Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Brentai]

Yeah but now they're talking about a bunch of acronyms nobody on either side have ever heard of but I guess it's something scary that liberals are doing to brainwash people.

Or... remove people's existing brainwashing.  They're still pretty clear on this "parental authority" point, which still kind of hurts my head since, you know, my parents taught me critical thinking mostly.

[Bal]

"Parental authority" is code for "Give parents every opportunity to brainwash children beyond repair".

[Brentai]

As an aside, or maybe not, there's been something that's been bothering since the last time I made the mistake of trying to talk to evangelists.  One of them said to me something along the lines of "Without God, you're going to turn around and start robbing banks!"

I told him of course there was more of a sliding scale between total piety and a life of crime and he just went wide-eyed and went, "Not to me there isn't!"

It seemed like just a line from a God-freak at the time but the idea's been gnawing at me ever since then.  Was that guy actually incapable of differentiating right from wrong by himself?

We know psychopathy exists and we know it's not a binary state; everyone's got a certain amount of compassion for their fellow man.  I'm not Jeffrey Dahmer but I'm probably not Andy Griffith either.  It's hard to say where the "average" for the typical human being lies, but looking at the history of societies rather than individuals, it's probably not high.

Morality is a very hard thing.  It takes a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of heart to parse through all the situations, laws, social precepts and golden concepts every minute of every day.  We know that We here are exceptional people.  I'm pretty goddam sure that even the worst of you are far above the norm in terms of honesty and rationality.  An as Exceptional People we tend not to spend a lot of time with Unexceptional People if we can help it.  It's not out of any sense of stuck-up superiority (well, in the forums' case it is, but not in general), it's because we simply can't fucking relate to most people.  How do you even start to understand a human being who can't or won't function without a seen or unseen master?

This is a bit of a rambling thought but I'll try to drive it home to a couple of points here.

We here consider critical thinking to be an ideal to strive for, but a lot of people don't - they don't want the responsibility of doing it, or the accountability of explaining their thoughts.  We value independence, but a lot of people don't - they want to be cared for and told what to do.  We value the right to make our own decisions and take responsibility for them, but a lot of people don't.  They don't trust themselves to do so, whether they really should or shouldn't.

I'm not talking about the people who actually wrote this stuff of course.  We know who they are - people with very high intelligence and very low compassion, who've learned how to to manipulate the Regular Joes of the world who yearn to follow a leader, any leader, as long as it claims some sort of acceptable authority.  Fuck these people, basically.  I'm not concerned with them right now.

Who I am concerned about are the Joes, the people we sometimes make the mistake of despising for being so apparently bitter and hateful but who are really in a very awkward position in this country.  Ask a random person what Freedom means and you're likely to get a very strange answer.  It's personal to everybody, to be sure, but often you'll hear stuff that doesn't even approach any sort of common definition of the term.  It's because everybody here knows that Freedom is something good, but to many, what we call freedom is actually something of a personal nightmare.  They didn't ask for this.  They didn't choose to take on the responsibilities that come with rights, they were born right into it!

Sometimes you have to take a step back for a second and think about what it really must be like to be a True Neutral farmer from Iowa with an IQ of 100.

...ehhh.

But, that guy deserves his own Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness too, even if he doesn't necessarily want all of it.  Do we foist him into this glorious new age of critical thinking, personal ethics, self-reliance and responsibility or do we let him stay comfortably wrapped up in whatever social dressing keeps him happy and productive?

Sometimes you wanna kick these peoples' asses, and it's usually when they start coming over to you and telling you that you should live in their own derpy THIS GUY IS RIGHT way, but the goal here is really to make sure they're all happy in their own way without being ABLE to come over here try to make us live in their own derpy way.  And then kick the asses of the backstabbing dirtbags who keep pulling their strings, because we're the good guys, damn it.

So yeah.

[Friday]

What you're saying isn't wrong, but average 100 IQ people can be taught to think critically. Attacking the people pulling their strings is all fine and good, but as long as people exist to be manipulated, people will come along and manipulate them.

The problem is so many people are indoctrinated at such an early age by people they are hardwired to trust (their parents) that even if they have above average IQs or are otherwise capable of thinking critically they still end up believing in a 6000 year old earth. I'm not singling out Christian indoctrination here specifically, it's just I have a friend who basically fits that description exactly. There's no way she'd believe in a 6000 year old earth if someone introduced the concept to her at age 13, but because it was drilled into her brain starting at age 2, with sunday school and homeschool and teachers and parents and friends all repeating the same thing over and over and over, she now exists as a very smart young earth creationist who does not believe in evolution.

Eh. I'm sort of rambling here. Let's just say that the topic Brentai brings up is something I've given a lot of thought.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, there's a litany of historical figures who were very smart and extremely-well-intentioned who used their smarts to help justify and perpetuate whichever church they believed in. Generally nobody being fair is going to call say, Francis of Assisi or John Paul II stupid, or a sociopath out to manipulate people, even if they're no fan of the Catholic Church. 

If people are doing harm to others intentionally, it tends to be grounded in sociopathy with little regard to intelligence. If they're doing harm unintentionally, that's when it tends to be more of a function of closed-mindedness or raw stupidity (though sociopathy can still play a part). 

Of course that's all complicated by the fact sociopathy can be mitigated by training or properly-applied intellect, and worsened by ignorance.

[Classic]

Brent, you're only a few, critical steps from slipping into the territory of the "smart man's burden," dood.

Especially when being smart or empathetic doesn't seem to limit the belief in crazy stuff. Even people who are good at critical thinking have opinions that they're unwilling or unable to examine rationally. See Friday's post.

That said...

I told him of course there was more of a sliding scale between total piety and a life of crime and he just went, "Not to me there isn't!"
Was that guy actually incapable of differentiating right from wrong by himself?

This has actually kept me up at night.

EDIT:
To make clear who I was commenting toward.

[Mongrel]

Oh well, not to worry about that. I don't think "Smart" is some kind of cure-all panacea at all. I am actually agreeing with Friday's point. My examples are of very intelligent, caring people who nonetheless blindly perpetuated an institution that has done both enormous good and enormous harm.  Hell, the thought required to maintain the complex rationalizations behind a lot of sociopathic constructs (say, slavery post-1750) often require a high level of intelligence to build. You don't need to tell me that intelligence can cut both ways.

What I was getting at was the that if you know full well you are doing harm and still choose to do so*, then that almost always means a deficiency in empathy (i.e. some degree of sociopathy). That's probably a minority of cases. In most cases harm is done simply through ignorance, wilful or otherwise.

Of course, Hanlon's Razor says virtually the same thing and does so much more succintly than me.

_{*Barring no-win corner cases, like a commander ordering soldiers to sacrifice themseves to preserve the army as a whole during a war. Every situation has some kind of exception, blah blah blah.}

[Classic]

ER, that was actually directed at Brentai. Your comments I don't really have too much experience with, because I prefer to imagine external forces as the plan of an ambiguously malign and impossibly capable cabal.

[Mongrel]

Oh okay, carry on then.

P.S. The devil's pulling them banjo strings.

[Thad]

I told him of course there was more of a sliding scale between total piety and a life of crime and he just went wide-eyed and went, "Not to me there isn't!"[

It seemed like just a line from a God-freak at the time but the idea's been gnawing at me ever since then.  Was that guy actually incapable of differentiating right from wrong by himself?

What's interesting to me is that this is also essentially the justification for "Being gay is a choice" reasoning.  I mean, are you CHOOSING to be straight?  Because I sure as hell didn't.

We here consider critical thinking to be an ideal to strive for, but a lot of people don't - they don't want the responsibility of doing it, or the accountability of explaining their thoughts.  We value independence, but a lot of people don't - they want to be cared for and told what to do.  We value the right to make our own decisions and take responsibility for them, but a lot of people don't.  They don't trust themselves to do so, whether they really should or shouldn't.

[...]

Ask a random person what Freedom means and you're likely to get a very strange answer.  It's personal to everybody, to be sure, but often you'll hear stuff that doesn't even approach any sort of common definition of the term.  It's because everybody here knows that Freedom is something good, but to many, what we call freedom is actually something of a personal nightmare.  They didn't ask for this.  They didn't choose to take on the responsibilities that come with rights, they were born right into it!

Oh sure.  The religious right is propped up by people who want to be told what to think, what to believe, what to fear.  (Not JUST the religious right, obviously; you'll find plenty of dogmatic parrots on all sides of any issue.)

There was a reddit interview recently with Fred Phelps's son who left Crazytown as soon as he turned 18.  Here's a bit that jumped out at me (or at the guy who quoted it on Boing Boing, I forget):

Yes, there is a tremendous amount of selective quoting. But this is lost on them because they never really were taught to examine the Bible and decide for themselves. They were taught to believe what he believes. This leaves them wholly unable to truly debate anyone. They recognize certain sounds and respond to those sounds with the sounds they learned. They don't critically analyze the incoming sounds at all.

One of those sounds they recognize is "why do you preach if you don't think people can be saved" to which they respond with the sound "it's not our job to save, only to preach". It's what I call the divine Nuremberg defense.

That's pretty much it -- Westboro is an extreme example, obviously, but fundamentalists of any type are essentially trained as dumb database-retrieval machines.  Give them a key and they'll spit out a value, but that's as much processing as they're willing to do.

And often they are wonderful people.  I've spoken of my grandmother now and again; she's the sweetest lady you'll ever meet but my God does she have some strange ideas.  (And by "have" I mean "possess", not "produce".)  The other day at dinner when a commercial got loud I said something as innocuous as "Congress is making them lower the volume of commercials.  At least they agree on SOMETHING."  And the next thing I knew she was talking about aborting babies based on their sex, and when I said I don't think that has ever actually happened in the United States she started in on how states are passing Sharia Law now.  (She pronounced the "i" like "eye".)  I started to explain that in this conversation the position consistent with Sharia Law would actually be the one that increases restrictions on abortions, but I managed to steer it back to "Hey, this is some good spaghetti right here."

Sometimes you have to take a step back for a second and think about what it really must be like to be a True Neutral farmer from Iowa with an IQ of 100.

Funny you mention farms in Iowa.  Because she was born on one.

But, that guy deserves his own Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness too, even if he doesn't necessarily want all of it.  Do we foist him into this glorious new age of critical thinking, personal ethics, self-reliance and responsibility or do we let him stay comfortably wrapped up in whatever social dressing keeps him happy and productive?

I'm pretty happy with the "Let him believe whatever he wants as long as he doesn't try to force it on everybody else" school.

Unfortunately, evangelicals really aren't big on the whole live-and-let-live thing.

Sometimes you wanna kick these peoples' asses, and it's usually when they start coming over to you and telling you that you should live in their own derpy THIS GUY IS RIGHT way, but the goal here is really to make sure they're all happy in their own way without being ABLE to come over here try to make us live in their own derpy way.  And then kick the asses of the backstabbing dirtbags who keep pulling their strings, because we're the good guys, damn it.

So yeah.

There's an extent to which I'll buy that.  But I'm still pretty big on the "Try and teach them critical thinking in schools" idea because it's the best inoculation AGAINST being a puppet.

Plus, people who go around talking about personal responsibility should really be able to take personal responsibility for the shit they're saying.

And back to something you said earlier about us not generally hanging out with people that diametrically different to us: this is probably the single biggest reason I am, and remain, a supporter of public education despite its flaws.

My other grandmother, a public educator herself, once said something to me: "We could have sent you to private school if we'd wanted to.  You'd have probably learned more.  But I just couldn't stomach the idea of sending you to the same school Symington's kids were going to."

I believe there's something inherently positive about places that force you to interact with people who are from different backgrounds and have different beliefs.  Public school is probably the biggest and best example I can think of.  Public university is another good one -- I'm sure I've mentioned my former roommate, a guy who chose college instead of a Mormon mission and slowly moved away from the church and its way of thinking as we helped him expand his horizons.  (BTW he'd been homeschooled after his folks pulled him from public school out of concern that he was being taught too much multiculturalism.)

And of course once we're done with school there's work, where you're pretty likely to have SOME people you generally get along with but don't agree with.  Unless you're working for the ACLU or some other self-selecting organization, I guess.  (And even there I'd be the guy disagreeing with the bosses' "money = speech" policy.)

The problem is so many people are indoctrinated at such an early age by people they are hardwired to trust (their parents) that even if they have above average IQs or are otherwise capable of thinking critically they still end up believing in a 6000 year old earth.

And -- not speaking to your friend specifically, of course, but in general -- the most insidious form of indoctrination is punishing people for asking questions.  The thing I linked actually pushed corporal punishment in schools, a pretty serious fucking Neanderthal idea (from people who don't believe in Neanderthals). 

There are precious few cases where I think it's acceptable to punish someone for asking questions, and all of them involve some sort of immediate danger that precludes having a discussion RIGHT NOW.  (Or preparation for same, I suppose, as in military drills, but that gets us off on a rather different tack and a whole other ethical/pragmatic debate.)

There's that bit in Religulous where Maher asks somebody "If you'd been taught fairy tales were fact and the Bible was a fairy tale, would you know the difference?"  Obviously that's a hypothetical (and just going to piss somebody off if you ask him that), but it's a pretty good comparison.

I had a friend once, raised by atheist British parents, who told me that they never explained the religious background of Christmas to her, that it was just a tree and presents.  (I don't think they even gave much more than lip service to Santa Claus; she said she didn't remember ever believing he was real.)  She said that, in kindergarten, when a friend explained the Story of Christmas to her, she responded by laughing and telling her "I can't believe you believe that."  This, as you might expect, cost her a friend.

Funnily enough, last I heard out of her she was pretty big into the whole church thing.  She doesn't actually believe any of that stuff literally (and indeed it takes very little effort to get her to start talking about all the pernicious ignorance in the Bible and the same as practiced by the religious right) but it appeals to her because of a sense of ritual and community.

Which brings us to another point: church and religion have a real appeal, a real sense of comfort and belonging.  That's why people are more inclined to believe what they're taught there (or by their parents, or by a good teacher, or what-have-you).  Stepping outside that comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable.

That's a very long post.

Well, I'll leave you with this, from Douglas Adams:

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

[Brentai]

And the next thing I knew she was talking about aborting babies based on their sex, and when I said I don't think that has ever actually happened in the United States she started in on how states are passing Sharia Law now.

She was probably trying to refer to the Sex-Selective Abortion Ban, a.k.a. Why We Need a Balance Against Intentionally Broken Bills for Stuff Everybody Actually Wants.  Thanks to this kindergarten bullshit we still have fucking hate crime abortions, whee.

[Thad]

Well yeah, she was definitely talking about that.  And how she couldn't understand how it didn't pass.

I said it looked an awful lot like a solution in search of a problem to me, a political distraction that sounds good but is stopping something that isn't actually happening.  (In America.  It was quite a problem in China for awhile, of course, though I hear that's starting to settle down.)

Hate crime abortions?  Are those things that happen?

[TA]

Non-veteran congressperson blasts his opponent in the coming election as "not a true hero" because she has the audacity to mention having lost two legs to an RPG attack.

Three guesses as to party alignments.

[Thad]

arguing that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was reluctant to discuss his own military service in 2008

...

[Brentai]

Our thoughts and prayers will always be with her for her service and her loss but these are serious times and the people of Illinois deserve to know what she thinks about real issues and what she will do as a Congresswoman.

Tammy Duckworth's jobs plan.
Tammy Duckworth's greater economic plan.
Joe Walsh's economic plan.  (It's the third sentence in the last paragraph.)

Anybody who votes for Joe Walsh is basically admitting that they are illiterate (or at least unable to use Google.)

[Royal☭]

Talking Points Memo has an interview he gave on CNN in which he pretty much straight up confirms that he's a condescending jackwad.

[Thad]

Joe Walsh's economic plan.  (It's the third sentence in the last paragraph.)

Psh.  Like you need to read all that to know that a Republican's economic plan is "cut taxes".

[Büge]

Taking the piss out of libertarianism as 'cool'.

[Classic]

My only complaints are that it addresses only a third of the really obnoxious young "Republicans" that really need to be told over and over why they don't understand economics and that it doesn't always link to persuasive articles to explain how economics actually works.

[Royal☭]

Oh, shit, my friend wrote that article for eXiled. Glad to see it's starting to go viral.