Debate about Gun Control

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-21-2017, 10:06 PM)Galen Wrote:

(05-21-2017, 08:03 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(05-21-2017, 07:39 PM)Galen Wrote: It really is depressing when a comedian does better research than you can manage.  Thinking really is beyond you isn't it?

Eric has a consistent and well thought out perspective on gun policy that just requires one to ignore certain things...  like history, the text of the law, the values of the authors of the law, the sources of the legal theories he is advocating, etc...  He can think, but his thoughts are highly selective.

Kinser usually makes sense and I can actually get through to him simply because he doesn't ignore huge swaths of reality and does his homework.  Like most of Generation X, he is aware that bad things happen when you ignore reality.

Eric the Obtuse seems more like a cartoon character than an actual person given how little contact with reality he has.  Try to translate his ideas into some form of formal logic like Propositional Logic or Predicate Calculus and see where that gets you.  Try to do that a few times and you will realize he is a complete lunatic.

This is likely to a great extent as your tangle of information sources and values is much closer to Kinser's than to Eric's.  I am very much into trying to understand extreme partisans.  Given the big differences between where people were brought up and how they were taught to think, people with a wide variety of world views can think of themselves as rational thinkers.  Extreme partisans attempting to interact with other extreme partisans of a conflicting flavor will reject each other.  The differences in presumptions and assumptions of how the world works are often too great for one with a narrow strict world view to comprehend a different narrow strict view.  You find it easier to reduce Eric to a cartoon than to try to understand where he is coming from.

A lot of extreme partisans care much more about protecting their world views and values and forcing their views on others than they care about improving their understanding of reality or improving their situation.  If someone has convinced themselves they have all the answers they stop seeking answers and start forcing them on others.  Many extreme partisans are fascinating in having extreme intricate consistent ways of holding their view of the world together, but to do so they have to reject information, news sources, sometimes whole fields of science, and what seems like simple facts of everyday life.

My premise is that most everybody has a rational or at least rationalizationable perspective.  The question is how many crooked rationalizations are required to convince themselves that they are right.  The more rationalizations, the tighter people try to hold on to them, the less able they become so see perspectives other than their own.  The problem isn't so much with one partisan or the other, but with the difference between the two partisans.  Two people sharing the same perspective will have similar defense mechanisms and are tied to similar 'facts'.  They will see each other as rational and be able to communicate.  If there are major differences between perspectives, one is more apt to stop trying to comprehend, but to make the simplifying assumption that the other guy is nuts.

I by no means agree with everything Eric says, but I can see where he is coming from.  I see your inability to follow him as more your problem than his.  What Eric is saying is not that complex.  He is not hard to follow unless one is so entangled by one's own perspective that one can't step out of it.

Of course, in trying to understand an extreme partisan, one has to temporarily swallow 'facts' or values that might seem absurdly implausible.  You might temporarily have to assume that Trump has the people skills to hold together a political coalition.  If you don't tentatively accept that assumption, which to me is hard to swallow, someone's perspective will sure look lunatic.  One might also have to wrap one's head around the idea that guns aren't useful for self defense.  Partisans will commonly go all in on ideas that seem so alien and wrong that words like 'lunatic' might actually apply.  My approach involves identifying a minimum number of key ideas that seem absurd and wrong, then attacking those few odd ideas.  For many partisans, the amount of rational thought is much higher than the number of absurd assumptions.  I'd focus on a few of the most absurd assumptions.