overtone

Robert Reich makes some interesting points here: -

Twenty or thirty years late. The Republican Party did not die in 2016. It was dead as a legitimate political Party when it impeached Clinton, if not before. It was a corpse - as a legit Party - when it nominated W for the Presidency, rigged key voting districts and the Supreme Court to hand him the office.

 

This isn't a surprise, a shock, a new thing in the public arena. Donald Trump is saying nothing that Rush Limbaugh wasn't saying in 1994, he's not a whit nuttier in his positions than Ronald Reagan was in 1980. Trump is unusually vulgar, like the hate radio and Fox punditry and PAC tactics that threw him up, but he's otherwise an ordinary Republican politician.

(Trump's economics make more sense than Reagan's voodoo, actually, and when Ronnie stood up on his hind legs and defended US support of death squads in Central America

- yes, they tortured, and under US guidance and supervision as well as support

- his invocation of the terrorist risk from the fanatic agents of Communism so close to the US border in Nicaragua was as fantastically delusional as anything Trump is putting out there. )

 

From the Reich link: "I, for one, regret its passing. Our nation needs political parties to connect up different groups of Americans, sift through prospective candidates, deliberate over priorities, identify common principles, and forge a platform

- - - -

But there was always enough of a Republican Party to do these important tasks – to span the divides, give force and expression to a set of core beliefs, and come up with a candidate around whom Party regulars could enthusiastically rally."

 

Robert, Robert - bless your warm and kindly heart replacing the spotlight of history with the glow of nostalgia, but the Republican Party has not been operating like that since the last time you raided the change jar for laundry quarters. That's not how Nixon won the Presidency, that's not how Reagan or W came to power in that Party, that's not where Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle and Dick Cheney and Sara Palin came from, that's not the Party taking its marching orders from Karl Rove and Frank Lunz and Newt Gingrich and the Kochs/Adelmans of this world.

 

 

Hardly a scientific paper, more a religious tract cloaked in scientific trappings.

And they used the rally monkey image from the Angels baseball team - very low ethical standards, there.

 

 

It must really bother you, Overtone, that people, who you consider NOT 'specifically good' people, or crazy people, or whining, spoiled and irresponsible ( for the past 40 yrs ) people, or people you consider your intellectual inferiors, have as much say in the government that represents them also, as you do.

I would be much less bothered if I thought the Republican Party actually represented the citizens of the United States. That would be simple justice - the citizens getting what they deserved, good and hard. No complaints.

 

Do you want a link for the definition of DEMOCRACY ?

Happytalk about Democracy is no excuse for the current Republican Party.

What's the difference between that and losing one's mind?

The approach to correct the problem. They don't respond to "OMG, you've lost your collective mind!"

So? Of course one wouldn't expect people who have lost their collective mind to respond to any such approach.

 

They think in terms of big picture scary, so big picture concepts from the left are automatically bad and quickly dismissed.

They aren't getting any big picture concepts from the Left. They aren't getting anything from the Left. They wouldn't know what the Left was if it was actually signing their Social Security checks "from the Left".

 

They're willing to approve spending that will alleviate the problems as long as it's not presented as one of those big picture scary concepts their media pundolts are always cranking the handle of the Jack-in-the-box about.

No, they aren't. And their media pundits are not going to just have a change of heart one day. Have you been following where these people are getting their news? Listening to their media pundits?

 

It's a good vent to call out the crazy, but being specific about their faults probably won't work as well as being specific about where they can help.

It's not a "vent", it's journalism. And if it isn't happening, it's the journalists who should be called out. Having the entire body of the news media ignoring the craziness of the current Republican Party, and treating the rise of fascism to power in this country with respect as a legitimate political ideology, is dangerous, and should be called out. Trying to be specific about where somebody like Mike Huckabee or Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz could "help" is a complete waste of time, unless you specify the planet on which you expect that to happen.

 

These aren't big critical thinkers, and they don't accept much criticism even if it's constructive. That's not a metric they respect. They're generally good people with big, easy-to-push YES and NO buttons (white and black respectively), who don't spend time much deeper than that.

They are not, however, "specifically good" people. For example, you're right about those buttons being white and black - yep. And I'm not interested in getting their respect - I'm interested in minimizing their influence on my government.

Look: if you think these people are reacting against being confronted and criticized, you are taking their whining and claims of persecution way too seriously. They have not been confronted, not been criticized, not been forced to account for themselves at all. These people have been mollycoddled for forty years, treated with respect for doing and saying stuff no adult should have to put up with from a two year old. They're spoiled, not persecuted. These are tantrums, not grievances. These people are, as Matt Taibbi documented so thoroughly last election, completely full of shit. And it's partly because they have never faced consequences for their behavior, delivered by the people they abuse.

 

So we can insist they need mental help, or we can break off some small chunks of reason and go out of our way to make sure they're palatable.

Insistence that they need mental help would be directed at those capable of providing it, not the crazy themselves. Meanwhile, if you think they are going to be paying any attention to reason you haven't been paying attention to them. How would they find out about it?

The good news is, this is 27% of the electorate. They can be isolated, and stepped on, democratically - the longer you postpone, the harder it will get. Once we had to fight a Civil War. Once we had to endure a Great Depression kicking their teeth in. Once we had to call in the National Guard so that their neighbors's children could go to school - through a gauntlet of these "generally good" people spitting and screaming. Those were consequences of letting things go and hoping they would see reason in small, palatable chunks. They won't.

 

 

It's a case of thinking you're doing something about the problem when you're really the biggest cause of it, something few people could ever admit. This makes more sense to me than the whole Republican party losing its collective mind.

To deny their role in causing their problems, they have been forced farther and farther into hallucination, farther and farther from a reality that will not - out of courtesy, say - ever become a different reality, and cease its progress away from them.

 

The progress of the entire juggernaut of crazy depends on amnesia, forgetting the past in order to mistake the direction and deny the destination. The only caveat here is that this is not recent: Trump is just Limbaugh running for office, Gingrich with no political obligations, Coulter with a fat ass and better makeup - Limbaugh has been the central and most significant Republican intellectual since 1992, Gingrich got this monster on its feet in 1994, Coulter has been the best selling Republican hit man for twenty years now.

 

What's the difference between that and losing one's mind? Losing one's footing in reality and losing one's mind are the same thing. We now have essentially every single pundit on the major media doing the "both sides" whackdance on this stage, trying to find some way to fit Donald Trump into a play about sane and competent adults belonging to a legitimate political Party democratically governing a major industrial power according to a commendable set of values, and it's becoming clear that what started in tragedy is going to end - as foreshadowed by Ronald "Quotes" Reagan and spotlit by Sara "Winks" Palin - in farce.

 

This isn't anything new, folks. This is the incoming Republican political world since 1968, the power takeover of 1980, the consolidation of 1994, the consummation of 2000 (remember the giddy celebration of W's win that year? The fireworks and chestbeating of Mission Accomplished? How much fun it was to call all those whiny liberals "traitors" before they turned out to be, once again, right? You can still find the remnants on Youtube).

Lizards - crocodiles and Komodo dragons and possibly others - act so as to intentionally deceive prey.

 

So lizard level intelligence is enough.

 

Whether or not they know they are lying, what exactly self-knowledge of lying comprises, is one of those questions.

It's important to realize that this current scene is not a recent development - the takeover of the Republican Party by the manipulated and deranged tools of this American faction that shall not be named dates back to before Palin sent it up the flagpole on national TV, before "Jeff Gannon" was installed as a Republican approved journalist with White House press credentials and 24 hour access, before Cheney installed a private safe in his VP office and blocked subpoena attempts to investigate its contents, before the famously discourteous and philandering Newt Gingrich used his Speaker position to shut down the US government for weeks over Presidential snubs and Presidential adultery, even before Reagan gutted the economy giving tax cuts to the rich while overseeing the setup of a black market arms and cocaine smuggling operation in the lower office levels of the White House:

 

It goes back to 1964, when a Democratic President set out to enforce the Constitutional guarantees of civil rights and civil liberties to black people in the former Confederacy. That opened the door to gathering the formerly distributed white fundies and bigots into one Party, and backing them with the serious money.

Height to voice is not a simple pitch relationship: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131207-sounds-voices-height-tall-short-science-health/

 

Male voices that can produce 80 Hz tones are common - I can, for example, normally sing a low D (one note below a standard pitch guitar's bass string), which is about 73 - 74 Hz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequenciesAnd I do not have a notably deep voice - a bit deeper than average, only.

I wonder where you get a function like

y=tan(exp(ax^2+bx+c)).

It looked familiar to me from a time when I was dealing with the mathematics of ecology and epidemiology - similar stuff would turn up in the middle of models.

 

 

"Snuff" is not the last book of the series

I'm sorry to hear that. I won't be completing the set, then - I did in fact set "Snuff" aside, permanently.

"Plainwater" Ann Carson

 

"Snuff" - The last book of the Discworld series, Terry Pratchett.

 

The Carson book may be (after future rereading and thought, which it deserves) the latest addition to my short shelf of "solos"; ( criteria: uniquely inspired, strange or weird, slim and concise, very well written in English, and elegant. Typical members: "Grendel", "Far Tortuga", Leguin's "Tao Te Ching", "The Miner's Pale Children", Rubin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis", Shakespeare's "Sonnets".) It's a compilation of a couple of compilations of short quasi-essays, or possibly near-poems, or muse-addled journal/travelogue entries. It fits in my hip pocket, and enchants.

 

The Pratchett book I began to read to complete the set, expecting and finding bad news, with a heavy heart as they say. I doubt I will finish it, on principle. By the numbers, it's many people's first or only encounter with his stuff, and that's a shame - this is not the book people should remember as Terry Pratchett's work. There is a dark fascination in comparing it with his earlier writing, and the differences are not at all what I expected - instead of simpler, less dense in jokes, less layered and allusive, confused or burdened with holes in plot, he became wordy and thorough and more completely descriptive. The jokes are still there, and in essence as fun and clever and complicated as ever - but now they are set up and laid out at length, repeated for emphasis, even explained. The characters deliver their thinking in speeches, or have it described to us in detail. The reader is not trusted to pick up on things, catch a hint. He shows as of old, but then he goes on to tell, in case we missed something.

 

In a sense it reads like a draft of one of his books - it's easy to imagine him removing about a third of the prose on any given page, tightening things up, and getting to the real Pratchett pace - but the trouble goes deeper: he has lost track of his characters. Fans of Pratchett will know what is implied by this example: he has Sam Vimes bragging and boasting.

 

I was almost wanting to cry, when it occurred to me that the backstory might be calming: it's possible that Pratchett did not write all this stuff. He had help, toward the end, and in addition to being unable to edit as masterfully as Pratchett himself they may have padded his prose. That would explain a lot.

Obama got called a communist even though he's probably to the Right of, for example, Kennedy.

He's to the right of Nixon and Eisenhower, as well - in his actual legislative and executive efforts and initiatives , certainly, and generally in his rhetoric as well. (TPP, EPA and similar agency policies, Romneycare without a public option, private military contracting and mercenary involvement in war, bank and financial industry regulation, Social Security and Medicare "reform", etc etc etc).

 

 

 

 

That's certainly consistent with the Right hand edge of it needing to be essentially insane, just to stay to the Right of mainstream

The Republican Party officials and major national figures, nominees, etc, are mainstream. Sarah Palin is not a fringe figure. Neither is Scott Walker, or Donald Trump. The neo-Confederates are not on the edge of the Republican Party - they are essential and dominant constituents of its base, its core political strength. Fox News is mainstream, middle of the road, standard US political propaganda - their vocabulary and framing of issues are adopted by all major "news" media.

The Democrats made the KKK. They own the mess they created. Nice try, but the Republican party will never own that stink or shame.

The Republican Party invited the KKK faction of the US population into its ranks in 1968; they accepted, and they have been Republicans ever since. They are Republicans , and the Republican Party represents them in Congress - right now, and for the past fifty years. If the Republican Party wants to avoid the stink and shame of them, it needs to clean house.

 

It won't, because it would never win another national election again - the heirs of the Klan (Birchers, Tea Party, "conservatives") are its electoral base.

 

 

Something Republicans had been fight for since it's founding. He was fighting Democrats and their terrorist arm the KKK.

The KKK faction has been allied with the Republican Party in US national politics since 1968. Lyndon Johnson drove them out of the Democratic Party, Nixon welcomed them into the Republican Party. Forty seven years now. They've been calling themselves the "Tea Party" lately - check 'em out: http://aattp.org/20-of-the-most-racist-teapublican-political-signs/

 

The Republican Party evicted Lincoln, and became the Party of Jefferson Davis, almost fifty years ago.

Confined to heterosexual, for a minute:

 

Men looking at naked women are being presented with sexual opportunity, in appearance.

 

Women looking at naked men are not, usually - they have to identify as being in the scene, project themselves, to be in that apparent situation. A man is not sexually available to a woman unless he is aroused by her.

 

So the equivalent erotic visual for a woman, to compare with a simply naked woman for a man, would be an aroused and intent naked man focused on her, apparently aroused by her.

 

If you are just showing pictures of the same stuff to men and women, you aren't comparing apples to apples, from temptation's pov.

 

 

Well, for the umpteenth time I didn't make the title or the thread.

So you will quit complaining about those who are discussing the thread topic as established by the guy who did make the title and the thread - ok?

 

Your studies, fro example, do not in themselves enlighten us as to the sources of the crazy in current US political conservatism. The correlations described are none of them, in themselves, even examples of craziness, let alone clear pointers to its source(s).

 

There was a time when "conservative" covered Eisenhower Republican political ideology, which most here and elsewhere agree was not crazy, regardless of its flaws. I see nothing in Altmeyers correlations that would definitely have changed since then. Do you?

 

 

Actually, it is the thread topic, or at least what I intended.

Fooled me with the title, then. And the first postings. Sorry about that.

 

There is a difference, though, between the question of why conservatives are conservative and the question of why modern US conservatives are crazy. Your study seems to deal with the first why only.

 

 

Both you and Overtone have a hard time staying on topic. Again, why are conservatives insane and what should be done about it.

That's not the thread topic, or my topic. My topic is the nature of crazy that has labeled itself "conservative" in the US these days. And discussing your posts is right in the wheelhouse of that topic.

Like this:

 

But since you insist. For your reading pleasure.

{long list of Democratic Party racist politicians and behaviors, ending in the late 60s}

By the way everything after 1959 occurred during my lifetime. Not ancient history. Just yesterday really. How some people choose to forget.

Now the notable feature of that list is its accuracy. It contains nothing that did not actually happen, more or less as described.

So how is it that political conservatives cannot make such lists, or deal with any such matters accurately, involving Republicans after about 1978? It's like a form of senility, in which one's childhood is clear and ready to hand, but yesterday is a blank filled with bad dreams.

Better check your history books about the origins of slavery and Jim Crow. Both are firmly enshrined in the Democratic party.

As was Ronald Reagan's political career. Also Strom Thurmond's, and Phil Gramm's, and so many others.

 

As Reagan put it: the Democratic Party left him, and he found a new home. Likewise the KKK faction, which became the John Birch Society faction and now the Tea Party faction - Nixon invited them into the GOP tent, they accepted the invitation, and there they dwell. That happened in the mid 1960s, when the Democratic Party took on the Jim Crow laws and other racial oppressions supported by white people's racial bigotry in the US.

 

It's temporary, perhaps - that faction destroys its environs, and has to move on every so often - but not at all quiet or hidden.

 

And thus modern "political conservatism", as it styles itself, was born - crazy from the very beginning, guilt-based from the git-go.

Now who's world view is on display. I like the "spawn of evils" comment the best. Now not insane, but evil.

One of the problems with crazy people is that they cannot read with comprehension.

 

Or will not. Which amounts to the same thing, on a science forum (in Ted Cruz's case, the implications are different).

 

Pointing out that political conservatism in the US is an "ideology" (of a sort) born of a great many evils, beginning (one must begin somewhere) with slavery and Jim Crow, and political conservatives are therefore adherents to a political ideology that is the spawn of these evils, is not the same thing as calling anyone evil.

 

Good people as well as bad can sell their soul - the good ones are rumored to fetch a higher price, even - and that doesn't make them evil. It does damn them, of course.

I said camps not ghettos. To protect progressives against the insane you need a lock a key.

And I pointed out: they are building their own, installing the gates with the locks themselves, and moving in behind them of their own free will. To protect themselves.

 

 

 

Those insane folks think that a government that does nothing does best.

Once in a while for a few minutes that string of verbiage crosses their speech centers and come out of their yaps, sure. Then, after saying that, they start two land wars in Asia and launch the biggest expansion of Federal bureaucracy since WWII, and set their (and our, which is the problem) government up chasing weed smokers all over the country and listening in on everybody's phone calls.

 

 

You are not looking at the big picture.

The Big Picture issue here is whether political conservatism in the US has become somewhat insane.

 

The little picture, an illustration, is your posting. The answer is yes. (Do you really think you are joking? These baroque fantasies of oppression and being picked on are central to your world view.)

 

If those guys are actually worried about progressives and liberals adopting their means and tactics, and they seem to be, one sane response would be to quit adding to the means - "political conservatives" in the US have been expanding the prisons, setting up camps for illegals and refugees, building high security exclosure/inclosure fences on borders and around boundaries, eroding the firm establishment of habeus corpus, discarding the Constitutional provisions against surveillance and preventive detention and interrogation by torture, and in general working their little tushies as hard as they can to set up a Federal government capable of exactly what they now project unto "progressives".

 

Which points to the hazard the country faces by having allowed this spawn of evils past to get its hands on the US military and the tax system and such - these people are completely sincere in their paranoid ravings, and if they have the means for a pre-emptive strike against these surrounding threats, they will use them.

The country tried that, in 2007/2008. They got worse, not better - started running around in tricorn hats and carrying guns.

You are right. Taking away there wealth and capacity to make wealth simply isn't enough. I know, we can re-educate them as well. So we don't waste to much money on the effort we should first concentrate them in camps and make them work to pay for there education.

That's already been tried as well - student aid was cut to make them work for it, dozens of private for-profit colleges sprang up for them, and they cooperated by concentrating themselves in various school districts and certain colleges.

It didn't work. Those folks don't take to "education" much.

But maybe the problem was that all that taking away of jobs and money and forcing them into educational ghettoes they have to pay for themselves was done to them by themselves.

Maybe they'd learn something from it if somebody else did it to them, the kinds of lessons we learned by having them do it to us.

Probably too late to find out.

 

 

They only win one voting demographic and seemingly every major city/economic driver in the country (Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, LA, Boston, Philadelphia, etc, etc) votes Democrat. Once the Federalist Judges on the Supreme Court no longer have the majority I believe Conservativism will become a fringe portions of the GOP are be interiorly banished to a third party all together. 5 - 4 decisions like citizens united and all the various assaults on the voting rights act will be repaired. That will essentially be like pulling the life support plug on the GOP.

The Democratic Party has become increasingly "politically conservative" in the crazy sense, so voting Democrat is not in itself going to dig the country out.

 

The Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn its major Reagan Era decisions until Roberts retires. He's 60 years old (the manipulations leading to his appointment were masterful). We are more likely to see Medicare declared unConstitutional than Citizens United overturned, by a Roberts Court.

 

The takeover of the US by the group put into power by the "rightwing authoritarian military/industrial atavistic-myth-justified family-values loyalty-based" political faction we are not allowed to name any more, or even discuss in plain language, is not dependent on the GOP for its continued maintenance. Historically, the only way to break the established grip of a ruling class like that has been cataclysm - the destruction and collapse of their economic base, by some means. The real question then is whether that grip has been established.

Why do they behave the way they do? Because they have jobs and money.

What can be done about it? Take away there jobs and money.

The country tried that, in 2007/2008. They got worse, not better - started running around in tricorn hats and carrying guns.

Is the study targetting the 'leadership' of the American Conservative movement, or regular people like me, who happen to share a few of of the ideals which are sometimes labeled 'conservative' ?

Nothing about "ideals" is relevant. It's patterns of behavior and specific belief that are at issue.

 

 

 

 

last year Canadian taxpayers ( sorry I don't have US equivalent values, but I'm sure they can be looked up and it'll shock people ) spent over 60 billion dollars just on interest, servicing our combined federal and provincial debt. This money did not go into social services, salaries, defence, education or health. It was paid directly to big banks and bond holders. In other word, this money contributes directly to the wealth inequality that you,

Tax rich people to pay off those bonds - use a "progressive income tax" or the like - and the contribution to wealth inequality will vanish, while the benefits from the infrastructure and so forth will remain.

 

 

 

 

Cutting government spending does not necessarily lead to an erosion of our social 'safety net'.

Cutting spending specifically and dramatically from the support of the social safety net does lead to erosion of that net, however. And that is the behavior of the politicians who promulgate "political conservatism" in the US - Ronald Reagan, for example, cut government spending on mental health care facilities and programs, whereupon that aspect of the social safety net eroded away and tens of thousands of mentally ill people hit the streets. Soon the prison population began to rise. along with the number of homeless people and the demand on food shelves and other charities.