K-Thug finds an acorn:
Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.
I don’t know. I think we just experienced eight years of this kind of rule, and I was terrified the entire goddamn time. It took years off my life. It radicalized me. It literally changed my life and all my priorities. It was a thing I felt compelled to fight every single day. That didn’t change for me when we won back the House and Senate, and it didn’t change for me when we won back the White House. Why? Because I know that one of these years, these yahoos will gain total control of our government unless we have people willing to fight them every single day.
I think Krugman knows this, and I think he does his part. But I also think he employs his own form of magical thinking a lot of the time. Namely, he acts like the world will conform to what reason dictates and that rational decisions will be made if only someone makes a rational argument. No. This is a knife-fight. Reason plays a part, but it isn’t decisive.
I really wish that more people could take a moment when they’re in the voting booth to remove themselves from the political fray that saturates our everyday lives and ask themselves one simple question: “I am about to help this person become the single most powerful person in the history of the world. Am I comfortable with that?”
In fact, I kind of wish they would post that IN the voting booths. It’s not a matter of partisanship, but of gravity.
I know you’d still get a lot of people who would cast their vote for a crazy person, but I would hope that it would give any reasonable person pause in voting for Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, etc.
I’m not sure it’s the reasonable persons who I’m worried about.
It’s the plethora of ones who are unable to exercise reason and good judgment that scare me. And, unfortunately, there seems to be a whole lot of them right now.
I don’t disagree that there are a lot of people who are unable to exercise reason and good judgment. And the really sad part of the matter is that they are the most vocal group, and the most likely to go out and vote.
But I do think a lot of reasonable people are misled into thinking they should vote for one candidate over the other based on some criteria that isn’t really as important as ‘should this person really have their finger on that button’.
Or, even worse, they are misled into thinking that it doesn’t really matter if they vote or not, since the ‘parties are the same anyway’. If someone thinks the parties are really the same, please do me a favor and vote anyway, and just vote for the less crazy person.
Yes, the frantic search continues for that rarest of voters; the one who carefully evaluates the candidates and votes for them based on criteria that matter. I’m afraid we will probably never attain a state where voting becomes an action undertaken by a significant number of informed people. We just haven’t evolved a system where people care enough to know who or what they are actually voting for. It seems our society has simply devolved into warring factions whose vote is now based largely on tribal instincts.
Unfortunately, a good part of the responsibility for this goes to our education system and, even more importantly, our media. If people are presented with two conflicting statements, and one of them is patently false, crazy, whatever, but they are presented as having equal validity, we create a situation that you describe. People end up basing their beliefs on the amount of trust they place in the speaker, and trust is frequently given for reasons having nothing to do with reality.
Yes, I agree. Not too long ago, our local FOX News station started promoting this “we present both sides of the issue” style of reporting. Which is fine, in and of itself, but there is absolutely no effort to explore whether one of those “sides” is being honest and factual and the other not. Or if maybe some of what both sides are saying has some merit. You know…..”real journalism” to help people separate fact from fiction. It is simply a presentation of what both sides are saying. I’m tired of screaming at the TV when they do this, so I have simply stopped watching. It is maddening.
Not sure you can blame the educational system. I went to a fine private college and participated in the speech and debate club, where students arguably got the best education in argumentation, argument fallacies, logic, etc that you’ll find anywhere.
A good third of our team still consisted of wingnuts, one of which told me he “sympathized” with Timothy McVeigh.
There are a lot of little ponies being led to water these days that just flat out refuse to take a drink.
Indeed this is a knife fight; good analogy. Reason and reasoning seem to be gasping for oxygen in a room not just where the Right declares itself the only patriots but where some Lefties or Independents wants to teach us all a lesson by either not voting at all or by voting for a obscure 3rd party candidate.
Enough with the lessons, in a knife fight you don’t get to sit it out or turn your back.
I’m afraid George W Bush’s administration was downright reasonable compared to what we would get in a Perry or a Bachmann administration. It astonishes me how the Republican party just seems to keep getting worse. I used to expect that they’d hit bottom at any moment, but I’ve given up expecting that.
With the electorate and media we’ve got, I fear the GOP won’t hit rock bottom until one of these loons gets elected president.
I thought that was Nixon. Then I thought that was Reagan. Then I thought that was G. W. Bush (43).
Didn’t happen, and the election of another fascist lunatic would only create a new definition of “a fascist too far.”
Nope, the election of Perry would be a total disaster, and would set us up for the election of another even more insane clown.
Or set us up for no more elections.
It truly seems a horribly twisted parody of “Groundhog Day” sometimes.