The Triumph of Stupidity in American Politics

[pbrower2a]

(11-15-2016, 01:58 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-15-2016, 01:16 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(11-15-2016, 06:20 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The critical part of the electorate was the demographic best described as readers of the fecal tabloid National Inquirer.  All sorts of renowned, often conservative newspapers including the Dallas Morning News, the Detroit News, and the Arizona Republic endorsed Hillary Clinton.

And don't forget the dynamic of the new media. Most places people source news on the web filter that news based on a profile that the news engine has developed regarding the user. This promotes values lock. It takes people who start out without values lock and slowly filters things and steers them into a given demographic. This is how you get some of the less aware independents going for Trump. I'm not saying that all independents who went for Trump are unwitting, but a fraction of indies were. Same deal with some of the cross over Dems as well as some of the non-Alt-Right GOPers who voted for him. I'm guessing that many who voted for Trump saw more "lock her up" themed "news" than "Putin's bitch" themed news or "Alt-Right emperor" themed news. It was an unwitting self selection in certain cases. Enough cases to impact a close election.

On that note, there are some very interesting articles at the following URL:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology..._news.html

'That’s consistent with Zuckerberg’s approach to other deeper questions about Facebook’s role in the media, including the charge that it insulates users in ideological bubbles by reinforcing what they already believe. “All the research we have suggests that this isn’t really a problem,” Zuckerberg said on Thursday, citing a Facebook-funded 2015 study that has been criticized as misleading. The data showed that Facebook does in fact expose users primarily to political content that conforms to their partisan identifications. But the study concluded, a little defensively, that this problem was insignificant compared with the problem of users’ own choices as to which sort of content to engage with. As Jefferson Pooley pointed out in Slate, it’s impossible to reproduce Facebook’s findings, because the company won’t let independent researchers see its data.'

Good to check out additional articles that can be found by scrolling further down the site.

I have never thought of Facebook as a news source. It is more a rumor mill of people who say what they heard elsewhere...

People need to look for news from multiple sources (unfortunately most newspapers are now behind firewalls). They also need to do what one used to take for granted with a newspaper: fact-checking. Fact-checking makes such junk as "Barack Obama is a Muslim" and "Barack Obama was born in Kenya"appear as the fraud that it is.

I find it hard to believe that the e-mail server counted for so much more than deeds that I thought would utterly discredit Donald Trump for the Presidency, like his admiration for dictators, his calls for violence against hecklers, and his crotch-grabbing. I can expect a conservative to admire Margaret Thatcher -- but Vladimir Putin? Someone who can call for violent retribution against someone who insults him as a campaigner could order the FBI to beat or kill a journalist. Crotch grabbing without consent or the unlikely need to rescue someone that way is about as close to rape as one can get without it being defined as rape.

Needless to say, I dread his Presidency. I would rather that Mitt Romney had won in 2012 and have won this time in a landslide. This is not a difference between 'liberal' and 'conservative'; it is between 'decency' and 'evil'

We Americans have more information available, but we lack the ability to sort it out. If someone told you that he admired Al Capone or John Dillinger, wouldn't you be scared of him? There is a good reason for Donald Trump doing less well among white college-graduates than among white non-college people. College graduates are much more likely to have taken a course in psychology. What people admire says much about them. If it's Mohandas Gandhi or Sir Winston Churchill one might have a good foundation for judgment. If it is a criminal like John Dillinger or John Gotti, let alone a tyrant -- then watch out! If one can't recognize a difference between

K-12 is no longer enough to prepare one for the complexity of life. People need to know some knowledge characteristic of some survey courses of a freshman in college -- like economics, philosophy, and psychology -- if they are to be able to deal with the complexity of modern life even without a concern for vocational preparation. We have a surfeit of information and, worse, attractive disinformation to sort out, and we need to have the means with which to deal with it. If we lack the  wisdom to discern truth from dangerous lies, then maybe we need to cut ourselves off from the material. (And yes, watch what your kids get access to on the Web. There's stuff like  terrorist-cult garbage far more dangerous than pornography

We need to make K-14 education the minimal norm for life. We used to have no more access to information than the local library. Now we have so much garbage to go with objects of legitimate scientific, cultural, and political interest.