March 9, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Some days, you get the bear
And some days, the bear gets you. As Dave says, it wasn't a great week. And as Dave says, these bastards aren't making it any better.
Supreme irony: when I read that headline, Young Ned of the Hill was playing on my iPod.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 9, 2007 6:16 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>Is Boston on your Ipod? Brad Delp, the lead singer, died today. I saw him and Tom Scholz in concert in 1997.
I was hoping to see them again. Sad.
Posted by: D------ on March 9, 2007 9:50 PMPeople form their political allegiances, usually, at a very early age. Probably in high school, perhaps earlier.
Then they spend their intellectual years constructing the intellectual defense FOR their political position, and AGAINST their opponents' positions.
It should be the other way around; facts would be evaluated and conclusions drawn accordingly.
But that's not how it works.
The practical consequence is that you can find very smart, very honest, very capable people who are effectively trapped in their support of a failed ideology. They will never spend nearly the energy or devote the honest, critical thinking necessary to evaluate the truth of their own opinions as they will to attacking their opponents' positions. They demand a far higher standard of evidence for their opponents than they do for themselves. And they are far quicker to overlook, gloss over, or forgive contradictions and unexplained discrepencies when they occur within their own arguments than when they occur in their opponents' arguments.
So they are trapped; doomed to spend the rest of their lives defending a false religion.
I know this right-wing Republican loyalist and ideologue. He's about 23. He's very smart, genuinely capable of critical thinking, a nice guy. But he "knew" when he was 13 years old that conservatism was the answer to everything.
Now, he scrupulously manages his perceptions of reality so as to allow no significant cognitive dissonence, and forgives his own side all contradictions, errors, and hypocricy. He is building an entire alternate reality in his head to justify his view of the world, and nothing can save him. No argument, no logic, no fact, and no reason will penetrate the wall he is building to prove to himself that his 13 year old self was right about everything.
And he's just typical of what everyone does.
Posted by: -asx- on March 10, 2007 11:51 AMAnd they are far quicker to overlook, gloss over, or forgive contradictions and unexplained discrepencies when they occur within their own arguments than when they occur in their opponents' arguments.
Why is this?
Because they are sure they can just go look up the answer. We all do this.
When someone corners us in a debate, or when we find a gap in our reasoning when we are thinking through our own ideas, we simply make a mental note: "Do some research; find out how my side deals with this question.
They know that they aren't the first to be confronted with the question at hand. They know that someone has already come up with an explanation. So all they have to do is go dig it up and add it to their repetoire of arguments used to defend their predetermined ideology.
It's one more brick in the wall they build to insulate themselves from reality and defend the validity of ideas they were already certain about at the onset of puberty.
It's just a weird way to process information. But it's what nearly everyone does.
Posted by: -asx- on March 10, 2007 11:57 AMI like how Dave can handle it, by going into histrionics.
Unless someone is operating under the delusion that they are already reading everything, filters generally result in reading more, not less.
Posted by: anon on March 10, 2007 1:29 PMPersonally, I just want Gerry Addams and Ian Paisley to live long enough to see S. Ireland and England join in a completely voluntary and mutually beneficial union. Then, they can each be given a board with a nail in it.
Posted by: Njorl on March 12, 2007 1:04 PM