War Is Not Healthy

Any True Christian

You have to have heard about this already, so I'll just pop my bit in here.



Cindy Castano Swannack is a great example of a Shopping-List Christian who thinks Jesus is really just god's customer service rep; somebody you get in touch with whenever you need to put the bite on the almighty for a favor (which is why they all go to god's house on his day off, btw). She's absolutely sure she knows everything about her lord and savior while actually knowing next to nothing.

Knowledge Is For Wimps

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  --Thomas Jefferson 1789.

Maybe that's why it feels impossible for me to trust most "conservatives" to run this joint.

From "Climate Change is a hoax", to "the federal budget problem is just like balancing my  check book", to "keep your gubmint hands off my Medicare" - these people go with intellect the way fruit bats go with motorcycles.

From boston.com:

Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

--and--

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Happy Palindrome Week, Everybody

From April 12 thru April 19, each day (as written here in USAmerica Inc anyway) is a palindrome.  4/12/14, 4/13/14, 4/15/14, etc

I'm sure somebody somewhere thinks that must mean something magical and mystical and ooky-spooky or whatever.  I'm just thinking it's a semi-interesting weirdness and I needed something to stick in the blog, so yeah.

Of course, next year the same thing will happen in May, and then the year after that it'll happen in June, and - aaaaaaaarrgh - we're doomed!

Not Much Has Changed

Your opponents don't stop doing what's working as long as it keeps working, and it keeps working until your side does something to make it stop working.



(from Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story)

The night is filled with terrors.  The darkness holds everything we fear.  There's a dark and dangerous side to populism.  Come to the dark side.  Dark is evil and ugly. White is godly and clean.  Cockroaches flourish in the darkness while flowers thrive in the sunlight.  Black is bad - White is good.

As long as we continue to allow this medieval associative bullshit to persist, we will never be rid of the assholes who manipulate those associations for less than honorable purposes.

Today's KO

The Wonderlic Test is always something of a mystery, inside a riddle, wrapped in an opportunity to poke fun at the NFL bosses who actually think we're going to believe they have any interest in any player's intellect.

Mr Deity And The Psych Exam

And This Is News?

Via Think Progress:

When organized interest groups or economic elites want a particular policy passed, there’s a strong likelihood their wishes will come true. But when average citizens support something, they have next to no influence.

That’s according to a forthcoming article in Perspectives on Politics by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University. The two looked at a data set of 1,779 policy issues between 1981 and 2002 and matched them up against surveys of public opinion broken down by income as well as support from interest groups.

They estimate that the impact of what an average citizen prefers put up against what the elites and interest groups want is next to nothing, or “a non-significant, near-zero level.” They note that their findings show “ordinary citizens…have little or no independent influence on policy at all.” The affluent, on the other hand, have “a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy,” they find, “more so than any other set of actors” that they studied. Organized interest groups similarly fare well, with “a large, positive, highly significant impact on public policy.”

From the report itself:

As to empirical evidence concerning interest groups, it is well established that organized groups regularly lobby and fraternize with public officials; move through revolving doors between public and private employment; provide self-serving information to officials; draft legislation; and spend a great deal of money on election campaigns.21 Moreover, in harmony with theories of biased pluralism, the evidence clearly indicates that most U.S. interest groups and lobbyists represent business firms or professionals. Relatively few represent the poor or even the economic interests of ordinary workers, particularly now that the U.S. labor movement has become so weak.22

But do interest groups actually influence policy? Numerous case studies have detailed instances in which all but the most dedicated skeptic is likely to perceive interest group influence at work. A leading classic remains Schattschneider’s analysis of the 1928 enactment of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, an astounding orgy of pork-barrel politics.23 Still, many quantitatively oriented political scientists seem to ignore or dismiss such non-quantitative evidence. There have also been some efforts (particularly during the Cold War era, when unflattering depictions of U.S. politics may have been thought unpatriotic) to demonstrate that interest groups have no influence on policy at all. Raymond Bauer, Ithiel Pool, and Lewis Anthony Dexter argued that business had little or no effect on the renewal of reciprocal trade authority. Lester Milbrath, having conducted interviews with lobbyists and members of Congress, rated lobbyists’ influence as very low. More recently, Fred McChesney(*) has made the ingenious argument that campaign contributions from interest groups may not represent quid pro quo bribery attempts by groups, but instead result from extortion by politicians who threaten to harm the groups’ interests.24

*McChesney's credibility is suspect because of his close ties to Cash-For-Comments type schemes - one of the more notorious being the Tobacco Lobby efforts to fight tax increases on tobacco products back in the 80s.  But more to the actual point, McChesney gives us a great example of The Turnaround (sales tactic). He's saying, "Oh no - these huge campaign contributions and the corrosiveness of lobbying and regulatory capture and the incest of the revolving door between Gubmint and Bidness - that doesn't really constitute a system of legalized bribery at all - it's those rotten politicians threatening to strangle our noble job creators if they don't pony up vast sums of money..."  It's easy to see it from that angle and I'm not pretending none of that goes on, but to make it out that the whole problem is one of simple extortion?  That sounds just a tiny bit too conveniently consistent with the standard malarkey of "government is all bad, in all things, and in all ways at all times."  And actually, McChesney isn't denying the quid pro quo shittiness anyway - he's acknowledging that people are buying influence and favors - he's just shifting the blame.

Not that any of this is going to make much difference.  This 'revelation' only confirms what we've known for a long time.  And let's remember we've been thru a coupla decades of Rising Idiocracy.  Paul Broun and Louie Gohmert - guys you shouldn't follow into your own fucking house - these are two of the leading lights in "conservative" politics.  Lots and lots of booger-eatin' morons just like them are in power - and will stay in power - because the people who put them in office have a lot more money than you have, and that's about all that's gonna matter for a while.

Today's Pix

Political Blackface

Whenever Ben Shapiro's paymasters get to feelin' under-appreciated, a little public fellatio is in order.

And this is precisely what Colbert does with regard to politics: he engages in Conservativeface. He needs no makeup or bulbous appendage to play a conservative – after all, conservatives come in every shape and size. Instead, he acts as though he is a conservative – an idiotic, racist, sexist, bigoted, brutal conservative. He out-Archie Bunkers Archie Bunker. His audience laughs and scoffs at brutal religious “Colbert” who wishes to persecute gays; they chortle at evil sexist “Colbert” who thinks men are victims of sexism. This is the purpose of Colbert’s routine. His show is about pure hatred for conservatives in the same way that blackface was about pure hatred of blacks. In order to justify their racism, racists had to create a false perception of blacks; in the same way, Colbert and his audience can justify their racism only by creating a false perception of conservatives.

And so, the message here is that "conservatives" are the real victims? Sounds like Shapiro is saying that Colbert's antics are somehow evidence that "conservatives" are being held down and oppressed, and treated unjustly simply for having suffered the great misfortune of being born to privilege? The (mostly) white (mostly) guys in the corner offices who came up thru the hard-knock ranks of prep academies and Ivy League-type business schools; the ones with the trophy (ie: heiress) wives and the obscenely fat bank accounts, and the fashionably skinny mistresses and the interlocking networks of wealth and power - those are the guys who're being mistreated?

What's your next column, Ben - "We are not amused!"?

From the comment thread: