Tag Archives: Authoritarians

It’s Not Easy Being Green

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Altemeyer, Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Green Party, Hillary Clinton, Politics

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The Green party has long been anathema to any genuine progressive turn in American politics now for upwards of twenty years or more. Beginning with Nader’s undercutting Gore’s electoral chances and thus putting Shrub (the lesser Bush) in the office of the President, the Green party has done everything in its power to demonstrate its absolute rejection of basic logic (to say nothing of facts on the ground) in favor of an “ideology” that amounts to nothing more than self-absorbed infantilism.kermit confused

And yes, I too have seen the strained fabrications that have self-righteously proclaimed that Nader did not cost Gore Florida in 2000. But like any person gifted with nothing more exotic than the mere abstract possibility of intelligence or thought, I recognize these exercises in childish excuse-making for what they are. This nonsense has even gone so far as to claim that Nader voters would have turned to Bush, had Nader not been running. Which is to say, Gore wasn’t far enough to the political left for such people, so in the absence of Nader they would have leapt even further to the political right. The only imaginable reason for doing so would be sheer, infantile spite which, given the nature of the Green party and its devotees, is actually almost believable. But I’m going to work on the assumption that Green party voters are merely stupid, as opposed to self-absorbed, narcissistic, intransigently petty, sniveling little cry-babies. If I am mistaken on this point, I apologize in advance. Continue reading →

The World is a Circle

15 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Logic

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The title is an ironic gesture to a disturbingly cheerful (some, like me, might say saccharin) tune by Bacharach and David, but my intention is to talk about what is less happily categorized as circular reasoning. This is one of those fallacies that has been recognized for so long that the medievals gave it a Latin name: petitio principii. It is also one of those painful failures of basic reasoning that goes beyond the narrow confines of formal logic, or introductory critical thinking classes. This is one of those monsters of bad thinking that empower authoritarian minded individuals and their enablers to unshamefacedly spout about “alternative facts” and other infantile drivel. You see, the problem with a circle, as well as with a mind that reasons in one, is that the circle is closed; inquiry, on the other hand, is (by necessity) open and ongoing.disturbing-1

I’ve talked before (several times, in fact) about what Altemeyer describes as the “compartmentalization” that occurs in authoritarian belief and ideology. One can scarcely dignify this latter as “thinking,” regardless of the degree of sophisticated cleverness employed in maintaining those compartments as air tight against all facts and logic. Authoritarian thinkers, following Hamlet’s example, keep their minds, bounded in a nutshell and count themselves kings of infinite space, were it not that they have bad dreams. (Of course, Hamlet was being ironic, and mocking his interlocutors, something the Mango Mussolini’s enthusiasts entirely fail to grasp.) The thing is, these people choose to be bounded by a nutshell, all the while imagining themselves in princely command of infinite space. Meanwhile, their bad dreams (which are the trailings of reality, dogging them despite their dogmatism) are the sources of their willing embrace of Trumpian neo-fascism. Because the nutshell – the “nut house” – in which they have bound their minds is a tightly enclosed circle that permits no entry from reality. Continue reading →

A Few Resources

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Authoritarians, Donald Trump, Education, Inquiry, Martin Luther King, Politics

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I am, with certain notable constraints, a book collector. Those constraints are worth noting here: since I have no space to store masses of wood pulp, those books have to be electronic in form, and since I have little disposable money, those books have to be free. In light of the looming political catastrophe facing us not only in the United States, but sadly across much of the world, it occurred to me that many of those books have become horrifyingly more relevant. With that in mind, it occurred to me that I ought to share what I’ve collected for any and all who might be interested. I will update this post as I discover new things, and list the date of the most recent update just above the foldeugene-debs

This in no way pretends to be a comprehensive list, merely a list of things I’ve variously stumbled upon and, on rarer occasions, went out looking for. I’ve not added anything that might be considered “classical” political theory (i.e., part of the “canon” in a philosophy class) as these can be readily found at places like Project Gutenberg. Nor have I included anything that might be viewed as socialist polemics since, once again, this can be readily found at places like the Marxists Internet Archive.

Updated: January 4th, 2017, the Indivisible guide book. Update is at the bottom.

Continue reading →

Arrow’s Paradox of Voting

26 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Fascism, Logic, Politics

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Kenneth Arrow is a well known economist, logician, statistician, and political theorist. While his scholarly contributions are numerous, his best known was his first, published as a part of his dissertation. This is the above titled “paradox of voting,” which is also referred to has his “impossibility theorem.” This latter is evidently the technically correct title. However, I learned about it as the paradox of voting, and that’s the title I’ll stick with here. For one thing, calling it his “paradox of voting” makes it more clear at the outset what the theorem is about, and suggests what is really at stake. Details of the impossibility theorem are readily found for no more effort than looking, so my intention here is to provide a non-technical gloss of the topic. Still, enough of what I say here is about basic logic (and not merely political screed) that I am satisfied that this topic falls within my basic parameters for this blog.

Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow

The stakes here could scarcely be any higher, as they effect the very foundation of our nominally democratic system. Because of how our voting and electoral system is set up, we have a “winner take all” format that can (and often enough, does) allow a person to be elected even thought that person did not receive a majority of the votes. Once you have more than two candidates (or more than two parties) involved in any particular election, it is no longer possible to representatively distribute preferences in the election. This is the somewhat fancy way of saying things. The simpler way of saying it is that the more widely detested candidate can win. Continue reading →

Fear Sum

22 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by in Altemeyer, Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Fascism

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Persons whose mode of interacting with the world is significantly determined by fear are not in a position to think clearly or thoroughly. This is not some new-age fatuousness or Star Wars homily, simply an obvious fact. And note that the language used here is fairly deliberate: I’m not talking about persons who are afraid all the time – a truly dreadful, and genuinely pathological condition to even imagine! I mean persons whose conceptual, perceptual, and affective approaches to how they frame and engage with reality have a substantive, more-or-less constant, fear-driven component. Even as this component is not the single greatest part of the entire puzzle (indeed, such persons will often enough hardly even realize that it is there) the fact that it is there, even though it whispers more than shouts, its endemic presence gives it disproportionate influence over the affected people’s lives. It turns out that such persons are overwhelmingly conservative in their political and social outlooks.Terrified scream

People who have this substantial (albeit subtle) inclination toward a fear-driven account of, and interaction with, the world are not particularly less intelligent than other people. Endless sniping to the contrary notwithstanding, neither liberals nor conservatives are less intelligent or less educated than the other. Many famous conservatives have advanced degrees: Newt Gingrich has a Ph.D. In European history, and Ben Carson is, by all accounts (not just his own) an extraordinary neurosurgeon. (Although, in Carson’s case, it may be legitimate to wonder about his genuine intelligence, as opposed to clever puzzle solving abilities..) But one of the aspects of Authoritarian thinking – which is often, if not mostly conservative in nature – is its ruthless compartmentalization. One can be very intelligent and very well educated, but within the fear-driven parameters of the Authoritarian mindset, that intelligence and that education will not be permitted to range freely across the full spectrum of inquiry for very long, if at all. This compartmentalization allows ideas to exist independently of rational critique, and they can take on an emotional tinge – such as fear – which is not objectively merited. Continue reading →

How to Lie with Questions

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Logic, Politics

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Many people labor under the erroneous assumption that questions are essentially innocent. To the extent that this is true, these people open themselves up to a kind of manipulation that is insidious to the point of being vicious. The asking of a question – any question, really – presupposes an enormous amount of background information in order for the question to even be meaningful, much less answerable. When that background information assumes as given fact matters that are in reality untrue, then the fallacy of the complex question has been committed. Groucho Marx famously posed the question, “Are you still beating your wife?” But this question cannot be answered unless it is first true that the person being asked is, or at least was, a wife beater. But if that condition is not true, then there is no way of answering the question, since either a “yes” or a “no” answer amount to the assertion of a falsehood. Which is to say, in answering a question, one is tacitly agreeing to the background assumptions.Groucho Wife

One can be at once variously innocent seeming, and yet aggressive, in how one poses a loaded question, depending on how utterly lacking in integrity one happens to be. Thus, for example, in politics one often encounters what is known as a “push poll.” Disguised as a questionnaire, a push poll’s real intent is not to learn what people believe, but to actively manufacture that belief. The seeming innocence of the push poll is in its sheep’s clothing as a questionnaire; the aggression comes in the implicit posturing as essential democratic process: failure to answer the question is a failure to participate in democracy. Which brings me to the Congressional Representative for my district in Illinois, Mike Bost. Continue reading →

The Least of These

19 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in atheism, Ethics, God, Logic, Syria

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I am not a religious person, a fact I’ve never hidden from anyone. However, I’ve also made it clear that I am impatient with “lazy atheism” – cheap shot forms of willful ignorance that make no effort to grasp the differences between religious, theological, and philosophical concepts of “god,” or the many nuanced ways in which such a being might creatively interact with the world. Just because you watched five minutes of Pat Robertson on the television does not mean you are an expert on the subject – not even on the subjects of religions as these are practiced, in fact, by people, much less the full range of concepts, both actual and possible, relating to “god.”

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But if lazy atheists are tedious, lazy theists are downright disgusting. I’ve never invested the effort to actually study the Bible, but I did read large portions of it when I was a child. So when my knowledge of this collection of texts exceeds that of persons who publicly posture themselves as devout Christians, I am disinclined to treat such people charitably.

It is my unscientific impression that these persons – willfully ignorant yet declared devout Christians – are invariably conservatives of an extreme variety.

The liberal Christians I have met (and, again, this is not a representative sample) have not only been less inclined to make public displays of their religious beliefs, they have been much more interested in learning and discovering new and different aspects of religious beliefs in others. The difference here may well be due to the fact that conservatives are much more inclined toward adopting authoritarian mind frames, to the extent that not only are they less interested in learning new things, but they are often positively opposed to permitting others to do so.

So it is that I cannot tell if it is ironic, or merely pathetic, that the noisiest opposition to the admission of a handful of Syrian refugees (a “handful” in comparison to the staggering numbers of them) to the United States, seems universally to be coming from conservative “Christians.”

44″Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’ 45″Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’

Mathew 25: 44 – 45

Savant?

10 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Authoritarians, Carson, Inquiry, Intelligence

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Specifically, “idiot savant.”

I’ve no idea whether the term “idiot savant” retains any currency – it might be considered too pejorative to be acceptable. But it is the term I originally learned, and so I will continue to use it here. (I originally encountered the concept over four decades ago, in a science fiction short story, that I’ve since failed to track down, titled “Idiot Solvent.”) An idiot savant is generally someone who scores very poorly on ordinary measures of intelligence, but is then exceptionally gifted in one particular performative area. Often times, this area is music. Other areas of performance are evidently possible, whether or not we’ve documented them. There might be a great deal of overlap between what is (or, at least used to be) called “idiot savant” and certain types of intense Asperger’s syndrome. (Perhaps it is more than an overlap, but something closer to an identity?)crates14

Regardless, while I am clearly unqualified to offer anything that might be viewed as even remotely “diagnostic,” I continue to struggle to find what seem to be workable analogies for the very public delamination of Ben Carson and his constructed story of self. At the very least, Carson does appear to be a profligate confabulator – in point of fact, Carson is a consummate bullshitter (which might, indeed, be something of a synonym for “profligate confabulator”) – as well as someone with an astoundingly ill-formed grasp of basic history and science. Carson is supposed to be a “brilliant” man; however, I will argue here that that is precisely what he is not. Rather, I wish to use Carson to exemplify how right-wing authoritarians (RWA) and their habits of compartmentalization, completely undermine anything that might genuinely qualify as intelligence. My characterization of intelligence, however, is not the one you’ll find in the dictionary. Continue reading →

Running The Asylum

10 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by in Authoritarians, Media, Politics

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As a general rule, there is a reason why the loonies are not allowed, much less encouraged, to run the asylum. It is because they are – oh dear! What’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, yes! – it is because they are INSANE. Evidently the (un)leadership associated with the GOP failed to get that particular memo. And now they, as well as everyone else, are set to reap the whirlwind that their negligence and systematic refusal to engage in even a pretense of governance has now brought down upon us.Cray

Things started coming unhinged in earnest back in the Clinton (that’s Bill’s) administration. The absolutely off-the-leash lunacy that came about because Clinton proposed mild improvements to the structure of health care in this country was unparalleled. That Monica smoked his bone under the Resolute desk – which is presumably made of “hard wood” – was never more than a red herring. Yet there were more than a few infantile ideologues in high elected &/or appointed (think “special prosecutor”) office for whom this matter of no possible interest or consequence loomed as the preservation or loss of the Republic. Kennedy’s exploits with “Mr. Happy” remain matters of Washington legend, yet nobody cared. Clinton has a single “extended conversation” with a willing intern of legal age, and it is the End of the World. This is because the GOP decided that the only way they could win elections was by engaging in overt acts of debasement and prostration to the most egregiously unhinged elements of their own party. Continue reading →

Gun Ownership as Identity Politics

04 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in Authoritarians, Gun Control, Identity Politics, John Dewey

≈ 12 Comments

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(This is a “hot button” topic. If you’ve not commented here in the past, then I encourage you to read my policy on comments and spam before commenting now.)KnottedGun

So, another day, another mass-shooting; ho-hum. The NRA and other gun lobbies will noisily declare – in absolute defiance of all logic and evidence – that if only there were MORE guns, such tragedies would not occur. The staggering costs of gun violence will be dismissed out of hand, even and especially on those vanishingly rare occasions when they are mentioned at all. Meanwhile, gun advocates will brazenly insist – again, in absolute defiance of all logic and evidence – that gun control is incapable of effecting gun violence.

This last piece of nonsense deserves special attention, given that the absence of basic reasoning is so manifestly stark. The claim essentially amounts to insisting that since gun control laws cannot be 100% effective (which is to say, completely eliminate all forms of gun violence), then they can only be completely ineffective and useless. In other words, even if gun control laws only reduced gun violence by 1%, those 330 lives saved each year (since we slaughter over 33,000 annually), simply don’t matter. And let us apply the above “reasoning” to other laws: making murder illegal has not ended crimes of murder; so by the same argument, we should make murder legal. The same approach applies equally to every other law and regulation out there. Continue reading →