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All Republicans should read this article

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KingOrfeo

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"Why I Left the GOP," by Jeremiah Goulka; a fascinating account of a recovering conservative's journey of political education and discovery. It concludes:

My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way. I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “creat[ing] our own reality,” into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics, and why they won’t let a campaign “be dictated by fact-checkers” (as a Romney pollster put it). It explains why study after study shows — examples here, here, and here – that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all.

Waking up to a fuller spectrum of reality has proved long and painful. I had to question all my assumptions, unlearn so much of what I had learned. I came to understand why we Republicans thought people on the Left always seemed to be screeching angrily (because we refused to open our eyes to the damage we caused or blamed the victims) and why they never seemed to have any solutions to offer (because those weren’t mentioned in the media we read or watched).

My transition has significantly strained my relationships with family, friends, and former colleagues. It is deeply upsetting to walk on thin ice where there used to be solid, common ground. I wish they, too, would come to see a fuller spectrum of reality, but I know from experience how hard that can be when your worldview won’t let you.

No one wants to feel like a dupe. It is embarrassing to come out in public and admit that I was so miseducated when so much reality is out there in plain sight in neighborhoods I avoided, in journals I hadn’t heard of, in books by authors I had refused to read. (So I take courage from the people who have done so before me like Andrew Bacevich.)

Many people see the wider spectrum of reality because they grew up on the receiving end. As a retired African-American general in the Marine Corps said to me after I told him my story, “No one has to explain institutional racism to a black man.”

Others do because they grew up in families that simply got it. I married a woman who grew up in such a family, for whom all of my hard-earned, painful “discoveries” are old news. Each time I pull another layer of wool off my eyes and feel another surge of anger, she gives me a predictable series of looks. The first one more or less says, “Duh, obviously.” The second is sympathetic, a recognition of the pain that comes with dismantling my flawed worldview. The third is concerned: “Do people actually think that?”

Yes, they do.
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king of ass tards need to put some chiapet in his ears .... hopefully that tunnel will fill in
 
It would be nice, while we're working to reduce nuclear capabilities and climate change worldwide, if Congressional Republicans actually learned something about those issues before voting on them.
 
phrodeau said:
It would be nice, while we're working to reduce nuclear capabilities and climate change worldwide, if Congressional Republicans actually learned something about those issues before voting on them.
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They're Congressional Republicans. You're asking them to flap their arms and fly.
 
And they knew good and damn well what was in it. All she said is no plan survives the battlefield and at some point we have to stop wandering in circles.
 
Also of interest: A gun lover sees the evils of gun culture: White supremacists, Obama haters, and me. What happened when a guy decided to sell his gun, but wanted to shoot it one last time.

My first visit, to an indoor pistol range in South Philadelphia, shocked me. It was filthy, nothing like the all-American halls I remember from my youth. The seedy personnel wore sidearms, not small caliber “personal” pieces, like the infamous Beretta .25, but big and powerful cannons, nuzzled into expensive breakaway holsters set high on the hip.

“I’ve noticed that all the staff here are carrying sidearms,” I said to the guy at the counter. “Why?”

He eyed me cooly and said, “For protection.”

“From what?” I said.

He said, “Whatever.”

I wanted to leave. This place had a bad vibe. Exiting through the long corridor to the street, I saw a few posters on the cracked plaster walls. “Is Obama a Muslim”? one asked. The other, emblazoned with the NRA logo, listed that organization’s enemies, all of whom were pro-gun control politicians and celebrities. Funny, I don’t remember any political overtones from my days as a neophyte marksman.

Sure, back then, there were NRA posters, but these were only entreaties to join. Spokesmen were family-values Hollywood stars Ronald Reagan and Robert Stack, who was a national skeet champion. Surely my reminiscences from a bygone day of enjoyable family outings could not have evaporated so completely. I felt like I had searched out a great restaurant and found a greasy spoon instead. Had the zeitgeist really shifted that dramatically?

While visiting my son in a state south of Pennsylvania, I stopped at an indoor range and purveyor of new and used guns. It was some operation — expansive, spotless and bright, with perhaps $5M in visible inventory on display. This was the rich cousin to the shabby place in Philly.

It was all there: From sub-machine guns like the one brandished by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a famous photo to $10,000 skeet guns to modern 1000-round-per-minute machine guns displayed from countless racks and shelves, and camouflaged sniper rifles set on tripods on the counter so one could see up-close a weapon that can put five bullets into someone’s eye from 1500 yards away.

Are there any civilian snipers, I wondered?

This was surely madness. As I surveyed this veritable black hole of potential human destruction, I thought that something must be amiss. This was massive overkill for even the most aggressive “sportsman” gun enthusiast. Guns and shooting were starting to feel less like a harmless pastime and becoming something unmistakably sinister to me. The staff here was also wearing sidearms, and when I asked what they were protecting themselves from, I got the same response: “From whatever.” So it was a script.

<snip>

Feeling some connection, I asked [the owner] why, unlike his staff, he wasn’t wearing sidearms.

“Don’t have to,” he said. “I always carry two knives.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. He sounded much too nonchalant.

“They’re much lighter,” he continued, “and besides, I can slit your throat faster than you can get your piece out of your holster.”

I had just heard the words “slit your throat,” and this wasn’t a Luc Besson film.

In the space of a minute the reasonable-looking businessman opposite me had undergone a startling transformation into someone who made the hair on my arms bristle.

He went on. “Look, this country is falling apart.” So much for foreplay, I thought. “We have a president who is an admitted militant Muslim whose objective is to destroy America. Just read his books. China owns us, lawlessness is rampant, the cops are useless and just look at unemployment.”

When I suggested the latest unemployment number was six percent, the retort was instant.

“Lies,” he spat. “Look, they talk about slavery and the historic condition of blacks in this country. What they don’t say is that the middle men for the slave trade were the black brokers in Africa and elsewhere who sold their countrymen to the white traders. Can’t blame the whites for wanting to make money, too, now can you?”

He continued. “My family was indentured for the first three generations that we were in this country, but by initiative and hard work we got out and prospered.”

He delivered his “enlightened” history to me with the confidence of a tenured sociology professor. I was appalled, but captivated. Such erudition on so suspect a topic.

This guy was not speaking in mindless bumper sticker aphorisms. He wanted to tie it together, to build an elegant theory, to move out of brainless wing-nut territory and offer some robust alternate history. And he was articulate, too. This, I thought, was a dangerous man.

<snip>

He opened the neat leather case and nestled into its form-fitting interior was a short and nasty-looking machine gun with a 30 and 50 round clip. I asked him to take it out of the case.

“It doesn’t come out,” he said. “You shoot it from the case so nobody will know. It has a sound suppressant. That little round hole is where the bullet comes out. Pretty neat, huh? Not many of these babies around. Thirty-eight grand.”

Worse probably than an assault weapon, I thought, this is an assassin’s gun. Designed for surreptitious murder. And for sale on the open market. And here was Zack, so very proud of it.
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BotanyBoy said:
He met some white supremacist so gun culture is evil?


LOL KO even for you this article is a bullshit leap of BAD.....BAD LIBURHUL *shaking finger at you * BAD LIBURHUL!!!
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His honest (anecdotal) impression is that the hard-RW (which is evil, as I'm sure you'll agree) has to some extent taken over American gun culture, which didn't used to be like that at all.
 
KingOrfeo said:
His honest (anecdotal) impression is that the hard-RW (which is evil, as I'm sure you'll agree)
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True. Based on his one experience.......how much you want to bet if he came out into the sticks of NorCal and all the gun toting hippies in the woods instead of a seedy skinhead gun range the article would have read nothing like this one?

And had THAT article been written you would have never posted it as it wouldn't support your anti gun views that you're trying to push.

KingOrfeo said:
has to some extent taken over American gun culture,
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Also true they LEAN right, but that could be said about a great many American sub cultures. Controlled by the HARD right? No....I just don't think they are that prevalent. I think there are a FEW hard right elements within the industries/cultures and the hyper partisan LW likes to use them as an example to flex their partisan pissing contest muscles and get some in everyone's post toasties because it suits their agenda.

That is to say metro libbies want to ban guns, except for their armed security guards of course, so that no one can legally have any guns. It's the LW wet dream....this is just an example of them pointing to the nastiest element of the gun culture and saying "See they are all like that, ban guns or you're racist just like them!!" and it's just that simple.

KingOrfeo said:
which didn't used to be like that at all.
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See I don't buy this anywhere but in the extreme perspective. That is to say you already have to be sitting pretty loony left to buy this guys single experience as any sort of accurate representation of the American gun culture as a whole. Come to any non metro area on the west coast from border to border and all of Alaska......and I'll show you a totally different gun culture that is nothing like a PA gun range owned and operated by neoNazi skinheads.
 
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KingOrfeo said:
"Why I Left the GOP," by Jeremiah Goulka; a fascinating account of a recovering conservative's journey of political education and discovery. It concludes:
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While it is not true that most of the poor could improve their circumstances if they applied themselves, it is true that they differ from the general population in ways that make difficult the achievement of the egalitarian agenda.

The tendency to believe what one wants to believe rather than what can be proven to be true can be found on both ends of the political spectrum.

Liberals ridicule conservatives who reject Darwinian evolution. Then those same liberals reject the Darwinian assertions found in books like The Bell Curve.
 
mark_j said:
Why is it very un-hippie? Could it be because it doesn't fit into your narrative?
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Well, isn't hippiedom all about peace and love and brotherhood and nonviolence, man? (I mean, in addition to sex and drugs and rock n' roll.)
 
KingOrfeo said:
News to me such exist. Sounds very un-hippie.
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Believe it bubba....not all of us live right down the road 90 seconds from teh po po/amberlance.

No chance in you curbing the "Got mine fuck the rest of you!" attitude hua???

Didn't think so....

mark_j said:
Why is it very un-hippie? Could it be because it doesn't fit into your narrative?
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That's pretty much it.....doesn't fit the radical metro lefty narrative or Salon hysteria.

One seedy neonazi range = gun owners all across america and ain't nobody telling KO any different....
 
Social change comes slowly to some parts of the country. I'm sure that in time all of the rainbow disco gun ranges will pick up the seedy neo-Nazi theme.
 
The_Trouvere said:
While it is not true that most of the poor could improve their circumstances if they applied themselves . . .
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No, it is not true that most of the poor could improve their circumstances if they applied themselves, but that is because of social circumstances, not heredity.
 
KingOrfeo said:
No, it is not true that most of the poor could improve their circumstances if they applied themselves, but that is because of social circumstances, not heredity.
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I see he's still trying to push "The Bell Curve" as if it hasn't been debunked nine ways to Sunday. :rolleyes:
 
Ulaven_Demorte said:
I see he's still trying to push "The Bell Curve" as if it hasn't been debunked nine ways to Sunday. :rolleyes:
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A 2010 study is relevant to that -- and to the OP; not all conservatives can/will learn like Goulka learned. Discussed here in relation to Ted Cruz' quite incredible and incredibly frequent falsehoods.

The trouble with this angle on Cruz’s misstatements is that it presumes that Cruz is, in fact, lying. But lying depends on the liar knowing that what he is saying is false. Cruz shows no signs of such awareness. As Ann Marie Cox points out in her survey of Cruz’s lies, there’s more going on here than just a politician’s twisting of the truth or a partisan spin on data. She wonders whether it is time to take seriously the idea that he really believes what he is saying. “There are objective falsehoods that show Cruz could just be looking at a different set of data. Other, more telling whoppers show that Cruz isn’t just looking at different data, he’s living in a different universe.”

That different universe is Cruz’s world of misinformation. He doesn’t lie because lying would require that he actually know the truth. And that is what makes Cruz an even greater threat to the health of our democracy than all of his lies put together. Cruz represents a turn in GOP politics where political beliefs operate more like religious fervor than reasoned inference.

Researchers have long worried about the connections between democracy and public knowledge. For obvious reasons, an informed electorate is a key part of a strong and effective democracy. Voters need to have relevant facts in order to make good choices at the polls. But research by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler explains that there is a vast difference between an uninformed public and a misinformed one. An uninformed public is ignorant, but a misinformed one is delusional—and that’s far more dangerous.

This distinction is essential. An uninformed voter can have contact with the truth and learn from it, but a misinformed one already believes an idea that’s wrong. Think of Cruz’s delusional comments about climate change, the number of IRS agents, and crime rates rising in areas with stricter gun control laws. Each of these examples indicates a whole new level of political “lying,” since each represents fiercely held beliefs with no basis in fact. This is not a case of simple stupidity. It’s a case of deeply believing something that’s just wrong.

If you care about truth and think it should influence political decisions, this is highly disturbing. But it gets worse. Nyhan and Reifler further suggest that those who hold misinformed beliefs are even less likely to learn from correcting information than those who have no clue.

That means that for those who think like Cruz, there is virtually no amount of data, reality checks or facts that can persuade the deluded citizen to give up their false ideas. This is the mindset of the Tea Party, the Koch brothers, and many on the far right. Nyhan and Reifler refer to this as “motivated reasoning.” What they find is that people who are attached to falsehoods perceive any correcting information as partisan and flawed. So conservatives don’t perceive science as information. To them, it’s just a liberal agenda. In other words, they don’t believe the truth.

And there’s more. Not only do those with false beliefs practice “motivated reasoning,” we also now know that any challenge to their beliefs is likely to “backfire.” Nyhan and Reifler found that when conservatives who thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were exposed to news stories correcting that view, “the correction backfired.” That is, “conservatives who received a correction telling them that Iraq did not have WMDs were more likely to believe that Iraq had WMD than those in the control condition.”

This means that exposure to the truth not only failed to adjust their views to reality, it actually made them believe in their false ideas even more strongly. This is why Cruz’s candidacy is really scary. This is not a case of a politician strategically using lies to advance a career; his whole career is dedicated to advancing a political platform built on a delusional view of the world. The catch is that to those who think like Cruz it isn’t delusional, it makes perfect sense.
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Furthermore:

Democrats, too, hold dear to their beliefs. It’s part of human nature to want to resist information that contradicts with the way we see the world. Psychologists call the practice confirmation bias, and define it as the tendency to interpret information in ways that support our preconceptions. And yet, we don’t all resist correction of our false beliefs to the same degree.

Indeed, there is research that suggests there is a vast difference between a liberal’s ability to accept a new take on the world than a conservative’s. To put it simply, part of what it means to be liberal is to be open-minded. That means liberals are open to information that might change a perception. In contrast, conservatives are defined as resisting change and as emotionally attaching more strongly to their beliefs. What we find with Tea Party politics, though, is a far more extremist version of Republican beliefs than we have ever seen before. Michael Grunwald of Time calls the new GOP an example of “reality-defying extremism and chronic obstructionism and borderline surrealism.”
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Latter research discussed.

Compare how conspiracy theorists think.

Denial is strongly linked with conspiracies in two senses. In one, the conspiracy theorist is in denial of the "official story," which is more often than not the one supported by facts. However, in the second sense, anyone denying the existence of a conspiracy inadvertently proves that it must exist. Denial of on-going conspiracies can be taken as proof that said employees are "in on" whatever conspiracy they are busily denying. Usually, the more they deny, the more conspiracy theorists will take it as proof — because, well, "they would say that, wouldn't they!" Furthermore, if people do not deny the theory, this can also be taken as proof on the grounds that "it has never been denied." This applies equally to anyone involved in a large, perhaps mysterious, enterprise, such as "scientists," "the Army," "automobile manufacturers," "Big Science/Petroleum/Tobacco/Florists" etc. That this entire line of reasoning is circular hardly needs pointing out.

A conspiracy theory becomes a total crackpot conspiracy theory when all evidence that might disprove the theory instead becomes co-opted as proof of the "cover-up" of said theory; requiring loyalty, resources, and competence on the part of the conspirators far in excess of what any actual conspiracy can muster.
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