06-16-2020, 11:16 AM
(06-14-2020, 09:27 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(06-14-2020, 07:36 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: So let me be clear. You live in the CNN bubble, among people who have absolutely no idea what's going on, but sit there are tell each other how clever and intelligent you are, and how the people outside are stupid racist white supremacists. I listen to all the channels, so I know. CNN is a sewer, and being in the CNN bubble means that most Trump supporters are far more intelligent than you.
Well, again, if you have a political world view, how wacky you are hasn’t that much to do with intelligence. If you buy into the CNN perspective or the Fox perspective, you are going to be called an idiot by those who have bought into the opposite regardless. It does matter if you have a scientific world view, that you check what you are told against reality. From that perspective, you have do do a lot of fact checking if you get into Fox or Trump.
CNN and even FoX News are good at reporting breaking news. It's when they go into analysis that they get into trouble. I rely as much on the AP news wires as possible because they come without analysis. It is impossible to spin mews that comes from blitz reporting.
FoX Propaganda Channel has its political agenda in promoting a profits-first, profits-only culture and giving uncritical praise to anyone who promises to deliver such. CNN may not have as blatant bias, but it often has cranky people from both sides trying to spin news to fit their images. One channel gives propaganda, and the other gives a muddle.
OK, Rachel Maddow is about as left-wing as FoX analysts are right-wing... but she relies heavily on fact-checkers to create the basis of her conclusions. One checks what she says, and it proves factually right. She has her opinions, but she identifies those as such. Her conclusions prove defensible.
OK, so who on the Right does what Rachel Maddow does? The Right would be much more credible with someone like her than with Sean Hannity or "Rash Libel" (OK -- Rush Limbaugh).
Quote:Your ignoring or disregarding facts that disagree with your ideology is part of this effect. If the facts disagree with the ideology, the ideology censors the facts out. This is not stupidity. This is how humans use worldviews as a short cut to arrive at solutions to problems or versions of how reality works. If you can view others as not being stupid, but as having conflicting worldviews, you have the problem of considering how warped your own worldview is. If you make the effort to understand how other's worldviews came into existence, of how their culture solved problems using a particular perspective, you can modify your own worldview to accept the wisdom, with or without caveats that it works better or ill under various conditions that one culture might see regularly, but another does not.
Even the generational cycle affects how people see the world. OK, that more than practically anything else. Maybe there won't be as sharp a divide thirty years from now between people who remember the Kennedy assassination and those who don't because that divide will -- but there is one now. Ethnicity is a factor; if you are a Japanese-American you probably never heard a polka as a child and if you are a Polish-American you never saw a bonsai tree in your house as a child even if the economic circumstances under which you were raised are very similar. (Polish-Americans are the second-most-successful white ethnic group in economic success in America, and it shows in educational and vocational attainment and avoiding criminal incarceration. At that Japanese-Americans are similar). Religion? There's a big difference between being a Methodist and a Muslim. Economic reality? If everyone that you know had to scrap for everything and still fall well short of some American dream that is simply middle-class, then your view of the world is very different from those who endured such struggles rarely if at all. Raw intelligence? Maybe there are things that dullards will never get, but there are things that smart people can never tolerate as parts of their lives.
Quote:But if you stick with one perspective, and call any other perspective stupid, you are going to miss a lot.
Nobody chooses the class, region, time, ethnicity, or level of intelligence into which he is born. Except for having a low level of intelligence (by definition), none of that is stupidity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
