Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt ~

Heh, I think I will tag some turf around the fringes of The Evening Blues today, except with more amperage.

For me, the whole horse race politics thingy has become so contrived. The fifth column, aka the super wealthy, corporations and political class, have rigged the system. Even Bernie is an establishment guy. The political system is so corrupt that I fear nearly nothing gets done, until the giant meteor saves us.

This Is Your Brain on This Election

Bloodthirsty rage appears to have swept up the American people, like mass hysteria boiling up in an angry mob. Discussions of deadly violence have become central to this presidential election season, with calls for killing in political ads and debates not just the ravings of a single fringe candidate. Gone are the intellectual arguments that have dominated our presidential debates for two centuries—this time it is the brain’s limbic system “fear center,” not the cerebral cortex, that candidates are tapping to drive public discourse.

The word “kill” was said 53 times in the Dec. 15, 2015, Republican presidential primary debate. Here’s a sampling. Ted Cruz: “… we will hunt down and kill the terrorists.” Donald Trump: “These are people that want to kill us…” Trump also advocates killing family members of ISIS terrorists. Lindsay Graham: “They’re trying to come here to kill us all…” Mike Huckabee: “We have to kill some terrorists and kill every one of them….”

By contrast, the word “kill” was never used in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy presidential debate, despite the era’s dire threat of global nuclear annihilation. The “K” word was not spoken by any of 2000’s Republican candidates—George W. Bush, Alan Keys, or John McCain—in their final debate on March 2 of that year; nor was it uttered in the Jan. 30, 2008, final GOP debate among candidates Huckabee, McCain, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney.

Clearly, these urgent calls for killing are a reaction to the widespread fear of terrorism gripping our nation. But when we operate out of fear, we are prone to making mistakes. This is not a matter of policy—it’s physiology. Republican or Democrat, hawk or dove, how our brain responds at times of perceived danger and how our cognitive function and behavioral reactions are overwhelmed by fear must be fully recognized.

I am so sick of listening to pear shaped white or orange men in expensive suits, cushy jobs and future security telling me how fucking tough they are. I find it rather incredulous and entirely dickish on their part.

Thinking With Concepts

Concepts are to us like the air we breathe. They are everywhere. They are essential to our lives. But we rarely notice them. Yet only when we have conceptualized a thing in some way, only then, can we think about it. Nature does not give us, or anyone else, instructions in how things are to be conceptualized. We must create that conceptualization, alone or with others. Once conceptualized, a thing is integrated by us, into a network of ideas (since no concept or idea ever stands alone). We conceptualize things personally by means of our own ideas. We conceptualize things socially by means of the ideas of others (social groups). We explain one idea by means of other ideas. So if someone asked us to say what a “friend” is, we might say, as the Webster’s New World does, “a person whom one knows well and is fond of.” If that same person asked us to say what it means to “know someone well,” we would respond by introducing yet further ideas or concepts.

Humans approach virtually everything in experience as something that can be “given meaning” by the power of our minds to create a conceptualization and to make inferences on the basis of it (hence to create further conceptualizations). We do this so routinely and automatically that we don’t typically recognize ourselves as engaged in these processes. In our everyday life we don’t first experience the world in “concept-less” form and then deliberately place what we experience into categories in order to make sense of things. Every act in which we engage is automatically given a social meaning by those around us.

To the uncritical mind, it is as if things are given to us with their “name” inherent in them. All of us fall victim to this illusion to some degree. Thus we see, not shapes and colors, but “trees,” “clouds,” “grass,” “roads,” “people,” “children,” “sunsets,” and so on and on. Some of these concepts we obtain from our native language. Some are the result of our social conditioning into the mores, folkways, and taboos of particular social groups and a particular society. We then apply these concepts automatically, as if the names belonged to the things by nature, as if we had not created these concepts in our own minds.

If we want to help students develop as critical thinkers, we must help them come to terms with this human power of mind, the power to create concepts through which we, and they, see and experience the world. For it is precisely this capacity they must take charge of if they are to take command of their thinking. To become a proficient critical thinker, they must become the master of their own conceptualizations. They must develop the ability to mentally "remove” this or that concept from the things named by the concept and try out alternative ideas, alternative “names.” As general semanticists often say: “The word is not the thing! The word is not the thing!” If students are trapped in one set of concepts (ideas, words) — as they often are — then they think of things in one rigid way. Word and thing become one and the same in their minds. They are then unable to act as truly free persons.

How many of you have noticed the massive distractions? The media is flooded with stories about the Kahns, the baby, the bad old Russians, ISIS, email servers and potty talk. I want the candidates to state exactly where they stand on social security, the retirement age, health care, the minimum wage, the MIC, domestic spying, telecom/FCC/Internet and stuff that matters. We are watching a magic show people, so don't watch their mouths, watch their hands.

Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies

Abstract

The assumption in the personality and politics literature is that a person's personality motivates them to develop certain political attitudes later in life. This assumption is founded on the simple correlation between the two constructs and the observation that personality traits are genetically influenced and develop in infancy, whereas political preferences develop later in life. Work in psychology, behavioral genetics, and recently political science, however, has demonstrated that political preferences also develop in childhood and are equally influenced by genetic factors. These findings cast doubt on the assumed causal relationship between personality and politics. Here we test the causal relationship between personality traits and political attitudes using a direction of causation structural model on a genetically informative sample. The results suggest that personality traits do not cause people to develop political attitudes; rather, the correlation between the two is a function of an innate common underlying genetic factor.

Oh boy could I string together a profane and disparaging description of a few of the conservatives that I have had the fate to be acquainted with.

American Apocalypse: Millions of right-wing Christians trust ‘End Times’ pastors with their politics — here’s why

Last year the Texas pastor John Hagee presided over the ninth annual summit of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which describes itself as “the largest pro-Israel organisation in the United States”. Five thousand evangelicals gathered in Washington to hear a distinguished roster of speakers including six US senators, a former director of the CIA and the Israeli ambassador to the US. Binyamin Netanyahu sent a recorded message; he couldn’t be there because Israel was at war in the Gaza Strip. Nearly a thousand civilians had already been killed, and even Israel’s staunchest allies were calling for restraint. But Hagee demanded that Netanyahu be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza. When he had finished, the pastor led other delegates up Capitol Hill to lobby those lawmakers who hadn’t shown up.

Hagee’s journey from a San Antonio megachurch to the halls of Congress has not been without setbacks. In 2008, after he endorsed the Republican presidential candidate John McCain , newspapers reported that Hagee had called Roman Catholicism a “false cult system” , and that he believed God had permitted the Holocaust for the higher good of establishing the state of Israel. Last November, he called Barack Obama “one of the most antisemitic presidents in American history”. Hagee later insisted that he had meant “anti-Israel”, though he didn’t retract his claim that God sent Ebola to punish humanity for Obama’s Middle East policy. If Hagee’s career seems impervious to the gaffes that would sink most politicians, perhaps it’s because he’s always led a double life as a public figure. When he isn’t demanding that the US bomb Iran, or Israel annex Palestinian land, Hagee writes bestsellers mapping the bad news of today’s headlines on to the bizarre landscapes of Bible prophecy. Would you take advice on the Middle East from a man who believes the world is about to end? The answer for millions of Americans, perhaps even for conservative members of Congress, is yes.

Matthew Avery Sutton’s new book locates prophecy belief at the heart of the modern evangelical movement. At the start of the 20th century, conservative Protestants reacted to the populist politics and theological liberalism of their age with righteous defiance. The stereotype of religious conservatism throws up images of rural churches in the southern Bible belt, but Christian fundamentalism was born in the big cities of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, funded by wealthy businessmen such as Lyman Stewart, a California oil tycoon who bankrolled The Fundamentals (1910-15), the book series that gave the movement its name. Initially, fundamentalists struggled to endorse candidates for Congress, let alone the presidency. Most loathed Franklin Roosevelt , who won an unprecedented four presidential elections despite their disdain. Politicians became aware of the power of evangelical voters in the 1950s and 1960s, and Jimmy Carter himself was a born-again Christian (though not a fundamentalist). But it was only with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that the religious right gained entry into the White House.

Bless their hearts.

Bill Nye: “Despite our best efforts we’re all going to die, and I think that makes all of us a little nutty”

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” appeared this week in a video for Big Think. In a previous Big Think video, Nye was questioned about evolution deniers; his answer prompted a debate with Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham, which in turn spurred his most recent book “Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation.” Salon’s interview with him about the book can be read here.

In this Big Think video, Nye discusses many topics found in his book — namely evolution, American innovation and humans’ fear of death. (He devotes a whole chapter to the latter topic, “Evolution is why we don’t believe in Evolution.”)

“I think, on Big Think, the problem is the same thing that allows us to recognize patterns — to imagine shapes and things and routes and ways to get things done — before we actually start doing those things,” Nye began. “That ability also enables us to understand that despite our best efforts we’re all going to die, and I think that makes all of us a little nutty. We all find it a little troubling.”

“And so because it seems incredible that all this stuff that we store in our brain — all the memories we have, all the mental images that we are able to keep, all the algebra that we learn — that all that goes away when we die is really hard for all of us to accept,” Nye continued.

“And along with this is that we are not nature’s last word,” he explained. “We are not the final answer that nature came up with. That we are not what some entity created as his or her very best work. We’re just one more step on the evolutionary timeline.”

It's enough to put a person in a funk.

Have a great weekend!