The American social norm, while more fettered by reason than the Republican social norm, is still highly unreasonable:
The survey found that 75 percent of Republicans believe at least one of the conspiracy theories that were polled, compared to 56 percent of Democrats who believed at least one of the four.We've become a society filled with people who believe crazy bullshit, whipped into a frenzy by media that don't care what's true or false, only what brings eyeballs to advertisers.
Right-wing pundits toe the line far better than left-wing pundits. The wingers know that their job is to provide plausible bullshit for their audiences so that wingnut victories become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Left-wing pundits foolishly think their job is a combination of analysis and opinion, tethered to facts. They fail to realize they're in the propaganda business.
Nate Silver kills them both. He looks at reality with some statistical sophistication, and he and his model learn to reduce new sources of uncertainty. Why no one ever aggregated polls and then simulated outcomes based on their remaining uncertainties is a mystery.
The wingnut pundits whined about Silver's predictions, as they did about all polls. Add one more item to the (overlapping) list of liberally biased areas:
Because they do:
Even presidential pets were viewed through the same lens. Tesler showed 1,000 YouGov respondents a picture of a Portuguese water dog and asked how favorably they felt toward it. Half saw the dog introduced as Bo Obama, and half as Ted Kennedy’s dog, Splash. (Both political dogs are the same breed, but the picture was of Obama’s.) Those with negative feelings toward blacks thought less of Obama’s dog.The bigots can't even keep their racial animus from infecting their view of a pet.
Our species has had wild success in the natural world, to such a degree that much of the world draws its nature from our designs. Most of that success has come in the past few tens of thousands of years. Often, we self-flatteringly credit our intelligence for this result - when we're not claiming even more self-flatteringly that god made us special.
We have souls, fer chrissakes. That makes us and us alone eligible for eternal paradise. God made us in his own image, so we're like so goddamn good-looking that it's a wonder satan doesn't hit on us. (Oh, right, he does. Yeah, in your hairy butt cleavage dreams.)
So we have to be the most intelligent species that ever could exist. We have to believe in human exceptionalism. We can't admit that eating and breathing and fucking and shitting and dying make us pretty much exactly like every other mammal, reptile, or amphibian that ever lived. Where's the wanking self-flattery in that!
In thirty years, we Americans have gone backward on accepting the plain truth that humans have existed longer than 10,000 years:
[T]he ”prevalence of this creationist view” has remained essentially unchanged since 1982.The underlying Gallup poll shows that both religiosity and Republicanism damage American reason, but the damage doesn't stop there by any means. Four in ten Democrats believe god spat in a handful of dust and made Adam, navel-free and special. Never mind anything we might have learned since a bunch of scientifically illiterate Jews found their promised messiah. Never mind that Genesis is so filled with errors of fact that Bible literalism is falsified.
South Carolina's wackaloon voters were not going to elect an open atheist anyway. It's doubtful they would even consider someone who professed evolution guided by god. But it was tribal to continue the plainly illegal prohibition, the treatment of a group of citizens as second class, as outside the tribe:In 1990 a colleague at the College of Charleston, where I was a math professor, pointed out that the South Carolina Constitution prohibited atheists from becoming governor.Since the U.S. Constitution bars religious tests for public office, I asked a local ACLU lawyer how this obviously unconstitutional provision could be removed.
I assumed, in my political naïveté, that state officials would consent to bring South Carolina into compliance with federal law. They didn’t. Governor Carroll Campbell said, “The South Carolina Constitution was fine as it was because this country was founded on Godly principles.”When a social scientist tells you that conservatives are loyal and value authority, that sounds positive. But it isn't. Loyalty to the tribe can destroy ardor for the truth. Valuing authority to the exclusion of all else inevitably puts shameless shamans and charlatans in charge. Or royalty, if there's any difference.
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.I've been expecting too much rationality from our society and our politics. Most humans just aren't built to examine their cherished beliefs. They're built to rationalize in order to stay right with the tribe.
Americans favor legalization of pot, but still:
According to the Rasmussen poll, just 36 percent of respondents say they are opposed to such a measure.Unfortunately, it's exactly the same people who would never smoke it, who need to, so they can relax and let go of their overwhelming fears of brown people, secularism, and pleasure. Although psilocybin would probably be more mind-expanding for them (and they and we need for them to expand their minds)...
I'm not sure I believe this - because I want so badly to believe it:
The latest national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner ... shows a Republican Party in deepening trouble and emerging underlying trends that may have shifted the balance for 2012.[1] Barring sudden economic shocks, there is accumulating evidence that we have entered a new phase in the political cycle, substantially more favorable to the Democrats.It's also not from an unbiased source, though of course pro-Democratic sources are always more reliable than pro-Republican sources.
Even Republicans can tell...
Mitt Romney's message people, I would guess, poll-test his convenient position changes. What they fail to poll-test is his credibility after switching yet again.
(h/t Rachel Maddow)
Nate Silver gives reason for hope in the Democratic lead on the generic House ballot.
Last year, Republicans won the popular vote for the U.S. House — essentially what the generic ballot is trying to measure — by 7 percentage points. So a poll showing Democrats 7 points ahead instead is a pretty significant swing.Of course it's waaay too early to count on, but we need hope to gird up for the arduous campaign ahead. Imagine the difference:
Because they do.
We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.The social norm in Mississippi is that it's still o.k. to think integration in the bedroom should be, not even merely frowned upon by white bigots, but against the law.
What went wrong in 2010?
The good news is that Americans realize that the media is bathing them in bullshit bubble-bath.
The bad news is that most of us apparently have no freaking idea how to distinguish shit from shinola.
The New York Times buries its lead (lede to the kool kidz). It wants to shout out - as it should - that Fox News makes its viewers more ignorant, not less. But it has to dither first, nicking MSNBC for the mote in its eye before proceeding to the log in Fox's.
The simple fact is Fox News infects its viewers with lies. Here's the proof Fox is a vector for bullshit:
There's an unmistakable Fox News ignoramus effect. The percentage of misinformed viewers goes up as their viewing peaks. Watching Fox daily disinforms viewers on 10 of 11 topics and disinforms them badly on 8 of the 11!
Note that Fox can get the facts right when those facts support Fox's political bias. The single topic on which Fox viewers became steadily better informed the more they watched: whether Democrats had proven the Chamber of Commerce used foreign money to finance its ad campaign against them.
Even after getting to their justified smackdown on Fox, the Times misses a much more dire story. No matter what medium an American prefers for news, there's a whole shit-load of ignorance out there. Fox is worst, CNN is pretty bad, but MSNBC is only good by exceedingly low standards. Newspapers in general are worse than MSNBC.
All of which is why we suffered in November a triumph at the polls of the refuted economic doctrines of the right wing:
Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.Zombie lies, kept alive by Fox and other right-wing propagandists, including the entire Republican establishment. Until we as a people become more discerning of the truth, we'll only get more politics of dogma, in which conservatives feel entitled to their own facts, no matter how contradicted by reality.
Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.
I surely can't be the first person to notice this. (Don't call me Shirley. RIP.)
Paul Steinhauser of CNN completely misrepresented a McClatchy-Marist poll.
The actual poll asked whether voters think Republicans ought to compromise with Democrats to get things done:
The Republicans have control of the House of Representatives. Which statement comes closer to your view about what you think should happen:Steinhauser dishonestly portrays the results as showing that the voters want Democrats and Republicans to work together.
- The Republicans should compromise with the Democrats and President Obama to get things done
- The Republicans should stand firm on their positions even if it means things don't get done
One day before a White House meeting between President Barack Obama and top congressional leaders from both political parties, a new poll suggests most Americans want Democrats and Republicans to compromise.The actual poll is about what Republicans should do. Steinhauser spins it into a bullshit balance, portraying the voters as saying something they didn't say.
This is only a freeped on-line poll, but:
[E]ven if you grant that the poll was the victim of an organized attack, I'm still amazed by what we can learn from it. In response to the question "Which policy options do you support?" 42 percent of the respondents chose the answer "keeping science out of the political process."Conservatives have embraced their schlerotic ignorance as a badge of honor. This is not a good thing for American society. Andrew Leonard could be channelling me (if channelling were real):
We need more science in the political process, not less. The countries that understand that will thrive and prosper. The ones that don't will undoubtedly fail, if they haven't already doomed themselves.
Last week, Gallup polled the generic Congressional ballot and found the Republicans - even these Republicans - ahead by ten percent, their biggest margin ever. Teabaggers everywhere cheered. Loudly, angrily. Of course. See, they said, we're gonna git you, suckas.
My side, those of us who are merely disappointed by the Democrats, but who recognize that the alternative is batshit insane, responded with keening, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. We're good that all three.
This week, Gallup has the gap at zero, and even they can't explain it. That thing about the greatest margin ever might have been the first hint that called for a little skepticism.
I heard about the new poll in a DCCC blast email on Wednesday, and it reached the media as early as Tuesday evening, but there's been very little ballyhoo. The media seem unwilling even to consider that their dominant narrative - Republican sweep! - might be reconsidered by the voters.
No, I don't believe we're even, just as I didn't believe there was a 10-point gap. Damn nuance! How do you fit that into a narrative simple enough for TV news simpletons?
The good news for the media: Gallup is already at work on the next weekly tracking poll. Maybe that will help them bring their chosen narrative back to credibility!
If it's not obvious to you, Republicans are nasty sore losers. They don't believe in democracy. They believe only they can govern.
Democrats, by contrast, are much more even-tempered and stable.
It was clear from day one that the teabaggers were attempting a superficial rebranding of the same old conservative Republican bullshit. They had nothing new to offer but the recycling of an old and honorable name into the fetid fever swamp of their outrage.
They wanted all the same policies as Republicans. They just didn't want to share the blame for the failures of the Republicans. Sort like declaring bankruptcy and escaping debts...
CNN is still giving the love to Sarah Palin with the headline "CNN Poll: Palin's popularity on the rise". (Juvenile jokes left as an exercise for the reader.) But here's the money paragraph:
"Palin is still not as popular Al Gore [sic] and remains more unpopular than Joe Biden, but her favorable rating is much higher than Dick Cheney's," adds [CNN Polling Director Keating] Holland.All because to quite a number of men, she's a MILF - or that exceedingly narrow category PILF...
You figure out which one is the wasting asset.
Click image for full Joel Pett/Lexington Herald-Leader cartoon.
CNN reports that, ho hum, the Sarah Palin resignation circus left 70% of voters with the same opinion of her:
"Many Americans have deeply-held opinions about Palin as a result of the national campaign in 2008," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.Well, duh. Of course this is true. She's the most over-exposed media personality this side of the Michael Jackson funeral circus. (I guess there was a two-for-one special in burials this week.)
