To make a political impact, all the Republicans that won their seats from this Fraud Election should abdicate their positions cause obviously, according to the GOP, they won their seats by fraud.
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I think that people long opposed to spending taxes on education have doomed our public schools to the poorhouse; and their preferred alternative, religious schools, don’t teach critical thinking (because it leads to questioning the legitimacy of religion.)
50 years ago, public schools in this country were undergoing a renaissance. Replacing the one room schoolhouse model and school principals with corporal punishment, kids were provided with a safe learning environment and professionally certified educators. They thrived, and went on to help build the world.
But then the public was conned out of paying for it by the kinds of politicians and “leaders” we see today; those who oppose taxes. In some areas schools have declined to the point where nobody with a dollar to their name dares sentence their children to their degraded, dysfunction public school system. As a bonus to the rat bastard politicians, the unfortunate students subjected to religious schooling end up incapable of questioning the legitimacy of the assholes who screwed them out of a real education.
So someday when you see Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell lying in the gutter after being dragged from the Senate by an angry mob, be sure to pause for a moment to take a long, hard piss on them.
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It’s really hard not to fall into the trap of “this is a giant morass, with a million causes and no small number of ways to address it” and become overwhelmed.
What it underscores is that all good people need to act, by taking care of their neighborhood, their family, the small number of people that they interact with and work to change it. Who we elect is not going to fix it - they are just going to manage it. It’s up to us to fix it, every day.
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To what extent is it actual belief versus tribal identification?
I guess when I see something like this I usually assume that it is just tribal identification and then am surprised to find people poisoning themselves with fish hydroxychloroquine.
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I suspect they’re inextricably intertwined.
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The correct takeaway is then that all polls have poor predictive value. That the problem is systemic rather than limited to this election makes them more of a problem, not less.
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What I’m curious about is how many of the 70+ million who voted for Trump are actual hardcore Trump cult members. Some people seem to think it’s all 70+ million but that’s obviously not the case. IMO his rabid base numbers are overblown and the GOP trying to hold onto them is going to bite them in the ass.
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Biden stole the election! It was a massive conspiracy involving 79,295,341 people!
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From your typing fingers to my crossed fingers.
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In that post, Silver specifies that while polls this time around weren’t any worse than normal, people (specifically voters and the media) need to recalibrate their expectations around polls.
I wasn’t saying pollsters got it wrong. I was saying people make assumptions based on polls that are often wrong and that the media encourages the making of those assumptions. Long story short: the world would be better off if people were more skeptical of polls, especially those in which it’s one poll/one sample as you yourself mentioned.
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Is this actually true? How do you know? It would seem surprising to me that religious traditions that include Aquinas and Augustine would be against critical thinking. I very much doubt that Hebrew schools don’t teach critical thinking. Is it all religious schools you are talking about or just a very narrow set of them?
A handful of religious schooling traditions (e.g. Jesuit-run Catholic schools or Orthodox Jewish yeshivas) teach what they call critical thinking, but with the strict proviso that it is not to be used to question religious authority. What they’re really teaching is deep textual analysis, semantics, philosophy (but more theology), and rhetoric/casuistry. The conservative Catholic SCOTUS justices come straight from that background.
They’re the exceptions, though. Most religious K-12 schools in the U.S. – and not just the evangelical Xtianist ones – don’t even pretend they’re teaching critical thinking.
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Most Republicans are idiots…
Well, duh! Critical thinking is un American! /s
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The whole system would be destroyed if all K-12 schools prioritised it. Credit card companies and Fox News would go out of business, and the GOP would be gone. Can’t have that!
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Most Republicans believe Biden stole the election because the conservative media and Trump himself are promoting that idea. They don’t have to actually prove it in court, they just have to find a few cases of questionable ballots and claims of bias to satisfy their loyal viewers that all Biden ballots must be frauds.
The fact that Biden was leading in the polls by double digits, and that Trump has never had good approval ratings is meaningless to them.
Republicans are also so emotionally invested in their beliefs that they will invent conspiracies, ignore evidence, and exaggerate claims to justify that they aren’t wrong. Trump is the perfect distillation of what the GOP has slowly become over the last 40+ years: ignorant, corrupt, selfish, hateful, racist, self-absorbed.
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My son was friends and bandmates with a neighbor kid who went to one of these (alleged) schools. We were chatting one day, and while I don’t remember the context or how the topic of “dinosaurs” came up, but he was quick to point out that “dinosaurs weren’t real”. He was a 15 year old high school student when he evinced this lack of education — it wasn’t just the response of a child.
And the kid was not stupid. He was well spoken, he knew math, and was a very nice young man. But after 10 years of so-called education he clearly had zero grasp of science, or even a fact-based reality to stand upon.
Fortunately the kid was a talented musician, and after graduating from a suitably religious college I heard he went on to teach music at some Christian school in Iowa; where I hope his sphere of influence has been limited to music theory, and not biology, geology, anthropology, archaeology, climatology, literature, writing, philosophy, physics, chemistry, or pretty much any subject but music or PhysEd.
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Proves that the conservative media uses Hitler type tactics to influence: “Tell lies long enough and forcefully enough and people start to believe them.” I think that the Republicans have figured out what works for ISIS can work for them - keep people repressed, uneducated and unable to CRITICALLY think for themselves.
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Was this like some home school co-op school? Or something like a fundamentalist school?
Catholic private schools I know teach dinosaurs are real. I am not sure how they handle evolution, but the official doctrine is that it does not contradict the Bible.
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Biden’s messaging on unity made for a nice victory speech, but if he keeps it up for long he’s going to be eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Definitely. Win the run-off’s in GA, and run slip shod over those GOP dicks.
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