is such that it can shatter without even being exposed to a liberal with a +10 logic sledgehammer (and let’s face it, we’re not often as persuasive as we wish we were!).
Tree With Water
“Some of the people, all of the time” will drive you crazy, every time.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rob in CT: OK, I can accept that. But then again, the fundies seem to think that exposure to godless liberalism is one of the things they need to guard against to keep the sheep within the fold.
One of their strong memes is that gays “recruit” vulnerable children into a lifestyle of wanton homosexuality. What they’re doing there is projecting what they do to vulnerable children.
It’s always projection with these assholes. Always.
Villago Delenda Est
@sfHeath: ISIL/ISIS is the logical result of the incredibly stupid misadventure in Mesopotamia.
smintheus
@catclub: Death rates for Iraqis during the spring and most of the summer of the surge were very high. They dropped when the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad caused Sunnis to abandon nearly all mixed neighborhoods except on the western fringes of the city.
That’s a fact that Republicans don’t acknowledge.
SatanicPanic
Just being honest, but I didn’t care about The Surge because the war was stupid to begin with so I don’t know shit about what it did or didn’t do. So I might have answered either way because fuck it why not.
LongHairedWeirdo
I might be one of those ideological fools, but I’d seen numerous statements to the effect that new strategies had been undertaken to reduce violence, and the declaration of the “surge” simply allowed us to put a spin on the results of those new strategies. The new troops were not needed to see good results.
Was it a political and media victory? Sure! But I was under the impression that the goal was not to spin the news cycle and win support for “a demonstration of brave, principled leadership[1]”, but to reduce violence.
If in depth studies have shown that, actually, the larger number of troops was necessary for success – okay, I didn’t hear that, and I’m wrong. But that’s a far different issue than a refusal to face “reality” but a refusal to blindly accept the favored narrative.
[1] Republicans often “demonstrate leadership”. It’s much easier than “leading”.
RSR
Calling the surge ‘a success’ is like calling your funeral ‘a success.’
sm*t cl*de
@Woodrowfan:
Speaking of BiP:
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/12/watch-man-with-hodors-condi.html
jl
@catclub: You are right about that. We need to see the actual question. I couldn’t get to it either.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@SatanicPanic: Kind of right there with you. Was it successful? Fuck all if I know, the whole thing’s been a disaster from start to finish so who gives a shit if one part of it went well or didn’t?
@RSR: Only one person died, so who gives a…hey wait just a fucking minute!
Southern Beale
Speaking of educated morons, Steve Emerson is a serial offender (no surprise to anyone, I’m sure.)
Seven other errors of ‘No Go Birmingham’ Pundit
fuckwit
@MattF: The Surge in Iraq was the equivalent of Nixon carpet-bombing southeast Asia, and for the same strategic reasons: it was cover for a retreat. So if success in those cases means it enabled us to get the hell out, sure, you can call it a strategic success. But from a human perspective, piling more killing on top of killing can hardly be called “success”.
With regards the other thread: if Bush III runs, then the media gets to revisit (and rehabilitate!) the Iraq war over and over again for a couple years, and if Clinton runs then they get to revisit Kosovo and BENGHAZI! over and over again too, just like when Kerry ran against Bush II they got to revisit Vietnam over and over again. Do not want.
Monty
As someone who spends a fair amount of time considering and writing about the impact of cognitive bias (in all its iterations) on the ability of humans to accurately process information, I find aimai’s response to the Surge issue particularly instructive:
Not sure whether it is appropriate to consider the underlying assumptions on which a particular event is predicated, or even if those predicates matter in determining the validity or effectiveness of that event. Should the entire policy be disavowed due to the contextual implications?
Relatedly, I seriously doubt that level of education has much impact on anyone’s susceptibility to the Dunning-Kruger effect; it simply provides a broader and deeper resource from which to rationalize disagreement with fact-based conclusions that run contrary to an individual’s predilections.
I realize these statements carry a whiff of “both sides do it,” but insofar as that goes, I think it fairly obvious that one side does it a fuck of more than the other, which is to say that in my experience liberals have much less difficulty incorporating incovenient facts into their worldview than conservatives, and indeed tend to be far less reactionary.
RaflW
Well, you gotta take into account that educated Republicans need to blot out any feelings of shame for flying in personal, 3 room suites in the sky, for example.
Or having Mommy, Daddy and princess each drive a 13 m.p.g. Range Rover.
They don’t just not want to change perceptions. They don’t wanna change behaviour.
Roger Moore
@Monty:
This seems like a great general retort to the “both sides do it” mantra: one side does it a lot more.
sm*t cl*de
Assumes evidence of “education”.
max
As an educated Democrat, I have always said that The Surge was not a success because it failed to satisfy the criteria by which it was sold: it was supposed to create space for a political deal that would result in a more or less functional Iraq. The Surge did create some space via reduced violence (though I also think burnout after several years of low-grade civil war was a factor), but the political breakthrough didn’t happen. Ergo, the Surge didn’t really work. It exists, IMO, between success and failure. It was a okish idea cooked up in an attempt to salvage a total clusterfuck. It always had low odds of success (as the political deal in question was always a dicey proposition).
Sigh.
That’s close, but not it. Here’s the thing, the idea that under laid the plan that was sold as The Surge was my idea. Lemme explain:
Back in 2005, things were looking pretty bad, and lots of people (like Andrew Sullivan for instance) were arguing that we didn’t have enough manpower to police Iraq. (True!) At the same time, we were taking worrying levels of casualties, and morale in the army was plummeting and so on. People were afraid that the army might collapse (Kevin Drum was writing about this). So I started arguing in the comments at Yglesias blog and Drum’s blog that we should kill two birds with one stone. People wanted to get out of Iraq (I certainly did) and we needed better policing in the populated areas of Iraq, which meant we needed to increase troop density.
So what I came up with was the idea that we should withdraw from the western areas of Iraq. At the time we had large patrols on the border so a lot of our manpower was dispersed into the desert. We also had a lot of troops in Iraq who weren’t doing much good there.
So I said, basically, pull out of the deserts of western Iraq (or more accurately, quit wasting manpower in the deserts of western Iraq) and pull those forces back to the cities, and maybe pump in some reinforcements from Afghanistan (where they weren’t having much success anyways). That would effectively increase the troop density in places like Baghdad, while ignoring towns out in Anbar. The western (Syrian) desert of Iraq is basically empty and very hard to defend (as ISIS demonstrated for everyone to see back in June). So why waste manpower there, when our troops are getting nickled and dimed to death in Baghdad.
More troops in Iraq meant more, shorter patrols, and more backup for the guys walking the patrols, which would mean fewer casualties and better policing. As a bonus, pulling back from the border would make it easier to withdraw from Iraq, when the time came. One argument from the conservatives at the time was that we could not withdraw because if we did the army would be destroyed (how?) and so we could never ever withdraw. (My thought was is that if your army is trapped and unable to move, it has already effectively been destroyed, so why not bail out?)
That’s the nickle version of my notion, which I argued for hither and yon for a couple weeks. And then the arguments moved on and I stopped talking about it.
About six months later, lo and behold, Frederick Kagen has a cover article in the (guess!) New Republic. The plan was for “The Surge” which sounded almost exactly like my idea but now with added argle bargle. Arguments raged all over the blogosphere, with folks arguing that it wouldn’t work, and attacking Kagen and lots of ‘moderate’ conservatives arguing for it. The hardcore cons would admit no problems existed, so the argument died off.
The Dems won the election and Bush implemented…the Surge. (Ignoring the path of transmission, am I saying GW Bush implemented my scheme? Yes! Yes, I am. Because he did.)
My little scheme worked for what it was supposed to do – reduce American losses, first and foremost, then reduce the damage from the violence, and last, be better position to withdraw. Of course it worked – if your problem is defined as not having enough manpower to defend and police the areas that you’re holding, an obvious solution is to reduce the size of the areas that you’re trying to hold on to. Duh.
Not having incessant patrols in Anbar, made the local tribes happy, so they were willing to be bought off, which helped with that problem, and the better policing (and walls) helped in Baghdad and Bob’s your uncle.
Unfortunately, Kagen and friends sold the notion as Solving All The Problems In Iraq Forever, which it did not. (How could it?) So we have Democrats arguing against the scheme of a Democrat (moi! albeit transmitted through Kagen and the Bush administration), and Republicans vociferously defending it. It got worse when they lionized Kagen as a genius (HA!) and Petraeus as a God among men and confused the entire mess with a change in tactics brought about by counter-insurgency. If by counter-insurgency, you meant ‘stop blowing away innocent Iraqis at checkpoints’ and also ‘be nice to the people you’re supposedly trying to help’, then yes, a change in tactics would be and was helpful (I know, I argued for a change there). But at that time they defined counter-insurgency as argle bargle something something and then a miracle occurred.
At which point things get even more confused and it was Democrats arguing for counter-insurgency (of the argle bargle variety) and against the surge and R’s arguing the other way.
And then Obama got elected and the Pentagon cooked up something else entirely that was envisioned to do something (I could never tell, and as far as I could determine the architects of said plan had no idea what said plan was supposed to do, besides Solve All The Problems…by some never determined means). So then we had at least some Democrats arguing for the Surge and some arguing that the surge didn’t work and everybody and their brother saying counter-insurgency over and over again like they knew what the hell they meant. (Or, in fact, knew what the hell anybody else meant when they said it. Counter-insurgency – a dessert topping and a floor wax!)
So here we are: conventional wisdom holds that the surge worked massively and All The Problems Were Solved Forever, while conventional wisdom also holds that every underlying element of the actual scheme was either wrong and was never implemented, or something that it’s not, or worked perfectly even if it never happened. People opposed to the conventional wisdom argue the opposite, whatever the opposite of the conventional wisdom actually is. (I dunno, it’s very difficult to determine what conventional wisdom thinks happened. Except it worked. Unless it didn’t.)
Whatever. They implemented my scheme (which was pretty simple after all) and that part worked. Only after they stole it, filed the serial numbers off and mislabeled it but hey! The DC establishment is a boat full of snakes floating on a sea of incompetence, so the main thing is it helped the army, which is good.
max
[‘Fewer dead people is always good.’]
Monty
@Roger Moore: Thanks. I should have included mention that liberals aren’t the group habitually tasked with ignoring the scientific method; for conservatives OTOH, everything is faith-based.
patrick II
I call it “intellectual tribalism.”
When I was young I looked forward to the day when I could work in a professional environment and things would be decided rationally and for the good. Then I actually worked among very smart professional people and found that their intelligence mostly increased their ability to rationalize their beliefs in a more sophisticated way.
The day the term “intellectual tribalism” came to me was when I was listening to a debate about torture and judge Richard Posner — a truly brilliant man and a judge no less — postulated that the Geneva convention should not apply to water-boarding because we were at war and it was such a dangerous time. Saying that laws regarding war crimes should not apply during times of war seemed much like saying that speeding laws should not apply while driving. It only made sense in that Posner was defending his republican tribe.
flukebucket
I just have to say that Ben Carson is without a doubt the dumbest supposedly smart person I have ever seen pushed as a possible Presidential candidate.
Peale
@xenos: yep. How happy I would have been if it turned out that removing saddam would have solved all of Iraq’s problems and huge stores of enriched uranium were found in an underground base guarded by Osama Bin Laden. Yeah, I would no longer trust a lot of liberal media types, and we probably would have taken it as a sign from God that we should invade Canada, too. But on the whole, wishing those stories to be true is really expensive and destructive.
Another Holocene Human
Why do decent movies with Black leads do so badly with white audiences, so much so that marketing and distribution don’t even bother? I mean, racism, duh, but does anyone have more of an inside view on this?
Peale
@fuckwit: nah. With Hillary, it’s always the perception that she might have burned her bra that sets them off. That kind of trachery from a Goldwater republican is just tough for them to get over.
Doug r
You guys do know that the earth is actually an oblate spheroid….
Another Holocene Human
@Rob in CT: I have read a number of deconversion stories that pretty much started with “One night, as I was trawling through the talk.origins FAQ….”
But yeah, the way they wander around with their bundle of their own facts makes us liberals pretty much unpersuasive on any matters of social policy or politics.
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: Which would make sense, as girls as a cohort out-perform boys in school during the puberty years, including in math.
(This and the dropout rate is why wingnut welfare wannabe’s like Christina Hoff Sommers argue that schools are mistreating boys. But it seems more likely to me that girls have been taught from a young age to inhibit their behaviors, making them more ‘docile’–teachable–and thus likely to succeed academically. Some boys get pushed to disinhibit behavior from a very young age because it’s “cute” and because their stupid father wants a mini-me to paint a living underline under his own piggish behavior and macho self-image. And the behavioral problems at school follow.)
SatanicPanic
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
It’s frankly weird that the media even brings it up anymore. Like finding an NFL team that went 1-15 and wanting to give the coach credit for his clever strategy in the game they won.
ETA- Just for the sake of argument, this metaphor assumes The Surge was a win, which it may or may not have been, I don’t know if that’s true or not and must confess I’m not that curious either way.
Another Holocene Human
@Doug r: The sun is a mass of incandescent gas. A gigantic nuclear furnace. Where hydrogen is built into helium. At a temperature of millions of degrees.
raven
OK, I have this worm on my monitor. I am running a mac theater monitor from a macbook pro. I have the lid up on the mac and there is no worm there. If I use “grab” or “quicktime” to screen cap the monitor it doesn’t show up?
Another Holocene Human
@raven: there are screensavers that look like that
raven
@Another Holocene Human: Yea but this just came put of nowhere. My background is my dogs at the beach. Why would it show up on the monitor and not the originating computer?
EriktheRed
@Violet: Yeah, they may have backtracked on that once it got more attention nationally, but the internet never forgets. As a result, when wingnuts talk about how much smarter and sophisticated they are than those stupid libruls I dig up this little nugget and throw it in their faces.
raven
Worm
No Worm
Another Holocene Human
@raven: Google isn’t helping. I suggest you post to a couple of Mac forums, also include your monitor specs. There is a trojan for Mac OS X since about 2011, they were supposed to have patched but it spread through a Java vulnerability and installed itself, rather than the user having to initiate anything. Scary….
CONGRATULATIONS!
@raven: Does it go away when you switch backgrounds? Does it show up in the same place when you turn that monitor off and then on? Does your cursor vanish when you mouse underneath it.
Cause I’m thinking it might be real. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen a critter get inside a piece of computing equipment.
Elizabelle
Paul Ryan has apparently just announced he will NOT run for president in 2016. NBC has this BREAKING news.
Actually, as chairman of Ways and Means, he’s right about it being a more powerful perch.
Dog save us.
Monty
@Another Holocene Human
Eddie Murphy’s movies did quite well in the early/mid 1980s, and before him Richard Pryor. (Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles? Fuck yeah.) Then there’s Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman and Sidney Poitier: all cast in lead roles in commercially successful and critically acclaimed movies. Then there’s Pam Grier in “Jackie Brown” and Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball.”
Not sure what you mean by “decent movies,” but yeah, those seem to be the exceptions.
SWMBO
@EconWatcher: If you are on facebook and want to help your daughter to have positive role models, try Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls or A Mighty Girl. Both are good places to see the effects and pitfalls of culture and media for girls. They also have books, histories and other media to encourage your girl.
pattonbt
The “Surge worked” for Republicans in the manner that they could now say (of course wrongly) “See, we gave ‘them’ some breathing space to relinquish their savage nature and become like us. But, alas, they are savages and didnt accept our offer. We did everything we said we could, but it was ‘their’ fault it didn’t work. Oh well, we were right, but ‘they’ couldnt handle it”.
That way they got to have their cake and eat it to. They got to say Iraq “worked” as sold and “they” still aren’t human (allowing the Republicans to still hold “them” as part of their “other” groups for continued political gain for their xenophic base).
As for Educated Republicans ignoring facts – it’s simple – Tribalism. They are invested in the R team and the R team has to win no matter what. Since they can’t win on facts, they have to ignore facts. Otherwise, they lose their power and standing.
If John McCain were to start making policy on facts, he would be “just another” Democrat and would lose his status (no more Sunday shows for you!). So he ignores facts. It’s that simple. Educated Repulicans, deep down, know the facts are against them, so they ignore the facts.
For most others – its all about money, their money. They know Republcians will cut taxes for them. Everything else is secondary as long as their wallets are fatter. So to keep their wallets fatter they will ignore everything else. They just dont have the balls to admit that is why.
Honest conversation on ACA with “Educated Repulican” (also a devout Christian who does mission work):
Me: So you like all the individual pieces of the ACA and recognize catastrophic care plans would not suffice
Him: Yes
Me: Yet you are against the ACA
Him: Yes
Me: Why?
Him: Those people will get a free ride
Me: Yet you realize, while not perfect, the ACA. overall, will do a great many things; increase quality coverage for many and reduce total societal costs for healthcare
Him: Yes
Me: So what would you do?
Him: Something else
Thats it. Something else. He knew all the facts, knew the ACA moved healthcare policy forward and in a direction he agreed with, yet hated it with a passion and had no alternative policy. What he really meant is that potentially some of the resource shift might mean more taxes for him so he was against it and would rather do nothing that would cost him a cent (since as an “educated republican” with an excellent executive role and all the trimmings, did not have any personal concerns in the healthcare space). He just didnt have the balls to come right out and say it.
Dave
@LongHairedWeirdo: Yep the “surge” was kinda sorta successful if you include all the surrounding policies etc. Not as a win everything always. What it really actually represented a policy acknowledgement on the tactical level and maybe lowest strategic levels that the Iraq “liberation” was not working and was not working as sold (I think it’s important to note here that while there was definitely cynical manipulation at all level that there really was a significant amount of true belief at those same levels often in the same individual). So basically it amounted to not fighting this horribly pointless conflict as dumbly as it was being fought and a tacit acknowledgement that Sweden on the Tigris was not being created and that what we were really looking for was a way to run out the clock with the ability to claim some sort of victory or at least not defeat (of course you can’t win what isn’t winnable in the first place there was never anything for the US to truly win there.). If I was asked in simple yes or no terms if the surge worked my answer would be fuck you that’s a bullshit frame. If I was forced to choose on pain of death I would say no (at least not for what it was sold as) and yes for what it at minimum aimed to accomplish (a sufficient reduction in violence to GTFO though that of course would never be admitted publicly).
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@max: Nice trick!
So, what’s the solution to Kashmir? :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who is genuinely impressed.)
sfHeath
@Villago Delenda Est: absolutely. Anti-war protestors saw the sectarian civil war as the ultimate result of the original invasion. I guess it would be more accurate to say that the surge successfully delayed the inevitable strife just long enough for the blame for it to be laid at Obama’s door, instead of Bush/Cheney, which is where it obviously should always have been.