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 science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
Last evening, I see that Rep. Liz Cheney voted along with all but
one of her fellow Republicans (see link above) to NOT remove/strip Rep. Marjory Taylor Greene from her House committees (education and budget).
What are we to make of the fact that, while Cheney unapologetically voted to impeach
Trump (and got a lot of GOP political flak for it), she did not seem to have a
problem with keeping MTG on these important influential committees?It should be noted that yesterday, Cheney herself, in a secret ballot, escaped removal from her prestigious "third in line" Republican Leadership role, by a vote of 145-she should stay, 61-she should be removed.
So, what happened to Liz’s "principles" spine?
-Was it a case of her being sympathetic to MTG plight, seeing’s
how Cheney herself came close to being an outcast?(I.e., didn’t want to play with fire and get burned again?)
-Did Cheney believe MTG’s mea culpa speech (for which half the GOP caucus gave it a
standing ovation) and that had no apologies in it; only so-called explanations,
regarding her “previous” beliefs in QAnon?
-Other?
Finally, do you predict MTG will revert back to her old ways, maybe
in a sense of revenge, now that she has been outcast from committees?
The $600 billion fascist calls its GOP COVID relief proposal a sincere attempt at bipartisanship. That is a cynical partisan lie. Their rationale is based on the tried and true radical right complaintb that we cannot afford Biden's $1.9 trillion proposal. When it comes to the fascist GOP doing mass deficit spending, e.g., the monster 2017 tax cut for rich people law, there are no complaints from republicans in leadership roles. But when democrats want domestic spending, the GOP hypocrites howl in sanctimonious outrage about the debt and that tactic has been in place at least since the 1980s. At least, that was my take on this matter.
Salon published a more comprehensive look at just how purely partisan the faux bipartisan claim really is. There's more to it. Salon writes:
Ten Senate Republican have proposed a COVID relief bill of about $600 billion. That's less than a third of Biden's plan. They promise "bipartisan support" if he agrees.
Their proposal isn't a compromise. It would be a total surrender. It trims direct payments and unemployment aid that Americans desperately need. Biden should reject it out of hand.
Republicans say America can't afford Biden's plan. "We just passed a program with over $900 billion in it," groused Senator Mitt Romney.
Rubbish. We can't afford not to. Millions of people are hurting.
Beyond COVID relief, Biden has other proposals waiting in the wings, such as repairing aging infrastructure and building a new energy-efficient one. These would make the economy grow even faster over the long term – further reducing the debt's share.
There's no chance that public spending will "crowd out" private investment. If you hadn't noticed, borrowing is especially cheap right now. Money is sloshing around the world in search of borrowers.
It's hard to take Republican concerns about debt seriously when just four years ago they had zero qualms about enacting one of the largest tax cuts in history, largely for big corporations and the super-wealthy.
If they really don't want to add to the debt, they have another alternative: A tax on super-wealthy Americans.
The total wealth of America's 660 billionaires has grown by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic, a 40 percent increase. They alone could finance almost all of Biden's COVID relief package and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. So why not a temporary emergency COVID wealth tax?
Let's be honest. The real reason Republicans don't want Biden's plan is they fear it will work.
This would be the Republican's worst nightmare: All the anti-government claptrap they've been selling since Ronald Reagan will be revealed as nonsense.
Government isn't the problem and never was. Bad government is the problem, and Americans have just had four years of it. Biden's success would put into sharp relief Trump and Republicans' utter failures on COVID and jobs.
Trumpian Republicans in Congress have an even more diabolical motive for blocking Biden. They figure if Americans remain in perpetual crises and ever-deepening fear, they'll lose faith in democracy itself.
This would open the way for another strongman demagogue in 2024 – if not Trump, a Trump-impersonator like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, or Trump Junior.
If Biden is successful, though, Americans' faith in democracy might begin to rebound – marking the end of the nation's flirtation with fascism. If he helps build a new economy of green jobs with good wages, even Trump's angry white working-class base might come around.
My worry is Biden may want so much to demonstrate bipartisanship that his plans get diluted to the point where Republicans get what they want: Failure.
Forget bipartisanship. Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans didn't give a hoot about bipartisanship when they and Trump were in power.
The multiple crises engulfing America are huge. The window of opportunity for addressing them is small. If ever there was a time for boldness, it is now. (emphasis added)
That presents a more complete picture of the fascist's false claim of motivation by bipartisanship. I find that reasoning and in view of the underlying facts to be persuasive. The fascist GOP really does want government to fail. They want faith in democracy and the rule of law to fade so some form of a corrupt, incompetent, white Christian autocracy-theocracy can take its place.
Another aspect of the false bipartisanship claim that has come up recently relates to the bailout after the 2008 financial disaster. The GOP reduce the size of it in the name of fiscal conservatism and they promised cooperation with Obama. Experts now think the bailout was too small and that significantly slowed the recovery. On top of that, Obama never got much or any bipartisanship after that. In retrospect, probably the only reason the republicans allowed a relief bill under Obama was because all the spending went to rich people and corporations, not to regular Americans.
We've seen this radical right Trojan House before and let it in. Doing that again would be a huge, maybe fatal, mistake.
There’s an old joke about a patient who visits the doctor and says to him, “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” And the physician responds, “Don’t do that.”
Similarly, attempting to cure stupidity in today’s world can be a frustrating, eternal quest. If you let it.
So, don’t do that, advises a West Chandler man, who has made it his business to address perceived moronic behavior – and there seems to be no shortage of that in these politically charged, pandemic-stressed times.
Don’t judge. Don’t presume. Take a step back, draw a deep breath and try to see another point of view, Eric Bailey recommends.
And what is stupid, really? As we’ve seen in recent times, “stupid” is something about which people may disagree.
“Everyone at some point in their life will think of someone as an idiot or stupid,” Bailey said. “That sentence, ‘You’re an idiot,’ completely shuts down communication. It shuts down connection. If you need to find ways to reconnect with one another, putting that judgement out there between us is going to prevent us from actually connecting.”
Bailey, 38, and his wife, Jamie, 37, who live in the Ray Road/McClintock Drive area of West Chandler, operate Bailey Strategic Innovation Group, which has morphed into a consulting agency that does conferences and workshops for organizations, government entities, retreats, strategic planning and leadership development for more than 200 clients around the world. They deliver authentic takes on life by using brain science to address irrational behavior and drawing from their own relationship to help people improve theirs so they can have a civil conversation with those with whom they disagree, or vice versa.
They do not do it by wearing shirts that proclaim, “I’m with stupid.”
Bailey is a voracious reader of psychological research. He has written a book, mirthfully titled The Cure for Stupidity, an exploration of real life in relationships and parenting. Together, they recently started a podcast, also named The Cure for Stupidity, which is available on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. Video versions are accessible on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
“It’s a lot of fun,” Bailey said. “One of the things we see a lot is how easy it is for people to see someone else as stupid or an idiot. We try to show people how to see beyond that and how to see the human on the other side.”
Among the Baileys’ clients are Association for Change Management Professionals-Europe, Zell, Google, U.S. Air Force, Los Angeles County, St. Louis and Phoenix Police Department.
This is a guy who has helped likely NFL Hall-of-Famer Larry Fitzgerald pet a rhinoceros, taught dozens of young children to ski, changed the strategic course of cities across the country, jumped out of an airplane with his wife, flown an F-16 and chatted with LL Cool J on the campus of Harvard University.
“What we find is that every single organization is dealing with the same things,” Bailey said. “Every single person we coach, from executives to front-line staff, is dealing with exactly the same things, about communication, understanding and empathy.”
Bailey’s experiences have taught him that no matter what life puts in your path, there are lessons to be learned or stories to be told. Among them is that “stupidity” comes from the natural tendency to judge another person, he said.
“All of this work is based in psychology and brain science,” said Bailey, who holds a master’s degree in Leadership and Organizational Development from Saint Louis University. “We try to help people realize that if they remove that natural tendency to judge, then those around us aren’t as quote-unquote stupid any longer, they’re just seeing the world from a different point of view.
“In everything that’s happening with politics and division, everyone tends to sit in place and point to the other side and say, ‘How are you this stupid?’ If we took the time to look at the other side and find the rationality of their position, all of a sudden, it’s, ‘Oh, you’re not stupid, you’re just seeing things in a way other than the way I see them.’”
According to Jaime Bailey, reflecting inward and seeing things from an alternate perspective is a good basis for finding common ground “as opposed to us vs. them.”
“In marriage, in friendships, with your parents, in the workplace with your manager or employees, it’s so easy to take an us-versus-them perspective as opposed to understanding and figuring out the best way together,” she said.
As Eric Bailey points out, it’s easy to say, “Don’t be judgmental,” but how do you get somebody to stop it?
“I encourage people to ask themselves: What do I truly want out of this?” he said. “Do I want to strengthen a relationship or do I want to win? Do I want to understand them better or am I trying to prove how smart I am? When you ask yourself that, it changes the way the brain functions, from a more animalistic fight-or-flight to a more human curiosity.
“Then, the follow-up question is: If that’s what you truly want, then how would you behave? If you want to strengthen a relationship, then you would show up differently in this conversation. You would stop trying to force your opinion and start trying to learn more.”
The most important question in these difficult conversations, Bailey said, is: Why are you so passionate about your position?
“That’s a very important question because, one, it acknowledges that we are on different positions but, two, it acknowledges strong emotion,” he said. “So, we’re not actually talking about why did you vote for this guy, but why are you so passionate about your position? It sort of gets at something underneath that is based on strong emotion.”
The COVID-19 pandemic also has influenced human behavior as a result of the stress, according to Bailey.
“Many are dealing with bouts of depression,” he said. “Uncertainty tends to do that. The same part of the brain is stimulated when we have uncertainty, when we face change, and when we experience physical pain. When you think about that, it makes sense why we are having such a hard time.”
There is trauma research called Toxic Positivity or Toxic Optimism, which suggests that if people always are looking for an optimistic outcome and then are frequently let down because it is not attained they can develop despair.
“Think how we entered this COVID time,” Bailey said. “Last February, we were all saying too bad for China. In March, we were saying, oh, too bad for New York and Seattle. That will never happen here. By late March, we were like, OK, we can shut down for a week. Then in April, we can shut down for a month. It’s just a month and then we can go back to normal.
“We kept pushing this finish line – to the end of May, then into July, then to now. Each time we missed it, many started to develop despair. You hear people say it will go back to normal soon. That starts to build this toxic optimism, where we’re continually let down when it doesn’t happen the way we hope it will.”
COVID-19 angst, uncivil political discourse and most issues within relationships can be dealt with effectively through understanding, Bailey said.
“I keep thinking about a scene in Apollo 13,” he said. “The ship is not going to reach the moon. Ground control is afraid we’re going to lose the astronauts. All of the people in Houston are sitting around a table trying to figure out how we are going to do this. How are we going to get a square peg in a round hole and save them?
“Then someone walks up and dumps a boxful of essentially garbage on the table and says, ‘This is what we have to work with. How are we going to get them home?’ That’s what I think 2020 was. We got a box of garbage dumped on us, and we’ve got to do our best with it.”
A Washington Post opinion piece discusses grim news from North Korea and how tyrants hate information they do not control. WaPo writes:
Last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did something none of his predecessors dared to do: He admitted that his country is in crisis. A grim reality may have left him little choice. The hermit kingdom is reeling from sanctions, natural disasters, famine and the covid-19 pandemic. And since life in North Korea looks likely to get even worse in the months ahead, the regime is doubling down on its efforts to prevent the flow of outside information into the country.
At the end of 2020, North Korea passed a slew of new laws to rein in what it calls “reactionary ideology and culture.” Key details of these laws, set to go into effect last month, recently emerged. They inadvertently reveal one of North Korea’s chief concerns: an influx of South Korean media. Reportedly, the new measures threaten anything from up to 15 years of hard labor for possessing South Korean books or movies to up to two years for just speaking with a South Korean accent. The laws even plan to hold parents accountable, calling for fines of roughly $111 to $222 for fathers and mothers who “failed to raise their children properly.” (One estimate puts the average monthly salary for North Koreans at about $4.) Distribution of foreign materials may warrant the worst punishment of all: death.
The regime has cause for concern. A 2019 study of 200 defectors showed that more than 90 percent had watched foreign or South Korean media before they defected. South Korean dramas pose a particular problem. Not only do they depict life in a wealthier, freer country, but also they threaten the fabric of state-sponsored culture. Even South Korean accents and slang have become more common as a result of the popularity of dramas in North Korea.
Of note is the South Korean 2019 hit rom-com, “Crash Landing on You,” a drama popular among defectors and North Koreans alike. The film partially takes place in North Korea and has been praised for its honest depictions of North Korean life. A sarcastic phrase from the drama, “You think you’re the general or something?” has reportedly become commonplace, angering North Korean authorities, who believe it is used to mock Kim (often known in the North simply as “the General”). While some criticize the drama for romanticizing life in North Korea, the regime is not too keen on the portrayals of its corrupt leadership, referring to the work as an “atrocious provocation.”
Northerners’ demand for products and information from the South appears to be growing. Some estimate as many as a quarter of North Koreans have mobile phones, many of which were illegally smuggled over the Sino-Korean border. This past October, authorities began a renewed crackdown on foreign cellphone usage by promising forgiveness if citizens and brokers “voluntarily” turned in their phones.
Before covid-19, North Koreans gained access to bootleg dramas via smuggled USBs sold in the jangmadang (private markets at times tolerated by the authorities). And South Korean media consumption has fueled demand for other illicit South Korean imports such as cosmetics, with some women using South Korean beauty products as a silent protest against the regime.
Well there you have it. Another example of a murdering tyrant trying to control and obliterate inconvenient information to suit their self-serving purposes. It is a major part of how they rise to power or maintain it. Once again, dark free speech is a core tool that most political, religious and economic authoritarians rely heavily on.
The ongoing RINO hunts for prominent republicans who criticized the ex-president for the Jan. 6 coup attempt is a factor that has cowed many prominent republicans into leaving the party, silence or retirement. The GOP is collapsing into a fascist personality cult before our eyes. The personality is the ex-president. The New York Times writes:
Knute Buehler, who led Oregon’s Republican ticket as the candidate for governor in 2018, watched with growing alarm in recent weeks as Republicans around the nation challenged the reliability of the presidential election results.
Then he watched the Jan. 6 siege at the United States Capitol in horror. And then, to his astonishment, Republican Party officials in his own state embraced the conspiracy theory that the attack was actually a left-wing “false flag” plot to frame Trump supporters.
The night after his party’s leadership passed a formal resolution promoting the false flag theory, Mr. Buehler cracked open a local microbrew and filed to change his registration from Republican to independent. “It was very painful,” he said.
With no dominant leader other than the deplatformed one-term president, a radical right movement that became emboldened under President Donald J. Trump has been maneuvering for more power, and ascending in different states and congressional districts. More moderate Republicans feel increasingly under attack, but so far have made little progress in galvanizing voters, donors or new recruits for office to push back against extremism.
In Wyoming, Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, headlined a rally on Thursday to denounce Representative Liz Cheney for her vote to impeach Mr. Trump. Joining Mr. Gaetz by phone hookup was Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, who has been working to unseat Ms. Cheney and replace her with someone he believes better represents the views of her constituents — in other words, fealty to his father. (emphasis added)
The head of the party, Ronna McDaniel, backed away from the rise of the fascists and says that she is not going to intervene. She only asks for internal unity. The fascist wing of the party has no interest in unity. They are openly gunning to take over and get rid of anyone in power in the GOP who does not pay sufficient fealty to the ex-president.
DT Jr. publicly argued that fealty to his father better represents the views of the people of Wyoming. He is explicitly arguing for a personality cult. The cult values loyalty to the ex-president above loyalty to the Constitution, the rule of law, facts, truth or democracy itself. This really is fascism growing onto a powerful monster right before our eyes, right now in America.
Two prominent fascists from the past:
how close will the GOP come?
Is the poison spreading?
For context, it helps to understand how deadly toxic the ex-president is for democracy. A few days ago, the military in Myanmar overthrew the democratically elected government. The military detained the president Aung San Suu Kyi. The rationale given for the coup was that the election was flawed and fraudulent. In the last election in 2020, Kyi was re-elected by a vote of 83% in her favor and the election was not fraudulent. Does that sound familiar?
Most everything good that the ex-president touches is poisoned, damaged and/or destroyed. He touched democracy. Or, is it unreasonable to ascribe some culpability to the ex-president for what happened to a democracy on the other side of the planet? Does what happens in American have no influence on the rest of the world?
Logos is Greek term meaning "discourse" or "plea" and it's essentially argumentation.
We use it when we engage in debate. We can employ informal logic to articulate and critically examination positions through logos.
This is probably familiar to most of you.
If you're going to employ it helps to understand common fallacies that come up in debate. Things like burning straw men, appeals to hypocrisy, appeals to nature, appeals to tradition, appeals to emotion, appeals to authority, and even appeals to logical fallacies are often fallacious.
Here's the issue with it. It usually doesn't help, as per what I call John Stuart Mill's lament. He writes in "The Oppression of Women":
The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeply-rooted of those which gather round and protect old institutions and custom, that we need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress the great modern spiritual and social transition;
I only disagree with him on one aspect of this, and that is that it doesn't include thinking errors in his analysis. In fact, I'd say thoughts - more specifically thinking errors - are more profound than feelings in terms of causing us to hold incorrect beliefs. Feelings are where our investment in those thoughts are grounded. They work in tandem, but they are distinct, as I'm sure most any mental health professional familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy will tell you.
Given he wrote this in 1869 we can afford him some leeway in terms of how he conceptualizes the way we think, as he's close enough.
Untangling thinking errors is a personal thing. I've got loads of them due to a messy childhood and mental illness. The only way to untangle them is to want to. It has to start with the person themselves.
Logic isn't going to help instill the desire to change beliefs. Pain and loss due to those beliefs will as long as they can see the connection. Self-interest will. This makes debate almost futile except in the unfortunately rarer cases where all parties are interested in self-examination and self-correction, rather than self-preservation.
Take a page from Plato. Where logos is profoundly helpful - I'd argue most helpful - is when we debate ourselves - and do so honestly. Our ego spends much of its conscious time preserving our id. This includes defending our worldview, however flawed. We can apply critical thinking to our own internal rhetoric, and that is probably the most effective use of logos, because if you're willing to do so, you're receptive to change as a matter of course.
I'll go further and say that whether it's internal or external debate, another aspect of debating effectively is humility. If you already think you know everything you're going to defend it rather than be open to learning something new or being corrected. Humility is a foundational component - perhaps the foundational building block of wisdom, and it's central to allowing us to learn.
The question then becomes, are you capable of being humble and honest with yourself? It's not automatic. It takes work. Sometimes it even takes therapy, rather than a cathartic Internet debate. The work however, is good for you.
If you think you're immune to this, or think you've already mastered it then it will make you more susceptible to thinking errors in your complacency. None of us have mastered it because the kind of eternal and incessant vigilance required to check every one of our beliefs simply isn't human. We don't have the mental throughput to do that. That said, we can check the important ones, and be more open to others checking them on our behalf. Ultimately they're doing you a favor.
