Motivated Reasoning, and Vigilantism

Two themes today.

  • A prime example of motivated reasoning, from today’s NY Times font page (as if on cue from yesterday’s post), about conservative opposition to transgenders
  • And several examples of the increasing Republican approval of vigilantism

NY Times, 16 May 2023: How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care, subtitled “In the campaign to ban gender therapies for minors, Republicans have amplified a group of activists who no longer identify as transgender, overriding objections from transgender people and medical experts.”

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Skepticism, Beliefs, and Cognitive Biases

Familiar topics, but worth another look, especially since if they were broadly understood it would make so many of America’s partisan controversies go away. (But conservatives will never allow concepts like skeptical thinking to be taught in schools, for precisely such reasons.)

Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 15 May 2023: Skepticism: Why critical thinking makes you smarter, subtitled: “‘In order to seek truth,’ Rene Descartes once wrote, ‘it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, all things.'”
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Fear and Guns, Fear of Diversity, and Conservative Misogyny

For today, current events items about

  • How gun buyers are motivated by fear
  • How Republican politicians are motivated by fear of change, and fear of the other
  • How Trump and his fans expose conservative misogyny

For later, I need to move away from my preoccupation with Republican and conservative issues, even though they are important and evidence, to me, that the US is tearing itself apart through the re-emergence of primitive ideology and anti-intellectualism. Yet I suspect this has always been the case. Human society has always been a three steps forward, two steps back, matter. We’re currently, in the US, in a step back. The steps forward will eventually prevail, because steps back are ultimately unproductive, and we live in a competitive world. I need to shift my focus to forward steps. More on that tomorrow.

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Red Herrings, and AI’s effect on Capitalism

Two items today

  • How Big Oil uses “red herring” issues to deflect attention away from the big issue
  • Ted Chiang on the potential corrosive effect of AI on capitalism

Plus, a brief reflection on the SF writers who’ve had things to say about their contemporary world.

Salon, Kathleen Dean Moore, 13 May 2023: How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change, subtitled “A logic professor explains how a persistent, subtle fallacy has infected public discussion of climate change”

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The Upside-Down World of Conservative Values

  • They’re for discrimination against some (gays and lesbians) against discrimination against others (religious conscientious objectors)
  • Their ideas of freedom involve the freedom to discriminate against people they don’t like (even if that infringes on *their* freedom)
  • Their belief in capitalism and the free market seems to have morphed into their role as “Soviet economic planners” (according to a piece I just read today)
  • The post finishes with some personal thoughts about character, and its relation to the understanding of the world

*

In the upside-down world of religious privilege in Florida these days, doctors *can* discriminate against gays and lesbians, but *not* against those who refuse to take vaccines. Whereas generally the latter is of more concern to the medical community than the former. (Cue Hippocratic Oath.)

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False Ideas of Human Nature

Just one topic for today.

Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 12 May 2023: It’s bigger than guns: Why the right does little to stop violence, subtitled “Conservatives have cultivated a negative and hyper-individualistic view of human nature”

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The Town Hall, and the Core Issue

The political news today is about the “Town Hall” on CNN last night that gave Donald Trump a full hour to spew his usual shtick of lies and insults, before an audience of his fans, and the commentary in the news media today about the ever-despicable Trump, his ever-despicable fans, and why on earth CNN broadcast such a thing.

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Biblical Ignorance and Climate Change

One of my emerging themes on this blog is my gradual, belated, realization of how many people believe so many things that simply aren’t true. Here’s an example in a religious vein: Bible believers who misunderstand their Bible, with potentially drastic consequences.

LA Times, Bart D. Ehrman, 3 May 2023: Opinion: How a misreading of the Bible fuels many Americans’ apathy about climate change

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A Slow American Civil War?

Items today about

  • The debt ceiling crisis and the deficit scolds
  • This Modern World on teacher bots and the debt ceiling, among other things
  • How the latest mass shooting suggests an American ‘slow civil war’

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Mental Illness, Gun Violence, and Lying

It’s hard to get through a week without more incidents of gun violence in the US, and Republican claims that they’re all due to mental illness. So why is the US an extreme outlier in gun violence? Why would more people per capita in the US be mentally ill? The Repubicans can’t explain that. (My explanation, a few posts ago, is that there are mentally ill people in every nation, but the the US gives easy access to the mentally ill to assault weapons; that is, those most attracted to assault weapons whose purpose is to kill masses of people, are by definition mentally ill.)

I’ve missed a couple of days of blogging here, laid low with another cold, this one sniffly, coughy, and chest congested. But no temperature; not COVID. I think my partner picked this bug up somewhere (because he had it first), and brought it home to me. It’s curious that I’ve had two colds now, in two months (the previous one was in early March), after some three years of none at all, because of mostly staying at home due to COVID threats. I suppose I’m back to normal; for my entire life, since I was a schoolchild, I’ve *always* had two or three colds every year. Though rarely flus, with temperatures, chills and being laid up in bed for a week or more. With a cold, it’s downtime for three or four days. And I’m getting better. And being laid up gives you time to think, and… make decisions.

For today, a couple takes on the weird political situation in the US.

Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 7 May 2023: Undoing Undue Hate: The corrosive role of common false beliefs, subtitled “Author of ‘Undue Hate’ on how a handful of universal cognitive biases exacerbate perceived divisions” Continue reading

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