You remind me of a teacher I was talking with one day, who was distraught because her students expect her to be Big Bird, and will not make the effort to learn unless she entertains them. Maybe the demagogues got too much help from the perpetual babysitter in the den.

Stirring, as usual Glenn.

I truly believe that whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword must’ve had you in mind.

And really liked the “knee” generation. Hadn’t heard that. So appropriate.

Thanks.

There certainly is a childish element to it all. Promotion of ignorance is infantilizing.

Thank you, Mr. Smith. You’ve hit it out of the park again.

Thanks, OFG. The might, however, is not in the pen. It’s in the readers.

Without steroids!! I’m just channeling y’all, though. Thanks!

During my college days, there was often a sense of “Sunday night depression.” That odd sense seems to start earlier these days….as we long for a solution.

No steroids? Then we can go ahead and strike you from the Congressional witness list. heh

Not to worry. Nothing a little end of empire won’t cure. As soon as the U.S. empire collapses, reality will return.

It’s been a kind of arms race, truth versus illusion and falsehood. Undeniably, we distribute more honest and enlightening information than any progressive movement has before. But the Right has us outgunned. A TV network, cowardly mainstream media who won’t take them on, a shameful willingness to deceive regardless of consequences.

For instance, why isn’t Media Matters having more luck promoting the truth? We need to attack this problem, but it does seem daunting. Truth will out, they say. Hope, I guess, comes first.

The one that sickens me is Frank Luntz. There is something diabolical about finding words that trigger the wanted response, short-circuiting the reasoning power of the individual.

If the smart set from the upper East side want to rip off the elderly through changes to Social Security which deprive them of future benefits, then it is hard for me to fault those less well educated and less well-off for ignorance or for being seduced by simplistic solutions and jingoisms:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22intro.html

Five out of six of the so-called experts or thereabouts, are falling for the Social Security is in trouble meme.

Well, there are those steroids I’ve taken in the past for allergies, ahem….

short-circuiting the reasoning power of the individual

Great phrase, and it’s the difference between honest framing and spin. Framing, done right, should enhance the reasoning power of individuals.

Ninety years ago, William Butler Yeats felt the way we do:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(from “The Second Coming”)

Frank truly fits the saying “the banality of evil.”

Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, Lippmann and that disgusting Trotskyite closet queen Eric Blair are beside the point. Read Baudrillard and J.G. Ballard for the Truth about the present moment.

Then prepare to attack anyone who claims there are “Two Sides” to everything. There’s only one.

Truth will out….I’ve always believed. Now we may have to work much harder, however.

Evil is not in the least banal. It’s just common.

This Glenn is the best of your’s (and just about anyone else) I have read. Thank you.

Those of us whose lives are spent in active advocacy for reality find ourselves in a poignant place. I am beginning to understand why some 10-15 years ago I lost my taste for most fiction, writing and performed. Of course good fiction is intended to purvey truths and some I suppose strictly for escape into titillation. We don’t need escape from reality. We need to find it.

Sadly I personally have come to expect lies from so many of my traditional sources of truth. Perhaps we should create a new medium a new style?

Yep, but it’s like a flood. We work harder but the river keeps risin’. Pass the sandbags!

Perhaps we should create a new medium a new style?

You’re on to something there. Despite enormous gains, we seem to be losing the race against unreality. We should explore the idea. Truth needs a hand.

The media and some politicians appeal to our most degrading instincts and sit back to watch the results. We are turned against each other which is what is intended and it’s working very well. The truth hardly matters any more because it isn’t convenient and it’s not a good story. Their problem is that WE won’t go away. There will always be some who are the “professional left” and they really hate us but we’re here.
Thanks, Glenn. Very nice post.

This is exactly how I’ve been feeling for quite some time, but it was something I’d had difficulty putting into words that adequately expressed the feeling. Thank you for so eloquently hitting the nail on the head.

But how odd is it that the real opponent of truthiness may be someone as ignorant as Ms Palin? Blows my little mind.

Palin is the Paris Hilton of Politics.

Who would imagine that an entire press corps would slavishly quote her Facebook posts, as if they were words of wisdom from on high?

I ‘m glad that the execrable Glenn Beck was mentioned in this piece. Under ordinary circumstances, he wouldn’t bother me too much. However, given the (apparent) multitude of followers, I must confess a certain measure of alarm. The proto-fascist rally being planned for 08/28/10 might tell us something about what we’re up against.

Palin is in a class by herself. I sometimes think she is just a really, really bad person. Other times I think she is hugely ignorant and dumb as a stump. I do know that she doesn’t care about consequences. Her popularity is not so high now and many of the people she endorsed lost, so there is hope. But one thing is certain – she is not going away.

Yep…and be believed.

You’re right. We will not go away.

March in Detroit August 28 for jobs, justice and peace.

http://www.rainbowpush.org/pages/rebuild_america_march_in_detroit

Will you be there? I hope so – you can report to us.
We need it to be successful.

They create a phenomenon like Palin and then rationalize continuing coverage with the argument that she’s a phenom they’re just neutrally covering, like they had nothing to do with her celebrity.

I was appalled at the media reception she received when she spoke to the ’08 GOP convention. Even pre-speech they were treating her like a second coming. Then she read a speech to the easiest audience on earth, and the media acted like she’d done something not mundane but remarkable. Quite the self-deceiving media.

I think a lot of liberals are flummoxed by the use of emotion as an ally of the virtual reality the right wing. People like and need emotion. But when confronted with their intensity we react with attempting to extract emotion in from our presentations.

Perhaps it would be effective if we can battle their emotions and their view of human nature as much as the lies. eg In a book review on Salon I found the comment that polls of the Brits during the time of attacks by the German.V! V2s found they opposed their government doing the same thing to the Germans ie carpet bombing etc.

In my case I find music and the visual arts the best at incorporating emotion and truth in a single experiential package. Just look at some of the early Joan Baez film. The words are compelling but so is her passion..

If the Glenn Beck proto-fascist rally draws more people on August 28th than a march for jobs, justice and peace on the same date in Detroit then what looms on the horizon is even more terrible than one can imagine.

Yes, I’ll be there.

You make a very important point. We try to rebut emotional argument with cold facts, as if emotion is the cause of the problem. It’s not, as Weston, Lakoff and others have argued persuasively.

As can be seen with Joan Baez, passion can be an ally of truth. Thanks for the reminder. Everyone, read TalkingStick’s comment @34.

For instance, why isn’t Media Matters having more luck promoting the truth?

I think you may have already answered this question in your post:

“You’re lying,” I said. He smiled. That’s it. He smiled.

I so appreciate your taking my disjointed thoughts and making sense of them. :-)

All true, and may your cogent plea not fall on the ears of the deafly fatuous, Glenn.

Branford Marsalis touches on one of the roots of the malaise, IMO.

;>)

Wealthy conservatives and corporate entities have been at war with reality forever. They’ve just upgraded their tools, is all. Examine the history of William Simon, the Olin Foundation, and the Powell Memo: The Cons and their corporate financiers have spent billions either buying up or buying off not just the press, but various think tanks and other arbiters of objective reality.

Reality is there, in front of our noses. It always is, but we complicate it with our capacity to remember the past and imagine the future.

Karl Popper, in “Open Universe” showed that determinism, particularly scientific determinism is false, and that the future cannot be determined from the past, no matter how much we know about it. It’s time we take that into our being and be comfortable in our present, in our skins.

“…and right now American politics is massless…”

But,unfortunatly, not assless!

By “our generation” do you mean boomers (born pre-1964)? I see Begala was born in 1961. Regarding Habermas and the other Frankfort School theorists, I would caution against what Terry Eagleton describes as the “patrician gloom of the late Frankfort School” in viewing the working class as “doped telly viewers”. The Frankfort School’s “critical theory” etc. (and the ideas of the late-60s “New Left” which it influenced) is far too pessimistic in its appraisal of the possibility of working class collective action. In my view it is essentially a theory for upper class lefties.

To understand why workers, the overwhelming majority of the population, react the way that they do you must put yourself in their shoes.We can disagree with other people’s attitudes (the continued existence of racism for example) but in order to understand why it exists you must understand what it is like to be a worker. Those of us from the working class (my father was an over-the-road truck driver) are often astonished at the almost complete lack of knowledge of what it is like to BE working class by upper-middle-class professionals. (In the entire time I worked on my PhD the only other students I met from a working class background was a German).

the future cannot be determined from the past, no matter how much we know about it

This is more complicated than presented.

Of course the past has an influence on the future, even in our genes.

But knowing the past does not give us the capacity to predict the future. That would come only from acting as “conservatives” if we could avoid change and perfectly preserve the past.

I simply can’t agree that a strictly reactionary way of living will out. That notion in my mind is right up there with Rand and the Invisible hand folks..

All that said: I do agree that much contentment is found in grasping the moment and forgetting the past and especially the future.

May I raise a dissonant voice here? I think the author’s got hold of the wrong end of the bat he knocked it out of the park with. The question’s not the loss of reality, beauty, truth, justice and all those other good and worthy things we’ve lost, because those are all amorphous words, now devoid of intrinsic meaning, if they ever had any. The question is the loss of the language, for which we share the responsibility.
O’Rourke’s “…control over one’s own ideas…” is a lofty and
wonderful concept, but those “ideas” are built of words, and if the words are not stiff and load-bearing, the structure…the idea…collapses. Unless it is shapeless, weightless, and can float, which, I think, is largely what we swap back and forth in our exchanges of ideas.

The friend asks, “(W)hat they are going to say about us three generations down the road(?)” Well, they are going to say what they think, and what they think will be ideas, and the ideas will be shaped by words, and if the words are shapeless…

Our legacy to three generations hence may be gibberish…of speech and thought. Instead of deriding Frank Luntz, maybe you should be paying attention to him.

The examples are too numerous (“…pro-life…”, “Support our troops!”, “…homeland security…”) to take up any more space with. Suffice to say, “they” claimed them and we ceded them…without getting anything in return. Whose fault?

I heartily concur on the idea that “…music and the visual arts the best at incorporating emotion and truth in a single experiential package”.

In fact they are the root of my inner workings, a standard against which I measure my own emotional responses with respect to reality. My own expression of that truth is to meld the one into the other in what is referred to as “Work in Progress”. They bootstrap one another.

Ok I read what I just wrote, and all I can say is the more I say about it, the less it is true!

It is a function of a completely corrupt system, of elites wholly given over to looting. During the Bush years, I suggested that every story concerning him begin with “The worst President in our history said today…” It was meant as a way of putting whatever followed in its core context. We need to do the same now. In front of every story, we should put “Our looting elites said today…” This is why I do not understand the publishing of post after post here of this Democrat doing better than that Republican, or that this Democrat said something that was not totally awful. They are all of them part of our elites, part of the system to loot us to dry husks.

Any support for any Democrat or any Republican is support for the looting and the looters. We have seen a million times now how the charade of rotating heroes and villains works. There are no good Democrats, not one. The votes on healthcare should have taught us that.

It isn’t just information. It is also analysis and action. The unreality is that there are so many here that still think that Democrats are on our side or that we can work with them or reform them or pressure them. We can’t. We need to move on. We need to draw the line with them once and for all. Democrats are not part of the solution. They are a very big part of the problem and we must oppose them.

Even in His heyday, God HImself never had anything even close to the power that TV has had during its 60-year reign over every waking and dreaming hour of our lives. Either you’re a zombie or you pretend you’re immune. It’s not hard to figure out: A fool and his money are soon parted; TV’s commercial function is to make you part with your money; so, it first makes fools of its audience. Who hasn’t suffered whiplash every time they hear “Look”, and probably salivated? Incidentally, ‘Look’ is President Obama’s favorite set-up locution.

Find Popper’s book “Open Universe” The complications are extensive, and he cuts an admirable path to his conclusions.

He is the inventor of the falsifiability Theorem which scientific theories look to for unassailable proof, or lack thereof.

Having an influence, agreed. Predicting the outcome??

Those who know, do not speak.
Those who speak, do not know.

-Lao Tzu

Very well expressed. Even the Silent Majority can’t disagree.

Karl Popper is a hack. His “Open Society and its Enemies” is a two-volume polemic in which he claims that structural explanations (e.g. those of Aristotle, Plato, Marx etc) trample on the rights of individuals. Let me give you an example that Popper would call a “deterministic” theory. Let’s say that I am teaching a class in which the students are asked to turn in essays. I grade them and hand them back, and the grade distribution turns out to be: one A, fourteen D’s and fifteen F’s. How do we explain this? An individualist like Popper would say that we MUST explain this distribution individually, i.e. by talking about what each student did. So say Mary got the A, we could look at how she studied, perhaps she didn’t watch TV etc.. And each other outcome (each student’s grade) is discussed similarly, what they individually did. Will that work, i.e. can we explain the distribution by what each individual did? Not if I had decided before the exam had been handed out that the distribution would be one A, fourteen D’s and fifteen F’s. (I can actually do that, as a TA I graded for an instructor who wanted 20% A’s, 20% B’s, 35% Cs, 15% D’s and 10% F’s). In other words, the explanation for the distribution must be structural, i.e. proceed independent of what any individual did. No matter what they do, how hard they study, etc., the distribution is going to be 1 A, 14 D’s and 15 F’s. Now, extrapolate from this example to a social explanation, say unemployment, and you can see that the explanation must be structural if there is a hidden structural phenomena, say structural unemployment at work. if there is a structural predisposition to have 10% unemployment it will not matter what anyone does as individuals. That structural dynamic is what Popper describes as determinism. In my opinion Popper’s work is little more than capitalist triumphalism in the form of pseudo-scientific quackery.

You are certainly correct about Obama’s look: I have been curious about the function…to clear his thoughts, get attention, take up time….who knows. But it (look) certainly has a place. Thanks for noting that, FWIW.

She will fade away when her looks fade and someone prettier and stupider and even more dangerous takes her place. Who’s being groomed at this moment?

II was hoping to be polite. I will let RedFlagg speak for me.

Popper is a joke along with all the Austrian schools of economics.

I struck through my unnecessarily snarky statement. Sorry about that.

Have you read “Open Universe”? I didn’t see that definition of determinism at all. In fact, he speaks to scientific determinism as the strong case because it is testable, predicated on accountability. If that’s quackery, then science is doomed.

Some think it is anyway!

If you have links to any counterpoint to his conclusions and methodology, I am all ears!

We agree that the future cannot be predicted. I would say, not in details, but certain presumptions can be made. That’s why we build infrastructure and individuals make efforts to save for retirement. etc.

I agree the language is being appropriated and meanings changed, even reversed. And the GOPers are masters of it. But it is a method the right wing uses to obscure reality, even redefine it. I think Glenn is spot on by directing our attention to the assault on reality.

But you know language at least since it has been written down has been used for those purposes. Remember the Maine?

Yeah, and Galileo was a sinner, worthy of the Inquisition for his heliocentric nature of the solar system.

I think Popper’s ideas and proofs are worth investigating. Others don’t. So be it.

Yes, so long as we remember they are presumptions, not conclusions. That’s the problem with the prevailing view about climate change. And in that case the devil is in the details.

The day I really stopped worrying about the future, I found myself being able to live, more alive than ever. And strangely enough, I became eager to participate in the unfolding into the future.

Yes indeedy, I wrote my dissertation on forms of explanation. The short answer (it really won’t be short, lol) about the nature of science would be this: real scientists aren’t at all interested in the sort of theories worked out by Popper and other positivists. (I am not a scientist, my area is the philosophy of science/ forms of explanation, and also luckily, the brother of one of the guys on my diss. committee won the Nobel Prize for biology and I had access to him). In short, positivist theories (Hempel is the most famous probably) which dominate in the social sciences are both too inclusive (they will “confirm” bad, racist, sexist hypotheses if they meet their criteria for confirmation) as well as too exclusive (excluding for example explanations that proceed according to objective social forces such as racism). For example, there is the infamous “Barbados Candy Bar” study. In this case university students went into two neighborhoods, one white and prosperous, one black and impoverished, and asked random children to make a choice: either they can have one candy bar today, or two candy bars tomorrow. Invariably the white children decided to wait for two candy bars the next day, whereas the back children wanted one today. From this, the “testable” hypotheses was “confirmed”: the white children are future oriented, the black children present oriented, and thus the hypotheses was confirmed: white prosperity is due to their future orientation, propensity to save etc, whereas poverty among blacks is due to their present orientation. What could be wrong with this “positivist” testable hypotheses, the ant and the grasshopper, right? How could “racism” explain the behavior of the black children? Well, the people doing the survey were wealthy white students, and the residents of the Barbados slums had many bad experiences with whites to the point that they did not trust them to bring two candy bars tomorrow. A bird in the hand etc. But yet this racist theory, “future orientation”, is “confirmed” under the sort of methodology dominant in the US social sciences.

Nice point about unemployment being structural (even mandated). Student essay grades, in your example, of course depend on ‘gradation’ – it’s what ‘grades’ in fact are in such a system. The correspondence to something like a natural or ‘normal’ distribution makes the malice go down smoother. Long ago ‘learning’ came to mean ‘employable’ by degree and gradation.

Some of us see an agenda in Popper or perhaps more accurately he has been used in the service of the corporatists’ agenda.

I do agree and personally I try to pursue as hedonistic life style as practical. But I think we do benefit from having some hope of influencing the future. It is the motivation for investment in it. I think we get hung up when we start believing we can or should be able to control all of the permutations. I try to settle for believing the influence I have had on others is in part passed on through the future generations. Having spent my life in a serving profession gives me some confidence that that will be the case, and that feels good.

From Emerson: “a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults”.

Why no comment on this? What does fiat currency have to do with this lofty discussion? Should we invite a libertarian to explain this to us?

From Mr. Smith: “The reality of visible things is in retreat, and in its place we have Glenn Beck, Drudge et al, masters of the art of replacing simplicity and truth with duplicity and falsehood”.

Oh how I wish Obama had been mentioned. I could join in praising this piece were it not partisan.

From O’Rourke: “The strength of America is not economic, military, or diplomatic. The strength of America is an idea”…….

I once spent and entire semester in a discussion of what it is that drives history. The choices were politics, economics and ideas. Why was class struggle omitted from consideration? Could it be that the intelligentsia has been complicit in the failure of the American experiment?

I think it’s patronizing. When he was in Charlotte during the campaign he sat down in an office at a TV station and chatted with a few of the ‘reporters’ in a very casual setting. He began most answers with “Look – blah-blah” like he was talking to children or pupils. I guess that’s what pedagogy is.

It was Emerson’s metaphor, nothing more. I thought about deleting for just that reason, that it’s an anachronism. But he meant it only as a metaphor, and I decided to leave it.

Absolutely right, it is unethical to explain distributions as arising due to individual differences in a situation in which structural coercion exists. no matter what anyone does, there will still be 10% unemployment. One of the things I remember best (with regret) about being a TA is that the spring semester students’ essays (it was a freshman European Government course) were MUCH better than the fall, having been through a semester already of writing college-level essays, but it didn’t matter: there still were only 20% A’s. And so explaining why John got an A as due to anything he did is completely beside the point and unethical: they could have handed all the essays in in fingerpaints and there still would have been the same grade distribution.

How about something really in your face and can’t be ignored, like when you go to vote and find Pac-Mac playing on your touch-screen voting machine?

- Tom

Ok, I get it. Thank you. However, Popper’s “Open Universe” is not concerned with the social sciences AFAIK, but rather the so called Natural Sciences, sometimes referred to as the hard sciences. Your example of the candy bar would fit right in with his thesis which is rooted in accountability. Questions like what is an Event, what do we mean by causal, and how do we account for the imprecision of the prediction? are the keystones to his proof. Being testable is not simply a matter of putting a voltmeter on a circuit board pin.

They make sense to me, but I do not possess a PhD in anything. Just an engineer and photographer (and a bit of a closet quantum physicist!)

As a student and colleague of George Lakoff, I’m well aware of the need to give attention to language. I can’t tackle or include everything in a 700 or 800 word piece. You are right about the importance of language, though.

I’d point out that you seem to be paraphrasing Emerson’s point, with which I opened the piece. Anyway, if I hit it out of the park, as one commenter said kindly, and I did it with the wrong end of the bat, well, more power to me!

That accusation of corporatist agenda really puzzles me. Can you link me to the information that supports that? I am, if anything, anal about that which speaks from the corporatist agenda, and if this is so with Popper, a pretty good snow job on me!

I am in agreement with the rest of your comment. What is most delightful is to be surprised at an outcome which is the result of any influence I might have provided (so long as it isn’t jail!) Teaching photography has been the best source of that delight.

Most important about TV’s perverse take-over of US society is how it insinuated envy into our personal and social organization. It’s obvious and self-evident with material things, not so obvious about ‘happiness’ and well-being. Most ‘characters’ and ‘talents’ on TV, from sitcoms, commercials, dramas, to ‘news’ shows and programs, are either healthy and happy looking, or smug, and often all three.

There are controlled ‘studies’ since most European TV wasn’t commercially owned and operated during the formative TV decades. Maybe it’s only coincidental that those societies provide for the common welfare of its citizens.

That is a great way to put it. I had been referring to it as unilaterally surrendering their capacity for reason. As I’ve mentioned before, a right-wing consultant freely admits to this short-circuiting.

The campaign plan…uses the phrase black arts when talking about how we’ll win in the fall. It’s not a document filled with dirty tricks but a plan to create a nonprofit organization called Ensuring Liberty Corporation. It uses unconventional methods to get our message out…A good piece of mail gets its message across in 10 seconds. Television gives you 30 seconds, maybe. We’re playing to the reptilian brain rather than the logic centers, so we look for key words and images to leverage the intense rage and anxiety of white working-class conservatives. In other words, I talk to the same part of your brain that causes road rage…

- Tom

Lakoff is tops, if only he had the influence on the democravens (actually I have given up on them) what Frank Luntz has had on the repugs. The problem I think is with liberals (I am not one) who believe that because rationality is possible (it is) that everyone always acts upon it first and emotion second (which they do not).

I agree with the assessment about rationality and the libs, or anyone for that matter. I suspect the problem is not so much rationality, which is derived from ratio, but what some think is rational.

I don’t apologize for seeming simplistic: I think the extremist blather is essentially a legacy of racist white supremacist hate. The blather attacked Scott Joplin’s ragtime music; it always attacked Jazz; it attacked so-called rock and roll; it attacked The Beatles. Why are so many otherwise intelligent people worried about them?

Incidentally, the 1950 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia had no listing or mention of Scott Joplin; under ‘Ragtime’ it named Irving Berlin as an important contributor (‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’). That multi-volume encyclopedia set also included Piltdown Man among our ancestors.

From Emerson: “a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults”.

It’s a metaphor.

One advantage conservatives will always have is that since they don’t believe in rationality (which I would broadly define as the ability to understand our world and to make changes based upon that understanding) they also do not believe in hypocrisy, that it is wrong to state something you do not really believe. For conservatives all “opinions” are unconfirmable- you have your opinion, I have mine, with no way of determining which is right other than the “character” of the person making the argument. I think the quote Tom R posted @75 is telling, and also the anecdote in the original post about “you’re lying”: for them, it doesn’t matter, there is no truth, no lies, up is down, the sky is red. All that matters is that what they say maintains the status quo.

Lucky for you that you decided to leave it. Fiat money is a perfect example of substituting nothing for something. It is only an anachronism because college professors say so. In fact nothing could be more relevant to our present circumstance.

Emerson said, “…wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.” It’s in his essay, “Nature,” and he was talking about the sacrifice of sacred truth to profane ambitions:

Hard money is a visible thing. And what could be a more profane ambition than to own the world in fee simple? That is the goal of the banking cartel that took control of our money in 1913. Educate yourself regarding the history of money and banking. Don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to Ben Bernanke. Look into the matter with an open mind.

My understanding of rational has to take in consideration irrational. Now in mathematics, there is no value placed on whether a number is rational or irrational. I tend to look at arguments the same way. At least for starters!

As for truth, we cannot know Truth, only point to it. So whatever one says about it, it isn’t.

1913? Try 1688!

To take from Nietzsche on Christianity: It’s a slave philosophy (religion).

Convince the simple folk that there is no reason to fret over fairness or strive to acquire assets or whatever for the future. You have no control over it anyway. One of the most pernicious examples is the brainwashing of the younger generations that social security will go away before they age sufficiently. It has been going on by the right wing for at least 40 years and only intended to be a self fulfilling prophecy and way to get their hands on pension savings.

The invisible hand will take care of you, etc. This is the standard response from the Cato Randians et al.

Another friend, Paul Begala, wrote a piece more than 10 years ago about the failures of our generation…I’m afraid he was right and I was wrong. We are, collectively, failing, and not because the tasks are too difficult, but because we are too easily seduced.

Jay Rosen tweeted “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” The concept is “too big to bust.” Or as Rosen puts it, “a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.”

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7964

I think there is something to this hypothesis. I’ve noticed that when revelations are of such magnitude that they can turn a person’s perceptions of reality upside down, some simply cannot face it. Delusion remains a soft, cozy blanket to wrap themselves in. Some do not have the emotional wherewithal to handle it or are too emotionally invested in their own belief system.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/07/12/exposed-to-facts-the-misinformed-believe-lies-more-strongly/

- Tom

I don’t get the connection between Popper and Nietzsche, if that’s your intention. Nietzsche is a corporatist?

I’ve enjoyed the conversation and don’t mind being hit over the head about my POV. Now I have to go off and do some testing of my own, on sharpness in digital photography.

May Popper not be looking over my left shoulder!

I come from a scientific realist viewpoint, which is strongly associated with Marxism. Roughly speaking, scientific realism holds that scientific theories are approximately true descriptions of actual unobservable entities.

Yes, and not facing up to our collusion with illusion and delusion costs us are warm blanket in the end.

I can understand that. But maybe we cannot observe the entities but we can observe the influences. No where is this more true than in quantum theory.

Good scare quotes around ‘opinions’. michaelfishman @45 still reverberates, the way language has been corrupted and virtually (haha) ruined. Genuine opinions are part of a very high order of intellection, only inferences and facts holding more prestige in argumentative discourse. In a court of law, ballistics experts offer their opinions about whether or not a recovered bullet came from a specific weapon. What we used to call ‘sentiment’ now passes for ‘opinion’. In fact in my own personal opinion it seems to me it might be raining outside.

1971 is also a significant date. Thank you for knowing what the f**k I’m talking about.

I thought I posted this but apparently it didn’t take. I hear and see Popper quoted all over the right wing blogs and think tanks justifying our current income inequality.

My response is taken from Nietzsche on Christianity. It is a slave philosophy (religion). For a slave to strive to change thel future is to strive to acquire freedom and assets. However if there is no hope of influence on the future (in the case of Christianity) before death one must be satisfied with the justice of the invisible god or in economics the invisible hand.

The most pernicious example of using this manipulation is by the MOTU in regard to Social Security. They have been creating a self fulfilling prophecy for the young that they will never live to receive a government guaranteed pension, thus directing all pension savings into their Wall Street slot machines.

You can also state that the speed of an object as “measured” is only an opinion, because you cannot go back and reference the starting point for the measurement, as it now lies in the past. But you can infer from multiple measurements including outcomes.

Right, I think the key is that reality is dynamic rather than static, whether we are discussing physics or social reality: where we came from influences where we are and where we are going to. And opinion is experiential. One of the problems with extrapolating from public opinion surveys is it doesn’t tell us what people will think under different circumstances. For example, workers who take part in strikes and see that they can work together have a completely different (positive) perspective on the possibility for meaningful social change than those who have not.

Ok, thanks. I didn’t see that about Popper.

That he is quoted as justifying their position does not in anyway discredit his work. Rather it is an insult to his work, or it seems to me.

Gotta go!

Recently, Grover Norquist was on The Ed Show and made the assertion that “government is a monopoly” (at about the 9:30 mark, toward the end).

We progressives need to fight this framing. A monopoly is where you have exclusive control of the market SUPPLY of a product or service.

But, in the case of negotiating drug prices on behalf of Americans, the government does not supply or manufacture pharmaceutical drugs. Government represents the American people, the market DEMAND or CUSTOMERS of pharmaceutical drug companies.

It’s monumentally wrong of Norquist to equate We The People with a corporation. I work for a corporation. If I ever confused what we do at the business I work for with actually being one of our own customers, they’d think I was mentally incompetent and I probably wouldn’t last much longer there.

I think it’s very important to attack this false right-wing framing of our government representing We The People.

- Tom

Hey, I thought you were off to the digital light room! The White House’s interior natural light called for an f/2 @ 30 seconds exposure using Tri-X ASA 400. I was informed that photographs were prohibited. Knowing the exposure, I had mounted a 35mm wide angle, waited for the fellow in front of me to shuffle ahead a few yards, coughed and clicked a superb snapshot of the formal dining room including Lincoln’s portrait.

I am somewhat anal about definitions and terminology. I was almost run off this board and HP both for insisting on a definition of liberal that posits both a rejection of government interference in personal, private matters (who you can have sex with and how, etc) as well as a rejection of government involvement in the economy (labor standards, safety regulations, etc). The fact that that is the traditional definition of liberalism, as well as the accepted definition everywhere but the US did not matter: they wanted to use a definition they were comfortable with, of liberals as favoring involvement in the economy. I just thought of that incident today in relation to this little article from the election in Australia Friday, and this quote:

the center-right Coalition combines two conservative parties, the Liberal Party of Australia and the Nationals

Americans want to think of liberals as quasi-Marxist, and there is no point in trying to change their mind, especially those who define themselves as liberal. But in my opinion accuracy is its own justification, and what makes discourse possible is agreeing upon definitions.

BRAVO!

We are locked in the Tower of Babel. We desperately need your help with popular but meaningless words like “progressive” or “Christian”. Even single syllable words are problematic, like left and right.

I think getting into discussions of what reality really really is is to get lost in distraction. Most animals have an innate capacity to recognize reality most of the time and to when fooled to learn from experience. For reality to be denied by humans there has to be a psychological block. It may be as simple as denial and disassociation in the face of capacities to cope with a threatening situation. This I think is highly operative in the climate change situation. Denial or distortion may come from such things as threats to self image. For example those who consider or have been taught to consider not having a job shameful will not only blame others with out jobs but will come up with ideas or be vulnerable to excuse their own jobless state, such as being discriminated against because of some trait such as race.

I personally think our time is better spent on identifying and dealing with manipulations of the emotional system..

My experience has been that Americans have always been politically naive, whether the realm is political science, government and governance, parliamentary procedure, and actual ballot issues. That is, until recently. Yet the US population has nearly doubled since my experience began, so I figure there is now a larger number of people who are better informed about ‘the political’, while there is still a very large number of uninformed and ill-informed people. Around 1960, a lot of Americans started to go to college. They may have been the first in their families or neighborhoods to hear and confront the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. They were hardly prepared to analyze the many distinctions and differences, except in their personal lives and in the larger society. For most of them, ‘liberal’ came to mean ‘tolerant’ (especially about sexual matters and civil rights) and ‘conservative’ came to mean ‘intolerant’. All hell broke loose when the ‘reactionary right’ confronted the ‘radical left’.

I don’t think ‘this board’ would run you off (HP censors indiscriminately), but I appreciate your employing the passive voice there.

Perhaps “run off” is a bit strong, but there wasn’t a warm reaction to my telling people that their long-held self-definition is all wrong, lol. But I like it here much more than HP, I really think Obamarahma has plants over there posting pollyannaish “its all Bush’s fault that Obama is so mediocre” replies to any post critical of him.

Great to see Emerson here, Glenn!

You, Lakoff, and Weston are right and have done a great job. The real progressives need to start spitting the rightwing nutjobs’ distorted words back into their faces, flip the diction back on them and run with it, making the language our own again and with meaning.

We all need to work more on this, with handbooks, dictionaries, websites, think tanks, slogans, phrases, etc.

I think we should wean ourselves off the word “progressive,” which means too many different things to too many people at too many different times. Plus, some people using this term are so far Right they are falling off the flat globe.

Then we need to find candidates and not crooks! Too bad Obama is so far to the Right he’s walking on his head, or Ronald Reagan’s.

No, they don’t. You’re right. And despite a veritable avalanche of research. Interestingly, there’s an East Coast-West Coast split on the cognitive science side, with guys like Pinker still defending Enlightenment-style supreme reason. And, since the Northeast is kinda the homeplace of traditional American liberalism, misplaced trust in the power of cold reason seems to be in their blood.

I think there’s something to that as well. It’s part of the problem with the climate crisis, and it’s kinda obvious in many scandals — Iran/Contra comes to mind.

Pinker, unfortunately, doesn’t even accept the evolution of music as important to language. I’m in line with Dean Falk’s theory that language originated from baby-talk and the mother’s emotional bond with the infant, among other things (maybe mirror neurons). We have to hit the emotional buttons if we really want to move people to action.

Right on with Dean Falk!