When Facts Don’t Matter

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When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 17, 2011 2:29 pm

When Facts Don’t Matter

Left Reflections on Backfire, Propaganda, and How to Fight (or Not Fight) the Right

February 17, 2011

By Paul Street


You know the drill by now with your dodgy right-wing Republican neighbor, colleague, co-worker, sibling, uncle, or cousin who says nice things about Glenn Beck and “the Tea Party” and who can’t stop spouting off about that great left wing radical Barack Obama and how he’s “ruining the country with socialism.” He believes and often boldly states all or some of the following things, most of which he has picked up from right wing media outlets like Fox News and talk radio:

* The (in fact militantly corporatist and military-imperialist Democratic Party) poses a radical Left threat to the capitalist system and the U.S. military.

* Barack Obama (not born in the United States) is a left Marxist and an ally of radical Islam

* Barack Obama took over the auto, financial, and health care industries, putting them under the direction of socialistic big-government power.

* The Federal Reserve and numerous other top federal agencies pose imminent “socialist” threats to democracy.

* The corporate media work for and are run by extreme liberals and leftists who loathe the nation’s conservatives and democratic values.

* The progressive income tax is a communist plot.

* Obama’s policies favor the poor, blacks, immigrants and Muslims over the rich and the hard working middle class

* Obama is an advocate of reparations to compensate black Americans for centuries of slavery.

* Obama and the Democrats are strongly attached to extreme welfare expenditures for urban minorities.

* Whites and blacks have an equal chance of getting ahead in the U.S.

* Any powers exercised by the national government beyond those specifically listed in the Constitution are unconstitutional; the health reform bill is unconstitutional.

* The U.S. Constitution is a holy covenant based on divine principles.

* Americans are under serious risk of internal takeover by radical Muslims who want to overthrow democracy by imposing “Sharia Law” on the U.S.

* The U.S. has been under top-down socialist assault since the Progressive Age, when president Woodrow Wilson assaulted American freedom and prosperity with his radical agenda, setting the stage for further and ever more leftward developments under Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and, last but not least Barack Obama – “the most left wing president in American history.”

* The economy will improve significantly only if Republicans are returned to power.

* Obama and Democrats are entirely to blame for “unsustainable” U.S. deficits and debt.

* The national debt as at its highest point in U.S. history.

* Nations cannot experience economic vitality and a significant governmental debt at one and the same time.

* The Obama administration and Federal Reserve are debasing the U.S. dollar and imposing runaway inflation on the American people.

* It would be of great benefit to the economic health of the nation to abolish the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard.

* Obama raised most Americans’ taxes in 2009 and 2010.

* The Democrats’ health care reform will radically increase the deficit and national debt.

* Tax cuts primarily for the rich are the only effective means of promoting economic stimulus.

* Anthropogenic global warming doesn’t exist or will result in no serious impact.

* Human are divinely ordained and directed to use as many fossil fuels and other raw materials as rapidly as possible.

* Efforts to address climate change are part of radical left conspiracy to impose world government and a sweeping redistribution of wealth.

* American universities are loaded down with and dominated by left wing radicals who are working to brainwash students to hate the United States and American freedom and prosperity.

Each of these beliefs is egregiously false. Many are blatantly preposterous. Some of them are positively wacky and paranoid. They are dysfunctional for most of the people who hold them – not to mention the rest of us – since many of them encourage policies that enhance the ever-expanding hyper-concentration of wealth, the persistence of economic misery, and the ruination of livable ecology. It does not generally serve one’s interests to go through life holding views and making decisions (political and otherwise) based on horrific misinformation. The rich are destroying the Earth and robbing the country blind while millions of American obsess about the mythical radical Left sentiments and conspiracies of the supposed illegal alien Barack Obama and his band of militant environmentalist, black nationalist, and communist comrades like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Backfire

In the past, at family events or discussions on the stoop or over the backyard fence, you’ve spent energy trying to argue against these sorts of assertions with facts, evidence, and reality – with reason. But you’ve stopped doing that. You’ve learned that your right wing neighbor/uncle/ colleague doesn’t care about facts. He’s not into evidence and is deeply suspicious of reasoned discourse. He will defend the various ways in which he knows that 2 + 2 = 5 to his last dying breath. Facts don’t matter in his world. Confronted with rationally presented counter-evidence, with facts that do not fit his assertions, in fact, he deepens his attachment to what he believes. It’s not just that he refuses to revise his position; he embraces the position more fiercely than before. He’s like a detective who deepens his insistence that a person was killed by lightning with every bit of forensic evidence you present showing conclusively that the victim was murdered with a shot to the head.

It’s scary. We like to believe that most people know and care about what is accurate and that if presented with real facts to prove that they’re wrong they would change their views accordingly. Indeed, one of the core assumptions behind faith in democracy is that an informed citizenry is preferable to an ignorant one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. Knowledge is supposed to be the lifeblood of popular governance. If people are furnished with the facts, the notion goes, then they will be clear-headed thinkers and superior citizens. If they are ignorant or mistaken, the facts will set them straight.

In fact, by my experience with many “conservative” Americans, the response to factual disproof is exactly the opposite. Facts, I observe, do not cure their misinformation. Rather, “like an underpowered antibiotic,” writer Joe Keohane notes, “facts… actually make [that] misinformation even stronger.”1

I am not alone in this observation. Some important social-psychological research out of the University of Michigan last summer shows that misinformed Americans adhere to their original beliefs even more strongly than before when presented with contradictory facts. This dangerous tendency is particularly pronounced with “conservatives” (right wingers), who were shown in controlled surveys to deepen their partisan beliefs on weapons of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” (that Iraq had them before George W. Bush ordered invasion), Barack Obama’s birthplace (outside the U.S., according to many right wingers), immigration (harmful and rising, according to the right), welfare (harmful and supposedly a huge portion of the federal budget) and other issues when presented with evidence contradicting their beliefs. For many Americans, factual proof that a belief is false seems only to reinforce that belief’s sway over reality.

The researchers call this phenomenon “backfire” and conclude that it raises disturbing questions about citizens’ capacity for meaningful democratic participation. Sadly enough, highly misinformed right wing citizens are particularly convinced of the correctness of their positions and more highly motivated to act politically on their convictions than other citizens and study participants – something that gives their wrong-headed view outsized political significance.2

There are two hopeful silver linings in the findings. The leading backfire researcher and political scientist Brendan Nyhan performed a study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new and correcting information and revise their political beliefs tan people who had not. “In other words,” Keohane notes, “if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This,” Keohane ads, “would …explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.”

An influential experiment by University of Illinois researcher James Kuklinski determined that “conservative” citizens became more much more likely to revise their false beliefs on welfare (that it accounts for a large percentage o the federal budget, that a vast number of people receive it, that most welfare recipients are black, and that welfare payments are very high) when researchers “hit them,” in Keohane’s words, “between the eyes with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas.” When given correct information by researchers in a direct and highly interactive fashion, backfire was significantly reduced.3

Cognitive Dissonance: Rationalization Trumps Rationality

What’s behind the growing authoritarian right-wing backfire phenomenon, so disturbing to behold at family dinners and so ubiquitous in U.S. political culture? Part of the explanation lay in the venerable psychological theory of cognitive dissonance, which holds that humans are often rationalizing instead of rational beings. Particularly when people are heavily invested in a belief, evidence that undermines that belief is a blow to their ego. Counter-evidence assaults their concept of themselves as smart, rational, and together – as functional and adult. The painful dissonance that results – the conflict between (a) their sense of their own competence and (b) evidence suggesting that that sense is significantly excessive – calls for resolution. If the conflict is not reduced by changing one's belief to match the facts – a humbling experience for many, requiring a reasonable capacity for shame – it can easily the belief-holder to try to “restore consonance” by deepening their faith in the false idea, seeking support from others who hold it, and attempting to persuade others of the belief.

Cognitive dissonance theory first emerged in the social psychologist Leon Festinger's chilling McCarthy-era book, When Prophecy Fails (1956). Festinger and some fellow researchers infiltrated a cult group that stridently and confidently predicted the end of the Earth at the hands of aliens on a fixed and imminent date. Many members dedicated their worldly possessions to the group to support its mission of proselytizing doom. The day of projected doom came and the birds still tweeted and the earth still stood. A big wake-up call for the group’s members, right? Wrong. When its prediction failed, the cult did not revise its beliefs and collapse but rather deepened its faith in an imminent world collapse and expanded its membership. Group members argued that the aliens had given the world a second chance for survival, picked another future date to warn about, and widened their circle of recruitment. Admitting that they’d fallen prey to a vicious hoax and/or delusional idea would have been acknowledging an episode of extreme gullibility and/or stupidity, something that was too painful for them to do: better to tweak their mad theory and grow the circle of converts!

But surely, one might argue, the fact that these beliefs don’t work, rationally and materially speaking, for the interests of the holders undermines their hold on the minds of the believers, right? Not necessarily. Festinger and his researchers found that people tend to more deeply and doggedly internalize false beliefs precisely when the rewards they get for holding those beliefs are slight. This finding seems counter-intuitive but ego-defense provides a plausible explanation: When you get a significant external reward for advancing a false idea – the notion that the conservative neoliberal capitalist Barack Obama is a big government socialist, for example – you don’t have actually believe hat idea to rationalize ego your willingness to do that. It does not require you to actually internalize the incorrect belief. You do it because it pays. Thing are very different when there is no external reward. Then the only way to make sense of believing something false and harmful is to decide that you believe it because it’s true.

Do Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, their employer Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire arch-polluters Koch brothers (leading financial backers of “the Tea Party”), and Sarah Palin really believe that America is being bankrupted by public family cash assistance and federal worker salaries; that global warming is a radical conspiracy; and that Obama is a left peacenik who has ushered in crippling bureaucratic socialism? They may or may not but they don’t have to in order to internally justify their dissemination of such preposterous notions because those ideas are making them filthy rich. The construction worker who helped undermine his own material well-being by trumpeting the anti-union rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh garners no such ego-inflating external reward and thus feels more pressure to actually adopt the ridiculous ideas Beck and his manipulative ilk believe or pretend to believe.

The idea that self-esteem and the need to protect it is part of the backfire phenomenon is supported in Nyhan's finding that backfire falls among citizens when their sense of self-worth goes up.

Manufacturing Misinformation

But it’s not just about individual and group psychology, of course. A big part of the right-wing backfire problem arises on the political news and information supply side, so to speak. Modern democratic theory posits the standard dichotomy between an ignorant citizenry (bad for democracy) and an informed one (good for democracy). But many citizens and voters fall in neither category. They are neither well-informed nor merely uninformed. They are something worse than ignorant – they are misinformed, believing objectively false things that have been planted in their heads and senses of self esteem by extremely powerful communications and propaganda institutions like Time Warner, Comcast, and the News Corporation. The most relevant media source for right wingers is of course Fox News, which the preponderant majority of self-identified Tea Party supporters cite as by far and away their main source of political information. Along with right-wing talk radio (I still remember Sean Hannity screaming on Election Day in November 2008 that voters had “three hours left to stop the socialist takeover of this great country by voting for John McCain”), far right newspapers like Murdoch’s New York Post and right wing politicos themselves systematically foment the monumentally false ideas listed at the beginning of this article. They drive and reflect the ominous return of the right-wing “paranoid style”4 in American politics. The generation and dissemination of these ideas and style is proceeding at a record pace thanks in great measure to the spectacular expansion of right wing media.

Numerous deeply ignorant, conspiratorial, and paranoid ideas have buzzed around the margins of the American right for decades, of course, before and since the McCarthy era. Such ideas have now have resurfaced and gained legitimacy in the dominant political culture like no time since the 1950s. There are at least four basic reasons for this. First, the Republican Party continues to move rightward and no longer seems willing or able to reign in its more extreme elements. In the early 1960s, Princeton historian Sean Willentz notes, “the [John] Birch [Society] …provoked deep anxiety among conservatives, who feared being perceived as paranoids and conspiracy-mongers.” That fear has disappeared on the part of much of the current Republican elite, which rushes in many cases to align itself with “the Tea Party,” which, according to one poll in the fall of 2010, garnered support from more than 70 percent of Republicans.

Second, top Democrats seem unwilling or unable to denounce the authoritarian threat on the right. In a 1961 speech in Los Angeles, Democratic president John F. Kennedy clearly denounced those “discordant voices of extremism” that “equate[d] the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, and socialism with Communism.” There has been no such clear and explicit denunciation of the new right paranoia from President Barack Obama or other top Democrats on the whole. As Willentz notes, “Obama’s White House [in October 2010] is still struggling to make sense of its enemies. In the absence of forthright leadership, on both the right and the left, the job of standing up to extremists appears to have been left to the electorate.”5

Third, a powerful right-wing communications empire arose in the late 1980s and now holds major propaganda strongholds operating from within the very heart of mainstream media. Fox News and the vast talk radio network broadcast the delusions of hard-right propagandists and their false– and rancid-populist paranoia and rage. With all due respect to the frothing reactionism of Father Coughlin in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy’ short-lived televised bully pulpit in the 1950s, and Mort Downey in the 1980s, there’s just never been anything like the current “right wing noise machine” in American media and politics culture.

Last but not least. late 20th and early 21st century America is dangerously bereft of a really existing relevant Left capable of countering right-wing stereotypes, pushing the Democrats to enact effective and progressive programs that might keep right wing critiques at bay, and capturing legitimate popular anger that is dangerously captured and misdirected by right-wing activists and personalities.

Left Vacuum

This last point – the left wing vacuum – is very important. Noam Chomsky has argued that the Tea Party represents legitimate popular anger that “the left” would do well not to ignore or mock. Chomsky frames the Tea Party’s success as a “sign of the failure of the left” because Tea Party supporters have “real grievances” rooted in the stagnation of American wages, the growth in unemployment, and bipartisan attempts to dismantle the social welfare state. Chomsky warned that growing public anger, expressed by Middle America and the poor, carried with it the specter of radical right-wing violence.6 Chomsky advanced more elaborate and grave reflections, evoking the memory of early German Nazism:

“Right now…there is a right-wing populist uprising. It’s very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that’s not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances….And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened…so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered—‘it’s the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don’t care about you.’ Either they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on…The reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren’t we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren’t getting them anywhere else.”

“The liberal Democrats aren’t going to tell the average American, ‘Yeah, you’re being shafted because of the policies that we’ve established over the years that we’re maintaining now.’ That’s not going to be an answer. And they’re not getting answers from the left. So, there’s an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they’re very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything. It’s a crazy answer, but it’s an answer. And it’s our fault if that goes on…. So…don’t ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, “Take over your factories.”7

Now, by my own findings in a forthcoming book (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) titled Crashing the Tea Party, the Tea Party phenomenon is not particularly rooted in the nation’s working and lower class majority. Its adherents are relatively affluent and petit-bourgeois and do not generally work in factories or other working class settings. Still, the left progressive vacuum that Chomsky bemoans is very real, leaving the field of popular resentment all too precariously open for the dangerous ranting and propaganda of Glenn Beck at al. It’s true that working people are “not getting answers from the left” (though here one might well ask “what left?”). And this is relevant even if it is not the case that the far right is winning over all that much of the working class and its populist anger. The left, such as it is, has been all too ready to surrender the mantle of populist rage to the dodgy, regressive, and authoritarian right.8 As Progressive magazine editor Mathew Rothschild wrote last October:

"The very character of our country is at stake…with economic pain at the highest level ever seen by most Americans, and with minorities especially hard hit, we’re seeing a revolt not by people of color, not the unemployed, nor the foreclosed upon. Instead, we’re seeing a revolt by the white middle class. It’s a revolt against the very notion of a positive role for government in helping people. It’s a revolt against Latin American immigrants. It’s a revolt against Muslim Americans. And it’s a revolt against our black president."9

There’s a telling contrast here with Europe. As millions of European citizens flooded the streets in major social movements and marches to resist public budget, wage, and pension cuts imposed by the global economic crisis last September and October, American progressives could muster only a modest turnout in early October for the “One Nation” rally in Washington functioned primarily as a pre-election get-out-the-vote rally for the Democrats and not as a significant statement against the bipartisan elite.10

How to Respond

So what’s a good, reasonably informed left progressive supposed to do about typically white and Middle American right-wing backfire in their midst? If you must engage your right wing uncle or neighbor or colleague on political matters, the research indicates that you should do so in a particular kind of way. Be very direct and personable in your presentation of evidence. Avoid the argument that their beliefs don’t serve their interests – this could only deepen their attachment to those beliefs. Avoid anger and shaming – this will only hook them into ego defense and sharpen their belief attachments. Be sure to highlight affirmation – of the legitimacy of their anger, of their reasonable alienation from liberal elites (who really exist and can be quite infuriating, as all good leftists know), of their sense that the world is going to Hell in a hand basket (it is, actually) – in your approach. Do not ridicule. Gently suggest alternative explanations – relating to corporate and military power – for the economic and social pain and insecurity that attacks their sense of self-esteem (thereby deepening their attachment to preposterous rightist ideas) and which they attribute to the supposed socialism of Obama and the Democrats. Along the way consider the insights of Buddhist thinker Pema Chodron on what triggers shenpa, the Tibetan word for attachment:

“Here’s how shenpa shows up in everyday experience. Somebody says a harsh word and something in you tightens: instantly you’re hooked….The chain reaction of speaking or acting or obsessing happens fast…This is very personal. What was said gets to you – it triggers you…The fundamental, most basic shenpa is to ego itself: attachment to our identity, the image of who we think we are. When we experience our identity as being threatened, our self-absorption gets very strong, and shenpa automatically arises. Then there is the spin-off – such as attachment to our possessions or to our views and opinions. For example, someone criticizes your politics, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your dearest friend …As soon as the words have registered – boom its there. Shenpa is not the thoughts or emotions per se. Shenpa is preverbal, but it breeds thoughts and emotions very quickly. If we’re attentive, we can feel it happening.”11

Another approach is not to engage at all. If you lack the patience or sensitivity or other abilities required to argue in a productive way, it is probably best not to say anything at all and thereby to keep backfire at bay. Switch the topic to food or sports. Arguing with right-wingers can actually intensify the right wing threat. At the same time, it’s not at all necessary to win right wingers over to your/our position (assuming that you even could do that in the first place). It is important to keep in mind that the right wing mindset does not represent anything close to majority opinion in the U.S. That opinion is actually remarkably progressive and social democratic on numerous key and core issues relating to economic and social justice, business power, and public priorities.12 Thanks to the left and progressive institutional vacuum in this country, however, that majority progressive public opinion is savagely de-mobilized and shockingly irrelevant even as a dedicated minority of highly motivated right wing, Beck-quoting Tea Party types help (with no small assistance from the corporate and Republican elite) tilt the political and policy spectrum further and dangerously rightward. “The left” has not generally lost it working class constituency to the right (the Tea Party is not a working class social movement at all – far from it)13. It has shut itself and its constituency down (again with no small help from economic and political elites) to a startling extent, leaving the field shockingly open to the authoritarian right.14 As the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne wrote in September of 2010, anticipating the deadly consequences of the pacification and depression of what passes for a left in the U.S.: “where are the progressives? Sulking is not an alternative…the Tea Party may be pulling a fast one on the country...But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, get away with it.”15



Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org)is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007; Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010); and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio), Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, May 2011). Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com


SELECTED ENDNOTES

1 Joe Keohane, “How Facts Backfire,” Boston Globe, July 11, 2010 at http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas ... _backfire/

2 Brendan Nylan, and Jason Reifler, “When Correction Fails: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Political Behavior (2010), read pre-published version online athttp://www- personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf. For an interesting discussion see “Sometimes The Facts Don't Matter,” National Public Radio, July 13, 2010 at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =128490874

3 Keohane, “How Facts Backfire.”

4 Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, read at http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy ... style.html

5 Sean Willentz, “Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,” The New Yorker, October 18, 2010.

6 Jon Hochschartner, “I Don’t See Much Difference: An Interview with Noam Chomsky,” Z Magazine, April 2010.

7 Noam Chomsky and Diane Krauthamer, “Worker Occupations and the Future of Radical Labor: An Interview with Noam Chomsky,” Z Magazine, February 2010, 22.

8 Paul Street, “What’s the Matter With the Democrats? Post-Massachusetts Reflections on Popular Resentment, the Liberal-Left Vacuum, and the Right Comeback,” ZNet (January 24, 2010); Lance Selfa, “Can the Right Stage a Comeback?” International Socialist Review, Issue 69 (January-February 2010).

9 Matthew Rothschild, “Rampant Xenophobia,” The Progressive (October 16, 2010), 8.

10 On the October 2 rally, see Jared Ball, “One Nation Under a Grip, Not a Groove,” Black Agenda Report, October 6, 2010; and Glen Ford, “Ignominious Surrender on the Mall,”Black Agenda Report, October 6, 2010, both at www.blackagendareport.com/?q=node&page=1. On the remarkable European protests and the telling contrast with the comparatively demobilized and left-bereft United States, see Richard D. Wolff, “European Workers Distance from U.S. Through Action,” ZNet, October 6, 2010, at www.zcommunications.org/european-worker ... d-d-wolff; and Richard D. Wolff, “French Labor Activism, U.S. Labor Passivism,” ZNet, October 16, 2010, atwww.zcommunications.org/french-labor-activism-us-labor-passivism-by-richard-d-wolff.

11 Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap (Shambala, 2010), 22-23.

12 For sources and details, see Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), Appendix A; Katherine Adams and Charles Derber, The New Feminized Majority (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 67–75; Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs, Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Charles Berber, “Capitalism: Big Surprises in Recent Polls,” Common Dreams (May 19, 2010) at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/18-3

13 See Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio, Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, May 2011), Chapters 3 (titled, “Tea Party ‘Super-Republicans’: Who They are and What They Believe”) and 6 (“Astroturf to the Core: Reflections on a Mass-Mediated ‘Movement’”).

14 Street, “What’s the Matter with the Democrats?”

15 E.J. Dionne, “The Tea Party Movement is a Scam,” RealClearPolitics (September 23, 2010)


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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby justdrew » Thu Feb 17, 2011 7:11 pm

good article but a heck of a lot of typo-corrections/editing needed.
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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby wallflower » Thu Feb 17, 2011 9:30 pm

I like this piece and was a bit puzzled by justdrew's response to it:

good article but a heck of a lot of typo-corrections/editing needed.


OkCupid researchers recently came out with an interesting article "The Best Questions For A First Date." http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-first-dates/ The question if you want to know "Is my date religious?" is to ask: "Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?" It turns out that as a group rationalist hate spelling and grammar mistakes. I'm not religious, but prone to making spelling and grammar mistakes, so I'm not very sensitive to them.

I was curious that I hadn't caught any mistakes in the article, so I copied and pasted the article into a word processing document. Even with the aid of red squiggly lines inserted with the software, I still don't see mistakes.

The issues of editorial judgement is trivial, except that it reflects a rhetorical style that Paul Street is critiquing. The centrality of self-esteem is key towards understanding both the effectiveness and pitfalls of ad hominem.

Left and left-leaning discourse online suffers from a lack of generosity. I think we often don't even notice that there's a problem because left and left-leaning folks hold vigorous rational debate in such high esteem. I fear that we often don't recognize how the psychology Street points to: "The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are." affects people on the left as well as the right.

Singing to and singing with the choir aren't a waste of time because self esteem is central to our beliefs and acts. Attention to our rhetoric is important regardless of who we're talking too. Especially online, phatic speech acts, words serving a social function, are important. That's not to say rigor isn't important, of course it is; rather that for rhetoric to be effective, we must consider the importance of self esteem as we speak.
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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby justdrew » Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:28 pm

well I'm not going to go through with a red pen, but there are repeated words, a missing word or two, etc. Spelling mistakes are rare these days, but it leads to other mistakes. Didn't make it unreadable, but it did make me think twice about posting it on to others. ok, so I guess I DID get the red pen out...

He’s like a detective who deepens his insistence that a person was killed by lightning with every bit of forensic evidence you present showing conclusively that the victim was murdered with a shot to the head.

should be when

who were shown in controlled surveys to deepen their partisan beliefs on weapons of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” (that Iraq had them before George W. Bush ordered invasion),

extra words, and "the invasion" would be better, but I guess the verb form as written is ok too, but I feel like it wasn't intentional.

and revise their political beliefs tan people

tan people?

citizens became more much more likely

extra word

that it accounts for a large percentage o the federal budget

needs an ' at least :) or an f

Part of the explanation lay

shouldn't it be lies here? If the sentence started with, "it turns out that..." lay would be fine.

– it can easily the belief-holder to try to “restore consonance” by

should probably be "be easy for"

you don’t have actually believe hat idea to rationalize

old hat, new hat, red hat, blue hat.

the billionaire arch-polluters Koch brothers

the billionaire arch-polluters, the Koch brothers
or
the billionaire arch-polluting Koch brothers

Such ideas have now have resurfaced and

extra word

Joe McCarthy’ short-lived televised

missing s

Last but not least. late 20th and early 21st century America is

should be a comma

right wing

inconsistent hyphenation of right-wing/left-wing

propaganda of Glenn Beck at al.

et

And this is relevant even if it is not the case that the far right is winning over all that much of the working class and its populist anger.

needlessly beginning a sentence with "and"

generally lost it working class

missing an s
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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby anothershamus » Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:46 pm

I thought the three questions were outlined scientifically in this article:

The Best Questions For A First Date

February 8th, 2011 by Christian Rudder

First dates are awkward. There is so much you want to know about the person across the table from you, and yet so little you can directly ask.

This post is our attempt to end the mystery. We took OkCupid's database of 275,294 match questions—probably the biggest collection of relationship concerns on earth—and the 776 million answers people have given us, and we asked:
What questions are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about?

Love, sex, a soulmate, an argument, whatever you're looking for, we'll show you the polite questions to find it. We hope they'll be useful to you in the real world.
First—define "easy to bring up"

Before we could go looking for correlations to deeper stuff, our first task was to decide which questions were even first-date appropriate. I know each person has his own opinion on what's okay to talk about with a stranger. I also know that if I had to wade through hundreds of thousands of user-submitted questions like these verbatim examples:
If you were to be eaten by cannibal, how would you like to be prepaired?
do u own 3 or more dildos in your room?
Do you hsve a desent job?

I would go fucking insane. The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!

So, instead of judging each question's first-date appropriateness subjectively, I turned to statistics. I decided our candidates were the ones that (a) most people were comfortable discussing publicly, and (b) were mathematically likely to tell you something you couldn't just guess. I sliced OkCupid's question pool like this:

Image

That blue rectangle is our highest-quality, least-invasive questions, and we next examined each of them for interesting correlations. (If you're interested in knowing more about the above graph, you can drop-down an explanation here, complete with an interactive scatter plot that took me forever to make.)

More details on how we pared down our candidate pool of first-date questions [hide this]

Whenever a user answers a match question on OkCupid, he has the option of keeping his answer private by clicking this box:

The less often people check that box for a given question, the more confident we can be that the question is okay to talk about. I sorted our huge mass of questions accordingly. Here's a simulation of the process—I can only picture a small subset of the data we crunched, but it should illustrate the principle involved. To explore the questions in the plot, you can mouse-over one to bring it forward and click it to send it back.
interactive step #1: sort by privacy | undo

At first, this seemed to work pretty well. It at least separated the questions about race and politics and sexual history from, say:
Are clams alive?

But as we got deeper into this post, this ordering felt inadequate. A question like Which describes you better, normal or weird? might be fine to ask, but doing so is of little value because almost everyone has the same answer. 79% of people think they are weird. Ironists "rejoice".

We wanted to recommend useful questions, not just ones that weren't awkward. So I added another dimension to the plot: how much each question splits public opinion. I've called this second property "answer diversity." Now let's sort by it, too:
add a sort by answer diversity |undo

Doing this, we can think of our space of questions as four zones, roughly described like so:

Clearly, the lower right-hand corner contains the kind of questions we want, and that's where we found the correlations we report below. Just wanted you guys to know we didn't get them out of thin air, or, worse, off some blog.

Now let's get right to the results.
Do my date and I have long-term potential?
Ask your date (and yourself!)...

* Do you like horror movies?
* Have you ever traveled around another country alone?
* Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?


Of all questions appropriate to a first date, the three listed above were the ones couples most often agreed on.

This is the shallow stuff to ask when you want to know something deep:
Okay, if you want to know...
Will my date have sex on the first date?
Ask...


* Do you like the taste of beer?

Because...

Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date.

Image

No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they've just met. Sadly, this is the only question with a meaningful correlation for women.

full article here:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-first-dates/
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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby Simulist » Thu Feb 17, 2011 11:16 pm

When Facts Don’t Matter

How much can facts really matter among a people who — in spite of their oligarchic government and genocidal history — can still manage the self-referential words, "land of the free, home of the brave"?
"The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
    — Alan Watts
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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Feb 17, 2011 11:55 pm

wallflower wrote:I like this piece and was a bit puzzled by justdrew's response to it:

good article but a heck of a lot of typo-corrections/editing needed.


OkCupid researchers recently came out with an interesting article "The Best Questions For A First Date." http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-best-questions-for-first-dates/ The question if you want to know "Is my date religious?" is to ask: "Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?" It turns out that as a group rationalist hate spelling and grammar mistakes. I'm not religious, but prone to making spelling and grammar mistakes, so I'm not very sensitive to them.

I was curious that I hadn't caught any mistakes in the article, so I copied and pasted the article into a word processing document. Even with the aid of red squiggly lines inserted with the software, I still don't see mistakes.

The issues of editorial judgement is trivial, except that it reflects a rhetorical style that Paul Street is critiquing. The centrality of self-esteem is key towards understanding both the effectiveness and pitfalls of ad hominem.

Left and left-leaning discourse online suffers from a lack of generosity. I think we often don't even notice that there's a problem because left and left-leaning folks hold vigorous rational debate in such high esteem. I fear that we often don't recognize how the psychology Street points to: "The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are." affects people on the left as well as the right.

Singing to and singing with the choir aren't a waste of time because self esteem is central to our beliefs and acts. Attention to our rhetoric is important regardless of who we're talking too. Especially online, phatic speech acts, words serving a social function, are important. That's not to say rigor isn't important, of course it is; rather that for rhetoric to be effective, we must consider the importance of self esteem as we speak.


But why should I care, if I know I'm right? Also, if I do not lack self-esteem with regard to my rightness? Although I do wish I was (even!) more sexually magnetic. Also, if I don't really care if things get better in this rotten world?

Kidding. Well kidding and self-checking too.

wallflower, I really appreciate what you've written here. (The bit about agnostic rationalists being grammar hard-asses is as new to me as it is now obvious. Thank you!)

I should take heed to it more often. Your advice, and also Paul Street's in dealing with anti-rationalist discourse. That is, if communicating, learning and persuading are as important to me as "getting it right" (as distinguished from merely "being right"), which, well, they sometimes are and ought more often to be.

.........


Street's article is good. It's about something important.

It's also limited. It's a deserved critique of the counterpopulism or fake right-wing alternative to the intellectual mainstream. I think that beyond the fundamentalist religion and abortion niches, where people share real (if misguided) passions, right-wing politics nowadays are a marketing campaign pitched at the inchoately frustrated. Right-wing campaigns and attack media like FOXNEWS get so much cash from on high because they create a noisy show of opposition, but one designed to prevent change.

Right-wing ideology so obviously and proudly attacks and corrodes and spits on reason and fact, and specifically tramples on so many threatened groups and classes, that those who would come together in movements for social justice feel forced to fight it, as a matter of self-defense. Generally that means they cannot complicate that fight with some unrealistically elevated critique of the status quo. So they forget about fighting the status quo. In fact, "fighting the status quo" is what the right wingers are supposedly doing; they have successfully stolen the language of opposition.

I think that is the reason that the article does not mention the even more powerful and entrenched myths of the status quo, which are more sophisticated and, in fact, appear to be far better substantiated, but ultimately just as wrong:

- We have a democracy and rule of law; all citizens are equal before the law.

- In our system, a pluralist competition of different economic and political actors plays out on a relatively accessible and even field of public debate and political influence; the push and pull achieves a reasonably just equilibrium among legitimate interests; this has resulted in constant progress for almost all citizens.

- The major institutions of government and society are visible and run according to the Constitution, written law, and known and transparent procedures; they may be faulty but they strive to function as advertised, and generally do well enough that radical alternatives should be anathema.

- There are three and only three branches of government; the existing separation of powers among the branches and sub-branches of government is ideal; it makes for an even balance.

- A relatively strong president allows "things to get done," but the executive branch is not out of control.

- Secret power does not determine (too many) important questions; the Pentagon and security state are only a few percentage points of GDP and therefore relatively weak in determining the shape of society.

- Wars happen and it's naive to think they won't, so it's good to prepare for them; the best preparation for security is to achieve the ability to completely destroy enemies without sustaining casualties of your own.

- With few exceptions, markets are ideal mechanisms for utilitarian outcomes, with just distribution of economic rewards.

- Winners in the market generally win by having better ideas and therefore deserve their rewards; complainers are probably losers; cheaters generally are caught before they get too powerful; it is just that the winners accumulate capital and thus the power to determine other developments in economy and society.

- Wildly differential incomes are essential to maintaining the system of incentives that keeps the best and brightest working as hard as they can and producing good outcomes for the society as a whole; without extreme difference, the best and brightest would lose their motivation to innovate; society would become level, grey, uncreative and boring.

- Wealth is a product of something called the "private sector"; something called the "public sector" lives from it; the latter is necessary but in some sense regrettable; corporations and the state are separate, quasi antagonistic sectors.

- Economic growth measured in dollars and consumption of things is both essential and sustainable; it is the best organizing principle for economy and society.

- The environment is something separate from human society, out there; it is a good thing and worthy of protection but cannot be prioritized above economy or we will suffer; technological progress and economic growth have actually turned out to be very good for the environment!

- There is a political spectrum, conceived as a line, running from something called liberal on something called the left, to something called conservative on something called the right; left and right correspond in the main to the Republican and Democratic parties; all reasonable positions fall within the two poles; at the extremes, they represent a significant opposition with radically different visions and programs; the poles correspond to different political cultures, which are quasi-immutable and based in "red" and "blue" regions; almost everyone in the country is within the two poles, and anyone who is outside them belongs to an extremist minority that need not and should not be acknowledged in mainstream political discourse; even within the poles, excessive "partisanship" is a terrible problem, with left as bad as right; the best and most fair policies come from something called the center; good politics are defined as moderate or bipartisan; anything bipartisan must be good.

- There are interests we all share as something called "Americans" (or name the country) that are higher than all others; unity of the nation is always a good thing.

- Soldiers serve you; thank them.

- All nations are engaged in a single economic competition within the only best possible model of development; nations prevail and prosper by selling more stuff than they buy in international trade on a single world market, and by attracting more capital than other nations or places; despite how this sounds like a zero-sum game, thanks to growth it will be possible for all nations to prosper; whereas any form of protectionism will produce disasters.

- Capital arriving to your town, region or country from the outside to invest in anything and freely perform any business is always an unmitigated good thing; it brings jobs and prosperity; anyone questioning that would recklessly impoverish the common folk; the state and local authorities should always take measures to attract capital in whatever form.

- The first priority of education must be to prepare people for their future roles in the economy as defined by capital; anything else is a disservice to the children who will end up unemployable; those who argue otherwise may secretly hate children.

- Science, math and native language skills are real education; the rest is frills and possibly a distraction; what matters is measurable performance in these hard disciplines.

- Technological fixes or technocratic solutions for most problems are coming; successful outcomes will be measurable in variables subject to objective agreement among qualified experts; discussions of definitions, values and principles are a waste of time.

- The idea that you can generate capital locally and strive to develop local self-sufficiencies prior to participation in global market is a dangerous pipedream that will starve the poor and keep them down.

- Political views are like religions and should be tolerated, up to a point; but economics is a single science and should have primacy.

- We are all one; major religious beliefs all strive for the same ideas of love, humanity and justice; and yet they can be kept cleanly separate from the secular sphere.

- Science has solved the major questions and none of its current reigning paradigms will, as they have until now, fail or be modified beyond current recognition. Big Bang theory is just as good as evolution!

- Physicists are the top of the heap in wisdom; their opinions should be taken more seriously, whatever the subject.

- Actually, moneybags are the top of the heap in wisdom. If you made a lot of money, not only should you get to design the world as much as you can afford to do so with your own capital, but your opinions should be honored and obeyed by all.

- The Federal Reserve system and modern banking must operate in the way they do, because the economy and especially finance are too complex to consider alternatives, and only a few trained experts can understand what's best for all.

- Interest with compound interest is a necessary and always legitimate way of making money from money. Whatever the market will bear is fine.

- Anyone who questions the Federal Reserve System and modern banking must want to return to the gold standard and probably has other unworkable and probably paranoid or bigoted ideas.

- Real communism was tried out; the workers were in charge of the communist countries; it failed horribly to deliver the goods in an economic competition with the capitalist nations.

- Reagan's war budgets and the Afghanistan crusade spent the Commies into oblivion.

- Africa's problems will be solved by AIDS medicine; this should always be the first priority in any discussion of Africa; any talk of imperialism or foreign interference to this day is merely excuses and holds those people back; the genocide in Rwanda happened because Western countries failed to intervene, and therefore we should prepare to do so to prevent future occurrences.

- PR, advertising and marketing are communication; people are adults, they cannot be swayed or fooled easily; it is insulting and snobbish to suggest otherwise; they know what they want and the media merely inform them about ways to fulfill their desires (or give direct fulfillment in the form of entertainment).

- It is mean, snobbish and anti-social to restrict television time for tots.

- Big utopian ideas may be well-intentioned but come out of a dislike of complex human imperfection and will uniformly and always produce totalitarian results, so stop thinking them right now.

- Name the problem: past abuses were a mistake; things are not as bad today; shhh old news.

- Radical questioning of your country's established institutions, especially the tendency to see institutions or influential groups as serving interests or agendas different from their stated public purposes, is conspiracy theory; conspiracy theory is a single linked set of wrong views that reject reigning or official ideas; it is a kind of ideology that grows out of a pathological drive to assign too many patterns in explaining events; it either provides the believer with a sense of comfort in a complex world or renders him entirely helpless and useless to just causes, but it always generates terrible body odor; the mere invocation of the phrase against you is a nuclear weapon that vaporizes any argument you may wish to advance and pulverizes your credibility; therefore all persons writing on human affairs are wise to preemptively distance themselves from conspiracy theory by delivering a speech that reviews these points in order while heaping contempt on the conspiracy theories du jour, real or invented.

See what I mean?

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby wallflower » Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:48 am

JackRiddler:
Right-wing ideology so obviously and proudly attacks and corrodes and spits on reason and fact, and specifically tramples on so many threatened groups and classes, that those who would come together in movements for social justice feel forced to fight it, as a matter of self-defense. Generally that means they cannot complicate that fight with some unrealistically elevated critique of the status quo. So they forget about fighting the status quo. In fact, "fighting the status quo" is what the right wingers are supposedly doing; they have successfully stolen the language of opposition.


Oh yeah, I do see what you mean.

I have 3Quarks Daily in my newsreader. I find it hard to go back and find articles there, somehow I never seem to find what I want using search terms. I was looking for an fairly recent article so I scrolled through. It still took me a long time to find it. Along the way I read an article in The Jewish Daily Forward about Samuel T. Cohen, the creator of the neutron bomb. From the end of that article:
Facts are not a shield against stupidity, and that is a difficult concept for scientists to grasp.

Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/134967/#ixzz1EHu4HyQS


The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:

Part of what fuels the charge of accommodationism is the view that religious believers should be treated with contempt. The view has it that those who are contemptible are not worthy of respect. This seems true as far as it goes. But notice that to hold a person in contempt is to ascribe to him a capacity for responsibility. Accordingly, we do not hold the mentally deranged in contempt for their delusional beliefs; rather, we see their beliefs as symptoms of their illness. To see religious believers as proper objects of contempt, then, is to see them as people who should know better than to believe as they do. It is hence to see them as wrong but, importantly, not stupid. Thus it is a confusion to regard religious believers as both contemptible and cognitively beyond-the-pale. Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.


Agnotology is culturally induced ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology. There probably are important distinctions between mental derangement and agnotology. But in respect to the issue of responsibility; i.e. that we "do not hold the mentally deranged in contempt for their delusional beliefs," it seems to me that in a like way culturally-induced ignorance is also hard to hold someone responsible for. It's also important to note that people do overcome--snap out of it--culturally-induced ignorance sometimes. Avoiding disrespect or blows to self-esteem can be an important consideration in encouraging overcoming agnotologies. At least that seems in part what Paul Street thesis is.

When it comes to left and left leaning debate the presumption is that the context of the debate is to resolve error. JackRiddler asks (in jest) "But why should I care, if I know I'm right?" LOL well I like the 3Quarks article I'm pointing to, but I know it's limited too. Still, Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse offers a useful view of rational persuasion:

When it is aimed at rational persuasion, argumentation has two closely related objectives. The first is the obvious aim of demonstrating that the view that one favors is true. We engage in argument in order to make explicit the grounds upon which we base our beliefs; in making them believe explicit, we simultaneously provide support for our beliefs. The second aim of argumentation is easily overlooked. When we argue, we also engage in a diagnostic project. We aim not only to demonstrate the truth of our own view; we additionally endeavor to understand how our opponent arrived at her view, how she conceives of the relation between her view and her evidence. Put another way, in argumentation, we aim to discover where our opponent has gone wrong. Being able to identify others’ errors is often a crucial part of persuading them to change their views. Furthermore, being able to diagnose our opponents’ mistakes is intimately related to fully grasping our own views. Knowing an issue means not only knowing the right answers, but also where the wrong turns are. As Mill observed, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”


It's good to persuade another that various rightist ideas are loathsome; no easy task that. But I think it's unfortunate how often debate among people with left leanings becomes acrimonious. We need solidarity. The very sort of diagnostic project that Aikin and Talisse propose seems a valuable objective in debate, and I agree with the authors it is too easily overlooked. This objective is distinct from Paul Street's attention to self-esteem, but it seems to me quite connected to it. Even in a vigorous rational debate it seems that the objectives of the debate are furthered by language which demonstrates mutual respect.
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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby Canadian_watcher » Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:17 am

wallflower wrote:The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:

... Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.


this is hilarious. Academic strategy for plying people away from their belief in God.
Good luck. It'd never work on me. Logic cannot trump the experience of miracles.

I get so tired out from 'smart people' saying that a belief in God is a sign that I'm mentally inferior to those who 'just know that there can't be a God.' Einstein believed in God. Whatshisname rocket guy... Von Braun believe in God. I could go on of course. Have times really changed that much that possibly those scientists were socially pressured into saying publicly that they believed in God whereas maybe if they were alive today they would state otherwise? I doubt it. Or maybe times have changed to the point where we've now proven there isn't a God/Gods? If so I totally missed the press release on that one.

It's okay with me that there are atheists - if they want to believe that they themselves are this universe's greatest manifestation then so be it, but why isn't it okay with atheists that there are those of us who can feel that there is a force greater than ourselves? What's their beef? Religion as a Cause of War? I admit it's been a handy tool, but to stop that little ruse they have to look at the money behind the war, not the believers in a God of any name. That's probably too scary & real for them since they themselves have no faith in anything greater than themselves.

anyway.. sorry for the tangent. :offair:
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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:55 am

Canadian_watcher wrote:
wallflower wrote:The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:

... Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.


this is hilarious. Academic strategy for plying people away from their belief in God.
Good luck. It'd never work on me. Logic cannot trump the experience of miracles.

I get so tired out from 'smart people' saying that a belief in God is a sign that I'm mentally inferior to those who 'just know that there can't be a God.' Einstein believed in God. Whatshisname rocket guy... Von Braun believe in God. I could go on of course. Have times really changed that much that possibly those scientists were socially pressured into saying publicly that they believed in God whereas maybe if they were alive today they would state otherwise? I doubt it. Or maybe times have changed to the point where we've now proven there isn't a God/Gods? If so I totally missed the press release on that one.

It's okay with me that there are atheists - if they want to believe that they themselves are this universe's greatest manifestation then so be it, but why isn't it okay with atheists that there are those of us who can feel that there is a force greater than ourselves? What's their beef? Religion as a Cause of War? I admit it's been a handy tool, but to stop that little ruse they have to look at the money behind the war, not the believers in a God of any name. That's probably too scary & real for them since they themselves have no faith in anything greater than themselves.

anyway.. sorry for the tangent. :offair:


Tangent? I think these issues arise unavoidably in any discussion of what constitutes fact.

I urge you to start, whether here or in another topic, by defining this God, regardless of who might have endorsed it/him/her. We should be able to agree that there is no one concept of it, that concepts of it conflict. You yourself say God/Gods, which is curious: what difference are you willing to acknowledge between the Hindus' veritable army of differently worshipped gods, the monotheistic desert tyrant of the Old Testament, and a deist philosophy's abstract concept of god as a universal natural order? The range of god-concepts shows great differences within the broad religious traditions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, usually far greater differences than between their mainstream iterations.

Surely among the valid questions we get to ask: what are we expected to believe on the basis of faith? By faith I mean not a personal miraculous experience but the word of a scripture, a church authority, a charismatic leader or a person who claims to have had miraculous experience.

My answer is that I won't believe any such thing, especially if it is attached to a cultural and religious program of authorities and commandments, without evidentiary confirmation or a rationale in keeping with my own experiences (witness statements won't necessarily be rejected, but won't be accepted when involving things that initially seem to be violations of the universally observable natural laws, like spontaneous manifestations, angel levitations, hidden spaces used for heaven or hell, etc.).

Behind it all, another question: Can we acknowledge how much of what's out there in the way of religious claims in fact is hucksterism, lazy repetition, or a product of social pressure (sometimes backed by horrific physical sanctions)? I know, what makes us authorities to pass judgement, to say one religious belief is sincere (whether or not we believe it) whereas another is a cult or a scam or a social tradition based on a fairy tale? So let's not, yet, but ask generally: Are there scams and lies and delusions and sales campaigns out there in the form of religions or faith claims? Are you willing to make distinctions between these and sincere beliefs, and if so, how?

.
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To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby vanlose kid » Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:04 am

JackRiddler wrote:...

Surely among the valid questions we get to ask: what are we expected to believe on the basis of faith? By faith I mean not a personal miraculous experience but the word of a scripture, a church authority, a charismatic leader or a person who claims to have had miraculous experience.

... Behind it all, another question: Can we acknowledge how much of what's out there in the [guise of science] in fact is hucksterism, lazy repetition, or a product of social pressure (sometimes backed by horrific physical sanctions)? ...


complicating things a bit here:

"So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology; I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion." -- Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power


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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby vanlose kid » Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:40 am

wallflower wrote:...

The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:

Part of what fuels the charge of accommodationism is the view that religious believers should be treated with contempt. The view has it that those who are contemptible are not worthy of respect. This seems true as far as it goes. But notice that to hold a person in contempt is to ascribe to him a capacity for responsibility. Accordingly, we do not hold the mentally deranged in contempt for their delusional beliefs; rather, we see their beliefs as symptoms of their illness. To see religious believers as proper objects of contempt, then, is to see them as people who should know better than to believe as they do. It is hence to see them as wrong but, importantly, not stupid. Thus it is a confusion to regard religious believers as both contemptible and cognitively beyond-the-pale. Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.


...


i'd find it hard to characterize the following as being either contemptible or cognitively beyond the pale, but then again, i love Simone Weil, so i'm biased in her favor.


In the period of preparation for loving God, the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no such thing as bread. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. – Simone Weil.


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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby vanlose kid » Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:46 am

facts didn't much matter to Bach, it seems...



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edit: maybe his music should be forbidden and the scores burned for reasons of irrationality.

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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby Canadian_watcher » Fri Feb 18, 2011 11:35 am

JackRiddler wrote:
Canadian_watcher wrote:
wallflower wrote:The article I was looking for is "Accommodationism and Atheism" http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/accommodationism-and-atheism.html#more which has an interesting argument:

... Atheists must decide whether to proceed as if religious belief is a kind of mental disability or rather an error. If we choose the former, it is a mistake to see religious belief as a failure of intellectual responsibility; if we choose the latter, we must engage with religious believers in a way which manifests a proper regard for their cognitive capacities, and accordingly seeks to hear and address their best reasons and arguments.


this is hilarious. Academic strategy for plying people away from their belief in God.
Good luck. It'd never work on me. Logic cannot trump the experience of miracles.

I get so tired out from 'smart people' saying that a belief in God is a sign that I'm mentally inferior to those who 'just know that there can't be a God.' Einstein believed in God. Whatshisname rocket guy... Von Braun believe in God. I could go on of course. Have times really changed that much that possibly those scientists were socially pressured into saying publicly that they believed in God whereas maybe if they were alive today they would state otherwise? I doubt it. Or maybe times have changed to the point where we've now proven there isn't a God/Gods? If so I totally missed the press release on that one.

It's okay with me that there are atheists - if they want to believe that they themselves are this universe's greatest manifestation then so be it, but why isn't it okay with atheists that there are those of us who can feel that there is a force greater than ourselves? What's their beef? Religion as a Cause of War? I admit it's been a handy tool, but to stop that little ruse they have to look at the money behind the war, not the believers in a God of any name. That's probably too scary & real for them since they themselves have no faith in anything greater than themselves.

anyway.. sorry for the tangent. :offair:


Tangent? I think these issues arise unavoidably in any discussion of what constitutes fact.


Tangential from the OP.. but I guess it is germane, anyway. The subject of 'facts' fascinates me, because I think that there are few facts, really, since we are bound into an existence that requires agreement of observation as a basis for the definition of 'fact.' This relates to truth, naturally, which then relates to the reality of being - science, religion, mysticism, all of these strive to codify, contain & otherwise collect unknowable things and call them 'fact.'

JackRiddler wrote:I urge you to start, whether here or in another topic, by defining this God, regardless of who might have endorsed it/him/her. We should be able to agree that there is no one concept of it, that concepts of it conflict.


Oh I can't define God.. it's a personal thing - a deep thing and by that I mean deep in oneself, not subject to anything BUT oneself. So yes, for as many individuals as there are on this planet.. and possibly all of the animals and vegetation, too, concepts of God do conflict.

JackRiddler wrote:Surely among the valid questions we get to ask: what are we expected to believe on the basis of faith? By faith I mean not a personal miraculous experience but the word of a scripture, a church authority, a charismatic leader or a person who claims to have had miraculous experience.

My answer is that I won't believe any such thing, especially if it is attached to a cultural and religious program of authorities and commandments, without evidentiary confirmation or a rationale in keeping with my own experiences (witness statements won't necessarily be rejected, but won't be accepted when involving things that initially seem to be violations of the universally observable natural laws, like spontaneous manifestations, angel levitations, hidden spaces used for heaven or hell, etc.).


I like the question and your answer. No one should be expected to believe anything, particularly not because some authority somewhere tells them to. I have come to a place where I expect myself to believe.. or rather to sort of not forget.. what I know within myself based on my lifetime of experiences and readings etc etc. Maybe this is a classic case of my imprecision with language though, because maybe you are talking big "R" religion whereas I am talking belief in God/Gods/Goddess/Balance/Nature/Karma etc.


JackRiddler wrote:Are there scams and lies and delusions and sales campaigns out there in the form of religions or faith claims? Are you willing to make distinctions between these and sincere beliefs, and if so, how?


I can't do it. For one, sincere belief is sincere belief, no matter what it is based upon, so that isn't a scam in any way shape or form. Those who molded the experiences of the people who thereafter formed that sincere belief might be up to no good.. they might not. Case by case I'm sure we could detect a great many hucksters who profited from cultivating belief in something that they did not also believe. But is this exclusive to religion? Can this be said of science, too? Economics? The family? The state?

It comes around again to facts and our strange insistence that we know a great many of them. We don't, really. We know a lot of trivia. We have built scientific laws on large collections of trivia - for the most part these hold, luckily for us. But are they holding due to their absolute truth or due to the overwhelming belief most people have in them?
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.-- Jonathan Swift

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift
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Re: When Facts Don’t Matter

Postby 23 » Fri Feb 18, 2011 11:46 am

I'd worry about facts mattering only after people learn how to differentiate fact from opinion first.

It appears to me that too many people construe opinion to be fact, and don't take enough time and attention to sift out one from the other.

Acquire this skill first, and then you can assign whatever weight you'd like to facts. First things first.
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