Did you hear the latest??
Sarah “fingernails on a chalkboard (IMO)” Palin is running for the House, to take the place of recently deceased Alaska Rep. Don Young.
There is only one congressperson allotted to Alaska, and she would be it.
So, what do you think?
-How do you see her chances?
-Is
this a "positive" or a "negative" for the direction of U.S. politics?
Thanks for posting and hitting the recommend button.
By Simon Kuper
https://www.ft.com/content/59b5d70e-00b1-44ee-9580-0871c7727ff4
Since 2016, a bizarre sequence of events has challenged our belief in political rationality. First, populism (chiefly, the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump), then the pandemic and now Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have uncovered previously concealed strains of fallacious thinking. People keep acting apparently against their own self-interest, from Brexit voters making themselves poorer to antivaxxers risking death, to the Russian state destroying the wellbeing of its citizens.
Indeed, perhaps the emblematic politician of our time, Trump, displays an unmatched understanding of human irrationality, as if he’d absorbed the entire corpus of behavioural economics. Meanwhile, opponents of these movements, like me, keep failing to foresee their next illogical choices. Here I’ve tried to identify the biggest irrationalities on both sides.
The first is the self-interest fallacy: the notion that people will always choose their own economic advantage. From Karl Marx until 2016, it was widely believed that “it’s the economy, stupid” — an analytical error that I kept making. Almost the only argument of the Remain campaign ahead of Britain’s referendum was that Brexit would make the country poorer.
But post-referendum research by academics Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin showed that most Leavers cared more “about perceived threats to their identity and national group”. I’ve finally grasped that when people have to choose between their status, their income or life itself, many choose status, suggesting Russia’s elite might prefer European war to status-destroying retreat.
Next up is the set of fallacies around expertise. It’s become apparent that many people don’t understand how it works, and demand a certainty and precision that expertise generally cannot offer. Experts aren’t always right. They are merely wrong less often than non-experts. Yet people still dismiss expertise by pointing to one expert’s error.
Something else that’s poorly understood: expertise advances over time. Our understanding of Covid-19 changes as experts learn more. Lastly: experts are better at explaining what happened than at making predictions. So we know more about the mechanics of climate change than its future path.
When asked for predictions, experts prefer to lay out a set of possible scenarios. But this is too wishy-washy for some people. You see the demand for certainty in arguments about vaccine safety or nuclear energy. The way to think about these issues is by assessing relative risk: taking a Covid vaccine poses a tiny risk, massively outweighed by the benefits. Similarly, future risks from nuclear energy are probably outweighed by the present dangers of climate change. But relative risks seem hard to grasp.
Of course, many people oppose experts for status reasons: experts may know things, but they are arrogant. A popular alternative to expertise is “simplism”: the belief that complex problems have simple answers. Simplists cannot accept that some explanations may be true and yet too complex for laypeople to understand. They prefer to blame, say, bad elites rather than intractable societal causes. Simplists stick to their views come what may, as per the Brexiter refusal to admit that Brexit has failed.
Simplists like conspiracy theories. Any event can be explained in a satisfyingly simple manner by blaming it on a person or group who might conceivably benefit from it, from a witch 400 years ago to George Soros today. There’s a touching faith in the power of elite evildoers to co-ordinate impossibly involved conspiracies.
Then there’s partisanship. As Steven Pinker argues in his recent book Rationality, most people don’t want to be rational: they just want their side to win the argument. When they try to understand the world, their first question is: who do I support? In choosing their side, some people reward norm-breaking — from unbrushed hair to bald-faced criminality — which they equate with authenticity.
And people back the politicians who tell entertaining stories. This valuing of words over good government also pervades the American left, which sometimes obsesses more about insensitive speech than about discriminatory social structures.
When people assess characters outside their own society — Putin, say — they often use the principle of “my enemy’s enemy”. Many western rightwingers liked Putin because he opposed their enemies: feminists, gay people and Hillary Clinton. Sometimes, though, your enemy’s enemy is just a war criminal.
When political leaders get attacked, partisans respond with whataboutism. So any criticism of Trump prompts a takedown of Joe Biden. But whataboutism rests on the “two wrongs make a right” fallacy. It’s also usually incommensurate in degree: Trump and Biden are both flawed, as is everything else, but one of them could destroy US democracy whereas the other is merely a mediocrity.
There: now that I’ve explained irrationality, people will surely ditch it.
There: now that I’ve explained irrationality, people will surely ditch it.
In February 1994, in the grand ballroom of the town hall in Hamburg, Germany, the president of Estonia gave a remarkable speech. Standing before an audience in evening dress, Lennart Meri praised the values of the democratic world that Estonia then aspired to join. “The freedom of every individual, the freedom of the economy and trade, as well as the freedom of the mind, of culture and science, are inseparably interconnected,” he told the burghers of Hamburg. “They form the prerequisite of a viable democracy.” His country, having regained its independence from the Soviet Union three years earlier, believed in these values: “The Estonian people never abandoned their faith in this freedom during the decades of totalitarian oppression.”
But Meri had also come to deliver a warning: Freedom in Estonia, and in Europe, could soon be under threat. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the circles around him were returning to the language of imperialism, speaking of Russia as primus inter pares—the first among equals—in the former Soviet empire. In 1994, Moscow was already seething with the language of resentment, aggression, and imperial nostalgia; the Russian state was developing an illiberal vision of the world, and even then was preparing to enforce it. Meri called on the democratic world to push back: The West should “make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance.”
At that, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, got up and walked out of the hall.Meri’s fears were at that time shared in all of the formerly captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and they were strong enough to persuade governments in Estonia, Poland, and elsewhere to campaign for admission to NATO. They succeeded because nobody in Washington, London, or Berlin believed that the new members mattered. The Soviet Union was gone, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg was not an important person, and Estonia would never need to be defended. That was why neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush made much attempt to arm or reinforce the new NATO members. Only in 2014 did the Obama administration finally place a small number of American troops in the region, largely in an effort to reassure allies after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Nobody else anywhere in the Western world felt any threat at all. For 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too, setting up systems to allow those same Russian kleptocrats to export their stolen money and keep it parked, anonymously, in Western property and banks. We convinced ourselves that there was no harm in enriching dictators and their cronies. Trade, we imagined, would transform our trading partners. Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy—and democracy would bring peace.
Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries. Opposed to anarchism, democracy, liberalism, and Marxism, fascism is placed on the far-right wing within the traditional left–right spectrum.
Fascism is generally defined as a political movement that embraces far-right nationalism and the forceful suppression of any opposition, all overseen by an authoritarian government. Fascists strongly oppose Marxism, liberalism and democracy, and believe the state takes precedence over individual interests. They favor centralized rule, often a single party or leader, and embrace the idea of a national rebirth, a new greatness for their country. Economic self-sufficiency is prized, often through state-controlled companies. Youth, masculinity and strength are highly fetishized.The end of World War II saw the downfall of several fascist regimes, but not all. In Spain, Francisco Franco, who incorporated fascist elements in his military dictatorship, hung around for several decades, while other governments, such as that of Juan Perón in Argentina, enacted a kind of fascism-lite, modeling its economy somewhat after fascist Italy.
....the concept of fascism has wide interpretive applicability across societies that otherwise differ quite drastically from one another.To rescue the concept of fascism for philosophy requires arguing that fascism has the kind of universal significance and centrality characteristic of philosophical concepts. It must have a recognizable structure that abstracts from local historical contexts, and be capable of being interpretively useful in locations that differ significantly from one another. .... If fascism is a historically located concept, however, then we do not need to be worried about confronting it. Fascism cannot reoccur, and political philosophers in recent decades have been right to ignore it.
If I am right, the view that fascism is a historically located concept is not just false, it is dangerously false. If fascism describes a dangerous ideology with universal appeal, representing it as an artifact of particular past historical circumstances masks a real danger. By not studying fascism philosophically, philosophy lends credence to the view that fascism is not a risk.
