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Both Parties Ignore the Facts
An anonymous reader writes "Any democrat will tell you the republicans ignore the facts. Any republican will tell you the democrats ignore the facts. Turns out they're right. A new study monitored brain activity of partisans; they shun logic and use emotional processing centers to justify their candidate's contradictory statements. 'With their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix.'"
They allow you to join a club and make club membership more important in decision making than whether or not someone really represents you.
My biggest frustration with many republicans is the fact that they claim to be for small government, and this administration has been anything but small government.
My biggest frustration with democrats is that they claim to be all for civil liberties yet silently let pass things like Clinton's support of the clipper chip or Hilary's closed door meetings with insurance companies to hammer out a health care plan that benefitted them.
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You should think about this article a little harder. It's not just the parties in power that ignore the facts, but any of us with very strong convictions. That's as true for the revolutionaries as those currently in power.
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Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
As ideological mantras go, "leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" seems like a pretty good one to me.
"Partisan".
Republicans are the only people who use this word, they and newscasters. It's a lovely thing, because they only use it as a term for people who call them liars.
As for the "balanced" folk, the newscasters, the majority of Americans: the truth, reality, the right answers, call it what you will, is not determined by looking at the "left" and the "right" and finding with certitute that reality lies somewhere in the middle, with liars hedged all about it on "both" "sides".
There are two sides in today's reality, the rightists with Bush as their titular head, and everyone else in the world, which the rightists term the "left".
That's why the Democrats are such a mess. They're absolutely everyone else that isn't Bush. They aren't a side, they're the majority of us, the contrarians to Bush's view of reality.
The rightists are monomaniacs, magical thinkers, borderline psychopathic personalities. They can't change their minds; it's not a concept they can understand. They have the truth, and everyone else can go to hell. Evidence, science, exposure, error, nothing can reach them. They lack empathy and think it a strength.
Bush and his co-thinkers have been wrong on the environment, tax cuts, terrorism, civil rights, causus belli, voting machines, the Swift Boat and Murtha smears, privacy, education, regulation, disaster relief, military reform, anti-missle tech, reactivating nuke weapon building, the UN, diplomacy, the powers of the executive, secret prisons, torture flights, torture, kidnapping, lying about same, secret executions, unpersoning American citizens in secret, being wrong about damned near every terrorist arrest and imprisonment, having the JAG's turn against him, the CIA turn against him, finally the military turn against him, the destruction of our preparedness for war, hiding personal military misconduct, wilderness preservation, the FCC, the internet(s), the Clinton's stealing furniture (Bush at least admitted they were wrong aboutthat, but who heard the retraction?, redistricting out of turn, bribery, treason in outing CIA ops for revenge, destroying the budget through tax cuts, borrowing from everywhere, on and on and on. He recognizes no error, no mistakes. At the "Q&A" last Monday, a student asked him why he cut education and student loans. He look confused, and denied he did it. Magical thinking. He can lie and not think it lying. This is the worst kind of madness. He enjoys lying. He thinks it artful. He laughs out loud as he fabricates, badly, on the fly.
There is nothing like this list of crimes against sanity on the "other" side. The truth is not in the middle, and both "partisan" sides are not equal in mendacity. The war in Iraq will cost two trillion at the end.We're broke. He's lying. All the 'pubs, even McCain, are lying even to this minute. The "other side" still thinks that they are playing a gentleman's game, as I watched the Alito hearings. They just don't understand what they are up against.
It's easy to play the fallacy of the false middle. It makes one seem wise, and has the advantage of relieving one of the hard work of making judgements based on actual knowledge. Reporters of the new school use it constantly. Thusly:
"Bush said today that the sky is green. Some Democratic spokesmen have said that the President is not being straight with the American people. Here are three talking heads to tell you why they are wrong."
All reporting thereforward is based on the Green Sky world, with occasional fillips of quotes from "partisans" saying that he might not be right. Entire cable networks dedicate there time to Green Sky stories, and it becomes the truth, inextricable. Later, geniuses talk about how both the Blue Sky and Green Sky "proponents" have not told the truth, and that they are addicted to their positions and their combat.
But the sky is fucking BLUE. It's not blue-green.
Studies show that where politics involve more than 2 sides, people must actually justify their arguments rather than bash and demonize the other side, as there is no simple "other side" to blame for everything wrong.
Ofcourse, this is utterly unimagineable for people living in the US, and I will be flamed into oblivion being named labeled both Neocon, Liberal and what not.
Since I'll probably get bashed however I put this, let me put it this way: There's no politics or democracy in the US, only corrupt government and manipulation of the public. There, I said it. I have karma to burn.
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