On a straightforward definition of conservative, the cautious approach, where you protect children against bullying and playground accidents is the conservative approach.
This just goes to show that the current labels "liberal" and "conservative" have absolutely nothing to do with their etymologies. Also, a large amount of tough guy posing is very important for being "conservative."
Is this about the research studies again?
Another alternative: "The amount of bullying that you personally received would make today's sissy kids commit suicide" could actually be "The amount of bullying that you personally received doled out would make today's could have made sissy kids commit suicide," and they don't want to think about that.
My wingnut Dad was particularly exercised about this issue when I was home for Christmas. Turns out Fox News has been making a bunch of hay over this issue, or were at the time, anyway. I'm not sure, but I do think he got bullied a bit in HS, and didn't have that great a time, fwiw.
Conservatives do seem to be in love with the idea of the Hobbesian state of nature, and want to preserve and extend it anywhere they can, insofar as they themselves don't have to suffer from it. All these old, white men seemed to have formed their masculinity around the ideals represented in Westerns.
In my experience on the bullying front it's because they read that as gay-bashing and as they hate gay people, well.
(A corollary: the really BIG disasters - the kid committing suicide after being bullied - are really so rare that we don't need to protect against them.)
Youth suicide is fortunately very rare. I once had a very long, difficult discussion with somebody who wanted to me do a statistical analysis to see if a certain program reduced the rate of suicide in a given set of high schools. There were something like four in that area in the past 10 years and the program had only run for one year. People sometimes think there is a special technique to compensate for not having data.
People sometimes think there is a special technique to compensate for not having data.
Lying?
7: Occassionally, because I'm cheaper than the some of the other people a nice guy, I'll get asked to look at something for somebody who started a project all on their own without any notion what might be a plausible outcome measurement.
I've heard this one a lot from parents who spank: "I was spanked and I turned out fine." I usually resist the impulse to respond, "No, not really."* I think you're right that a lot of this type of reasoning stems from the impulse to normalize our own experience rather than see ourselves as victimized. But also to rationalize our inability to figure out how to do things differently. ("People who don't spank refuse to discipline their children" = "I don't know how to discipline a child without spanking.")
*Obviously, I know there are people who were spanked that really did turn out fine.
In my experience on the bullying front it's because they read that as gay-bashing and as they hate gay people, well.
Yes, but it's also probably more general. They like the idea that they have extralegal means to punish anyone outside the mainstream. This applies only as long as they're in the majority, though. When Rush Limbaugh learned that a white kid got beaten up on the bus by some black kids shortly after Obama was elected, he didn't respond saying, "Ah well, part of growing up. He'll be tougher because of the experience, now."
I'm actually kind of sympathetic to the idea that overprotectiveness is a bad thing, it's good for kids to bang themselves up a little, if you come in at the end of a long day outdoors without something scraped or bruised you probably didn't have fun, and so on. But extending that to defending people's right to hurt each other deliberately is screwy.
Conservatives think bullying is not so bad because they tend to be the bullies.
With regard to protective equipment, and such, I'm not particularly concerned about protecting my kid from minor scrapes and bruises. Its the rare, but potentially life-changing head-injury that concerns me. If protecting him from that also leads to him getting less scraped up, I guess that's good, but is not really the intention.
Comment #1 is correct. I know people who describe themselves as "conservative" not just to mean "I voted for Pat Toomey and John McCain" but as if it's some sort of coherent ethos or philosophical approach to the world. I want to know how to make them realize that the only goal Pat Toomey has in his approach to any issue is to take something that government currently does, that has been done for decades, and get rid of it, without replacing it with anything. That's his coherent ethos.
With regard to protective equipment, and such, I'm not particularly concerned about protecting my kid from minor scrapes and bruises. Its the rare, but potentially life-changing head-injury that concerns me. If protecting him from that also leads to him getting less scraped up, I guess that's good, but is not really the intention.
I think this is typical of liberals, right? We're not really concerned with settling petty rivalries between kids, either. It's only the extreme injuries that concern us, but we're not going to get worked up about preserving bumps and bruises if they're reduced in the course of keeping kids alive.
I found The Authoritarians to be a most excellent explanation of just what is going on with the Conservative mind.
Its a book that's given out as a free PDF.... I do wish he would put out a proper Kindle version.
There are two problems. First, 'conservative' as in 'right wing' has nothing to do with conservative as in temperamentally cautious. But that could just be an accident of naming: it could be a philosophy that for historical reasons got attached to a name that doesn't make sense, which happens all the time. Second, if conservative as in right wing is a coherent ethos, I don't understand it -- there could be something systematic that I don't get because I'm unsympathetic, but all I'm sure is that whatever's going on with political conservatism, temperamental conservatism isn't it.
Second, if conservative as in right wing is a coherent ethos, I don't understand it
One of the things discussed in the book I mentioned in 18 is that the right wing ethos doesn't put a whole lot of value in coherence. Calling conservatives out on their inconsistencies tends to be an ineffective means of arguing with them, because they don't really give a shit about being inconsistent.
I was thinking about that in connection with the Haidt now-six-factor theory of morality; that intellectual/emotional consistency is missing from his list, and it's something that liberals value differently than conservatives. Holden Caulfield grousing about phoneys is expressing a liberal value or sensibility in the same way that some conservative valuing purity or authority is being conservative.
Calling conservatives out on their inconsistencies tends to be an ineffective means of arguing with them, because they don't really give a shit about being inconsistent.
I hadn't thought about this quite so clearly.
20, 21: I think this is pretty clearly wrong. Conservatives may or may not be less coherent than liberals, but they certainly at least pay lip service to consistency, and like to think of themselves as consistent.
Her's what the book has to say about it:
....authoritarians' ideas are poorly integrated with one another. It's as if each idea is stored in a file that can be called up and used when the authoritarian wishes, even though another of his ideas--stored in a different file-- basically contradicts it. We all have some inconsistencies in our thinking, but authoritarians can stupify you with the inconsistency of their ideas. Thus they may say they are proud to live in a country that guarantees freedom of speech, but another file holds, "My country, love it or leave it." The ideas were copied from trusted sources, often as sayings, but the authoritarian has never "merged files" to see how well they all fit together.
23, 24: So in other words, there is a file called "I am consistent".
I am regular. Blueberries every morning.
23: But their relation to it is different. I mean, going back to Haidt, even for liberals it's rare to find someone who doesn't value purity or authority at all; that conservatives pay lip service to consistency doesn't mean their feelings about it are the same as liberals'.
consistency
Don't know, I think that this depends on framing. Regarding an individual's freedom to say both own guns and grow pot, neither left nor right stereotypical views are consistent. Regarding the state's power do as it sees fit to control military administrative decisions or hospital administrative decisions, there's "inconsistency" on both sides again. Simpleminded organizing principles that don't always apply are useful for everybody, not just right-wingers.
Haidt now-six-factor theory of morality; that intellectual/emotional consistency is missing from his list
It is a part of the fairness/reciprocity foundation, (now "fairness/cheating.") Fairness/reciprocity includes justice, and justice is fundamentally a matter of being consistent--treating similar cases similarly, as Aristotle said.
Liberals are very concerned with coherence because it insures we are being fair. Conservatives are somewhat interested in consistency, but they've got a lot of other priorities.
I find Haidt's theory very useful, but the fact that he keeps adding foundations (there were only four in the very first theory) increases my sense that he's just making this shit up.
29.4: That's what a liberal would think.
they certainly at least pay lip service to consistency
They pay lip service to consistency because they do indeed think of themselves as consistent. But their self-image of consistency is not exactly consistent with how consistent they actually are.
I am regular. Blueberries every morning.
You should try Crossfit. Seriously.
24: Oh, I don't dispute they're full of shit and inconsistent; just the idea that consistency isn't a value conservatives claim to aspire to. Also, I don't have a great deal of confidence that my beliefs or anyone else's would stand up to an uncharitable consistency audit.
32: If I switch to a different fruit, can I keep with my current exercise program.
29: But I think there's more to it than fits comfortably under fairness. Again, think Holden Caulfield -- he's not bitching about phoneys because they're acting unjustly, but because there's something fundamentally displeasing to him about people who he sees as inconsistent or unintegrated.
And yes, I think Haidt is making stuff up. I find him fascinating and annoying.
Haidt had a result in his recent book (which I haven't read) saying that conservatives were consistently better at predicting how liberals would apply their moral standards than liberals were at predicting conservatives. And I found myself wondering if you'd get more accurate results from liberals if you asked them not "What would a conservative do in situation X" but "If you asked a conservative what they would do in situation X, what would they say they would do?"
In my experience, which is old, how well peoples' views hang together depends almost entirely on situational factors and psychometric/little bitchery wars about defining the structures which are supposed to be consistent.
I mean, going back to Haidt, even for liberals it's rare to find someone who doesn't value purity or authority at all
But a liberal's ideal of purity would probably be something like: "Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing" (Huxley). Which a cartoon conservative (real or imaginary) would see as giving rise to incoherence and inconsistency.
36: if you'd get more accurate results from liberals if you asked them, "What would annoy you the most?"
First, 'conservative' as in 'right wing' has nothing to do with conservative as in temperamentally cautious.
But it's my impression that "Conservative" parties world-wide are right-wing parties. Sometimes "Liberal" means right-wing as well, but "Conservative" always does.
Scalia in his judicial heckler role is the type specimen conservative.
40: When the U.S.S.R was ending, you'd see "conservative Communist" used to describe the people against Yeltsin.
40: Sure, it's a consistent pattern of naming, it's just unconnected to what you'd call 'conservative' if you weren't talking politics.
I think "hardline communist" was more common as a phrase, but you would see people who were trying to revive/maintain communism described as conservatives in the U.S. press.
If you asked a conservative what they would do in situation X, what would they say they would do?"
But that's what they asked, according to this.
Also, a useful thing to do is to imagine a conversation just like this on conservonfogged, and to realize (I think) that it would go just like this one.
(Delurking to say this must seem like trolling, but it's just that you guys were saying all the right things until just now)
this
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/liberals-conservatives-and-the-haidt-results/46113
Conservative in the political sense used to be quite closely connected to what we mean by conservative in the more general sense. The real deviation came AFAICT in the 1970s and 1980s as the current right wing coalition was assembled. To stuff social conservatives into the same tent as economic libertarians and crusading neocons required contortions leading to what we have today. Of course it's not consistent - it's three completely different things glued together by a common hatred of a caricature of liberalism that represents maybe 1% of the liberals but which they portray as the dominant faction in the democratic party.
When the U.S.S.R was ending, you'd see "conservative Communist" used to describe the people against Yeltsin.
One of the other points of the book in 18 was that the hard-liner Communists had basically the same personality type as those in the John Birch Society. The drive is to support a strong social order... whether the particular social order in question is Communist or capitalist is not of critical importance.
45, 46: I've been mulling over a post on this for awhile now, and I haven't put it up because the natural response is exactly what you said "You think they're incoherent and inconsistent? Don't you think they say exactly the same thing about you?" And making the argument that there's a real asymmetry there rather than just namecalling is a bunch of work that I haven't done yet. But I do think there is a real asymmetry, and if I get around to doing the work I'll probably put up the post.
On the Haidt results specifically, you're right about the question that was asked; I'm speculating that liberals were answering the wrong question, thinking about what they expect conservatives to do rather to say, and I'd be interested in further surveys explicitly intended to tease that apart.
45,46 I think liberals are confused by the fact that conservatives really believe the bullshit they say.
I don't think they would complain about us being inconsistent. The would complain about us being disrespectful of social norms (e.g., traditional marriage, the importance of bullying, why we need to incentivise job creators) .
It seems like the thing to say is that most people are confused and inconsistent; and that you'll find both more and less confused and inconsistent people both among liberals and among conservatives (and we're talking about the psychology here, so which worldview is more consistent is only indirectly relevant).
So any argument for asymmetry would have to rely on something like "yes, but they're worse" or "yes, but their elites are worse." And arguments like that never sound good.
51: a data point: there are 258K google hits for "liberal hypocrisy" and 39k for "conservative hypocrisy"
Back to the Holden Caufield thing, I think liberals are just as likely to be hypocrites as conservatives. And if you focus just on conservative Christians, there is arguably *more* emphasis on not being a hypocrite, because Protestant theology is so focused on faith and personal integrity. (The fact that they still have a lot of hypocrisy points only to the difficulty of the value system they are trying to adhere to.)
50: Seriously, I think there's a state of mind that's more comfortable for conservatives than for liberals where you simultaneously sincerely believe something in one sense, but do know that it's bullshit in another. Doublethink.
The correct conclusion from that study is that liberals, being more coherent, are easier to understand than conservatives.
So is there some way for us to answer these questions as conservatives and see how well we do?
(Admittedly, "republican hypocrisy" beats "democratic hypocrisy" unless you throw in "democrat hypocrisy" as well)
With respect to the Conservative Party in the UK, if on any issue you think to yourself, 'what would a total venal bastard, a bone-deep arsehole of the highest water, a wanker who thinks only of himself and the narrow interest-group he represents do?', you stand a 99% chance of getting the Conservative Party policy position on that issue nearly exactly right.
52: I'm appealing to an argument that I haven't made, so I'm not trying to convince you, just explaining that I'm not convinced and gesturing at why. But if it is possible for liberals and conservatives generally to differ in the way they interact with other facets of morality, it's also possible for them to (on average) differ in the strength of their feelings about intellectual consistency. The argument that it's just really unlikely that there's any systematic difference on that front doesn't work.
56: Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking.
60: Sure, there's likely some systematic difference (there are always systematic differences). But it seems unlikely to me to be large enough to justify "authoritarian personality"-type talk.
What a strange questionnaire... Apparently I came out as conservative on 3 of the foundations (harm, fairness, and loyalty), and liberal on two (authority and purity). The weird thing is that puts me in agreement with the lower of the two on all measures except loyalty.
I often do get the sense that liberals place hypocrisy higher up on the scale of badness than conservatives (at least those of the social conservative/Christianist sort).
To me it seems to go without saying that while cheating on your spouse is bad, cheating on your spouse while stepping into the pulpit every Sunday and haranguing people about that sanctity of marriage is worse.
I get the impression that that religious conservatives don't share that feeling. Almost the opposite; that your public endorsement of good behavior somehow mitigates your private bad behavior.
There's certainly a massive difference in the media they prefer to consume.
And if you focus just on conservative Christians, there is arguably *more* emphasis on not being a hypocrite, because Protestant theology is so focused on faith and personal integrity.
I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that conservative/rightist Protestants place greater emphasis on non-hypocrisy, except perhaps rhetorically. You read the Slacktivist, right? He knows their culture very well, and he knows Protestant theology very well, and he's very clear on the point that conservative/rightists Protestants don't give half a shit about their own hypocrisy. Their entire current belief system sums up to, "if you say the right prayer and believe these 4 political statements about the world*, then you're a Christian in good standing no matter what."
* gays, abortion, evolution, global warming: all bad and/or nonexistent
Almost the opposite; that your public endorsement of good behavior somehow mitigates your private bad behavior.
Public endorsement of good behavior indicates that you are the Right Sort of Person. Being the Right Sort of Person mitigates bad private behavior.
I find Haidt's theory very useful, but the fact that he keeps adding foundations (there were only four in the very first theory) increases my sense that he's just making this shit up.
I suppose he tells an interesting story that has some intuitive validity, but he's aiming for something more scientific/authoritative, and I don't think he delivers. I find him very annoying to read, or read about, for this reason.
64.last is precisely the position of conservative Protestants. Barack Obama, who, according to all the evidence, is a faithful husband, loving father, non-corrupt politician, and someone whose preferred domestic policies line up pretty well with the Gospels (soak the rich, feed the poor, heal the sick), is viewed as the Antichrist because he doesn't say the things that conservative Protestants want him to say.
Because he leads a Christian life but doesn't hate gays, he's anti-Christian.
Because he leads a Christian life but doesn't hate gays, he's anti-Christian.
Plus, he's actually a Muslim.
67: Right. Taking it out of the religious realm, there's a right-wing-culture-war sense that urban/intellectual/highbrow/upperclass is bad, rural/simple&straightforward/lowbrow/workingclass is good. And the loudest voices for this are media millionaires who live in big cities. And that's not a secret -- people who listen to Rush Limbaugh stroking them for being the salt of the earth as opposed to those latte-sipping-urbanites aren't deceived about how he lives, they just don't care that he's inconsistent.
Rich liberals get accused of hypocrisy for being rich while advocating for the poor, but that's a different type of hypocrisy. It may be selfish not to give everything you have away to the poor if you care about them so much, but it's actually perfectly consistent to think that poverty is bad and should be ameliorated, and also to not choose poverty for yourself.
There was a kid in my high school who was bullied so often that he was called "Running Man" because he would run to class between periods so he wouldn't get beat up in the hallway. He's now the class correspondent.
And some day he'll send everyone anthrax letters. Wrong thread?
it's actually perfectly consistent to think that poverty is bad and should be ameliorated, and also to not choose poverty for yourself.
Just keep telling yourself that, Manhattanite.
Over-earnestness here, but: I don't get 74?
Just over-earnestness. My 71 could be read as defensive ("I'm not a hypocrite, really I'm not!") so JRoth was hassling me about it.
Chris Mooney has caring about accuracy or truth or something like that as a liberal value.
45:
When faced with statements such as 'one of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal' or 'justice is the most important requirement for a society,' liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree."
The superficiality of Haidt's analysis is vexing to me. Sure, conservatives say they favor all kinds of things, but killing defenseless animals is something that conservatives publicly defend all the time. (Think about publicly stated attitudes about hunting and vegetarianism.)
So the question itself is ill-defined. Is Haidt asking "what would a conservative say regarding this issue?" Or is Haidt saying "what would a conservative say if confronted with a question phrased exactly in this fashion."
And yes, they favor "justice" because they like the word. But what could be more stereotypical than a conservative saying "Life isn't fair," and using that fact as an excuse for not trying to make life more fair?
Being the Right Sort of Person mitigates bad private behavior.
Which is why the guys who bang the family values drum the loudest are so often caught soliciting anonymous gay sex in public restrooms.
There are two problems. First, 'conservative' as in 'right wing' has nothing to do with conservative as in temperamentally cautious. But that could just be an accident of naming: it could be a philosophy that for historical reasons got attached to a name that doesn't make sense, which happens all the time. Second, if conservative as in right wing is a coherent ethos, I don't understand it -- there could be something systematic that I don't get because I'm unsympathetic, but all I'm sure is that whatever's going on with political conservatism, temperamental conservatism isn't it.
I'm tempermentally conservative, and distrust and want to slow down the pace of change, but the basic premise of all actually existing conservatism ever has been, basically, fuck the poor and protect the privileges of the most powerful. Be cautious, be radical, be religious, be anti-religious, be libertarian, be protectionist, be traditionalist, be modernist -- all of these are just different tools that are subservient to the overwhelming ethos of fucking over the poor.* Which, somewhat surprisingly, has proven to be an attractive ideology for lots of people who are just barely not poor.
*I think this is the thesis of that Corey Robin book, which I should read.
There was a kid in my high school who was bullied so often that he was called "Running Man" because he would run to class between periods so he wouldn't get beat up in the hallway. He's now the class correspondent.
Good lord, were we in the same high school class? I guess I wouldn't have said "hallway" but Running Man is our class correspondent.
I have only a vague idea of Haidt's work based on what I've at places like Crooked Timber and here.
My impression is that he makes a point of following up his analysis with injunctions that if only those big ol' meanie liberals weren't so meeeaaan they would be able to find comity with conservatives.
I don't know if he follows that up with standard centrist "If you would just stop being so dogmatic in your insistence that women have access to healthcare we could all get along" schtick or not.
Maybe I'm being uncharitable.
79: gotta signal the next stall somehow.
82: During the time I've been paying attention to him, he's been drifting in that direction, kind of.
16/19: Agreed re: non-political meanings of "conservative." I'm conservative. I generally like predictable routine, my personal life is no one's business but if you must know it's pretty humdrum, and I want cautious government policy. All this is why today's leading Democrats are nowhere near left-wing enough for me.
40
But it's my impression that "Conservative" parties world-wide are right-wing parties. Sometimes "Liberal" means right-wing as well, but "Conservative" always does.
Well, that's true in the modern, developed world, but all the modern, developed world is strongly influenced by modern America anyway. I wouldn't know if that's true in the less-developed world and wouldn't be at all surprised if it wasn't, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't always been true historically; it's not hard to imagine protectionist policies being considered conservative.
64
I often do get the sense that liberals place hypocrisy higher up on the scale of badness than conservatives (at least those of the social conservative/Christianist sort).
This is plausible to me. Maybe because it's easier to justify in many different belief systems or no belief system at all, or genuinely ecumenical rather than just a rhetorical thing - whether Christian, Muslim or secular humanist, we all should be able to agree that saying one thing and doing another is wrong, correct?
78: I haven't followed that part of the discussion too closely, and I'm glad of it if that's the kind of thing it hinges on. That seems like a very problematic foundation to base something so far-reaching on.
75, 76: Pure humor, in the "protesting too much" vein. Plus, of course, additional Manhattan tweak for LB's benefit.
if only those big ol' meanie liberals weren't so meeeaaan
I'm getting particular enjoyment of watching the FoxNews twits shrieking that "Obama is politicizing the killing of bin Laden and dividing the country!" There is no violin sufficiently tiny.
Which is why the guys who bang the family values drum the loudest are so often caught soliciting anonymous gay sex in public restrooms.
Which reminds me, I assumed at some point we would get around to discussing this research* ("Homophobic? Maybe You're Gay"). Curious what the more knowledgeable think of the methodology.
The twist was that before each word and image appeared, the word "me" or "other" was flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds -- long enough for participants to subliminally process the word but short enough that they could not consciously see it. The theory here, known as semantic association, is that when "me" precedes words or images that reflect your sexual orientation (for example, heterosexual images for a straight person), you will sort these images into the correct category faster than when "me" precedes words or images that are incongruent with your sexual orientation (for example, homosexual images for a straight person). This technique, adapted from similar tests used to assess attitudes like subconscious racial bias, reliably distinguishes between self-identified straight individuals and those who self-identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual.
*Maybe the people in question were *turned* gay by the research itself. Were appropriate chimpanzee control tests performed?
Also, the repeated op-eds gravely warning that the Obama campaign is going to "play the Mormon card" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and how a candidate's religion should be off-limits (especially when the other side is a cryptomuslim secularist Jeremiah Wright something something).
"play the Mormon card" (whatever that's supposed to mean)
That's the jack of the same color of the suit that was bid that isn't the jack of the suit that was bid.
87: To be fair, Republicans never, ever used any aspect of Osama Bin Laden for political advantage.
Good lord, were we in the same high school class? I guess I wouldn't have said "hallway" but Running Man is our class correspondent.
!!
I understand why republicAns think it's unfair for presidents to run on the very popular things the've done, and it's because their presidents so rarely do anything popular.
87: So am I. They are desperate to get Obama to stfu about it because it makes him look competent and undermines the wimpy liberal narrative. It's really clear that the memo has gone out from Roger Ailes to pound on the divisiveness narrative.
I don't understand how criticizing Obama for talking about getting bin Laden does anything but remind people that Obama got bin Laden and I don't see how that hurts Obama. Maybe I'm missing something.
78: It's a bit ambiguous, but not super-ambiguous. He is saying "how would a conservative answer this exact question," but maybe he's misleading people a bit. The questions are (Graham, J., Nosek, B., & Haidt, J. (submitted). The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration across the Political Divide, http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/publications.html):
When A TYPICAL LIBERAL [CONSERVATIVE] decides whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to the liberal's [conservative's] thinking? Remember, instead of selecting your own answers, answer all questions as a typical liberal [conservative]
Please read the following statements and indicate the extent to which A TYPICAL LIBERAL [CONSERVATIVE] would agree or disagree. Remember, instead of selecting your own answers, answer all questions as a typical liberal [conservative].
Anyhow, the effects aren't huge, and maybe a fairer way to characterize the results is that liberals tend to exaggerate both how liberal liberals are and how conservative conservatives are more so than conservatives.
I'm not saying that some people won't listen, I'm just saying that those people weren't going to vote Obama regardless.
What is a class correspondent?
I think the poor fool who emails everybody about the reunions, but my class is too small to have one so I don't really know.
98: Almost the same thing as a class broker, but with a stronger institutional affiliation.
95: You're not missing anything, but I think the GOP is boxed in here. I think that A. they intellectually believe that they need to respond (lest they get Swift-Boated, which everyone now agrees was a failure of response*), and B. they emotionally need to respond. This is direct hit on the very core of their political self-image (we're tough, they're not), and they can't stand it.
If Romney had a better narrative/more compelling message, it might suffice to say, "Obama's being divisive and just trying to distract from the critical issue of X," which they have said, but no one really buys their X**, so they keep coming back to the first part instead of pivoting towards the second.
I hope this lasts all summer.
* true or not, it's CW now
** the economy. Honestly, I think that Obama owes OWS a huge debt, not just for shifting the general narrative, but for specifically wounding a guy like Romney. Pre-OWS, I think that Romney's "I'm a CEOP who will fix the economy" schtick might have gotten some traction, but now he's so thoroughly painted as a one percenter that even those who don't love OWS are skeptical of his schtick. It's a lot like how Kerry was hamstrung by his own position on the war - he simply couldn't attain that clarity of message he needed to really make hay.
101: Some part of me would love to see the full pivot to pointing out how bad the Republicans are at national security (9/11!, Anthrax!, Lebanon Marine Barracks!). Total miscalculation on Iraq. Various problems with this left as an exercise for bob the reader.
102: That would be so nice, wouldn't it?
What's a class broker?
Somebody who takes all the class allowances and loses them by putting them in toxic junk bonds.
102:Shouldn't be any need, but the problems for Democrats and lefties in getting all excited and moist over our guys being all military hardasses overseas and doing whatever it goddamn takes, goddamit, to get the bad guys wherever they hide should be imbibed by Social Democrats with our mother's milk.
But I learned about modern liberals around 1969 2003-04...Klein and Yglesias. "We're tough, we're bad, we are twice as hard as any Republican, go troops, uhh, wait, people are getting hurt and killed? I thought this was a video game. I'm off the bus until the next strutting and bluffing."
If you going to celebrate violence, determine the better closer enemy, the one who is really gonna kill ya and fuck your lives. Fuck bin Laden.
Hey Excellent book from Routledge
Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger, Jab Patocka
Violence as constitutive rather than instrumental. I may be quoting this for a month.
And The Obama in the warroom gets warned about possible capture in the bin Laden raid and stands tall and says no, no bombing I want that fucker's head and if the Pakistanis are in the way on the way out...
...shoot your way out of a nuclear power.
And the Obamabots go Oooh Ahhhh di-di-di-ta-di Hey baby, talk a walk on the wild side.
And if you focus just on conservative Christians, there is arguably *more* emphasis on not being a hypocrite, because Protestant theology is so focused on faith and personal integrity.
Definitely agree with JRoth that this is nonsense, at least as far as public rhetoric goes. When the whole Ted Haggard thing happened, there were tons of conservatives saying, basically: "So what if he's a hypocrite. That's a good thing, because it means he has a moral code to betray, unlike you godless liberals."
I may be quoting this for a month.
Lucky us.
It's a bit ambiguous, but not super-ambiguous. He is saying "how would a conservative answer this exact question," but maybe he's misleading people a bit.
In fact, it's not at all ambiguous. He's not asking how a conservative would answer a specific question; he's asking about what conservatives believe. Read it again:
Please read the following statements and indicate the extent to which A TYPICAL LIBERAL [CONSERVATIVE] would agree or disagree.
He's asking whether conservatives would agree or disagree - not whether they would say they agree. It's obvious that he hasn't even considered the distinction.
Moreoever, the claim you and Bauerlein are making is entirely dependent on agreeing with my interpretation of this question. You (and presumably Haidt) are arguing that liberals are unclear about what conservatives believe, not about what conservatives would say about what they believe. Bauerlein's claim is that conservatives are opposed to the killing of defenseless animals, and that liberals don't know this.
Maybe I'm just an ignorant liberal, and I'm unaware that conservatives tend to oppose slaughterhouses and hunting. Or maybe conservatives are okay with slaughterhouses and hunting, but those things don't involve killing innocent animals. Maybe my hamburger was convicted by a jury of its peers.
But as you can see, I don't buy it. I think conservatives are much more inclined than liberals to mock vegetarians - particularly vegetarians who cite morality, rather than health, for their food preferences.
In fact, it's not at all ambiguous
Yes it is. The first sentence that you quote does support your interpretation a little (though literally it does ask whether the person "would agree," not whether they "would agree in their heart of hearts"), but the second sentence is "Remember, instead of selecting your own answers, answer all questions as a typical liberal [conservative]," so I would say the fair interpretation is "what they would say." The other instruction is a bit more ambiguous.
You (and presumably Haidt) are arguing that liberals are unclear about what conservatives believe, not about what conservatives would say about what they believe
I never said that, though Haidt did.
Haidt didn't tabulate the data for the individual questions, so for all I know you'd be absolutely right about the innocent animals. If it turned out that you aren't, the Haidtian explanation would be that you think that the typical conservative is someone who mocks ethical vegetarians, when in fact some conservatives do that, some don't, and some may have qualms about sluahgterhouses and hunting.
You (and presumably Haidt) are arguing that liberals are unclear about what conservatives believe, not about what conservatives would say about what they believe
(I was responding just to the first half of this in 110. I don't really think the second half is a killer objection; being able to predict what someone would say is a pretty good proxy for being able to understand what they believe)
110
In fact, it's not at all ambiguous. He's not asking how a conservative would answer a specific question; he's asking about what conservatives believe. Read it again:
I realize that argument-by-dictionary is often annoying, but the word "agree" actually can mean either saying something or believing it.
being able to predict what someone would say is a pretty good proxy for being able to understand what they believe
Specifically not in the circumstance under discussion, where there's an issue as to whether the speaker is likely to say something at odds with their beliefs as demonstrated by their actions.
LizardBreath, I'd like to see that post.
I've read/heard some comments almost in passing about this book that I don't know what to make of.
Is Haidt the one who gave interviews a few years ago where he described his research as the surprised realization of a liberal (like the interviewers' readers, presumably) who had never realized that conservatives had all these important values he had practically never heard of (roughly)? I found that annoying but it might have little to do with his work.
111: though literally it does ask whether the person "would agree," not whether they "would agree in their heart of hearts"
So Haidt specifically asks about conservative beliefs, but because he didn't ask for real, true beliefs, he's really not asking about beliefs? That's gibberish, but Haidt is certainly capable of gibberish.
The second sentence in no way contradicts the first sentence, by the way.
102 - It's truly astonishing to me how much the Lebanon barracks bombing has vanished down the memory whole. (But we whipped up on Grenada!) That and Reagan's sale of arms to Islamic terrorists are just non-events. Didn't happen! They're the embarrassing Third Eye Blind fandom of recent American history.
It's of a piece with Romney's "Even Carter would have gone after bin Laden!" crack, which is awesomealope both because Romney is on the record saying he wouldn't violate Pakistan's territorial integrity to kill bin Laden and because, no shit Carter would have done it, because he authorized an even riskier move in Desert Eagle, it worked out terribly, and he lost the election to a genial, senile Bircher who didn't know the difference between Grover Cleveland and Grover Cleveland Alexander.
114: Obviously if the person is confused about what the question is asking, it's a problem, but isn't being able to predict what someone would say not a good indicator of understanding the person and hence having a pretty good idea of what the believe in any case?
116: You're being unreasonable.
72 etc: my college class secretary just won a Pulitzer Prize and then ran for another term. He did not get the prize for class notes, though they are very good.
119: The point is that if you're asking what someone would agree with, and (arguendo) they are likely to pay lipservice to ideals that they don't actually hold with much intensity as demonstrated by their actions, there's a serious ambiguity as to whether 'agree' means 'what would they say' or 'what would they do'.
Someone who could both predict what conservatives would say and what they would do would understand conservatives well. But if the disjunction I've suggested between conservative lipservice and actual conservative beliefs exists, someone who's answering on the basis of how they know conservatives to behave isn't confused because their answers are at odds with what conservatives would say.
Right, I see the point, and it would be good if the question were less ambiguous, though I think the second sentence isn't very ambiguous at all (which doesn't mean that some people weren't confused)
Obama won the right to push his 'better on national security' persona in large part by continuing or even amplifying some of the worst aspects of what Bush did. Hasn't started an Iraq-scale war yet but gave serious ground on Iran and made it harder to prevent a war there (by saying that the possibility of an Iranian bomb was a major threat to U.S. national security). He has been terrible on civil rights, drone killings, war on terror issues, etc.
On conservatives, there's a lot of weird sadomasochistic stuff going on in modern conservatism (which has some familiar echoes in fascist movements, although the American right is not all the way there). This desire to side with the stronger party and pleasure in seeing the stronger victimize the weaker, a kind of desire for violence and suffering to be visited on the perceived weaker other.
A large part of why I am a Ron Paul fan, despite all his many problems, is that I see this urge as completely absent in him.
Poor people and pregnant women don't count as "weaker others"?
The single-minded hunt for gold keeps his mind pure.
Some of those poor people (and pregnant women, come to think) work out you know.
it would be good if the question were less ambiguous
It's not just that, though. It's also that the research claims are importantly different from the research measures. I don't think the question could have been less ambiguous, because it is crucial to the study's conclusions that it assumes that the people answering about their own beliefs are reporting accurately. (This despite the fact that, of course, self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, even in much less fraught circumstances.)
116: You're being unreasonable.
Okay, let me see if I understand the reasonable position here.
1. Haidt set about to find out what conservatives believe, and what liberals think conservatives believe. (And vice versa.)
2. He created a survey.
3. In this survey, he asked neither what conservatives believe, nor did he ask liberals what conservatives believe.
4. He offered no explanation for this omission, and indeed, doesn't even acknowledge it.
Here's my unreasonable alternative view: Propositions 1 and 2 remain the same, but we make a substitution for 3. I propose:
3. Haidt asked what conservatives believe, and asked liberals what conservatives believe.
This would render 4 moot, and the whole enterprise suddenly becomes a lot more comprehensible to my unreasonable mind.
Granted, my view doesn't reflect very well on Haidt, but I would argue that it's more charitable to him than your view.
My views reflect so well on Haidt that he uses them to shave.
131: While I'm predisposed to agree with you, I don't follow this -- I think you dropped some words or something.
I don't think the question could have been less ambiguous, because it is crucial to the study's conclusions that it assumes that the people answering about their own beliefs are reporting accurately.
I feel like we're nearing the point where everything that could be said about this was said, but, I disagree. If we leave out the first sentence and rephrase the second one with "Try to guess what a typical liberal/conservative would answer to this questionnaire," we'd have an okay measure of how good an idea the subject has about typical liberals and conservatives.
It's actually unclear to me that under your standards you could ever say anything about people's beliefs at all -- after all, it's not as if people don't ever act against their beliefs, so without telepathic abilities, how could you tell what their true beliefs are? Which is a fine, I guess.
(The full results in the paper, again, are that everyone thinks liberals/conservatives are more extreme than they are, and it's especially true that liberals think that the typical liberals are more liberal than they actually are, and the typical conservatives are more conservative than they actually are. It is a shame that Haidt doesn't mention this more prominently)
131, it's good that you mostly dropped the open aggression, but your (3) is still not reasonable enough for me. My answer to the reasonable version of your argument is in 134.
it's good that you mostly dropped the open aggression
I don't think I recall seeing you around, although my memory for short pseudonyms is weak. Just because squabbling is less entertaining than many other modes of interaction, may I suggest that this sort of comment is likelier to intensify pointless hostility than to calm it down? If you've been annoyed by pf's tone, "Look, asshole" or similar is actually, I think, less likely to pull the conversation all the way off the rails.
It's truly astonishing to me how much the Lebanon barracks bombing has vanished down the memory whole. (But we whipped up on Grenada!) That and Reagan's sale of arms to Islamic terrorists are just non-events. Didn't happen!
Maybe it's just me, but Iran-Contra seems orders of magnitude worse than Lebanon. And, yes, truly astonishing. The president of the United States, in direct contravention of Congressionally passed law, secretly sold weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States in order to fund terrorists who were committing unbelievable atrocities. That's pretty damn fucked up. It puts the UK's political arms scandals of the era (the supergun, Al-Yamamah etc) to shame. And we Brits can do arms scandals.
You're right, of course.
(I haven't commented before, I think)
No problem. You've mentioned the full paper a couple of times, and if it's linked in the thread, I missed it, and I haven't seen it my haphazard rummaging around. If you've got the link, point it out for me?
Initially I found the result of the Haidt study plausible because liberals as a group are terrible at understanding people who are too different from liberals. This is because liberals always ask themselves "why would I act this way"? In the immediate wake of 9/11, I heard lots of liberal speculation of how maybe the attacks had something to do with the rejection of the Kyoto treaty, or similar issues that liberals took seriously. I remember someone saying in exasperation that liberals apparently believe that the World Trade Center was knocked down by European diplomats.
But politicalfootball is right. At this point conservatives are all too familiar to us to not understand. Before the Internet, we could have a completely imaginary notion of conservative principles, and how they made some sort of sense, even if we didn't agree with them. (I suspect Nostalgia for real republicans is a misplaced nostalgia for the illusion.) Now we know that the principles are just lip-service over deeper, inchoate impulses, and it is the impulses that drive the behavior.
I found that conservative behavior is easy to understand if I just assume that it's motivated by animus against black people. I don't know if it actually is consciously motivated by animus against black people, but is observationally equivalent.
(And I'd link the fruit basket, but I've forgotten where it is. You didn't want it, anyway.)
Go to http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/publications.html , and request
Graham, J., Nosek, B., & Haidt, J. (submitted). The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration across the Political Divide.
It gets sent to your email immediately.
It amazes me that someone is seriously arguing that conservatives aren't any more hypocritical than liberals.
143: Come on. If we're going to argue about anything, which I for one like doing, entertaining the possibility that political disagreements aren't all determined by the fact that conservatives objectively suck has to be open for discussion. I mean, I do, in fact, think that conservatives are more likely to be comfortable with doublethink, but I accept that it's a proposition that has to be argued.
142: Thanks -- I saw the 'request' link before, and figured it meant actually hassling a human, which I didn't want to do. Knowing it's automatic makes all the difference.
I found that conservative behavior is easy to understand if I just assume that it's motivated by animus against black people. I don't know if it actually is consciously motivated by animus against black people, but is observationally equivalent.
I can't remember where but I recently read something like "Republicans are motivated by returning private power to men and employers." They didn't throw in white people, but it fits.
I don't even see why in this particular way conservatives objectively suck. What's so terrible about hypocrisy? Hypocrisy is about 10,000th in the list of human flaws.
Neal Stephenson (who has definite conservative tendencies), mocked liberals in Diamond Age for creating a society which was so morally relative that the only thing you could criticise people for was hypocrisy, since if there's no objective morality, the only way you can criticize someone else is for failing to live up to their own principles. (I have no memory of how this fit into the book -- it was like a random Heinlein-like aside.)
While I'm predisposed to agree with you, I don't follow this -- I think you dropped some words or something.
I wish I could do better, but I don't think I can. As I see it, WF is making two assertions:
1 - Haidt is trying to use a survey to determine a.) the beliefs of conservatives, and b.) what liberals think the beliefs of conservatives are, and
2 - that Haidt's survey never asks 1a. or 1b.
(I can footnote this if you like - identify the places where I believe WF makes these assertions.)
And as for the general tone of the conversation, I thought 131 was actually pretty snotty* on my part, what with its sarcastic references to what's "reasonable." So I disagree with WF there, too!
*that's a word my parents would use sometimes to describe my attitude as a child, and I think it applies here.
Less intellectual people are often not consistent at all. My aunt who is utterly enraging is quite liberal in a Prius environmental way, was quite the hippy and would vote for Medicare for all. But she wasn't willing to give me a couple thousand dollars, because she thinks that messy things like money don't belong in caring family relationships. (long family history of money being used to manipulate people, so she went to the other extreme.). I got mad and said that it struck me as odd that she had taken money from those people and not given it all away. She said that that was different because it wasn't about basing a relationship on money. I told her that it wasn't. She thinks she's being consistent, but (now I'm biased) but I don't think she is.
re: 147.last
IIRC, it was in one of the speeches one of the neo-Victorians makes justifying their world-view. Basically, 'we have a moral code, sometimes we fuck up and can't live up to it; that doesn't invalidate the moral code'.
Having reflected on the OP a bit, I am reminded of something I wrote to a friend of mine during the 2008 election season, along the lines of "The desire to be, or to appear to be, strong is the root of a great deal of evil these days."
I think liberals and conservatives alike make a great thing of toughness (perhaps more so than in the days when most or all of the political/cultural generation would have survived WWI or WWII, but that's another matter), but, if one were honest, one might suggest that being tough isn't really very important or desirable, and that time spent teaching children to be tough with one another or themselves could more profitably be spent teaching them to, say, read.
but, if one were honest, one might suggest that being tough isn't really very important or desirable,
I dunno. I think there's a real wisdom in the belief that it's important for people to have strategies to cope with various forms of violence - and that's a definition of "toughness" that I think liberals and conservatives can agree upon.
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This is pretty much exactly what I predicted would be the best-case scenario for an outcome right after the incident. Things to keep in mind: The assailant, Schmitz, had a swastika tattoo and 3 prior assault charges. This was ruled inadmissible as evidence. CeCe had passed a bad check once. This was ruled admissible. The woman who started the altercation, by slashing CeCe's face with a broken glass, has never been charged. CeCe was denied medical attention for days, causing her cheek to swell up with golf-ball sized lump. She was kept in solitary confinement for no other reason than her gender identity for a significant portion of her incarceration. In 4 similar cases which have occurred in Hennepin County in the past year, the DA has refused to press charges when there was some evidence of self-defense.
There's nothing worth saving here. Burn it all down.
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/149864755.html
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149: I see no inconsistency here whatsoever. The belief that government should be ordered a certain way implies nothing at all about how one should deal in one's personal life.
My father is pretty generous with his children in a pinch, but he thinks poor kids with cancer ought to fend for themselves. I don't see any inconsistency there.
My experience of talking with nonpolitical conservative people is that their inconsistency often manifests in ways that feel like bad faith. You ask someone a question, you take them at their word for the answer, you act on that answer, and then you get the rug pulled out from under you. It's painful.
Liberals have plenty of inconsistency, but because they *value* consistency/coherence, if you point it out in a nonthreatening way, there's a chance you can problem-solve your way through it. Liberals are maddening in other ways, but the specific whiplash described above is definitely more a conservative phenomenon, IME.
In other news, this has to be the single greatest blog post on what a company can do to fix its racist ad that I have ever seen. Based on this one post I totally have a non-creepy blog crush on Anil Dash.
147, 150: It's not just in that section. One of the supporting characters, Lord McGraw, epitomizes Stephenson's ideal: He's a multiracial child of midwestern university professors, who grew up in the Boy Scouts and going to two different Christian churches and a synagogue, and who was surprised that the national news made a big deal of the fact that so many regular Iowans helped out with repelling the floods of '93. So of course, based on that kind of upbringing, he became a hardcore social darwinist, quickly rising through the ranks of neo-Victorian society based on his innate intelligence and positive moralist outlook. By contrast, the other extreme of society is represented by Tequila, the white-trash mother of one of the protagonists, who is a maid, lives in a crummy apartment building, gets knocked around by her parade of nogoodnik boyfriends and refuses to protect her daughter from being sexually assaulted by same. She's the inevitable outcome of moral relativism, and, indeed, any kind of belief in equality or redistributive social justice.
Not quite as awfully racist a book as Cryptonomicon, but it's close.
I haven't followed this thread at all, and just tuned in at comment 140.
147: Neal Stephenson (who has definite conservative tendencies), mocked liberals in Diamond Age for creating a society which was so morally relative that the only thing you could criticise people for was hypocrisy, since if there's no objective morality, the only way you can criticize someone else is for failing to live up to their own principles.
It's not great to argue any of this with reference to a fiction writer's accounting of the thing. Anyone who adverts to liberals' supposed extreme moral relativism is playing around, anyway.
89
... "play the Mormon card" (whatever that's supposed to mean) ...
The meaning seems clear enough to me, make an appeal to anti-Mormon prejudice.
144
Come on. If we're going to argue about anything, which I for one like doing, entertaining the possibility that political disagreements aren't all determined by the fact that conservatives objectively suck has to be open for discussion. I mean, I do, in fact, think that conservatives are more likely to be comfortable with doublethink, but I accept that it's a proposition that has to be argued.
I doubt you will convince anyone who isn't already on your side. About like trying to argue conservatives are uglier than liberals.
As for the original post I don't think it's that complicated. People naturally don't like outsiders, who look down on them, criticizing their culture and so will tend to reflexively defend it.
158: I understand the concept. I meant specifically.
I blame this post title for putting Kanye West in my head today.
159: [gritting my teeth at sincerely engaging JBS on politics] Thing is, we Unfogged liberals will happily admit that, per Haidt's (dubious conceptually, but probably narrowly accurate) classification, conservatives consider certain moral values, like in-group loyalty, more important than liberals do. There's no, "nu-uh, there's no difference whatsoever in weltanschauung between liberals and conservatives, it's just coincidence that they, uh, see the world differently." Conservatives value certain things more; liberals value certain other things more. It's actually a pretty parsimonious explanation for the political differences.
If there were some sort of scarcity situation affecting pet ownership, then you'd have clashes over policy between cat people and dog people, and it would be stupid to say that cat and dog people are identical, except for their completely incidental pet attachments. While Browns fans and Steelers fans are basically the same because football teams are basically the same, and so fandom goes to personal history (geography + ancestry + who was good when you were 12), Rs and Ds aren't, actually, basically the same. They advocate different policies that result in different societies. I don't vote Democrat because I grew up in Democratburgh (yes, many people vote party line for fandom-like reasons; that's not what we're talking about here).
163
... Rs and Ds aren't, actually, basically the same ...
The differences are trivial compared to the amount of overlap. And what does this have to do with whether liberals or conservatives are more comfortable with doublethink?
There's nothing worth saving here. Burn it all down.
Dude, I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but man this case sounds like a bad one to go all out on. IME, when the suspect says things like "I only took out the scissors to scare him and he ran into them" it's a bad, bad sign. Lord knows I've been on a lot of stabbings and such where it sounded like the person on the receiving end had it coming. But, if you shank someone and they go echo you better be on solid ground and "he ran into my scissors" is the kind of line you hear when someone realizes that they just did something illegal in the heat of the moment.
Being the Right Sort of Person mitigates bad private behavior.
As I think I may have mentioned before, the distinction is between people who think "Al's doing good things, he must be a good person" and people who think "Bob's a good person, therefore the things he is doing must be good".
156: you stopped reading before the bit where the character admits that neo-victorian society is essentially self-destructive and doomed, huh.
Judging from indirect experience (parole hearings etc) gswift sounds spot on - so many knife murders are almost certainly not the result of someone thinking "I am going to stab this person now and kill them", but someone in a scuffle (normally drunk) who pulls out a knife to intimidate the other person or try to cause them some minor injury. But knives are chancy things and if they hit the wrong bit of the body then they can kill very easily and quickly.
Conservatives value certain things more; liberals value certain other things more. It's actually a pretty parsimonious explanation for the political differences.
It's also rather tautological. People with systematically different views have systematically different values. That's not the brilliant insight that Haidt fans make it out to be.
Browns fans and Steelers fans are basically the same
As a Browns fan, I find this insulting.
Rs and Ds aren't, actually, basically the same.
BULLSHIT!!!!
My father ... thinks poor kids with cancer ought to fend for themselves.
Pardon me. I should point out that my father probably wouldn't say that he thinks poor kids with cancer ought to fend for themselves.
155.3: that post is great, but dear god don't start reading the comments.
154: The inconsistency is in accepting an inheritance and then saying that it's wrong to give family members money. My point was that she is (1.) a liberal and (2.) not entirely consistent in her beliefs. I did not mean to say that I had evidence that her political beliefs are internally inconsistent.
And her status as an intellectual/non-intellectual? What does that have to do with it?
155
Liberals have plenty of inconsistency, but because they *value* consistency/coherence, if you point it out in a nonthreatening way, there's a chance you can problem-solve your way through it. Liberals are maddening in other ways, but the specific whiplash described above is definitely more a conservative phenomenon, IME.
This may just reflect the fact that you also are a liberal. People are more willing to consider arguments from people they see as basically on their side. Similarly a conservative might find it easier to change the mind of another conservative than of a liberal.
176: A number of the audiences I speak to do not know my political beliefs, and given the context I'm speaking in it is not necessarily easy to figure out.
(Not-infrequently I discover that somebody is apparently assuming that I am a conservative like them -- typically, when they make a racist comment that they think I am going to agree with.)
In B4 James says that 177 is unclear because the racist people Witt is likely to encounter are racist black people and those people are likely not conservatives.
Way more fun than racism -- has everyone already heard about Alabama Shakes? I heard a long radio interview with them the other day and was quite struck. Interesting sound.
I'm sure actual music people would be able to locate their place in the American music scene (Southern rock? Southern soul? I have no idea).
175: Seriously, if one doesn't know a disturbing number of "intellectual" people whose personal and political ethics have nothing in common, one doesn't know enough intellectuals.
154: The inconsistency is in accepting an inheritance and then saying that it's wrong to give family members money.
But giving away money when one is dead seems to differ in important ways from giving away money when one is alive, no?
And, of course, accepting money from a relative is different from giving it away. One can have all kinds of motives for your aunt's combination of actions that aren't inconsistent at all.
If your aunt contends that relatives must give money to each other, then refuses to do so, that's inconsistent.
Speaking of "What doesn't kill you" [makes you stronger], has everyone but me already seen this several-week-old Slate article on the US torture program? It's not exactly news to anyone here, I don't think, but it's good. (via this blog from unfogged's blogroll.*)
...They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.
They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.
And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture. They did it by denying detainees legal process because, as the CIA's Inspector General put it in a 2004 report [pdf], when you torture someone you create an "Endgame" problem: You end up with detainees who, "if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention."
They managed all this, for a time, through secrecy--a secrecy that depended on the aggressive suppression of two groups of voices.
Over and over again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, in secret CIA black sites and at CIA headquarters, in the Pentagon, and in Washington, men and women recognized the torture for what it was and refused to remain silent. They objected, protested, and fought to prevent, and then to end, these illegal and immoral interrogations. While the president and his top advisers approved and encouraged the torture of prisoners, there was dissent in every agency, at every level.
The documents are full of these voices. ...
Alongside the dissenters, another group of voices surfaces in these once-classified materials: the men we tortured. Theirs are the voices the entire system of incommunicado detention and closed tribunals was constructed to censor, and it worked: To this day, few Americans can identify more than a handful of detainees by name. Fewer still know how far from the "worst of the worst" the vast majority of those we tortured turned out to be.
Torture dehumanizes. But that only extends a process of dehumanization that must take place in order for abuse to happen: It is impossible to torture those whose humanity we recognize. In joke-filled letters to their attorneys, in frank and vivid testimony in tribunal transcripts, in startlingly naive and in powerfully emotional exchanges with interrogators, images emerge not of the maniacal and monolithic and monstrous, but of distinct and recognizable individuals. To hear these voices is to begin to reverse the terrible dehumanization the documents chronicle....
It is one thing to be in the dark; it is another thing to have the record of what happened in the darkness right in front of us, and fail to reckon with it. That, sadly, is the situation in the United States today.
(It's a little unsettling to read this while being distracted by the teaser on the sidebar for "The Secret Ingredient That Will Take Your Guacamole to the Next Level", but that's Slate, I guess.)
* Incidentally, the post immediately under that is also interesting, about working vs. middle class norms for friendship and marriage. I'd link, but that blog doesn't appear to have permalinks.
182: As I said, I'm biased, but I disagree based on the particular situation. She also happens to be unwilling to do things to help people, only to talk about things, so I find that troublesome. I'm dealing with a pretty dire situation, so I'm quite biased, of course
And she's said that she doesn't want to leave any of her money to family, like nothing -- only socially worthy causes. So, if she thinks it's wrong to leave money to family but was willing to accept it, I think that's a sort of inconsistency.
(It's a little unsettling to read this while being distracted by the teaser on the sidebar for "The Secret Ingredient That Will Take Your Guacamole to the Next Level", but that's Slate, I guess.)
THAT SEGRET INGREDIENT?
THE BLOOD OF THE INFIDEL
165: If she hadn't fought back, she'd probably be dead. And if she'd been white, and straight, she wouldn't have been charged. Obviously, yeah, it would have been a lot smarter from her perspective to clam up until she'd talked to a lawyer -- that's what cops do when they're being interrogated, after all. But given that all of those statements were made under duress -- having a gigantic, untreated slash wound on her face -- I think it is reasonable to discount them.
44% of the victims of hate crimes are transgendered women.
44% of the victims of hate crimes are transgendered women.
It's a horrible situation that you're discussing, but that statistic cannot possibly be correct.
This is why white guys like that stupid "I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6" line so much -- for the most part, they know it's going to be neither. Other folx aren't so lucky.
187: Sorry, it's hate murders.
http://www.glaad.org/2011/07/14/research-shows-increase-in-hate-crimes-against-lgbt-people/
By that link, it's actually hate murders of people because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status. There were a total of 27 such murders in 2010, again by the report. In other words, a horrible amount of crime for those involved but there are 15,000 murder in the U.S. a year.
Maybe I'm avoiding work, but anyway.
84: I see a new Alanis Morissette song*, "Inconsistent". "It's like your stingy aunt, who gives all her money away".
*I do these jokes despite being more sympathetic to the spirit of original song than most seem to be. Second line of the new song: "It's like making che-eap jokes, about things you don't really mind."
If she hadn't fought back, she'd probably be dead. And if she'd been white, and straight, she wouldn't have been charged.
Those things aren't clear to me at all. Granted, the "victim" in this sounds like a real piece of work and I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep at his passing. But the accounts I've read have CeCe going over to the group to confront them after they started yelling stuff and eventually the fight was on. And she didn't stab the person who hit her with the glass, she stabbed a guy who by all accounts had no weapons. It gets harder to argue the fear for your life thing when you voluntarily confront people. And generally speaking, regardless of race, when a fight ends with a body and only one person had a weapon, the odds of getting out of there without a charge are slim.
But given that all of those statements were made under duress -- having a gigantic, untreated slash wound on her face -- I think it is reasonable to discount them.
Some things are understandable when the adrenaline's still running. "Fuck him he had it coming" and such would be something I wouldn't put a lot of weight on in the aftermath of a fight. But "he ran into my scissors" IME is the kind of thing you hear when someone knows they fucked up.
And generally speaking, regardless of race, when a fight ends with a body and only one person had a weapon, the odds of getting out of there without a charge are slim.
It's true. They did charge Zimmerman ... eventually.
Cops protecting Nazis, as usual: http://youtu.be/FsHi6_l1XzA
LB: I'm actually kind of sympathetic to the idea that overprotectiveness is a bad thing
Yes, me too! I'm not up on the latest bullying events, but I also believe it's good for kids to work things out themselves in most social settings. But I certainly wouldn't carry this over in extreme situations.
197: Over the course of extensive discussions, I believe we've worked out that precise right level of protectiveness is that which the commenter themselves experienced as a child.
There's no way I'm going to let my kids get away with what I got away with. I could basically do whatever I wanted between lunch and dinner, no questions asked.
That was the way for most of us over a certain age, I expect. Although it's somewhat class-dependent in the UK, in that poorer/working class kids often still have more freedom from adult scrutiny.
199. Depending how old you were, what's wrong with that?
Maybe Walt's kids are a lot stupider than he was.
if she'd been white, and straight, she wouldn't have been charged/i>
Yeah, I'm pretty sceptical that, in America, white blokes are habitually stabbing other unarmed white blokes to death in bar fights and not even being charged.
If it turns out to be true, though, I have an interesting idea for the next NY meetup.
201: Because I spent all of my time on activities like shoplifting.
198 et seq: I almost added "with certain rare exceptions" to my original claim and do so now.
204: Knives out, motherfuckers?
207: swords and improvised poetry, actually. A la fin de l'envoi, je touche!
