Deepwater Horizon

2 thoughts on “Deepwater Horizon”

1. 

   I find it strange that someone would make a connection between Donald Trump and reality. In fact, it is Trump’s tenuous grasp on reality and his promotion of an alternate reality supported by ‘alternative facts” that is his defining quality. Empirically speaking, 69% of what he said as a candidate and 70% of what he has said during his time in office are somewhere between mostly wrong and flat out lies.
   But since Conservatives no longer read John Locke, I guess empiricism, like the truth and reality are considered over-rated by today’s right. From George W. Bush to Sarah Palin and now Trump, the right-wing alternative reality bears precious little resemblance to the actual real world we live in. After the coal miners and factory workers who live in the great and wonderful midwestern parts of the country figure out what a conman Trump is , as the people of NY, Atlantic City, Scotland and Trump U. already have, his historically low ratings will sink even deeper. Afterall, he’s less than 100 days in and already running out of places to bomb.

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   Posted by tomrossman2017 | April 16, 2017, 2:23 pm
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   • 

     It’s rich, ironic, pot calling the kettle black, for any leftist to accuse the right of being unmoored from reality or of embracing fact facts.

     From the time of Jean Jacques Rousseau to today leftism has been based in a conception of human nature that amounts to anti-science magical thinking with no basis in fact.

     If not for denying reality and embracing fake facts leftism in all its forms, including liberalism and progressivism, could not, would not, exist.

     The news is no more or less fake now than it’s ever been.

     The only thing that’s changed is the left’s whining about it, now that the left has lost its monopolistic control of the flow of information.

     Obama, and Democrats and liberals more generally, are far less moored to reality than are conservatives.

     This has always been the case.

     Read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. It summarizes the social science finding on this.

     Social science reveals that there are at least six evolved psychological mechanisms of social perception and awareness, and that conservatives use all of them roughly equally whereas liberals use about half of them, and of that half mostly just one.

     Studies show that Conservatives understand liberals and human nature better than liberals understand conservatives and human nature.

     Here’s R. R. Reno’s conclusion about liberalism in his review of the book:

     Thus the profound problem we face. Liberalism is blind in one eye”yet it insists on the superiority of its vision and its supreme right to rule. It cannot see half the things a governing philosophy must see, and claims that those who see both halves are thereby unqualified to govern.

     Here’s a passage from the book:

     In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

     The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

     If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness. You might even go as far as Michael Feingold, a theater critic for the liberal newspaper the Village Voice, when he wrote:

     Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they causeany more harm)3

     One of the many ironies in this quotation is that it shows the inability of a theater critic-who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living-to imagine that Republicans act within a moral matrix that differs from his own. Morality binds and blinds.

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     Posted by The Independent Whig | April 16, 2017, 2:50 pm
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