08-17-2020, 01:20 AM
(08-16-2020, 09:53 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-16-2020, 05:50 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Dude, you're an imbecile who has no right to accuse me of being intellectually-destitute or stupid.
I generally think having a strong ideological world view or values does not depend a lot on intelligence. One gets sucked into an ideology in one’s youth and just does not change. It is just a shortcut. Humans react to how a problem fits into their perspective rather than think though each problem afresh. Overall, this has been OK though history, but during the transition between ages it leaves a lot of people running on obsolete perspectives. We have just changed a lot. We are not designed to change a lot. If people live in an environment which does not change, it is hardly a surprise that they do not change.
Extremist beliefs are likely to reflect the culture of one's parents (as in one comes from a Commie-infested or Klan-infested family), a rejection of those that leads to the supposed opposite, or perhaps some personal trauma. Those rarely have anything to do with intelligence. Joseph Goebbels and Ted Kaczynski left no question that they were geniuses. David DuKKe has a very high IQ, and one of the key inventors of the transistor (William Shockley) got entangled one the vile side of the debate on 'race'. Supposedly Stalin was a really-good linguist...
Sometimes one finds that what one's family says on one topic or another (mine is deep into antisemitism, and I got to find out that Jews are mostly moral, decent, honest people who have an enviable culture. People often attribute to other groups what they dread in themselves... I have much to dislike about myself, but it is my character, some of it indelible, and nothing to hang on others.
Quote:4Ts have evolved as a way to force people to change their perspective. If you have an obsolete perspective, eventually a 4T will illustrate the mess resulting from a dated perspective and that perspective gets abandoned.
Nothing so powerfully repudiates bad habits, personal or collective, like a 4T. In the end a 1T shows what the world is like without those habits. We get thrift instead of speculation, we get reason instead of cranky conspiracy theories, the celebrity circuses get shown for their emptiness, and character begins to matter across all classes. Bad business practices lead to shame instead of quick profits. People start seeing the legitimacy of the low-yield, long-term investment (such as setting up a small business) during a 4T that starts to pay off.
Quote:In the Civil War, the old rural bigoted slaveholding faction got creamed, and was forced to take a large step back. I anticipate it will happen again this crisis. That the parties have reversed their progressive vs conservative ideals does not matter. The arrow of progress points towards democracy, equality and human rights. If you are against these things, and a 4T comes along and you lose. Sorry, but you lose.
Just recall my overlays of Eisenhower and Obama elections. All that kept Obama from being a shining example of a conservative President was that he was not a conservative. Otherwise the style and substance is conservative.
Quote:But somebody’s intelligence has little to do with it. If you look at the strong ideologues of both sides, you see intelligent and less intelligent folks on both sides. Still, there is an unwillingness to check against reality and switch perspectives when there is no match. That is the big difference between an ideological political perspective and a scientific one. Ideologues get more attached to their perspective than to reality.
Not sure what to do about that. I guess reality will eventually hit people who try to ignore it hard enough. Harder than I can, anyway.
OK. I am a conservative on some things. Law and order (which does not mean brutal law enforcement) is the first civil right, without which all enumerated rights are cant. I took the LGBT side once I came to realize that I had no defense against misdirected homophobia, and that gay-bashing violence is dangerous lawlessness. I am about as anti-drug as one can be without supporting brutal and pointless enforcement of drug laws. I am an arch-conservative on educational content; yes, character (or virtue) matters greatly, and if we don't promote it we get a merciless jungle. We have a great trove of culture and learning that we ignore at great cost to the quality of our lives. Above all, don't mess with children.
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.