Batshit Bugfuck Crazy

Revisiting John Cole, Tire Rims and Anthrax, and Still Life with Cole and Pets.

Of Course They’re Crazy:

Of course they are crazy. Ross Douthat is just a hack who does his best to run cover for his dumber compadres, but they are all crazy. There is really no reason to debate this anymore. They deny evolution, many of them think the earth is only several thousand years old, they don’t believe in global climate change and adamantly don’t believe humans have anything to do with it, they think being gay is a choice and I guaran-god-damned-tee that at least half of them think you can pray it away, they think stem cells are tiny babies, they think Saddam Hussein had a role in 9/11, they think you can cut taxes indefinitely and government revenues will always increase, they think Sarah Palin is qualified to be President and Joe the Plumber has keen political insights, they think Obama may be a Muslim and might not be a citizen, they think the solution to gun violence is more guns, and that dijon mustard and arugula are elitist, that the President who appointed half of Goldman Sachs to his administration is a socialist, and so on. And I’m not attributing to the GOP made up stuff, these are things in their fucking platform or that they state regularly on camera and in print. Michelle Bachmann was just on tv all wild-eyed asserting that even if we default, seniors will still get their social security checks and that Obama is a big meanie for suggesting otherwise. How will we pay them? Who the fuck knows? They aren’t dealing with reality and haven’t been for a long, long time.

Say What?

Once again I’m stealing from the current Say What? at the Doonesbury site (where do they find these things?):

"We're a capitalistic society. I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. They're not going to bail me out. I've been on welfare and food stamps. Did anyone help me? No."
-- actor Craig T. Nelson

Can actors think for themselves without writers?

I’m a hard-core liberal leftist. I’ve never been on welfare and/or food stamps. I’m going to assume that Craig T. Nelson is a conservative. What does all of this say about left/right stereotypes?

Divided We Fall

From American Aparthood by Glenn W. Smith:

The Right believes humankind is sorted naturally upon a ladder. The Left believes we walk together upon a bridge.

For the Right, freedom means the recognition of a natural, hierarchical order. By "democracy" the Right means a system that makes sure the "poor and despised" do not usurp the power of those above them on the ladder. The Right says it does not seek to "eat up the poor," though the enforced euthanasia of our health care system puts the lie to that claim.

The Right's worldview is not just an ad hoc, cynical justification of selfishness. It is a meaningful, if destructive, worldview, a worldview that produces aparthood as a reasoned solution to the unpredictable dangers of our lives together in a hostile universe.

As we run up against the resource limits that betray the pacifying illusion of movement up their ladder of life, the Right is panicking.

Human sociality is full of ladders and bridges. The theoretical genius of American democracy lies in this recognition. The Right shares the Framers' skepticism of the masses, but rejects the Framers' much more alarmed skepticism of unchecked authority. The Framers understood that human nature was not an unchanging thing, that humans could not be fixed to permanent, isolated places on a ladder the powerful lower from above.

Disgusting Political Social Games

From Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal by Nicholas D. Kristof:

One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.

Some evolutionary psychologists believe that disgust emerged as a protective mechanism against health risks, like feces, spoiled food or corpses. Later, many societies came to apply the same emotion to social “threats.” Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust…

Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals.

It appears that we start with moral intuitions that our brains then find evidence to support. For example, one experiment involved hypnotizing subjects to expect a flash of disgust at the word “take.” They were then told about Dan, a student council president who “tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students.”

The research subjects felt disgust but couldn’t find any good reason for it. So, in some cases, they concocted their own reasons, such as: “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob.”

So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down “us vs. them” battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side’s morality, even if it’s not our morality.

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

The Ignorance Of Sarah Palin And Ann Coulter

From Sarah Palin: Conservative of the Year by Ann Coulter :

Sarah Palin wins HUMAN EVENTS’ prestigious “Conservative of the Year” Award for 2008 for her genius at annoying all the right people. The last woman to get liberals this hot under the collar would have been … let's see now … oh, yeah: Me!

The entire presidential election year was kind of a downer for conservatives. Once the “maverick” John McCain won the nomination, the rest of the year was like watching a slow motion car crash. Except at least a slow-motion car crash is occasionally entertaining. So it was going to be a long year.

Until Palin.

It was not genius, but ignorance that annoyed “all the right people.” The right people in this case being the American voter.

Let’s hope that future “Conservative of the Year” Award winners are as successful as Palin at winning elections.

Courting The Neanderthal Vote

From Palin's Rising Star? by Josh Marshall:

As I think Noam Scheiber said a week or two ago, Palin is the first Republican presidential or vice-presidential since Richard Nixon to so genuinely appeal to the politics of resentment. Sure, the Bushes and McCain have played to it. But either economically or socially or both, these men were all to-the-manor-born -- elites who've lived their whole lives on greased rails.

To use a different analogy I think Palin (and perhaps Joe the Plumber too) appeal to the brainstem of conservatism, where the most primitive and persistent impulses are registered, even as the areas of higher reasoning and cognition (frontal lobes and all that) are flat-lining or tracking into oblivion.

When Will Conservatives Learn That It Is 2008, Not 1938?

From Negotiating isn't appeasement by J. Peter Scoblic:

In a speech to the Israeli parliament Thursday, President Bush took a swipe at Barack Obama for his willingness to negotiate with evil regimes.

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said. "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

But if there is anything that has been discredited by history, it is the argument that every enemy is Hitler, that negotiations constitute appeasement, and that talking will automatically lead to a slaughter of Holocaust-like proportions. It is an argument that conservatives made throughout the Cold War, and, if the charge seemed overblown at the time, it seems positively ludicrous with the clarity of hindsight.

Chaos Theory

From Red Mind, Blue Mind? by Wray Herbert:

New York University psychologist John Jost and his colleagues have been using time-tested instruments to plumb the unconscious attitudes of both self-proclaimed conservatives and liberals. Although most everyone prefers order to chaos, the psychologists found this yearning to be much more potent in conservatives than in liberals. Put another way, conservatives have little tolerance for any messiness, let alone rebelliousness, even on this basic neuronal level. Liberals, by contrast, have a deep-wired preference for flexibility and progress over tradition. The starkest difference between conservatives and liberals was related to feminism, which conservatives believe in their gut to be a threat to their ordered world.

This does not make much sense to me. If this is true why are conservatives so hawkish? War is the most chaotic, messy, rebellious, and disorderly activity invented since the dawn of time. You would think conservatives would hate it.

I guess as long as it is out of sight and not in their own backyard it is OK.