Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[pilowsky]

From Noah Smith interview with Saikat Chakrabarti, creator of the Green New Deal:

 

 

 

Just out of interest Mr 66, what is your personal opinion of all these quotes that you post?

[Winstonm]

I am curious how to reconcile this with the recent celebration of the Democrats' (EDIT fixed apostrophe - more than one Democrat) success :)

 

Just because your troops remove an enemy sniper doesn't mean you have won the war.

 

 

PS: Here is an example of the continuing war:

 

PHOENIX — A Republican lawmaker wants to allow the Arizona Legislature to overturn the results of a presidential election, even after the count is formally certified by the governor and secretary of state — and even after Congress counts the state’s electors.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Winstonm

[pilowsky]

I would regard myself as a secular Christian upbringing atheist (who tried to incorporate and make sense of half a dozen other major traditions etc) with a lifetime of complex experiences who has a distrust for some high profile outspoken atheist types due to their rather limited lens on the world and human experience. They/many atheists seem to deny the sophistication and complexity of human evolution, cognition, psychology, and what all the different philosophical/religious interpretations and representations of those things could be.

I prefer to work out and question (as a scientific type) what things mean(how they came about) rather than mocking them which is a common approach.

Note - regarding your comment on locus of control is it not the case that possibly the majority of the world has a very little power/control (and entitled to feel it is largely external) and many of those who mock/similar word have huge power

 

I feel that some extreme atheistic pronouncements/attitudes are on a par with the distrust I have with techs running our world

 

PS I remember when I first visited Indonesia I was advised to call myself a Christian rather than an atheist. It was a safer approach :)

 

PPS As an afterthought I should be careful what I say about papers from one of my associated (and trained) professional groups, but I do find the nature of much psychological research (including my own) to be rather frustrating in how it is researched, analysed and written up. It too seems to lose the complexity of the human mind. This thing appears not to be correlated with this but it is with that kind of thing

 

Other work has shown that atheists tend to know more about philosophy and religion than people that claim to believe in a supreme being. I put this down to a need to "check the evidence".

My Atheism is hard-core. I am certain in my disbelief of things that do not subject themselves to rational explanation.

Bridge is a synecdoche for life in this sense. From time to time, I harbour incorrect ideas about bidding and play. I know they are wrong because my results are bad. So I constantly test these ideas to check which are right (useful, give positive results) and those that are wrong.

On top of that, there are advanced methods that I know exist, but I haven't conquered - that's a different problem,

 

Regarding what I should appear as in different countries. I was always advised to introduce myself as an Australian in Europe in case they took me for British - or American.

Luckily, because of my upbringing, I'm quite good at accents.

[Chas_P]

Just out of interest Mr 66, what is your personal opinion of all these quotes that you post?

Interesting question.

[thepossum]

Other work has shown that atheists tend to know more about philosophy and religion than people that claim to believe in a supreme being. I put this down to a need to "check the evidence".

 

Maybe on average which is the limit of most studies. That's something I call "needing to look for limitations in models"

 

However as an atheist I feel I would know more about religion and philosophy than most people - religious or atheist :)

 

However since I am not a professor of religion or atheism (or even have a PhD) those who profess to know most about everything and conveniently use models to back them up would take no notice of anything I say on the subject :)

 

Come to think of it are atheism studies a subset of religious studies?

 

I also struggle with claiming to believe or not believe in something that isn't really very well defined at all

 

However on the other subject, when visiting (and trying to respect) highly religious countries and cultures I try not to let Western whatever (godlessness?) it is get in the way of choosing to avoid unnecessarily complex or difficult arguments with people who may not accept or understand that viewpoint. Maybe it depends who you talk to, but most of the time when traveling I preferred to be with ordinary people like me rather than those in the Universities

[kenberg]

I guess I will weigh in on the posts w/o comment.

I often find them interesting and I suppose the implied comment from Y is "I found this interesting".

 

One of the reasons that I stick around is I see various views from various sources that I would not have consulted or, in some cases, didn't know existed.

 

I agree that this could be abused, but I have often found these posted links, from others as well as Y, to be interesting. In particular, I sometimes click on the link and read the link in its entirety, sometimes even look for other notes by the same author.

 

 

I sometimes feel that I have posted my own views so often everyone knows whether I prefer my fish to be fried, broiled or baked. Visitors welcome, even remote visitors.

[kenberg]

Maybe on average which is the limit of most studies. That's something I call "needing to look for limitations in models"

 

However as an atheist I feel I would know more about religion and philosophy than most people - religious or atheist :)

 

However, since I am not a professor of religion or atheism (or even have a PhD) those who profess to know most about everything and conveniently use models to back them up would take no notice of anything I say on the subject :)

 

Come to think of it are atheism studies a subset of religious studies?

 

I also struggle with claiming to believe or not believe in something that isn't really very well defined at all

 

However on the other subject, when visiting (and trying to respect) highly religious countries and cultures I try not to let Western whatever (godlessness?) it is get in the way of choosing to avoid unnecessarily complex or difficult arguments with people who may not accept or understand that viewpoint. Maybe it depends who you talk to, but most of the time when traveling I preferred to be with ordinary people like me rather than those in the Universities

 

 

"Jonah, he lived in a whale" or "Methuselah lived nine hundred years", are religious tenets that many would agree ain't necessarily so. But if religion means organizing our lives in ways that are not strictly a matter of inescapable logic, then things get more complicated. It's not that I take a religious view, I don't. Rather it's that I don't believe that my life stands up to full logical scrutiny either. Try reading Kant. If you can make it all the way through you are a better person than I am. Choices are certainly worth thinking about, but we choose, probably putting Kant aside unread. We might rethink some of those choices later.

[thepossum]

"Jonah, he lived in a whale" or "Methuselah lived nine hundred years", are religious tenets that many would agree ain't necessarily so. But if religion means organizing our lives in ways that are not strictly a matter of inescapable logic, then things get more complicated. It's not that I take a religious view, I don't. Rather it's that I don't believe that my life stands up to full logical scrutiny either. Try reading Kant. If you can make it all the way through you are a better person than I am. Choices are certainly worth thinking about, but we choose, probably putting Kant aside unread. We might rethink some of those choices later.

 

I've read more than enough religious and philosophical texts to last me a lifetime

 

The way everyone trivialises argument with constant straw men such as those on this thread are part of the problem. How many sentences are there we could take issue and throw at each other etc

 

The sad thing is that its hard to even get atheists (with their supposed superior intellect) to think and argue at a higher level

 

Many extreme (I use the word cautiously) atheists or rationalists maybe are at a level that think everything can be explained at a reductionist level of neurons and genes. That is a battle we have to fight in many disciplines, not just philosophy/religion whatever. I am seriously concerned about the state of the world with the increasing dominance and power of those tendencies/outlooks and the loss of the philosophical. I started studying (went a long way almost to practice) psychology - mainly because of its groundings in philosophy and its more sophisticated analytical/philosophical elements only to find a gradual take over of the cog-neuro perspective with its very limited lens

 

I posted all this stuff about human history, psychology, cognition, language, migration patterns, evolution and what all those philosophies may have meant at some period in time - its a widely studied and fascinating subject, not to be trivialised.

 

Why do I always feel at risk on these forums. As if I am being setup for something

 

PS Its also concerning to me that many people (powerful influential and authoritative ones) have a very limited view on what constitutes evidence. Thats what I was getting at with my comment about evidence and understanding of models. There is so much evidence in many important disciplines that is ignored simply because people cannot find a trial or meta analysis to back it up etc. Thats the point I am trying to make in relation to philosophical outlook and different modes of inquiry

[pilowsky]

I've read more than enough religious and philosophical texts to last me a lifetime

 

The way everyone trivialises argument with constant straw men such as those on this thread are part of the problem. How many sentences are there we could take issue and throw at each other etc

 

The sad thing is that its hard to even get atheists (with their supposed superior intellect) to think and argue at a higher level

 

 

Being an atheist and a rational thinker does not deny the possibility that some things cannot be explained using existing models.

It does mean that - as a rationalist - I am always attempting to explain any phenomenon in a way that does not require the invocation of supernatural beings.

As it happens, I ascribe to Jewish ethics (which btw are focussed on how you behave in this world - not some "afterlife"). Most of the subsequent "new-fangled" religions as my father called them do the same.

 

People who identify with different parts of the political spectrum make constant appeals to authority and set up straw man arguments.

 

How often do we hear the following phrases:

"the American people want."

"The Framers (of the US) constitution knew what they were doing"

"As everyone knows."

"You must never lead away from an Ace."

 

Whenever I hear someone utter one of these lines, I instantly find it hard to take anything else they say seriously.

If you are prepared to blindly accept one thing, how can I trust anything else you say?

 

Personally, I expect that 90% of what I say will be proven wrong within a fairly short time.

That's how learning works; by not sticking blindly to rules set down by authorities.

 

Regarding the specific question about reductionism, I don't believe in a soul or essence. Ultimately, everything in a biological organism ought to be explicable in terms of the elements of the organism and how it interacts with the world.

Given that any vertebrate is more complex (slightly) than a deck of cards. It seems obvious to me that trying to devise a model that explains all human action is probably impossible. Heisenberg backs me up on this.

 

Heisenberg is stopped by a traffic policeman. "do you know how fast you are going?"; "No, but I know where I am".

 

or this very slightly rude version (warning it contains a slightly offensive word)

 

 

 

Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Ohm are in a car...

... And they get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"

 

"No, but I know exactly where I am" Heisenberg replies.

 

The cop says "You were doing 55 in a 35." Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts "Great! Now I'm lost!"

 

The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says "Do you know you have a dead cat back here?"

 

"We do now, asshole!" shouts Schroedinger.

 

The cop moves to arrest them.

 

Ohm resists.

 

 

[y66]

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?abVariantId=1&campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210301&instance_id=27632&nl=the-morning&productCode=NN&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=52604&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2Fbfab85b4-ba65-5338-809c-b3aab54db576&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

In dozens of states, the Republican Party has responded to Donald Trump’s defeat by trying to change election laws, often to make voting more difficult.

 

The Democratic Party is struggling to figure out how to respond.

 

And voting-right experts are worried that the result could be the biggest rollback of Americans’ voting rights since the demise of Reconstruction in the 19th century.

 

First, some background: Trump did not start this trend. For more than a decade, Republican politicians — often worried about their ability to win elections in a diversifying country — have tried to reduce voting access. But Trump’s defeat and his repeated claims about voter fraud (almost all of them false) have lent new energy to the effort.

 

Legislators in Georgia are pushing bills that would make it harder to register and harder to vote by mail. Arizona, Pennsylvania and several other states are also considering new restrictions on mail voting. The Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank in New York, has counted 253 bills across 43 states seeking to tighten voting rules, as The Times’s Michael Wines has noted.

 

It’s a reflection of a widespread belief among Republican officials that high voter turnout hurts their chances of winning elections. They may be wrong about that: As the Republican Party has become more working class, it has attracted many supporters who vote only occasionally.

 

Still, Republican candidates will probably benefit from any changes that disproportionately affect Black and Latino voters, like the elimination of automatic registration. “The restrictions we’re seeing are going to have a greater impact on the communities that have been most traditionally disadvantaged,” says Myrna Pérez, a voting rights expert at the Brennan Center.

 

Democrats, along with any Republicans and independents who favor wider voting access, have three possible ways to respond. One of those three will be on display today at the Supreme Court.

 

‘The last place you want to be’

The court will hear a case from Arizona in which Democratic officials are challenging two state provisions. One requires the disposal of any ballots cast at the wrong precinct, and another forbids people — like church leaders or party organizers — to collect absentee ballots for submission. The Democrats argue that these provisions especially affect minority voters and thus violate the Voting Rights Act. (Adam Liptak, The Times’s Supreme Court reporter, explains in more depth here.)

 

The Arizona lawsuit is an example of a main way that advocates have tried to protect voting rights over the past few decades: through the courts. Along the way, they have won some victories, including in a recent case from North Carolina.

 

But they have usually lost. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has generally ruled against voting-rights advocates, and most court observers expect the justices to allow Arizona’s restrictions to stand.

 

If anything, the justices may use the case to issue a broader ruling that endorses other voting restrictions. “I think the real question here is not what happens to these particular restrictions,” said my colleague Emily Bazelon, who’s covered fights over election laws. “It’s the test the Supreme Court imposes for future challenges to more onerous restrictions, more of which are coming down the pike.”

 

Richard Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, told me that he thought Democrats had made a mistake in bringing this case. “If you’re a voting-rights lawyer, the last place you want to be right now is the Supreme Court,” Hasen said.

 

The filibuster versus voting rights

Other than the courts, the other two main voting-rights battlegrounds are state governments and Congress.

 

But state governments are hard places to protect voting rights today, because Democrats control only 15 of them — and none in swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. The Democrats’ biggest problem in many states is the failure to develop a message that resonates not only with college graduates and in major metropolitan areas but also in blue-collar and rural areas. Republicans have compounded that issue through aggressive gerrymandering, including in Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

 

The remaining option for voting-rights advocates is Congress — and Democrats now control both Congress and the White House.

 

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would expand voting rights, and President Biden supports it. It would guarantee automatic voter registration and widely available early voting and mail voting, among other steps. For the bill to have any chance in the Senate, however, Democrats would need the unanimous support of their 50 senators, and they would need to scrap or alter the filibuster.

 

The debate over the filibuster can sometimes seem theoretical. But voting rights is one of the tangible ways in which it matters. If the filibuster remains in place, voting rights in the United States will probably be in retreat over the coming decade.

 

A different G.O.P. approach: In Kentucky, Republican state legislators are working with Democrats to expand ballot access while also strengthening election security, as Joshua Douglas of the University of Kentucky has explained for CNN.

[y66]

https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARq9kPCuG1Y/jonathan-bernstein?sref=UHfKDqx7

 

I’ve seen a number of perfectly fine articles about why and how former President Donald Trump still wields influence over the Republican Party, but c’mon! The main reason that Republican politicians feel stuck with Trump is that they know that he’s capable of turning against their party at the drop of a hat.

 

Yes, Trump is good at tapping into resentment, but plenty of Republican politicians are good at that. Yes, he’s popular among Republican voters, but most politicians are popular among their own party’s voters. Yes, he’s willing to take sides in primaries, but he doesn’t actually have a particularly impressive record of swaying primary voters.

 

No, what’s different about Trump is that unlike any other former president — really, any former nominee — in living memory, it’s that easy to picture him telling his voters to stay home and handing elections to the other party. And that’s why he’s been an impossible dilemma for Republican politicians ever since he emerged as a major candidate in 2015.

 

No one worried about that in 1976, 1980 or 1992, the last three times that an incumbent president lost a presidential election. Oh, yes, Jimmy Carter has occasionally criticized Democrats since his 1976 defeat, and it’s possible to find examples of failed nominees criticizing their party or it’s leading politicians. But full-on rejection of the party? For that, you have to reach deep into the pile of rejected presidential candidates to find a Democrat like Eugene McCarthy or Republican like Pat Buchanan who ran as third-party candidates in 1976 and 2000, respectively, but took very few voters with them.

 

Why? For one thing, a lot of politicians strongly believe in the basic policy orientation of their parties. It may be why they got into politics in the first place, and they know that turning on their party would risk enactment of policies they strongly oppose.

 

For another, many politicians develop deep friendships they would be betraying. Others identify with demographic groups or organized interests that find homes in the party, and don’t want to turn against them even if they don’t care about the party itself.

 

And then there’s reputation. Many retired politicians, such as Carter and Richard Nixon, spend a lot of time and effort trying to rebuild their reputations, especially if they were pushed out involuntarily. That’s obviously not true for all retired politicians — ex-President George W. Bush has done almost nothing active to revive his reputation after the Iraq War debacle, and neither George H.W. Bush or Gerald Ford did much after their electoral defeats — but it does seem to be true for some of them. And for them, turning against their party is a losing move, since it would alienate most of their remaining fans without adding many new ones. Staying above the fray, with occasional electioneering if invited, is surely the safer path if reputation is the goal.

 

None of these factors appear to apply to Trump. And even if they did, Republican politicians are (or should be) aware that Trump does things against his own apparent self-interest all the time, anyway. That’s a big part of why he was such an unpopular president. It’s also worth noting that Trump wouldn’t really get anything from betraying the Republicans other than revenge for perceived slights. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it.

 

If Trump persuaded only 5% or so of Republican voters to stay home or support a third-party candidate, the damage from the top of the ballot to the bottom could be devastating. This gives Republican politicians a strong and continuing incentive to try to accommodate — to try to mange — the former president.

 

Of course, that’s not all that’s going on within the Republican Party. Some politicians and other party actors surely are trying to flatter Trump because they believe (perhaps correctly, perhaps not) that it will propel them to successful careers. Surely others sincerely (if implausibly) believe that Trump really was a great president and that the party is best off with him as their leader as long as he’s willing. But I do think that a lot of them just consider him a threat they need to appease.

[Winstonm]

Not Carlito's Way but Biden's Way - getting things done rather than talk trash. WaPo puts it in perspective:

 

We're witnessing endless obsessing over the constellation of enemies that increasingly define the Trumpified GOP — rioters burning down cities, woke mobs conspiring with Big Tech to effect mass repression of conservatives, Pelosi and "the Squad."

 

But that's also uncontrollably bleeding into an effort to tar Biden and most mainstream Democrats as radical socialists who are similarly destroying the country.

 

If Biden and Democrats can pass economic relief, followed by a big infrastructure package — both offering ambitious, broadly popular solutions to major national problems — it could further marginalize the hysterical anti-leftism that increasingly defines Trumpism.

 

All this could undermine Trumpism in still another way. As the Times notes, a big infrastructure package might include "spending on highways, bridges, rural broadband networks, water and sewer lines and even some cornerstones of fighting climate change, like electric-car charging stations."

If Biden and Democrats can recast public expenditures on climate as a form of job-creating infrastructure repair — a broadly popular concept — it could give working people a stake in battling the climate threat.

[y66]

When I started writing about lowering the voting age 10 years ago, I was toying with a hypothetical. It’s no longer purely a pipe dream.

 

The idea moved a baby step forward on Wednesday, with a second attempt to add it to a big democracy bill in the House of Representatives. As was the case two years ago, an amendment to set the voting age at 16 failed, with a final vote of 125-302, almost identical to the 126-305 vote in 2019. The small progress? Despite losing its only Republican vote, the amendment this time won 57% of Democratic votes, an increase from 53% last time.

 

Sure, that’s not much of a change. But the issue has come a long way. For one thing, advocates have organized around a specific change: lowering the age to 16 from 18. For another, it’s now a part of the Democratic agenda, although to date winning the support of only the more liberal portions of the party. It’s plausible to see the 16-year-old vote becoming a mainstream Democratic position. If that happens, the it will have a realistic chance to be passed when the partisan context is right — that is, unified Democratic government with larger majorities in both chambers. Whenever that might be.

 

In the meantime, advocates did post one practical victory in 2020, lowering the voting age for school board elections in Oakland, California, although they fell just short at a second attempt across the Bay for San Francisco municipal elections.

 

The national effort, although far from succeeding, does suggest that statewide efforts in solidly Democratic states might have a chance to win.

 

The Constitution says that citizens who are 18 or older must be allowed to vote, but leaves any further decisions optional. Congress could mandate a lower age; if it remains silent, then the states are free to lower the age for federal, state or local elections. Many states also allow local jurisdictions to set their own lower minimums. Expanding the franchise through the legislative process is always a tricky proposition, because it requires elected officials to listen to advocates who currently have no vote, and therefore (usually) less influence. Even when a political party theoretically supports such laws, it’s often difficult for such a measure to become a top priority, and parties usually only have the ability to pass their top priorities.

 

But Democrats have made voting rights one of their top priorities, and it does appear that lowering the voting age is working its way onto the group of policies that make up a broader democracy agenda. Of course, it’s far from certain that any of that agenda will make it through Congress any time soon, no matter how urgent supporters believe it is or how many times many Republicans indicate their contempt for and opposition to basic democratic norms and practices.

 

I won’t repeat the arguments in favor of lowering the voting age, but I will say one thing I’m quite confident about: Had folks several hundred years ago, at the beginning of mass democracy, set vote-from-birth as their rule, we would all use vote-from-birth now, probably with kids gradually taking over their own vote from their parents by their teens, and everyone would think that was natural and normal and would be aghast if anyone suggested eliminating it. Kids are people, and they have political interests! (I’m not for vote-from-birth, but I do think the arguments for it are reasonable).

 

I think that the biggest obstacle to lowering the voting age has been that it just seems weird to people who haven’t thought about it. Choosing 16 as the target has no doubt helped, given that it’s harder to think of a two-year adjustment as a big deal. But more than that, each attempt, and every vote that generates some publicity, makes the entire topic seem less of a fringe idea than it was a decade ago. And that’s why I’ve come to believe there’s a reasonable chance that it’s actually going to happen at some point.

[Winstonm]

The New Yorker has an excellent article depicting the binary thinking patterns of the Christian Nationalist insurrectionists who attacked the capital with the intent to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

 

It was among the most jarring scenes of the Capitol invasion, on January 6th. As rioters milled about on the Senate floor, a long-haired man in a red ski cap bellowed, from the dais, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” A man to his right––the so-called QAnon Shaman, wearing a fur hat and bull horns atop his head, and holding an American flag—raised a megaphone and began to pray. Others in the chamber bowed their heads. “Thank you, heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into the building, to allow us to exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow the America, the American way of the United States of America, to go down,” he said. “Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and love Christ.”

[thepossum]

Being an atheist and a rational thinker does not deny the possibility that some things cannot be explained using existing models.

It does mean that - as a rationalist - I am always attempting to explain any phenomenon in a way that does not require the invocation of supernatural beings.

As it happens, I ascribe to Jewish ethics (which btw are focussed on how you behave in this world - not some "afterlife"). Most of the subsequent "new-fangled" religions as my father called them do the same.

 

People who identify with different parts of the political spectrum make constant appeals to authority and set up straw man arguments.

 

How often do we hear the following phrases:

"the American people want."

"The Framers (of the US) constitution knew what they were doing"

"As everyone knows."

"You must never lead away from an Ace."

 

Whenever I hear someone utter one of these lines, I instantly find it hard to take anything else they say seriously.

If you are prepared to blindly accept one thing, how can I trust anything else you say?

 

Personally, I expect that 90% of what I say will be proven wrong within a fairly short time.

That's how learning works; by not sticking blindly to rules set down by authorities.

 

Regarding the specific question about reductionism, I don't believe in a soul or essence. Ultimately, everything in a biological organism ought to be explicable in terms of the elements of the organism and how it interacts with the world.

Given that any vertebrate is more complex (slightly) than a deck of cards. It seems obvious to me that trying to devise a model that explains all human action is probably impossible. Heisenberg backs me up on this.

 

Heisenberg is stopped by a traffic policeman. "do you know how fast you are going?"; "No, but I know where I am".

 

or this very slightly rude version (warning it contains a slightly offensive word)

 

 

 

Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Ohm are in a car...

... And they get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"

 

"No, but I know exactly where I am" Heisenberg replies.

 

The cop says "You were doing 55 in a 35." Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts "Great! Now I'm lost!"

 

The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says "Do you know you have a dead cat back here?"

 

"We do now, asshole!" shouts Schroedinger.

 

The cop moves to arrest them.

 

Ohm resists.

 

 

 

EDIT Sorry I want to respond to your comments about supernatural beings and afterlife and similar concepts - please bear with me :)

 

When I thought back to my comment about rationalism I was concerned that I had used the word correctly and how I intended. So I re-read a bit and sure enough I had. But I also know that within myself I am closer to that end of things than extreme empiricists who deny rational thought and have to have stuff pointed out or proved with an experiment. Those who seem incapable of thinking things through. So I regard myself as a rationalist and an atheist but not an extreme one. I think (and I was interested in those early psychologists and philosophers whose methods seem out of fashion) that many (even most) things and problems can be thought about, solved, or at least hypothesised about simply using one instrument (human thought) - I get totally irritated at people who dismiss it all by asking to see an RCT or meta analysis to back it up

 

Extremists are always the problem. I also found reading about these different terms how much aspects of philosophical discourse annoy me. That is that they are obsessed with constantly arguing and debating extremes of different models and seemingly incapable of abstracting away to the higher level and the high level. Everything must always be couched in these low level models and debates

 

I always feel at a disadvantage when people produce names I need to have read or models I need to have read. I prefer to debate things just using my own brain and thought and argue with other people on that level playing field. Resorting to specific models or names of people who we may or may not have read is a way of disempowering and essentially cancelling an argument. People also quibble over words, use their advantage of regularly using exactly the right term and model and not listening and thinking about what the other is really saying

 

I generally prefer just talking about ideas and thinking about ideas. When I say stuff it usually fits into someone's model without me even knowing it or remembering it

 

As for reductionism and explaining (theoretically - clearly not possibly) everything looking at very low level processes if I am suffering sever trauma from something that happened to me in my life I think its more useful to discuss people's experiences at a level that makes sense - the traumatising incident, the impact on their lives, feelings and experiences - not at the inhuman (EDIT I don't mean inhuman in case anyone is upset - low level systems are essentially prehuman but also essentially human too) and impossible to really explain level of genes, neurons, chemistry - beyond saying that certain biological systems may have been messed with. That is the level at which most human experience needs to be dealt with discussed and thought about. Of course you can look at brain scans and body chemistry but seriously. Of course people study and have their models of the damage that is caused to a biological and neurological systems but for most of us and most of our experiences and communications that is rather useless

 

PS On the subject of atheism, I was re-reading various different philosophies/traditions I have tried to understand over the years - one of which is Jainism. I was interested in their cosmology and understanding of the world. Evidently its not really theistic or atheistic. Some have even coined transtheism as a higher level concept.

 

Can we not do the same and try to argue at a higher level about true meaning. We could argue endlessly at the levels of atheism-theism, empiricism-rationalism etc

 

Thats what I am trying to get at. And its very hard ever being able to argue at that level because we all have these models which are useful in some way but also very constraining

 

PPS Some of the worst cases of resorting to authority come from the academe who use it all the time to assert claimed superiority and their sole right to speak without actually listening. They are often worse than the examples of unbacked statements and straw men you referred to. We are currently being expected to change the whole world by a group of people whose confident utterances may be proved wrong in so many years time

 

Final edit by way of apology for how my posts always turn out, start to ramble, need editing. It relates a bit to what I was getting at above. Discussing in these types of forums causes extreme anxiety - and a very extreme anxiety response (explainable no doubt by by neurology and body chemistry and fear systems out of whack - something is flooding my body and brain). But the cause of that anxiety is at a much higher level - it is fear of being misunderstood, fear of using the wrong word, fear of looking stupid, fear of causing offence, hurt or disrespect etc. Both personally and professionally I like to (and feel obliged to) treat everyone the same, respect everyone's beliefs and view points, while at the same time holding my own. Its a strange thing and something of a contradiction that by simply trying to understand and explain (to myself) somebody else's beliefs, explain it with my models I could be causing disrespect rather than even getting close to understanding. But that is a problem we all face in life

[pilowsky]

One of the biggest problems that I find with some academics is that (like many other people) they believe that having succeeded in one small area of knowledge acquisition, they are therefore experts in other areas about which they know very little.

For myself, I quickly discovered as I moved along in the academic world that I knew and understood less and less.

This 'structural uncertainty' that is part of every academics life makes scientists (and people that cleave to rational thought in general) appear simultaneously unsure about everything and incredibly arrogant. It's a truly bizarre concatenation, but there it is.

 

When a scientist/academic says, "I'm 90% sure that if we don't do something about climate change", they do not mean "If we don't do anything about climate change, things are probably going to be OK".

So it annoys me when I state something (carefully phrased to allow for the possibility that some of the struts of a carefully constructed argument are wrong) in an area that I know something about when others with no specialised knowledge quote something that a Journalist picked up second-hand and 'blogged' about in google as being equally valid.

 

This latter problem of 'cherry-picking' came into the mainstream as a side-effect of the information revolution and reached its apogee with Trump and his cogeners. The use of op-eds as evidence instead of synthesizing information from primary sources to present a well-founded perspective is now the rationalism du jour.

 

The reason that people do this is usually obvious: personal gain. Tragically, the value of wide dissemination of information has brought the opportunity for people to push an extreme position to generate an informational 'fog of war'.

This fog of "it could be", "it was published in a 'reputable scientific journal" represents the most odious of uncritical thinking.

 

I have personally reviewed hundreds of scientific articles in my career. Working academics will tell you that most of what is published turns out to be wrong (https://bit.ly/WrongScience).

It's not surprising that many scientists observe something and then publish it when they see an effect.

 

Recently, I have had some good results (by my standards) playing Bridge. It would be easy to conclude that this results from hard work, learning and consequently, improvement.

Sure, this may account for some proportion of the variance. For myself, I suspect it is equally likely that the overall quality of the candidature has fallen.

 

 

 

 

[thepossum]

Being an atheist and a rational thinker does not deny the possibility that some things cannot be explained using existing models.

It does mean that - as a rationalist - I am always attempting to explain any phenomenon in a way that does not require the invocation of supernatural beings.

As it happens, I ascribe to Jewish ethics (which btw are focussed on how you behave in this world - not some "afterlife"). Most of the subsequent "new-fangled" religions as my father called them do the same.

 

 

To make it easier than constantly editing just a few comments. In relation to those metaphysical concepts to which you refer I personally feel able to incorporate/explain/understand them within my own rationalist/atheist mindset. I don't feel the need to dismiss them. They can all be explained or mostly explained through human psychology, subjective reaction to circumstances. I have no problem discussing concetps such as souls, gods, reincarnation, afterlife. They can have so many different meanings - maybe not those that others have - but we can at least try to conceptualise them. I appreciate to many that may be disrespectful but its the only way I can make sense of the world and try to understand as many people as possible

 

As an example, and please dont mock, I believe in spirits, ghosts etc. I personally have experienced ghosts in a building with many ghosts. However I know its a highly subjective experience and the reason I could feel them was projecting my knowledge of a place, my feeling and sense of a place onto my own psychology - I felt the anguish, the torment and the fear of the people who had been through that place. All easily explained by biology and psychology. But most people would not have felt anything

 

People live on in many ways after their biological death etc. They live on in other people, and often in very deep and profound spiritual ways etc They inhabit places, they inhabit inanimate objects. They are there and real to people who can feel them

 

Human evolution has lasted many hundreds of thousands/millions of years on top of the existence of this planet and all living things. How we are all connected, through the evolution of our brains, our cognition to being homo sapiens, followed by our migrations around the world, our different traditions and philosophies developed at times and places - responding to place and time - all different but at the same time all human and sharing uch of the same underlying psychology overlaid with the unique cultural and geographical and historical components etc. All those things can be thought about, discussed, conceptualised as both a shared human psychology and an individual and cultural psychology etc There have been hundreds of thousands of years since we all migrated (at some hypothetical common point in our shared history). When that happened - at different places and times around the world - how people feel about their place. I am happy to accept a model of both having shared human biology and evolution as well as a conceptualisation and believe of having grown from a place. I try to respect all views and beliefs and fit them into my understanding without being disresepctful - I hope. Its almost an impossible task but at least I try. How am I o live somewhere with one of the world's oldest cultures and try at least to understand and respect those Indigenous belief systems while tt the same time believing in my own cultural "Western" scientific background and evolution and migration etc. I actually have no problem with that at all - maybe others have a problem with me thinking I do

 

Another way of conceptualising things like spirit is energy etc

 

There are countless ways of concetpualising and discussing anything but surely we cannot just throw away history, culture, evolution of human cognition, shared aspects of psychology and those unique to our place, history and culture. We cannot all just be reduced to beings differentiated solely by our biology. Many of us have experienced things which are difficult to explain - feelings of connectedness to all things - I'm sure explainable by many via brain chemistry and neurology - some people take drugs to achieve it. But that connectedness cannot simply be dismissed. We have things like archetypes, deep parts of our psychology, our culture and history. Some may be shared by everyone, some specific to place. If migration to some places happened so long ago and so separated from other influences for many millenia, that is enough time for highly unique psychological and social development overlayed on our common human ancestry etc As with everything I say I have extreme anxiety at it being wilfully misunderstood by destructive interests. That is a risk we all face. Many people have been destroyed without even getting a chance to explain what they mean, with other people not even making an attempt to understand what is really meant. I do it - I tend to react sometimes

[thepossum]

One of the biggest problems that I find with some academics is that (like many other people) they believe that having succeeded in one small area of knowledge acquisition, they are therefore experts in other areas about which they know very little.....

 

 

I quite agree. Sadly the media seems to have no problem inviting people on to shows to discuss stuff they know little about - academic or non-academic

I quite accept and sympathise with all your points

 

However I disagree that it is possible to always stack up authority against other views/experiences to totally reject and repudiate them. There is a thing called power, it looks after itself and actually can obstruct legitimate alternative paradigms and theories etc. And sadly too often highly trained and knowledgeable authority figures are too ready to dismiss something that another highly educated trained and informed person may say (based on experience, information and wide reading), simply on the basis of weight of authority. Argument from authority must be challenged no matter who uses it. It has some weight but not everything. I am assuming your rhetorical dismissal of some people's views as being based on Wikipedia or blogs was not aimed at me since I certainly never rely on a few simple sources in anything I say. They are often used as a simple example on a page rather than citing all my sources. Maybe look at all your own posts and see how often you use a fairly trivial source as your backing. Sometimes over stuff I think I would have as much if not more informed and broader knowledge. How about the post on psychosis and delusions in relation to president Trump. You produced a little bit of backing to back up your authority. Have you had a lifetime's experience of psychosis to inform you?

 

And in relation to power - it is a force all of its own and much so-called authority and knowledge simply seeks to perpetuate power whether it is right or not. Sadly some people are always on the wrong side of that power, maybe they always will be and will never be listened to. That is power. At least I accept it and how it compromises and corrupts so-called knowledge. I don't know many thousands of papers I have read/reviewed in one way or another (in a wide range of discplines too) - maybe not refereed in the academic sense. For me weighing up numbers of papers is not a good measure of the validity of anyone's arguments. It can help but its not everything

 

Also, many extremely educated and academically smart people (different types of smarts of course) choose different paths or have different paths available to them. They may also lack one critical skill which is the critical skill in academic advancement (ie writing in a particular way), not thinking, understanding but the one thing that gets people to progress through that system. Simply possessing that one skill is not enough to grant authority over anything. And I have heard many extremely senior academic people say things that were blatantly wrong and get away with it on that authority.

 

In terms of degradation of quality I also have serious concerns at the degradation of the term professor. It seems a trend in some countries these days that title is claimed by people at very junior levels of the academe (maybe with a prefix not understood by the ignorati). but not everyone can be a Professor, much as they would like to think they are

 

However I am not hanging on for somebody to develop a piece of equipment to measure and disprove the existence of spirits in a place which many of us (if not all) know are there etc

 

PS Finally the whole world has often be dominated and defined by a few groups who have the power to get things published. I believe that power and influence and control has grown even more and become even more concentrated and compromised by power and self-interest

[pilowsky]

 

However I am not hanging on for somebody to develop a piece of equipment to measure and disprove the existence of spirits in a place which many of us (if not all) know are there etc

 

What a great idea! We could call it a "spirit-level"

 

Useful in keeping as on an even keel...

[y66]

Ezra Klein: Biden Is the Anti-Trump, and It’s Working

 

American politics feels quieter with Joe Biden in the White House. The president’s Twitter feed hasn’t gone dark, but it’s gone dull. Biden doesn’t pick needless fights or insert himself into cultural conflicts. It’s easy to go days without hearing anything the president has said, unless you go looking.

 

But the relative quiet is deceptive: Policy is moving at a breakneck pace. The first weeks of the Biden administration were consumed by a flurry of far-reaching executive orders that reopened America to refugees, rejoined the Paris climate accords and killed the Keystone XL oil pipeline, to name just a few. Now the House has passed, and the Senate is considering, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, a truly sweeping piece of legislation that includes more than a half-dozen policies — like a child tax credit expansion that could cut child poverty by 50 percent — that would be presidency-defining accomplishments on their own.

 

It goes on. The White House just sent Congress the most ambitious immigration reform bill in years. It midwifed a deal to get Merck to mobilize some of its factories to produce Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and now Biden is saying there should be enough of a supply for every American adult to get vaccinated by the end of May. Imagine! The administration is also working on an infrastructure package that, if early reports bear out, will be the most transformational piece of climate policy — and perhaps economic policy — in my lifetime. Biden is blitzing.

 

This is roughly the opposite of how Donald Trump approached his presidency. Trump combined an always-on, say-anything, fight-anyone communications strategy with a curious void of legislative ambition. He backed congressional Republicans’ unimaginative and ultimately doomed Obamacare repeal effort, and then signed a package of tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy. It was bog-standard, Paul Ryan-conservatism — nothing like the populist revolution Trump promised on the campaign trail. Trump signed plenty of executive orders, but when it came to the hard work of persuading others to do what he wanted, he typically checked out, or turned to Twitter.

 

Even so, Trump convinced many that he was a political genius whose shamelessness had allowed him to see what others had missed: You didn’t win by being liked, you won by being all anyone ever talked about, even if they were cursing your name. “Very often my readers tried to persuade me there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and Trump had proven that,” Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., told me. “All that mattered was you were occupying space in the spectacle — not what was actually happening to you in that glare.”

 

One rebuttal to that theory was always obvious. “Trump never got over 50 percent approval,” Rosen says. “He’s a widely hated man, a one-term president.” For all the talk of Teflon Don, Trump paid a price for his antics and affronts and scandals. Bad publicity actually is bad publicity.

 

But another way of looking at it is that Trump’s communication strategy was successful in getting Trump what he actually wanted: Attention, not legislation. Biden wants legislation, not attention, and that informs his team’s more targeted approach. “You can be all over every newscast and insert yourself in every conversation, but if you aren’t driving that conversation toward a focused agenda, it isn’t doing you a lot of good,” Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director, told me.

[y66]

The New Yorker has an excellent article depicting the binary thinking patterns of the Christian Nationalist insurrectionists who attacked the capital with the intent to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

... “Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and love Christ who was also white.”

fyp

[thepossum]

What a great idea! We could call it a "spirit-level"

 

Useful in keeping as on an even keel...

 

:)

 

PS sorry about my edits I keep on writing and editing

 

PPS Do you know how often I have been irritated by academics of many different disciplines using Heisenberg or Schroedinger as part of their arguments. I actually studied quantum physics at uni :)

 

PS If anyone wonders at my lvels of anxiety and nature of my posts I hope they never take them the wrong way. Unlike some philosophical arguments you actually have to know the entirety of a person's circumstances, experience and history before judging how they react. Some people sadly don't think that way. They also seem to believe that the author of a text is unimportant and that the meaning they were intending to impart was unimportant too

[johnu]

Murdoch finally admits what Fox News is all about

 

Network is the "Loyal Opposition" to Biden

 

Just in case anybody was of the "opinion" that the Fox Propaganda Channel was anything but a mouthpiece for the Republican Party, this should set them straight. The "Unfair and Unbalanced" channel is finally out in the open, even though any independent thinker would have come to this conclusion decades ago.

 

The last time I watched anything on the Fox Propaganda Channel was on inauguration day, January 20, 2021. I wanted to see what the Fox coverage would be like. IIRC it was the white supremacist Carlson's show, and he spent about a 10 minute segment on the show talking about a Teddy Roosevelt statue controversy that wasn't even on Federal property that had been going on since June 2020.

 

Absolutely amazing. On the day when the office of the most powerful person in the world is changing from twice impeached Manchurian President to President Joe Biden, Fox makes a conscious decision to spend a significant portion of a prime time program on one of the most important political days of the year, to revisit an old and many times rehashed right fringe source of fake outrage removal of statues.

[Chas_P]

The title of this thread is "Has U. S. Democracy Been Trumped?" It was begun on 17 August, 2015, and now has 3,664, 503 views and 17,947 replies. The subtitle is "Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America." That is a very interesting question. Trump is now gone. So a more interesting question in my mind is now "Who is actually the POTUS?" To anyone with one eye and half a brain it obviously is not Joe Biden. Ostensibly he won the Presidential election. But the puppet masters have kept him hidden away because, for all outward appearances (what few there have been), he really doesn't know where he $hit last. So will the real President of the United States please stand up? Who is it? Pelosi? Obama? Zuckerberg? Bezos? Dorsey? Inquiring minds want to know.

[PassedOut]

So a more interesting question in my mind is now "Who is actually the POTUS?" To anyone with one eye and half a brain it obviously is not Joe Biden. Ostensibly he won the Presidential election. But the puppet masters have kept him hidden away because, for all outward appearances (what few there have been), he really doesn't know where he $hit last.

You might be onto something with with your "anyone with one eye and half a brain" observation. I have two eyes and a whole brain, so that's not my assessment at all.

 

I saw Biden in person during the primaries, watched the debates and his inaugural speech, and he seemed up to the job to me. Clearly he's suffered the ravages of age, but so have I, and so has Trump. And Biden has appointed people who know what they are doing, so he doesn't have to do it all himself. Trump was a one man show and an embarrassment to the country almost every day. That's why most voters made it a point to replace Trump with Biden.

 

I've been a conservative businessman all my life and would be happy to be able to vote for a republican again. Unless the party gets out of the grip of the Trump thugs, though, I don't see that being possible.

 

Is there anything specific you can point to that suggests that Biden has the amount of dementia you claim? I don't remember hearing Biden suggest that we ingest bleach or make any of the other inane comments that we heard from the previous POTUS. Biden did express opposition to Neanderthal thinking recently, but I oppose Neanderthal thinking too.