Not so much that I expect rationality (I do not), but that I hope vainly to get them to see their irrationality. I suppose that’s really not much better or more likely.
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You and me both. It baffles me the way some people can compartmentalize like that. My husband, as a child, was part of a religiously conservative social group (not his own choice) so I’ve often asked him questions that begin with “how do they justify this?” He was the one who pointed out I was going to be continually frustrated if I expected rational thought from religious conservatives.
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Think about how many of them are deeply distrustful of the government, some of them so much so that they claim they need to stockpile guns and ammo “just in case.”
These are frequently the same people who smugly suggest that if young black men would simply submit to (government!) authority, they’d be less likely to be killed by the police. Those are, of course, also the same people who cheered when Cliven Bundy turned his guns on those “government thugs” who showed up to arrest him because he refused to pay his bills or to respect other people’s property.
And they’re the same people who trust the government to administer justice and execute people – to literally decide who lives and who dies?
None of it makes any rational sense, it’s all this big muddled mess of cognitive dissonance that looks so obvious to me I’ll never be able to figure out how they don’t see it.
But, when I look at Donald Trump I see a bumbling conman more obvious than many megachurch pastors and “Nigerian princes,” and yet …
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You’re commenting on an article about a guy who thinks she should get the death penalty.
Yes, that was my point. He’s generally the exception. If you ask your average “pro-lifer” who believes fetuses are babies and abortion is murder what should be done with a woman who hires someone to murder her baby you generally won’t get the answer that would logically follow from that belief.
The only logical and intellectually honest reply to that question is: she should be charged with murder for hire and sent to prison or executed, as the law allows.
But remember during the presidential campaign, when Trump suggested that women should be “punished” for getting an abortion? And people on both sides of the argument freaked out? That is what I was talking about. It’s just plain crazy – if they actually believed what they claim to believe, they’d be cheering for this guy, they’d have been cheering for Donald Trump.
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Cognitive dissonance is mental discomfort caused by having conflicting beliefs. What these guys have is called compartmentalization. The conflicting beliefs actually never even meet in their minds. What they say one minute is never checked against what they said the minute before.
I think mostly it makes sense to think that they don’t even believe what they say, at least not in the sense that you probably believe things.* They say things to generate a social effect, not to communicate information (everything any of us says exists on this spectrum, but this kind of thing is way off to one side). The social effect they desire is to exalt their authority figure.
* To be clear, them “not believing” it doesn’t mean they won’t act on it. Violence is totally justified in the name of authority.
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No. State-sponsored killing should be abandoned and forbidden as unworthy of a civilized people.
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At first I thought maybe I just got sloppy with my phrasing, but I don’t think that’s it. It’s that I’m so biased, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be able to believe two wildly contradictory things at the same time, so in my mind it’s difficult for me to accept they aren’t at least dimly aware of it. I can’t wrap my brain around how someone could compartmentalize two things that are (to me) so obviously contradictory.
As one random example of many, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard folks go on and on about how Hillary Clinton is nothing but an idiot who rode her husband’s coattails, who is sick and feeble and weak in mind and in body, who can barely stand on her own, who has zero accomplishments, etc. – and yet she is also an unstoppable calculating career criminal, nigh unto super villain territory, who has gotten away with her many, many crimes for decades. And it’s like, both those things can’t be true, but it doesn’t matter one bit to them.
Their minds clearly work in a way that is alien to me. I have no doubt about my own ability to compartmentalize. I know I do it to some extent, but if I am ever made aware of it, I become aware of it. How do they not experience cognitive dissonance?
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They do experience it when pointed out, I think. It’s just that when you’re confronted with it you take it as an opportunity for self-reflection and critical thinking, whereas these folks will call you a commie libtard and go back about their business.
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To me, when you work back from their exceptions, especially when you add opposition to birth control, you end up with “Children are God’s punishment for sex. Doing anything to subvert God’s will is a sin.”
If you can wrap you head around the Trinity the rest of the non rational mental gymnastics come pretty easy.
But really, for many, being “Pro Life,” has become their shibboleth. It is a icon for their tribal identity as “social conservatives.”
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I once heard a waggish Jesuit explain it (in a quite compelling way) by drawing a comparison to 3-in-One Oil.
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At some level, this sort of things date back to the civil rights era or even reconstruction It was the FEDERAL government enforcing rights for black people. So the racists created an entire belief system the idea that only state and or local government is legitimate. This was to ENABLE segregation and institutional racism. And that has become the world view that conservatives have been brought up in. And that is so all-encompasing that even those who don’t see themselves as racist, who don’t believe in segregation and government sponsored racism, believe that the federal government is inherently oppressing them.
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No, shitstains are the results of shitting. Assholes gonna shit. 
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The fact that he goes immediately to hanging just says a lot to me about how bristling with contempt he is for women. In 2018 you don’t hang someone to punish them, you don’t hang someone to neutralize the threat they pose to society, you hang them to send a message and in this case I can’t see any other message than pure hatred.
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“God is good, and loves me.”
“God will send me to hell to suffer for all of eternity, ceaselessly, with absolutely no recourse if I don’t believe in him.”
Like, 70 percent of americans believe both those things. I can’t see how that isn’t some kind of mental illness.
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This is why I no longer subscribe to The Atlantic.
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Nah. Amputate the entire internal part of the twig and the tubes going from the berries. He’ll still have the bits but won’t be able to do anything with them.
Crossed my mind, but I’ve been an Atlantic guy for a long time and they have pushed that “Overton Window” thingy in the other direction too - publish Ta-Nehisi Coates laying out the case for reparations and the “First White President” article.
I think that Atlantic should be lobbied to hire a full-on, up-front socialist who considers Bernie a “good start”, but while giving them a chance to do that, I’m not going to stop reading.
I didn’t click on this guy’s first article because it sounded stupid; if he keeps that up, you can send a tailored economic signal to The Atlantic by clicking on everything BUT his articles. If everybody does that, Goldberg will be the one taking orders soon enough…from some AI.
-dazed look-
Great, blazing asteroids…
Didn’t see videos, too early in morning…
Need to see, puppy and kitten videos, hear uplifting music, restore faith in humanity.
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Of course I do not subscribe to such viewpoints, but from what I recall of the bioethics class I took twenty years ago, doesn’t it go something along the lines of how a fetus has much greater potential than a convicted criminal?
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