Willie71

Robert Reich is quite brilliant. His economic ideas are evidence based, not ideologically or faith based. He has a lot of short clips on that website that anyone interested in fact checking economic policy proposals for any of the candidates could benefit from.

So please, where is your log comparable list of Republican party racist actions. You know, pulled off by the great savior of the Democratic Party Dick Nixon and his successors?

 

Do Democratic voters and politicians simply stop being racists when the become Republicans? You should be able to give some examples.

 

The US will be remembered for at least three great racist epochs.

 

1) Slavery

2) Jim Crow

3) Welfare

 

All three perpetrated by the Democratic party.

 

The insane thing is that Democrats just cant acknowledge the third as racism and all they have to do is read Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

This makes me sad. I don't remember a Democrat who has used a racist platform in decades, but there might be some I don't know about. Modern democrat policies include amnesty, minority equality, increasing the minimum wage, decreasing the increasing disparity in the distribution of wealth, and foreign policy based more on diplomacy than war. While democrats do get bought through the legalized bribery that is American Democracy, the policies are not racist.

Welfare as racism? Totally laughable and an insult to reality. The welfare system needs an overhaul, but don't forget that there are states where 90+% of food stamp recipients are white. People in poverty are locked into a winless cycle in spite of race, not because of race.

Why yes, I do. Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

 

It was rich people's money being taxed away from them and re-distrtibuted to poor people. That is not the same thing as "the people's own money". It was obtained by levying heavy taxes on rich people's incomes, and it was distributed in the form of government paid wages to poor people for work performed on government funded projects. That is ideal, classic, Keynesian "demand side" economic policy for responding to recession. It is the opposite of Reaganomic "supply side" economic policy for responding to recession.

 

You stated that FDR did not raise taxes on rich people, and instead handed them large sums of money to use in hiring people to work for them on their projects. You stated that such supply side government policy was what got the US out of the Depression. That is fantasy. It never happened. The opposite happened.

 

 

 

 

 

You'd have to be seventy years old for that.

 

The Republican Party in the US has been representing the same people and the same values since 1968, and employing the same rhetoric in the service of the same legislative agenda since 1980. W's rhetoric, agenda, and legislative efforts were identical to Reagan's. McCain's and Romney's campaigns, as well as the entire Republican Congressional delegation's, were standard model post-Reagan Republican political efforts. There's been no substantial change in the Republican Party in decades.

 

The surge of "Independents" we've seen - which has been tailing off since Obama won re-election and the memory of W faded - came not from Republican voters listening to their representatives

 

actually listening to Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bush&Quayle, W&Cheney, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Fox News, Sarah Palin, David Duke, Ted Haggard, Paul Wolfowitz, Ronald Reagan, Louie Gomert, Bobbie Jindal, Strom Thurmond, Bob Dole, Ben Carson, Helen Chenoweth, Michelle Bachmann, or any of the rest of the menagerie, any of the dozens upon dozens of spewers of racial bigotry, economic juvenilia, vicious religious fanaticism, crackpot conspiracy, baroque political delusion, military adolescent fantasy, and dingbat science denial that has been the undifferentiated and interchangeable Republican contribution to the national political discourse since 1968

 

and deciding that that fountain of garbage did not represent them.

 

That didn't happen. All these "Independents" were fine with that representation of their values for decades. There was no surge of "Independents" when Gingrich took over the US House and the Republican Party shut down the government and set out to impeach a President for no good reason.

 

What happened was this: they won the whole thing. Reagan and Gingrich and Limbaugh and Scalia got a solid foothold, and then W&Co took control - the Reagan Republican Party had all three branches of government And then the consequences of actually letting those people run their country finally came around and bit so hard even a Republican tool felt the tooth. Katrina. Abu Ghraib. "Mission Accomplished". "The army you have". Jeff Gannon. Ted Haggard. Halliburton. Blackwater. The most corrupt war America has ever fought. An even bigger banking fiasco than Reagan's.

 

So the choices became: pretend it hadn't happened; rewrite history and blame others; admit you were wrong and the liberals were right the whole time; deny history and disown your former allegiances.

 

Options 1, 2, and 4 have proven popular (1 and 2 maintain the crazy, 4 is more sane albeit ethically compromised). Option 3 is vanishingly rare.

I wish I could give you unlimited positives for this post. As I learn more about American history, the more I realize the bizarre belief that the U.S. is a free nation is as far removed from reality as it is. All of the evidence points to an emerging fascist state. History will see the Americans much like we see Nazi Germany today. I an quite frightened as to how far this will go before it is stopped.

I just finished reading The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, and that book answers the questions pointed out here quite nicely. There was a divergence on the right, and particularly the far right isolating itself from academia and evidence in the 60's, exacerbated by Reagan in the 80's to the point that laws were passed that made it nearly impossible to influence policy with science, giving significant advantage to big industry, such as tobacco, oil, and sugar. George W. Continued to totally dismantle any chance for the government to utilize evidence to inform policy, and the propoganda has led many conservatives to believe that science is just a liberal brainwashing field. When they use the term "junk science" they are referring to real science that hasn't passed the conservative standard that is unrealistic in real practice. They call valid science "sound science" and the definition is quite rigid, meaning if it isn't direct laboratory cause and effect, it cannot pass the standard. Because of this, anything involving modelling is out, probability is out, psychology, economics, climate science, sociology, medicine etc. cannot meet the minimum standard and gets labeled "junk science" by conservatives.

Is this delusional, on the same scale that religion is. They believe what they are taught, and in the strongly conservative states, there is a concerted effort to remove critical thinking from schools. They feel it promotes liberal ideation, and socialism or communism will follow.

I personally believe the big industry buys these guys to do their bidding, and doubt many of them actually believe what they are saying.

I think the people buying the politicians, and some of the politicians are just using the fear based rhetoric to maintain their control of the economy, and convince people it's ok to give up civil rights. I post regularily on a political subforum run by right wingers, and they seem to truly believe the rhetoric. They threaten to ban me repeatedly, call me a mental midget, and believe all research is a liberal communist propoganda campaign to indoctrinate students. The moderator claims to have three phd's, but he can't follow basic logic, and is convinced climate change is a liberal conspiracy to raise taxes. It would be fun for a few of you guys to post there to see how absurd it is.

I think you are underestimating the human capacity for self-deception. I don't think "conservatives" are aware any longer, if they ever were, of the original motives behind their sequential adoption of the latest rhetoric and talking points of their media sources.

 

They are perfectly sincere in their denials of racism, for example. They can at the same time

 

assert Obama is a secret Muslim from Kenya in thrall simultaneously to Reverend Wright, his African Muslim heritage, and radical Chicago ghetto politics, while possibly being the bastard offspring of a Black Power founding member, in addition to having rested his academic achievements on affirmative action favoritism,

 

and claim to be free of racial bias in their political assessments,

 

without the smallest awareness of any cognitive discord.

Self deception is associated with decreased abstract reasoning. The more polarized one thinks, as in either/or, black/white, for me/against me, the less cognitive dissonance one experiences. In therapy, almost every class jumper has been a person with advanced visual spatial thinking, a heightened experience of cognitive dissonance when exposed to BS, and an exceptional ability to connect the dots. It's like they see the world in hi def color, and conservatives see low res black and white. They simply don't see the diversity in the issues. On the conservative forum, I repeatedly get paraphrased into an either or position, and they claim I'm lying or back tracking when I try to explain the idea of gradients.

http://www.mentalhealthcommission.ca/English/system/files/private/document/TEMPO%2520Police%2520Interactions%2520082014.pdf

Summary: conservatives thinking is overridden by fear. They fear things that aren't real threats, but cannot be convinced the threat isn't real. Recent examples are Ebola, islamaphobia, systemic racism, and fear of others that is so strong they can convince themselves they need to be armed to protect themselves from random attacks.

Let's check with reality. None of these risks are greater than being struck by lightning. Yet, these are very real concerns to the conservative population. They just aren't real in terms of measured risk.

The belief that everyone in America has the same opportunity, and success and failure is based on personal character, motivation, or morality is an absolute myth. There is not a single paper from a respected source that could make this case.

Conservatives are much more likely to be religious, and the more right, the more fundamental. Policy on the environment, and medical sciences are based on mythological teachings from a couple millenia ago.

Economic beliefs on the right actually decrease the average citizens prosperity. The GDP, or per capita wealth may look better at a glance, but the 1%ers prosper so much at the expense of everyone else, that the general stats look good. Liberals aren't stealing from the citizens, they are establishing a more even distribution of wealth, at the expense of the peak value statistic.

It goes on and on. There is no conservative belief that stands up to scrutiny. It's simly a religious faith.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/study-predicts-political-beliefs-with-83-percent-accuracy-17536124/

http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Political_beliefs_of_academics

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201104/conservatives-big-fear-brain-study-finds

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/29/secrets_of_the_right_wing_brain_new_study_proves_it_conservatives_see_a_different_hostile_world/

Read this and get back to me.

One particularly spectacular red herring is the reference to psychology.

If you want a medical diagnosis of insanity you need a psychiatrist.

If, on the other hand, you are using the term colloquially then any of us is "qualified" to give an opinion.

it's especially clear that it's a red herring as I pointed the issue out before.

This is incorrect. As a psychiatric nurse, I give diagnosis on each case I see. Psychologists and social workers at the masters level can too.

There is no diagnosis of insanity either. The specific condition will be lured based on the manual used, the DSM5, or the ICD10.

Anything other than a medical diagnosis is non-scientific and simply name-calling. We call things/people "insane" or "crazy" in common usage not because people are actually insane or crazy, but because we simply find the idea or person ridiculous, outrageous, disagreeable, etc. This sort of usage is subjective, unscientific, non-medical, and simply reflects the user's own biases and opinions....nothing more. They may be perfectly sane....more sane than the person calling them "insane" and we recognize that such verbiage is simply opinion and not a reflection of the accused's actual mental state.

 

I will draw your attention to the fact that before there were psychologists we treated homosexuality, transexuals, and a host of other non "insane" people as if they were literally insane. Even after there were psychiatrists, we treated such people as if they had a mental disease. We treated people of different races as if they were sub-human and lacking in mental capacity. Forgive me then if I take issue with your "de facto" diagnosis that is not backed by scientific evidence. Such diagnoses have a very high rate of false-positives and tend to be colored by a person's biases. Calling those you personally disagree with "insane" without any actual psychiatric evidence to back it up falls under this same sort of biased diagnosis that you call "de facto" that was used to justify locking homosexuals up. The only person that it is "de facto" too is yourself and those who share your personal biases.

 

At this point, your refusal to actually provide psychiatric evidence that conservatism is a form of insanity is nothing but dodging. Your responses are dodging and an attempt to justify "folk psychiatry" as legitimate science.

I ask you again....do you have any actual psychiatric/scientific evidence that conservatives are insane? If not, then we can conclude that calling them such is simply your opinion and can be dismissed as such.

Insane is not the correct term. Are they scizophrenic, bipolar? No. They have a belief system that is not connected with reality, but as with religion, a shared group delusion is a faith, not an illness under current standards. If it is learned, then it is belief. Outside of this caveat, conservatives, when asserting the world is 6000 years old, or that evolution is untrue, or that climate change is not happening, are clearly and unequivocally out of touch with reality. It's simply delusional, but taught just like the various magic man beliefs of the Abrahamis religions. One read of the bible should confirm the nonsensical nature of the assertion, but we are told repeatedly that this is truth, and questioning is not acceptible.

Really Willie ?

 

I like some conservative ideas, yet I don't fit into any of the stereotypes you just mentioned.

I also like a lot of liberal ideas.

And I dislike quite a few from both camps.

I suspect there's an awful lot of people like me.

 

Where do we fit in your world view ?What're you gonna do ? Label us also, and call us confused ?

If you don't toe the party line, you aren't a conservative. That label doesn't fit you. I think most would refer to you as unaffiliated, or independent.

Did the part about the beliefs a few Muslims have, or the beliefs a few black Americans have, totally go over your head ?

 

A belief is an opinion they have, just like Conservatism, and painting everyone with the same broad brush is still wrong.

Being conservative is agreeing on some specific philosophical tenets. Those tenets are clearly not supported by science, and therefore the philosophy is misguided at best, and outright insane in the more extreme forms. There are differences in the way conservatives in general reason, and respond to fear. There are differences in acceptance of differences in others, as well as in rigidity of thinking.

If someone varies from these tenets, do we still call them conservatives?

Sam Harris, The Moral Landscap, also The end of Faith and Free Will. Not purely philospohical, but there is enough discussion of philosophy that they fit.

I think philosophy has a use, not in answering questions, but in encouraging metacognition. If we don't stop to think "why is it like this?" something common to science, but also philosophy, we can get caught up in assuming everyone else sees and experiences the world the same way.