It is every American’s inalienable right

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It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby PufPuf93 » Mon Nov 13, 2017 3:55 pm

The astute social commentator Frank Zappa once said on the Diana Shore show:

“It is every American’s inalienable right to NOT have a good time. That’s why god made Republicans.”
-FZ

Please discuss.

This is not to say that Democrats or any other political orientation guarantees a good time or good outcome in general but that Republicans are particularly adept at not having a good time and imposing the lack of good time for others as a major human pursuit.

Why are Republicans like that?

If you are a Republican, why? (not to say what you should be).

What is the innate construct of Republicanism that seeks to take the joy and fun out of life for themselves and for others?

Why are so many Republicans power hungry twisted perverts that believe it fine to demean others?

Why do Republicans defend and even double down on the crimes and perversities of Republican leaders?

Why?
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 13, 2017 4:04 pm

money and power are the most important thing for them..they used to be tolerable but now that they are the party of old white men they will do ANYTHING to stay in power.....keeping blacks from voting is their number one objective..they do not need to cheat at the polls they just need to keep people from getting there

they sold their souls to the religious right to stay in power



The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory




they see their power slipping away and they are trying desperately to hang on.....so sad...to bad...bye bye

I'd like to ask the people of Alabama that question


Dear #Alabama,

1) #47 in education
2) #48 in children deaths
3) #47 in children malnourished
4) #41 in children have children
5) #38 violence agst children?

Yet you continue to vote for Republicans?

Image

seemslikeadream » Sat Jul 29, 2017 1:11 pm wrote:
THE RIGHT WING

The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory
The deception started long before Donald Trump.
By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet July 28, 2017, 1:49 PM GMT


People are wondering out loud about the parallels between today’s Republican Party and organized crime, and whether “Teflon Don” Trump will remain unscathed through his many scandals, ranging from interactions with foreign oligarchs to killing tens of thousands of Americans by denying them healthcare to stepping up the destruction of our environment and public lands.

History suggests – even if treason can be demonstrated – that, as long as he holds onto the Republican Party (and Fox News), he’ll survive it intact. And he won’t be the first Republican president to commit high crimes to get and stay in office.

In fact, Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president we’ve had in this country.

Since Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, six different Republicans have occupied the Oval Office.

And every single one of them - from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump - have been illegitimate - ascending to the highest office in the land not through small-D democratic elections - but instead through fraud and treason.

(And today’s GOP-controlled Congress is arguably just as corrupt and illegitimate, acting almost entirely within the boundaries set by an organized group of billionaires.)

Let’s start at the beginning with Richard Nixon.

In 1968 - President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war.

But Richard Nixon knew that if the war continued - it would tarnish Democrat (and Vice President) Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election.

So Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend an upcoming peace talk in Paris.

Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he would give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

LBJ found out about this political maneuver to prolong the Vietnam war just 3 days before the 1968 election. He phoned the Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen – here’s an excerpt (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson:
Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he'll hold out 'til November the second they could get a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to get this in the campaign.

And they oughtn't to be doin' this. This is treason.

Sen. Dirksen: I know.

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon that Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

But by then - Nixon’s plan had worked.

South Vietnam boycotted the peace talks - the war continued - and Nixon won the White House thanks to it. As a result, additional tens of thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, died as a result of Nixon’s treason.

And Nixon was never held to account for it.

Gerald Ford was the next Republican.

After Nixon left office the same way he entered it - by virtue of breaking the law - Gerald Ford took over.

Ford was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason.

The third was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980.

He won thanks to a little something called the October Surprise - when his people sabotaged then-President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to release American hostages in Iran.

According to Iran’s then-president, Reagan’s people promised the Iranians that if they held off on releasing the American hostages until just after the election - then Reagan would give them a sweet weapons deal.

In 1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the fifty-two hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor earlier this year, had successfully run for President on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

"I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking]."

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980 Presidential election, California Governor Ronald Reagan, would go to win an election.

Behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran's radical faction - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini - to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election.

This was nothing short of treason. The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini - the so-called "October Surprise" - sabotaged Carter and Bani-Sadr's attempts to free the hostages. And as Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the “October Surprise,” which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.

And Reagan’s treason - just like Nixon’s treason - worked perfectly.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes.

And the same day Reagan took the oath of office - almost to the minute, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal - the American hostages in Iran were released.

And for that, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called "Iran Contra" scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

After Reagan - Bush senior was elected - but like Gerry Ford - Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan.

If the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980 - you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four illegitimate Republican presidents.

And that brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency - Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

"The counting of votes ... does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election."

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn't important that Scalia’s son worked for the law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn't important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida...which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)

And more than a year after the election - a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount in Florida - manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year - and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.

Why? because the 9/11 attacks had just happened - and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already in crisis.

And none of that even considered that Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s rolls just before the election.

So for the third time in 4 decades - Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one.

And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.

Most recently, in 2016, Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters – most people of color – from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Millions of otherwise valid American voters were denied their right to vote because they didn’t own the requisite ID – a modern-day poll-tax that’s spread across every Republican state with any consequential black, elderly, urban, or college-student population (all groups less likely to have a passport or drivers’ license).

Donald Trump still lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power through an electoral college designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.

You can only wonder how much better off America would be if 6 Republican Presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House.

In fact - the last legitimate Republican President - Dwight Eisenhower - was unlike any other Republican president since.

He ran for the White House on a platform of peace - that he would end the Korean War.

This from one of his TV campaign ads:

“The nation, haunted by the stalemate in Korea, looks to Eisenhower. Eisenhower knows how to deal with the Russians. He has met Europe leaders, has got them working with us. Elect the number one man for the number one job of our time. November 4th vote for peace. Vote for Eisenhower.”

Two of his campaign slogans were "I like Ike" and "Vote For Peace, Vote For Eisenhower".

Ike was a moderate Republican who stood up for working people - who kept tax rates on the rich at 91 percent - and made sure that the middle class in America was protected by FDR's New Deal policies.

As he told his brother Edgar in 1954 in a letter:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history."

And Eisenhower was right - the only way Republicans have been able to win the presidency since he left office in 1961 has been by outright treason, a criminal fraud involving conflicted members of the Supreme Court, or by being vice-president under an already-illegitimate president.

And that's where we are today, dealing with the aftermath of all these Republican crimes and six illegitimate Republican presidents stacking the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.

And this doesn’t even begin to tell the story of how the Republican majority in the senate represents 36 million fewer Americans than do the Democrats. Or how in most elections in past decades, Democrats have gotten more votes for the House of Representatives, but Republicans have controlled it because of gerrymandering.

This raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the modern Republican Party itself.

They work hand-in-glove with a group of right-wing billionaires and billionaire-owned or dominated media outlets like Fox and “conservative” TV and radio outlets across the nation, along with a very well-funded network of rightwing websites.

The Koch Network’s various groups, for example, have more money, more offices, and more staff than the Republican Party itself. Three times more employees and twice the budget, in fact. Which raises the question: which is the dog, and which is the tail?

And, as we’ve seen so vividly in the “debate” about healthcare this year, the Republicans, like Richard Nixon, are not encumbered by the need to tell the truth.

Whether it’s ending trade deals, bringing home jobs, protecting Social Security and Medicaid, or saving our public lands and environment – virtually every promise that Trump ran and won on is being broken. Meanwhile, the oligarchs continue to pressure Republican senators to vote their way.

Meanwhile, a public trust that has taken 240 years to build is being destroyed, as public lands, regulatory agencies, and our courts are handed off to oligarchs and transnational corporations to exploit or destroy.

The Trump and Republican campaign of 2016, Americans are now discovering, was nearly all lies, well-supported by a vast right-wing media machine and a timid, profit-obsessed “mainstream” corporate media. Meanwhile, it seemed that all the Democrats could say was, “The children are watching!”

Fraud, treason, and lies have worked well for the GOP for half a century.

Thus, the Democrats are right to now fine-tune their message to the people. But in addition to “A Better Deal,” they may want to consider adding to their agenda a solid RICO investigation into the GOP and the oligarchs who fund it.

It’s way past time to stop the now-routine Republican practice of using treason, lies, and crime to gain and hold political power.

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/gop- ... nd-treason



ALABAMA’S OWN HUMBERT HUMBERT

Roy Moore’s GOP Stands for ‘Grand Old Pedobears’
Supposed conservatives convinced Hillary Clinton was at the center of a global child sex-slavery and ring are now cheerfully using the “nut or a slut” attack on Moore’s accusers.

Rick Wilson
RICK WILSON
11.13.17 3:44 PM ET
The sad, sick saga of Judge Roy “Bad Touch” Moore (R-Lolicon), Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Alabama and alleged child defiler is the rare case where farce devolves into tragedy and not the other way around. In a just and sane world, Roy Moore would have already been disqualified, but in the era of Bannonite Republicanism, the gravity, credibility, and seriousness of the accusations against Moore aren’t disqualifiers; they’re selling points to a faction of the GOP intent on showing the world just how low they can sink as a party and as humans.

While the testimony of the first four victims is damning, the worst is yet to come, with the testimony of Beverly Nelson Monday adding deeper layers of evidence that Roy Moore’s pattern of predation included his attempts to intimidate his victims based on his role as the District Attorney.

Nelson recounts that Moore told her: “You're just a child and I am the District Attorney of Etowah County, and if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you.”

That should be a political death sentence, but then again after the first four victims shared their stories, 29% of Alabamians said they were more likely to vote for Moore because of those allegations.

Driven by the cult of Trump-Bannon outrage politics, Moore’s story of teen predation is rapidly metastasizing into another tumor in the political cancer that is consuming America from the inside out. The throat-burning putrefaction rising off the corpse of the GOP’s moral stature is at its most pungent not just from Moore’s actions, but from the passionate chorus of his defenders.

With the rise of the Moore controversy, I’ve done an uncomfortable amount of reading on this particular corner of human darkness. Whether you want to look it as evil (raises hand), a character flaw, an inherited compulsion or a cultural artifact, there are broad similarities in how those driven to inappropriate personal and sexual relationships with children ply their trade. If your stomach and imagination are strong enough, join me in envisioning the scene in late 1970s Alabama of Roy Moore and it rings every alarm bell in the patterns of behavior and technique of child predators.

His focus on the daughters of single mothers, his desire to isolate those girls from direct parental supervision, his reliance on his status, and then his post-hoc minimization of his behavior are all hallmarks of a man with strong prospects for gold in the “I Have A Puppy In My Van, Little Girl” Olympics. The fact he sought relationships and interactions with enough teen girls to fill out a high school cheerleading team is also a common pattern; this kind of paraphilia is marked by multiple targets and sadly, multiple victims.


Roy Moore Isn’t a Family Values Hypocrite—He’s an Exemplar

The patterns and contemporaneous accounts all paint the picture of Moore, then in his early 30s, creeping literally and metaphorically toward his victims, oleaginously charming, superficially unthreatening, softly whispering promises to their mamas that their little girls would be just fine in his company. After all, he was a lawwwwyer, and a young man on the rise.

You can imagine Roy Moore, serving up Mateus Rose and muttering in his molasses-mouthed Bama accent, “Leigh Corfman, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Leigh Corf-man, the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.” Until now, the Humbert Humbert of Alabama’s carnal desires for the junior-high set would have been seen like those of all paraphiliacs; somewhere on the spectrum between inexplicable and criminal.

The oppositional defiant disorder that is the hallmark of Bannon’s politics and “strategy” was on full display with the Trump media complex this weekend, with Bannon dispatching his Breitbart henchmen to Alabama to smear the women who came forward on the record to tell their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of Roy Moore. Social media is filled with “conservatives” who were utterly convinced Hillary Clinton was at the center of a global child sex-slavery and cannibalism ring centered in a D.C. pizza restaurant, who are now cheerfully using the “nut or a slut” attack on Moore’s accusers.

The damage done to Moore’s victims is a dark terrain we can probably never truly understand. Like the unknowable tragedies of far too many women and men who have been abused, assaulted, and victimized by sexual abusers, their lives bear the scars we dismiss for mere political advantage at our moral peril.

The sudden emergence of Twitter Con Law experts screaming that Moore deserves due process don’t understand the distinction between political and legal peril. This isn’t a decision about whether Roy Moore belongs in jail; that’s a job for a court. This is a decision about whether Roy Moore belongs in the United States Senate. It’s a matter of weighing the on-the-record statement of the victims, and of those who knew Moore and had nothing to gain by coming forward.

Another contemporaneous account hints we are just at the start of discovering more about Moore’s teen dating pool, as was seen in this statement by a former colleague:

“As a Deputy DA in Gadsden when Roy Moore was there, it was common knowledge about Roy's propensity for teenage girls. I'm appalled that these women are being skewered for the truth. It was common knowledge that Roy dated high school girls, everyone we knew thought it was weird...We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall..."

Some Republicans have taken the politically expedient and morally vacant “if true” position on Moore, which is a perfect example of why Steve Bannon’s war to destroy them is succeeding. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes got it exactly right when he called Bannon “the strategic genius who’s managed to maneuver the Republican Party into being all in on a man who stands accused of molesting a child.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a few others deserve enormous credit for bucking the Bannon tide and calling on Moore to leave the campaign. (Think about it, Roy. You could spend more time doing the things you love, like cruising playgrounds, and hanging out at Chuck E. Cheese.)

McConnell’s action echoes that of President George H.W. Bush when he called down the resources of the Republican National Committee to stop David Duke’s election to statewide office in Louisiana in 1991. We can hope this motivates those who have been too timid to stand up to the Trump horde, too cowed by Bannon’s thuggery, and too soft to stand like men who were raised to protect the defenseless.

McConnell statement probably won't drive Moore from the race, but it's incumbent upon the rest of the Senate Republican caucus to lay down a marker for the good of the party and the country. Here, guys. It’s simple; “Given the gravity, credibility, and seriousness of these allegations, if Roy Moore is elected to the United State Senate, I will vote under Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution to expel him.”

In 1847, the cartoonist Thomas Nast first used an elephant as the symbol of the Grand Old Party. The Bannon/Trump faction needs their own logo and branding. Given their defense of Roy Moore, may I suggest Pedobear?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/roy-moore ... -pedobears
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby DrEvil » Mon Nov 13, 2017 7:47 pm

PufPuf93 » Mon Nov 13, 2017 9:55 pm wrote:The astute social commentator Frank Zappa once said on the Diana Shore show:

“It is every American’s inalienable right to NOT have a good time. That’s why god made Republicans.”
-FZ

Please discuss.

This is not to say that Democrats or any other political orientation guarantees a good time or good outcome in general but that Republicans are particularly adept at not having a good time and imposing the lack of good time for others as a major human pursuit.

Why are Republicans like that?

If you are a Republican, why? (not to say what you should be).

What is the innate construct of Republicanism that seeks to take the joy and fun out of life for themselves and for others?

Why are so many Republicans power hungry twisted perverts that believe it fine to demean others?

Why do Republicans defend and even double down on the crimes and perversities of Republican leaders?

Why?


It's a heady mix of religion, conservatism and plain old stupidity.

My personal bugbear is religion, especially the fundamentalist variety that finds a welcoming home in the Republican party. That unquestioning obedience to authority transfers to the party itself, and prevents what little critical thinking they have breaking out. Questioning the party or its representatives is tantamount to heresy.

It doesn't help that a significant percentage of these people believe that the ascendancy of liberal and progressive values literally heralds the end of days. Many of them really believed that Obama was the Antichrist, and a scary number subscribe to nonsense like Young Earth Creationism, the Rapture and dominionism.

Facts and figures, reasoned arguments and critical thinking have no place among these people. To them politics is religion, and the same rules apply. See also: the Taliban
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby 82_28 » Mon Nov 13, 2017 9:06 pm

Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?

Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).

Then there are the false beliefs about generally accepted science. Only 25 percent of self-proclaimed Trump voters agree that climate change is caused by human activities. Only 43 percent of Republicans overall believe that humans have evolved over time.

And then it gets really crazy. Almost 1 in 6 Trump voters, while simultaneously viewing photographs of the crowds at the 2016 inauguration of Donald Trump and at the 2012 inauguration of Barack Obama , insisted that the former were larger. Sixty-six percent of self-described “very conservative” Americans seriously believe that “Muslims are covertly implementing Sharia law in American courts.” Forty-six percent of Trump voters polled just after the 2016 election either thought that Hillary Clinton was connected to a child sex trafficking ring run out of the basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., or weren’t sure if it was true.

If “truth” is judged on the basis of Enlightenment ideas of reason and more or less objective “evidence,” many of the substantive positions common on the right seem to border on delusional. The left is certainly not immune to credulity (most commonly about the safety of vaccines, GMO foods, and fracking), but the right seems to specialize in it. “Misinformation is currently predominantly a pathology of the right,” concluded a team of scholars from the Harvard Kennedy School and Northeastern University at a February 2017 conference. A BuzzFeed analysis found that three main hyperconservative Facebook pages were roughly twice as likely as three leading ultraliberal Facebook pages to publish fake or misleading information.

Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.

It’s also not just misinformation gained from too many hours listening to Fox News, either, because correcting the falsehoods doesn’t change their opinions. For example, nine months following the release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate, the percentage of Republicans who believed that he was not American-born was actually higher than before the release. Similarly, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Democrats corrected their previous overestimates of the unemployment rate after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the actual data. Republicans’ overestimated even more than before.

Part of the problem is widespread suspicion of facts—any facts. Both mistrust of scientists and other “experts” and mistrust of the mass media that reports what scientists and experts believe have increased among conservatives (but not among liberals) since the early ’80s. The mistrust has in part, at least, been deliberately inculcated. The fossil fuel industry publicizes studies to confuse the climate change debate; Big Pharma hides unfavorable information on drug safety and efficacy; and many schools in conservative areas teach students that evolution is “just a theory.” The public is understandably confused about both the findings and methods of science. “Fake news” deliberately created for political or economic gain and Donald Trump’s claims that media sites that disagree with him are “fake news” add to the mistrust.

But, the gullibility of many on the right seems to have deeper roots even than this. That may be because at the most basic level, conservatives and liberals seem to hold different beliefs about what constitutes “truth.” Finding facts and pursuing evidence and trusting science is part of liberal ideology itself. For many conservatives, faith and intuition and trust in revealed truth appear as equally valid sources of truth.

To understand how these differences manifest and what we might do about them, it helps to understand how all humans reason and rationalize: In other words, let’s take a detour into psychology. Freud distinguished between “errors” on the one hand, “illusions” and “delusions” on the other. Errors, he argued, simply reflect lack of knowledge or poor logic; Aristotle’s belief that vermin form out of dung was an error. But illusions and delusions are based on conscious or unconscious wishes; Columbus’s belief that he had found a new route to the Indies was a delusion based on his wish that he had done so.

Although Freud is out of favor with many contemporary psychologists, modern cognitive psychology suggests that he was on the right track. The tenacity of many of the right’s beliefs in the face of evidence, rational arguments, and common sense suggest that these beliefs are not merely alternate interpretations of facts but are instead illusions rooted in unconscious wishes.

This is a very human thing to do. As popular writers such as Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler have pointed out, we often use shortcuts when we reason, shortcuts that enable us to make decisions quickly and with little expenditure of mental energy. But they also often lead us astray—we underestimate the risks of events that unfold slowly and whose consequences are felt only over the long term (think global warming) and overestimate the likelihood of events that unfold rapidly and have immediate consequences (think terrorist attacks).

Our reasoning is also influenced (motivated, psychologists would say) by our emotions and instincts. This manifests in all kinds of ways: We need to maintain a positive self-image, to stave off anxiety and guilt, and to preserve social relationships. We also seek to maintain consistency in our beliefs, meaning that when people simultaneously hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, one or the other must go. And so we pay more attention and give more credence to information and assertions that confirm what we already believe: Liberals enthusiastically recount even the most tenuous circumstantial evidence of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians, and dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters happily believe that the crowd really was bigger at his candidate’s inauguration.

These limits to “objective” reasoning apply to everyone, of course—left and right. Why is it that conservatives have taken the lead in falling off the deep edge?

The answer, I think, lies in the interaction between reasoning processes and personality. It’s each person’s particular motivations and particular psychological makeup that affects how they search for information, what information they pay attention to, how they assess the accuracy and meaning of the information, what information they retain, and what conclusions they draw. But conservatives and liberals typically differ in their particular psychological makeups. And if you add up all of these particular differences, you get two groups that are systematically motivated to believe different things.

Psychologists have repeatedly reported that self-described conservatives tend to place a higher value than those to their left on deference to tradition and authority. They are more likely to value stability, conformity, and order, and have more difficulty tolerating novelty and ambiguity and uncertainty. They are more sensitive than liberals to information suggesting the possibility of danger than to information suggesting benefits. And they are more moralistic and more likely to repress unconscious drives towards unconventional sexuality.

Fairness and kindness place lower on the list of moral priorities for conservatives than for liberals. Conservatives show a stronger preference for higher status groups, are more accepting of inequality and injustice, and are less empathic (at least towards those outside their immediate family). As one Tea Party member told University of California sociologist Arlie Hochschild, “People think we are not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees. But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

Baptist minister and former Republican congressman J.C. Watts put it succinctly. Campaigning for Sen. Rand Paul in Iowa in 2015 he observed, “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good.”

These conservative traits lead directly to conservative views on many issues, just as liberal traits tend to lead to liberal views on many issues. But when you consider how these conservative traits and these conservative views interact with commonly shared patterns of motivated reasoning, it becomes clearer why conservatives may be more likely to run into errors in reasoning and into difficulty judging accurately what is true and what is false.

It’s not just that Trump is “their” president, so they want to defend him. Conservatives’ greater acceptance of hierarchy and trust in authority may lead to greater faith that what the president says must be true, even when the “facts” would seem to indicate otherwise. The New York Times cataloged no less than 117 clearly false statements proclaimed publicly by Trump in the first six months of his presidency, with no evident loss in his supporters’ faith in him. In the same way, greater faith in the legitimacy of the decisions of corporate CEOs may strengthen the tendency to deny evidence that there are any potential benefits from regulation of industry.

Similarly, greater valuation of stability, greater sensitivity to the possibility of danger, and greater difficulty tolerating difference and change lead to greater anxiety about social change and so support greater credulity with respect to lurid tales of the dangers posed by immigrants. And higher levels of repression and greater adherence to tradition and traditional sources of moral judgment increase the credibility of claims that gay marriage is a threat to the “traditional” family.

Conservatives are also less introspective, less attentive to their inner feelings, and less likely to override their “gut” reactions and engage in further reflection to find a correct answer. As a result, they may be more likely to rely on error-prone cognitive shortcuts, less aware of their own unconscious biases, and less likely to respond to factual corrections to previously held beliefs.

The differences in how conservatives and liberals process information are augmented by an asymmetry in group psychological processes. Yes, we all seek to keep our social environment stable and predictable. Beliefs that might threaten relationships with family, neighbors, and friends (e.g., for a fundamentalist evangelical to believe that humans are the result of Darwinian evolution or for a coal miner to believe that climate change is real and human-made) must be ignored or denied, at peril of disrupting the relationships. But among all Americans, the intensity of social networks has declined in recent years. Church attendance and union membership, participation in community organizations, and direct political involvement have flagged. Conservatives come disproportionately from rural areas and small towns, where social networks remain smaller, but denser and more homogeneous than in the big cities that liberals dominate. As a result, the opinions of family, friends, and community may be more potent in conservative hotbeds than in the more anonymous big cities where Democrats dominate.

The lack of shared reality between left and right in America today has contributed greatly to our current political polarization. Despite occasional left forays into reality denial, conservatives are far more likely to accept misinformation and outright lies. Deliberate campaigns of misinformation and conservative preferences for information that fits in with their pre-existing ideology provide only a partial explanation. Faulty reasoning and judgment, rooted in the interactions between modes of reasoning and judgment shared by all with the specific personality patterns found disproportionately among conservatives may also play a central role.


www.slate.com/articles/health_and_scien ... _lies.html
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 13, 2017 10:10 pm

I certainly don't identify with the Republican Party but I also feel that this is valid:

How do we understand the role of the Democratic Party, and what should be our orientation toward it?

The Democratic Party is a bourgeois party with neither the interest or likely the capacity to produce meaningful reforms for the working class. Worse, it has over the last 40 years failed to defend the most basic necessities for the reproduction of the working class despite presenting itself as a “lesser evil” and the last line of defense against open white supremacy, queerphobia and misogyny, and direct attacks on unions. It’s played a leading role in the mass incarceration of black working class people, in negotiating away reproductive rights and access to “welfare” including child care, and been at the forefront of the resegregation and privatization of public education. The Democrats have a long history of absorbing and demobilizing working class coalitions, and transforming left wing movements into electoral support for war, austerity, and deregulation.

Because of the nature of the Democratic Party and the record of defeat and cooptation, revolutionaries should ultimately support the development of an independent working class party; while there is a lot of debate on the socialist left about this right now, this weekend, there is not a clear path to that outcome; recent history is littered with failed efforts at inside/outside strategies like those proposed by various factions in the DSA, or in New York, the Working Families Party, along with a failed attempt in the 90s at developing a Labor Party rooted in labor bureaucracy.

For a possibility of working class independent electoral power to emerge, a greater degree of working class organization and militancy is required; in the current period, we aim to focus energy into building organization in workplaces and outside of them *rather* than active support for socialist candidates in electoral races inside or outside of the Democratic Party.

We arrived at this conclusion both through the study of revolutionary history, but most importantly through the observation of current conditions. There have been several left electoral victories and near misses in countries around the world in the last 15 years. In cases where social democratic forces have prevailed at the ballot box, they’ve run aground on the political unity and economic power of the ruling class in the EU, or in Latin America, of Washington and national bourgeoisie, opening the door for organized reaction combined with disorientation of the left and working class. The nearest “near miss” in the United States, the surprising Bernie Sanders phenomena which made “socialism” a commonplace word and concept in American politics for the first time in a long life time. But the leadership of the Democratic Party made it plain that they prefer to lose an election than to lose power within their party. The subsequent growth in socialist organization mean that many Bernie supporters recognize that problem, though a coherent solution to it has not developed. Some argue that campaigns at local levels can overcome the power of the DNC. But this perspective tends to underestimate or ignore the local machine base and its tight grip on local politics—including NGOs and unions—in major urban areas. So it’s both not possible to have another Bernie at a national level, we don’t have independent forces at a local level, and if we tried to make it happen again, we’d be wasting precious time that could have been spent on building the interest in socialist and working class organization that his campaign fomented.


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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby 0_0 » Tue Nov 14, 2017 3:58 am

i heard someone describe democrats as republicans who are okay with abortion.
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Tue Nov 14, 2017 8:59 am

Based on observation, my really short answer is they're authoritarians. It's not that they don't have fun; they do. Rules are for everyone else while they fake following them themselves. :partyhat
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby 82_28 » Tue Nov 14, 2017 10:47 am

Since basically all evangelicals are republican. . .
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby PufPuf93 » Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:12 am

My intent was not to make this thread a Republican versus Democrat (or any other political persuasion) but to hone in on what is innate in some humans to be Republicans.

The main stream Clinton oriented faction of the Democratic party approach the Nixon era GOP in policy. The Democrats have moved away from representing the working class and the GOP always have represented the ownership / business class over labor. But this thread is not about Democrats but what is innate to republicans.

Old white males only goes so far as many old white males in the USA are not Republicans.

Old white males that are not Republicans appears to be the major demographic at RI. I am an older white male who has never considered voting for a Republican in 45 plus years of voting with one exception, I voted for John Anderson against Reagan in the 1980 Republican POTUS primary with no intention of voting GOP in the general election.

Authoritarians.

Evangelicals.

Money.

Power.

Gullible to self-serving lies and distortions.

Lack of empathy.

Violent.

Not egalitarian.

Racist.

Sexist.

Conservative resistance to progressive change.

Relation to the environment.

Others stuff.

Most of these items can be viewed as symptoms.

How does one raise a child to openly experience joy and happiness and care about others and not be a Republican?
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby minime » Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:14 am

Doesn't it get old.

This is an echo chamber echo chamber echo chamber echo chamber echo chamber echo chamber
Last edited by minime on Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby PufPuf93 » Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:16 am

minime » Tue Nov 14, 2017 8:14 am wrote:Doesn't it get old.

This is an echo chamber echo chamber echo chamber echo chamber


You do not like this thread?

Add something that makes it better please.
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:33 am

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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby minime » Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:36 am

PufPuf93 » Tue Nov 14, 2017 10:16 am wrote:
minime » Tue Nov 14, 2017 8:14 am wrote:Doesn't it get old.

This is an echo chamber echo chamber echo chamber echo chamber


You do not like this thread?

Add something that makes it better please.


Yes, the thread sucks. You already know what the party line is, so why bother.

I drove a med car until a month after the election, ferrying my fellow poor to and from the doctor/hospital etc. We talked. Much of what we talked about was politics, and especially party politics, and especially Trump.

"Hey how bout that Trump, huh?"

The responses regularly defied stereotype. For instance, I recall four elderly black women saying they were going to vote for Trump, and as they said the overriding concern of each was safety.

What people think, and what you may think they think, are often (usually) two different things.

3000 conversations or so with our brothers and sisters in two years. The world, at least the world I experienced in that time, is nothing like it's presented at RI.

I know, I know, elaboration is an exercise in futility, so why bother?!

Long story short: What makes a Republican? You'd be surprised.
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby minime » Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:53 am

You see: There's no tug of war if everyone's on the same side.
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Re: It is every American’s inalienable right

Postby minime » Tue Nov 14, 2017 11:57 am

So... "they need help, you go on that side. We need more people on that side."

But, who's running the game? Democrats, Republicans?

Ha!
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