Voters Use Common Sense Experience Based on Their Culture and Not Logic

Tags: Voters Common Sense Experience Conservative Without Conscience The Social Animal Everything Is Obvious Brain Books

Voters Use Common Sense Experience Based on Their Culture and Not Logic Books Conservatives Without Conscience and Everything Is Obvious Campaign Strategy

Even though common sense has worked well in our interpersonal lives very well, this experience does not translate into thinking about complicated policy questions often foisted on us by politicians.

Being too simplistic without knowledge and judge politicians by how handsome or beautiful they are not what they are planning to do to make our life more miserable by trashing Medicare and Social Security. I think the best way to improve government is to keep out the Ivy League politicians and choose people who have more real life experience, not corporate experience at the unacknowledged at the corporate university training centers.

Two books I have been reading in tandem, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks and Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer, by Duncan J. Watts, and reviewing the previously read book Conservatives Without Conscious by John W. Dean, have helped me more clearly understand how I and others think and behave, and especially how conservatives think and behave badly. I am hopeful that State Democrats have started attacking the Republicans hard on visceral topics instead of campaigning on high ideals, which may have worked once for Obama, but voters saw that he did not act on them. It won’t work the second time.

Everyone knows and believes that Republicans are much better at winning elections and atrocious in running our government. Reagan and Bush, Jr. Are typical examples. They run it like CEOs from the top for the top income corporations and families and help themselves to the free floating cash as we had seen in the many financial scandals during their terms, and how fast the Middle-class is shrinking dramatically.

About half of the working families make less than $50,000 a year which makes survival difficult without borrowing too much money at high interest rates. The wealth of the top one percent equals that of 150 million Americans!

In our society seniors feel entitled and are largely conservative and provide 30 percent of the Presidential votes because they vote in high numbers. Republicans can always count on 40 percent of the vote for this reason. The same for Democrats except not as many vote so Independents normally decide elections. These votes are normally in the Midwest and Florida which has many seniors, Cubans, and many midwesterners. The New Yorkers also are abundant who tend to vote Democratic, but it is still a swing state. For this reason we get a Tea Party senator and a crook for governor in Florida.

Why? Independents are the most ignorant voters in America. They like tall and handsome rather than a black Democrat. Even with more than enough evidence, voters who vote Republican still vote Republican even if they are crooks. Bush tried to pack the Federal prosecutors by ousting those who did not obey orders from the top to investigate Democratic politicians with no evidence at all. Our brain is wonderful in that we can justify crimes in politics, but strict honesty with our neighbors. The records clearly that crooks seem to occupy the Republican Party to a much larger extent than the Democratic one.

Why? We all our products of our culture which influences our beliefs and the way we think.

Common Sense does not work well when we apply it to areas where we have very little knowledge. That is why such huge mistakes are made at corporations and governments.

The right wing Democratic Leadership Council established by Republican Bill Clinton, yes moderate Republican, which President Obama behavior seems to indicate similar defects. Obama is too inexperienced to have developed principles to rule by. He just comprises with power and wealth. The idea is to win elections instead of doing the right thing. I did not initially support Obama because he had no experience. I was right. Hillary Clinton is a more natural leader and would have been a much better President. Obama seems not to have any deep principles that can guide his leadership.

He seems to do what he thinks is politically best rather than do what is right in his opposition to the 9^th Circuit Appeals Court ruling to implement the Gay Rights in the military. Every other modern nations has done this decades ago. What is wrong with us!

Jim Kawakami, July 19, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com (Note I am strongly considering joining FACEBOOK because of Peter Singer’s (Princeton Ethicist) essay in the August Harper’s Magazine Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets. He points out that we no longer have secrets due to the efforts of government and corporations such as FACEBOOK and Google where both extract our behavior and thoughts so they can sell us something and there may be some good to laying it all out. WikiLeaks is one good example. It helps Americans know that our motives are not always so pure. )

Debt Ceiling Holy War: Why Do Conservatives Have Unshakable Faith in Ideas That Are Totally, Demonstrably False?

Facts come second to faith in the GOP's populist brand of conservatism.

AlterNet, Chauncey DeVega, July 18, 2011 |

The Republican Party is holding the U.S. economy hostage. While the American people overwhelmingly support a solution to the debt ceiling impasse that includes a mix of tax hikes on the rich and cuts to the federal budget, the Tea Party GOP is deaf to their concerns. Moreover, even though President Barack Obama is willing to make painful concessions on entitlement spending—a move that hands the Republican Party a practical win—the Tea Party GOP remains intractable in its refusal to support even the most minimum of tax increases on the wealthiest Americans.

The American people, the world’s financial markets and the pundit classes remain perplexed by the Republican Party’s dangerous brinkmanship. Why would they risk financial armageddon? What is the practical gain to be had from such irresponsible behavior? Is this a ploy to undermine the Democrats before the 2012 election?

Observers remain befuddled because they have failed to connect the dots between the Republican Party’s intransigent stubbornness and a populist brand of conservatism where the world of facts has been made secondary to the intoxication of faith.

Consider the following: faith is based upon a belief in that which cannot be proved or demonstrated by normal means. Faith is also immune and separate from tests of empirical proof. Not to be overlooked, the contemporary Republican Party is home to the Religious Right. Consequently, the primacy of “faith” as the decision rule in political decision-making is both a perfect and logical fit for conservative populism.

When coupled with conservatives’ penchant for authoritarianism, http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ , (John W. Dean’s book Conservatives Without Conscience was largely based on Canadian Bob Altemeyer’s book Authoritarianism) their adherence to simple moral scripts, and a either/or binary world view, the allures of faith mated with fiction are irresistible to the Republican Party. Thus, the idea that politics should serve the common good for all is truncated and superseded by the pursuit of a common good that is only for the faithful, the few and the ideologically pure.

This cognitive framework colors a wide range of the Republican Party’s policies. For example, in the face of overwhelming evidence the Tea Party GOP continues to deny the existence of global warming. Doubling down, history is made into a plaything; the U.S. Constitution is transformed into a fetish object where the intent of the framers is almost magically divined by “strict constructionists” who pray at conservatism’s altar. School boards in Arizona and Texas rewrite the historical record at a whim in order to indoctrinate students into right-wing ideology. And conservative darlings such as Mike Huckabee and “scholar” David Barton pander ideologically correct, snake oil, flimflam versions of U.S. history to the Tea Party GOP faithful who are suckered into buying their books and videos.

In all, the Republican Party is possessed by a spirit of willful denial: aided and abetted by the right-wing media, Conservatives can bend the world to their wishes; reality is subject to their fantasies; any belief, however specious, is made true because they want it to be so. This is a pathology that extends both to the debt ceiling debate and the broader assault by conservatives on the country’s social safety net. Both are examples of a frightening pseudo religion called Free Market Fundamentalism—a faith based on a set of assumptions that are immune to interrogation, challenge or the collective weight of reality.

Myth Number One: The crisis over the debt ceiling is an artificial panic. There will be no serious consequences if the United States does not resolve this issue by August 2, 2011. In fact, President Obama and the Democrats are trying to scare the American people into thinking that a calamity will occur if the United States chooses to selectively pay its bills. Alternatively, the United States Treasury has more than enough revenue to push the debt ceiling issue down the road to a future date.

While Tea Party darlings such as Congressman Allen West are saying this is "much ado about nothing,"a failure to resolve the debt ceiling crisis would be an unprecedented event in American history. A range of non-partisan organizations, financial giants such as Standard & Poor's, Moody's and even the Chinese government are warning the Obama administration that if the United States were to default on its debts a global financial crisis would ensue. Moreover, a myriad of government agencies would be closed and a shock wave would ripple out to all corners of the U.S. economy. … http://www.alternet.org/story/151673/debt_ceiling_holy_war%3A_why_do_conservatives_have_unshakable_faith_in_ideas_that_are_totally%2C_demonstrably_false?page=entire