The definition of clueless

When I talk about people being unable to recognize their own biases, I mean stuff like this:

Middle-class white man tells poor black kids how to succeed

Never mind the obvious stupidity of even considering writing such an article (this guy doesn't understand platform?), here is the money quote:

Many of these kids don’t have the brains to figure this out themselves – like my kids.  Except that my kids are just lucky enough to have parents and a well-funded school system around to push them in the right direction.

Technology can help these kids.  But only if the kids want to be helped.  Yes, there is much inequality.  But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.

See what he did there? First he identified with the poor and downtrodden. See, his kids aren't smart either, they're just lucky.

And then he excuses the entire system from blame by saying that people that don't succeed don't deserve too, because they aren't smart enough. He acknowledges the role of luck in success and then immediately asserts the role of moral character in failure.

Apparently, if you succeed it is luck; but if you fail, it is because you weren't good enough.

He doesn't seem to understand he has just stated that his own kids don't deserve to be equal.

And just what the hell does he think we should do about all those kids who aren't smart enough to succeed, and aren't lucky enough to be born rich? Nobody is even interested in talking about smart black kids who grow up poor; for dog's sake, one of them is President. The problem here is that there is an entire underclass of kids (black, brown, and white) who are doomed to poverty because they are a) normal, and b) unlucky. This is the issue. And this moron writes an entire column without even acknowledging the issue.

And he gets paid to write columns, presumably to educate and inform, rather than to defend an ideological position with incoherent propaganda.

It's not just this guy's kids that aren't smart enough for a middle-class existence.

Do people know what their religious concepts are?

This is an interesting question. In my experience the answer is definitely negative. I find that most people don't actually know what they believe (not just about religion, but about morality, philosophy, and all sorts of abstract things).

Do people know what their religious concepts are? This may seem an absurd question, but it is in fact an important question in the psychology of religion, whose true answer is probably in the negative. In most domains of mental activity, only a small part of what goes on in our brains is accessible to conscious inspection. For instance, we constantly produce grammatical sentences in our native tongue with impeccable pronunciation, often without any idea how this is done. Or we perceive the world around us as made up of three-dimensional objects, but we are certainly not aware of the ways in which our visual cortex transforms two retinal images into this rich impression of solid objects out there. The same goes for all our concepts and norms. We have some notion of what they are, but we certainly do not have full access to the way our minds create and sustain them. Most of the relevant mental machinery that sustains religious concepts is not consciously accessible.

Why Religion is natural

Even more interestingly, we are hard-wired not to admit we don't know. Patients with brain injuries have shown that when the brain doesn't know a fact about the self (for instance, they can't remember why they put on a sweater), it makes one up after the fact rather than admitting it doesn't know.

So it's not bad enough that people make decisions without understanding the assumptions and beliefs that go into those assumptions; they actively resist the knowledge that they don't know their underlying assumptions.

In other words, we evolved to be ignorant.

Why Obama has to win

The only hope for America is not just a Democratic win, but the complete destruction of today's Republican party.

Or at least, that's what former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett says:

Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan adviser who is a harsh critic of the current Republican party explained why. 

“Basically we’re still stuck in the situation we were three years ago and we haven’t made any progress at all except that our problems are much worse because of political reasons, because we now have a crazy party in charge of one of the Houses of our Congress and they won’t allow anything to happen because it’s in their vested interest to make things worse,” Bartlett explained in his typically exasperated way. “Plus they have a theory that is completely nuts…. I’m very depressed. I’d love to see some program like this [paper] enacted. I see zero chance of it happening. The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don’t get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational such as what is discussed in this paper.”

It's rare to find me in agreement with anything a Reaganite says, but some things are just obvious.

Why Obama is going to win

Christian television and video maker Jason "Molotov" Mitchell, sums up his feelings pretty well with this quote: "I can’t stand Barack Obama, but at least he doesn’t trade in his wives like used cars."

The good news is, this shows there is a floor. Even the Right-Wing Christofascists do have a sense of decency, at long last.

One is a ship of fools; the other is a private yacht

Imagine a balance scale that measures wealth. On the left side you put the poorest 30% of Americans, some 90 million people. On the right side you put the Walton heirs... all six of them.

And the scales balance.

That's right. Six people own as much wealth as 90 million Americans. That's 6 to 90,000,000. And they earned it the old-fashioned way: by inheriting it.

If you still think an inheritance tax on estates over a million dollars is theft, if you still think rich people are job creators, if you still think that the money trickles down from the top, if you still think a perfectly fair tax rate as enjoyed by this country for over 50 years of unprecedented growth would hobble growth, then you probably think Newt Gingrinch is a man of integrity.

Both ships are full of fools

It's not just the Right that is operating in a fact-free environment. Here's a woman who just discovered that Obama isn't a complete failure:

'Obama care' to the rescue

It turns out that the ACA actually helps people. Who knew? Well, anyone with a basic understanding of policy and law. Which rules out most of the electorate.

The political environment has become so shrill that openly lying is now the new norm, history is less than 24 hours, and even victories are painted as defeat by the side that lost and the side that won because they didn't win big enough.

Another review of Sara's book

This one by Felicia Day, of "Buffy," "The Guild," and "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" fame.

Color me officially jealous.