Logic alone might not be rationally convincing about all things all the time. But it damn well needs to be explained when it fails. And, when it fails, we are left with personal judgments and opinions. There is a leap from (1) pure facts to (2) true or robust truths (beliefs that most reasonably less biased/partisan people believe are true) to (3) personal judgments and opinions based on the facts and robust truths.I find that ~99.9% of the time in political disagreements I engage in, the failure of my interlocutors to deal with simple facts and robust truths I assert reveal their weakness, irrationality, bad faith engagement, and/or blind, irrational partisanship of their arguments.The most common responses I get from people who can't handle inconvenient facts or truths I raise are (a) insults (a form of logic flaw, and evidence of bad faith), (b) deflections (evidence of bad faith), (c) logic flaws (straw man arguments, false dilemma arguments, etc., also and evidence of bad faith), or (d) silence (more evidence of bad faith). I see those a-d responses all the time. I've been seeing it for over 20 years. That's how I know that when I ask someone to show the evidence or truth (1 and 2) they rely on for their opinions (3), they resort to one or more of a, b, c or d.How often do my interlocutors come back at me with solid fact evidence? That happens in about 1 in every 300 to 400 disagreements I get entangled with.I got facts and logic (roughly, often sound reason) on my side. Most MAGA people got just opinions on theirs. I believe that is usually why they refuse to engage with the facts and truths I assert in defense of my own judgments and opinions. They shoot opinion blanks, while I shoot fact and truth bullets.
Dissident Politics
Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
Monday, March 9, 2026
Dealing with MAGA supporters & their empty demagoguery
Thoughts about the complex problem of consciousness
"Which is the case with pain? Maybe the physical changes cause the pain in which case we have the hard problem. Maybe the pain causes the physical changes, in which case we need a supernatural theory. Maybe something else causes both, but we have no idea what. Or maybe they really are the same thing. Many materialists argue for this last explanation, but if this was true we have absolutely no idea of how it could be true. How could pain actually be the firing of my C-fibers?"
When we talk about pain, there are several possibilities.
The physical processes in the body such as nerve firing or brain activity cause the feeling of pain. But if that's the case, we face the "hard problem of consciousness", namely why and how those physical processes give rise to any subjective experience at all. The hard problem of consciousness is how to explain why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to any subjective experience. Why is there "something it is like" to feel pain, see red, or taste coffee? Even if we fully understand the brain's mechanisms and functions, the hard problem asks why those mechanisms are accompanied by conscious feeling rather than functioning in the dark with no subjective experience, like a zombie.
Alternatively, maybe the conscious feeling of pain causes physical changes in the body or brain. That view implies that subjective experience can independently influence the physical world. That requires a kind of non-physical or supernatural explanation, typically some form of "dualism" where the material brain is one thing and consciousness is different and immaterial.
A third possibility is that some unknown underlying factor causes both the physical changes and the subjective sensation. Currently we have no idea what such a factor might be. Also a form of dualism.
The fourth possibility as many materialist believers claim, is that the physical and the experiential or subjective feelings are not two different things at all. Instead, pain is identical to the firing of C-fibers and associated brain activity. But if that's true, we don't have a plausible explanation of how identity between a subjective feeling and a physical process could work or exist. We don't know how the qualitative sensation of hurting could literally be a pattern of nerve firings. As far as we think we know, we are not zombies.
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Wearing down the defenders of the environment
Personally, I mourn the avoidable loss of species and natural beauty that global warming caused. I see it here in the mountains in San Diego county. I feel some of the grief and mental distress. I know that Trump and MAGA are going to cause a lot more damage and continue to tell us it's just a hoax or something else ludicrous. Much of MAGA's damage will be either irreversible or very hard to reverse.
Saturday, March 7, 2026
Pardons for Sale: Trump’s Vision of Justice for the Right Kind of Criminals
Trump has turned his presidential pardon power into a sleazy, cash‑drenched patronage machine. This shows cynical indifference to law and harm done to ordinary people. His pardon of nursing‑home magnate Joseph Schwartz, who defrauded the government of nearly $39 million in payroll taxes and helped collapse a multistate nursing‑home chain, wiped out prison time, fines, and $5 million in restitution after Schwartz had served only a few months. This contempt for victims and for the sentencing judge, who had rejected leniency because of the scale of the fraud, signals a president who treats justice as an opportunity to harvest cash by selling access to his presidential pardon power. Link 1, link 2

Trump has built a lucrative “pardon industry” that now sells access and influence to rich felons. To buy a pardon, each criminal launders about $1 million to Trump through operatives and lobbyists with personal connections to the president and his inner circle. The official clemency list is a roll call of tax cheats, securities fraudsters, murderers, corrupt politicians, foreign influence peddlers, and January 6 and 2020‑election traitors. Trump rewards loyalty, ideological alignment, or personal usefulness in his calculation of who gets pardoned. He operates a pay‑to‑play get out of fines and jail (not for free) for criminals. Trump's moral rot openly mocks the rule‑of‑law ideal that justice cannot be bought. Link 3, link 4

Estimates are that Trump’s pardons and clemency grants have eliminated almost $2 billion in court‑ordered financial penalties, including restitution, fines, and forfeitures. Of that, more than $1.3 billion was owed directly to crime victims in restitution. In other words, Trump shafted the victims of pardoned criminals' crimes in return for payment from the criminals themselves. So far, his pardons have taken about $1.3 billion from innocent crime victims. Link 5, link 6
Criminals buying pardons for cash is MAGA law and order in action, right? /s
Q: Is Trump's pardons for cash evidence that he really is on the little guy's side, as he always claims, or is it evidence he is on the big guy's side and, more or less, could not care less about shafting little regular people who have been harmed by criminals?
Link to the DoJ's list of Trump pardons since Jan. 2025: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-donald-j-trump-2025-present
