On liberals and conservatives

[Moonbeam]

Liberals are motivated by regurgitating news articles that they read and then put zero thought into what they parrot around. .....................

Did you think I read somewhere the post I made that you quoted? And why on earth did you bring up the Cadillac tax as if it were somehow my fault. Is that a something you read about that got stuck in your craw? You seem to be in some kind of pain and I don't mind being blamed for it but I know from experience it won't bring any long termed satisfaction. Perhaps you could ask yourself what you are feeling. I know what it feels like, the raging against the machine and the sick hopelessness of futility it brings. When all the doors close around you, there is a secret door out called love.

 

[ivwshane]

Textbook example of projection.

Thanks!

Seriously! Holy shit! I was waiting for the troll face GIF to be posted at the end.

 

[agent00f]

[agent00f: Feelings" are a more universal biological trait which we as humans uniquely attribute & rationalize anthropomorphic causes to, for the evolutionary advantageous purpose of justifying linguistic arguments I've previously mentioned.

M: I don't disagree. I find no relationship between these thoughts and what I am proposing.

a: Consider why a dog might similarly feel "happy"/content. Using your powers of observation & inference instead of internal feelings on the matter, you might figure that motivation to seek contentment would lead it on course of action beneficial to survival, instead of what the dog might be repressing from its youth, etc. In fact you might even figure that what some owners might believe to be the internal dialog of their pets based its feelings is rather comical and irrelevant to the existence of that species.

M: You can make a dog cringe at the sight of a stick by beating it, but you will never be able to make it suffer existential feelings of worthlessness because all of that has its source in being put down by words that having caused pain in association with trauma, don't require the trauma to rekindle the pain when used later.

You don't know what a dog is feeling. They also seem to experience some forms of trauma, we just don't psychoanalyze them yet still come up with useful theories of how they generally came to be a certain way. As mentioned it's rather egotistical to believe humans are completely unique in terms of evolutionary strategy.

a: This isn't to say that a dog might not share some of the same internal experience we do, ultimately causes it do what it does, sans its ability to verbalize or otherwise convince us of this. The brain is very complicated and we don't even begin to understand it; even relatively sophisticated tools like the latest fmri's are incredibly crude instruments.

M: I am talking about something extremely simple but which is profoundly difficult to verify. To know how worthless you feel despite all your denial requires that you feel what you feel. That is the last thing anybody wants to do and is the hardest thing in the world. I understand you don't know what I am talking about and so you invent all this stuff that's not related.

So if this is admittedly uncommon psychology, why would you propose that it underlies everyone's psyche?

a: There's compelling if not indisputable evidence that the brain hardly sees world like a video camera or medium that can be replayed. Our ability to capture & remember detail is poor, yet we tend to be convinced that the interpolation/extrapolation our brains do to make up for it is just like the real thing. The level of conviction doesn't alter the basic reality of it, which can be tested empirically: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/mar/02/psychology-neuroscience

M: Hehe, when you feel what you feel you won't have any doubt it's real. I am unable to prove anything to you that you haven't experienced. I only suggest what I believe can be known with difficulty.

I don't doubt it feels real. I doubt what feelings mean outside of primitive chemical drives useful to our survival. Same for dreams, etc, which also seem a byproduct of other useful features, and similarly overinterpreted to the domain of physical reality.

Also just because another may or maybe be able to exactly empathize doesn't mean they can't be sympathetic to feelings of dread/fear/hopelessness/etc. Consider most people either shake off or otherwise deal with those emotions same as they do dreams/nightmares.

a: There are certainly many things that can make us as individuals more happy/content, and very few of them are related to being factually correct though quite a few are related to feeling right. That's why I suppose millennia of people believed they were right preceding the very recent generations which are actually starting to get somewhere using much better tools. We usually find our ancestors were often not very right despite similar levels of conviction.

M: There is a difference in believing ideas and knowing psychological states. You can believe in unicorns and be wrong, but when you say a nightmare was terrifying, everybody can relate who has also had one.

a: To put myself in the same context, I've seen that it takes certain uncommon personality which is only content with the pursuit of some best possible answer along with related values. It's the kind of personal attribute that can be surveyed and there's always some small minority of any general group inclined toward it.

It makes sense the more these attributes are prized at a place for some practical end, the more these people are culled from wherever they can be found, so it's no surprise when such people these days are typically employed at otherwise quite "diverse" workplaces.

M: Perhaps you could use specifics instead of talking theoretically. I don't get the point.

interchange asked why I do what I do, and the answer is I appear to be biologically driven to seek the most explanatory answers, and this drive seems exhibited in a certain portion of the human population. It was worth elaborating that institutions which work on hard problem employ a concentration of these people for obvious reason and they evidently come from an array of geographical/cultural backgrounds.

This relates to the previous observations that various portions of human spawn appear to have differing biological tendencies, not unlike other species of social animals down to ants except somewhat more nuanced. Perhaps worth mentioning the feels you tend towards might be a genetic minority or even anomaly.

a: Personally I'm not particularly motivated to consider the psychology of people other than what had compelled me, since even supposedly smart/rational peers are subject to human nature to also pursue their own self-interests which a younger more naive me was poor at guarding against. Nietzsche's cynical treatment of what we say vs what we mean helped a lot to illuminate the contrast between the inner beast vs how enlightened we portray ourselves as.

M: And there it is...... I hear that you have been hurt by something and you have armored up to prevent that from again happening. I would suggest that you long to return to that more naïve place but hold yourself in contempt that you were vulnerable there. I can't tell you the bitter tears I have shed for what I lost and how glad I am that I did.

Personally I fixed the problem by understanding the situations better, thus leading to less painful results. The basic biology seems to have worked in both cases: the individual specimen did what it can to resolve the source of discomfort.

In the future it helps to at least tag whoever you're replying to so they get the flag notification.

 

[agent00f]

It seems to me that conservatives are motivated by strong moral issues and liberals by reason and rationality. If the outward is motivated by the inner it would imply that conservatives are concerned with appearing moral and liberals as being smart. That seems to fit with the stereotype that conservatives are stupid and liberals are evil. But what would cause such a motivation.....why the need to appear a certain way......where's the ego satisfaction, what is being protected, what illusion maintained.

If we hate ourselves,. as I have long suggested, but each in different ways, what could categorize us into two broad political groups. As I have also suggested we were enculturated, programmed to fit in, trained how to behave to make us safe from criticism, and this was done by criticism itself, being put down for being out of line, non=conforming in some way. There are two common ways to do this. One is to strike the fear of God into we children, to make us fear moral deviation, and another is to call us stupid for bad behavior. We are tremendously competitive, in my opinion, as to who is smart and who is good. Now if external emphasis is on one or the other the emotional need arises out of the opposite feeling, either that we are really evil, which we would project onto others as a defense, or that we are really stupid, which we would want to tag others with. Meanwhile, our egos would provide us with a sense that we are good people, an immunity to moral shame, or that we are smart and rational. And of course, we might even be driven to really be those things in practice,

Seem to me everyone is motivated to be "good", to the extent that they rationalize whatever they want to do in their personal interest to be rhetorically "good". Not a single leftist movement has every proclaimed itself to be the baddies, nor does their right wing counterparts. This fits with the argumentative theory I linked previously that proposes "reason" was developed to cast ourselves as the good guys worth following/believing/etc.

The smart/dumb narrative is largely a product of recent events whereby the intelligentsia recognized the path civilization is following towards immediate & rational progress, away from traditionalism, also previously mentioned to some extent. When they shift towards one side and the other is left with mostly dummies it's no wonder the zeitgeist is so.

 

[werepossum]

It's not conspiracy. It's trickle down economics. Cut taxes & regulations on the Job Creators so that a rising tide will lift all boats. But that's not what happened. It seems clear that it delivers only to those at the top yet remains the core of Repub ideology.

You go on like that all the time, obviously lacking any clue whatsoever.

Democrat core ideology is just the same, except the trickle comes down from an all-powerful government. And it's yellow and smells like a public restroom.

 

[Moonbeam]

Democrat core ideology is just the same, except the trickle comes down from an all-powerful government. And it's yellow and smells like a public restroom.

Can you help me to understand this a bit better. You seem to object, not only to democrats, but also to an all powerful government, but isn't it the function of government, especially American government, to make sure that that power which it seems to me an any government that governs and therefore ipso facto is all powerful, will be in the hands of the people? In short, a government run by republicans would be as all powerful as a one run by democrats, no? So I see no point in mentioning that fact in your post. It seems in-American, actually, if you ask me, because our system of government is supposed to be, "We hold these truths to be self-evident and all that", implying that whatever the government is that we elect will be according to the will of the people. So wouldn't a government that votes to piss on the people, perhaps in the opinion of some, be exactly the legitimate and proper government for the folk who elected them.

I mean, you can cry sour grapes all you want, but you can't be a real American and substitute your will for the will of the people. Do you want government to be all powerful, limited of course by a constitutional commitment to respect inalienable rights, or do you want to have the final say. If not you then surely you are misusing the term all powerful when referring to a democratic party majority. I think you should unpack, instead, the notion that democratic policies are yellow and smell like piss, but maybe not here.

I mention this only to note there was no real logical reasoning in what you said and that it appeared to rely on some unexamined assumption that democrats are authoritarians thieves with bad intentions.

Surely you don't want to drive other people off the cliff with such hysterically unsupported claims. You could do some real damage, no?

No of course not.