Republicans' Attitudes About Things They're Completely Wrong About

Why don't they trust Hillary? Any sober investigation of the facts shows that she's actually unusually frank and forthcoming -- or at least, unusually frank and forthcoming for a politician. Likewise, it's easily demonstrated that Trump, whom some refer to as a "straight talker," is unusually dishonest even for a politician.

And why do they think that the economy isn't recovering, and that the climate isn't warming?

Someone may have actually answered all of those questions.

Someone -- I think it was Lawrence O'Donnell -- pointed out that many Republican positions are emotion-based, by their own admission. They (probably Lawrence) gave many examples with video clips from the Republican Convention. Seeing the entire montage all together was very striking, and suddenly some previously baffling behavior and rhetoric made sense to me: "The numbers may say otherwise, but it just FEELS to me like the economy is stagnant." "I may have no evidence, but I'm convinced that Obama is a Muslim. That's how it FEELS to me." "Yes, those scientists have all of those numbers, but it doesn't FEEL to me like the climate is warming." "I don't know... I just don't trust her!" "Okay, so actual cases of voter fraud in the US have been extremely rare for decades... but that's not the way it FEELS to me!" Etc.

This may be surprising to some people who "FELT" that conservatives were hard-headed and fact-driven, and liberals were wussies who were controlled by their emotions and refused to face unpleasant realities. File that one alongside the one about conservatives spending responsibly and liberal running up huge budget deficits.

I wish I could say that a quick and effective solution had occurred to me, now that someone, probably Lawrence, pointed out the nature of the problem to me. But no, knowing the nature of the problem just points out how extremely difficult it will be to solve it. Tripling the budget on education might put a dent in it after a few decades. That won't be easy, because there a lot of pinheads out there who vote and who FEEL like money is being wasted on education as it is, and that there is a huge liberal conspiracy to hand control of the world over to lesbians (and by the way, they can't prove anything, but for a long time they've had this FEELING about Hillary...), and that academics are an integral part of this liberal-lesbian world-conspiracy.

Still, understanding more about the nature of stupidity can't hurt. The problem, the enemy, is stupidity: the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

Lawrence O'Donnell On Donald Trump

Once on this blog I referred to Lawrence O'Donnell as a dingbat, and I stand by that, but keep in mind: I have high standards. O'Donnell is far from the worst of the current crop of turnips passing themselves off as Amurrkin journalists, and he has a healthy contempt for Donald Trump, and a very refreshing lack of inhibition when it comes to showing that contempt on the air. (Wonder how O'Donnell would weigh in on the question of journalistic objectivity?) Dingbat or not, O'Donnell would make an infinitely better President of the United States than Donald Trump, just as most of us would.

It's good that O'Donnell goes right after Trump, because 1) It's so important that Trump be stopped that even a big movement within Trump's own party has named itself after that very cause; and 2) Trump is such an easy target that it's hard even for a dingbat like O'Donnell to screw it up. And yesterday, reporting on Trump's news conference about the money raised for veterans' groups -- and hastily given to those groups only after the press has discovered that Trump had been lying about it -- O'Donnell got in a good shot: at the press conference, O'Donnell said, Trump "defended his integrity the only way he knows how: by lying."

Yesterday on some of the other news-talk shows, pundits wondered whether this story with Trump and the veterans' groups -- claiming at yesterday's news conference that he did the fundraising strictly for the veterans and didn't want any credit for it, when in fact he did the fundraising in front of TV cameras, and has kept praising his own alleged part in it on TV for months now, but then only actually giving the money after the Washington Post found out the veterans' groups hadn't gotten it yet, and then in yesterday's news conference saying that it takes time to vet groups who are getting donations and that he had never heard of some of these groups, while in fact he had spoken before some of these groups and had other personal dealings with them, and verbally abusing the press for scrutinizing him -- verbally abusing them for this at a press conference he had called -- etc --anyway, some pundits are wondering whether this press conference might finally have been so horrible that Trump's own behavior might start to hurt him in the polls.

Well, let's hope so. But, of course, Trump's publicly-known behavior going back decades has been more than horrible enough to keep him from getting nearly as far as he has in politics -- if the press had done its job, and told people about it, clearly and directly enough for them to understand. The real question is whether yesterday, Trump's insults of the press were finally disgusting enough to get them off of their asses. This man should not be President, period. The press should warn the public to that effect, period. If they feel helpless and uncertain about how to proceed on this vital task, there are videos of Lawrence O'Donnell's show on the MSNBC website.

There are thousands of news stories per day about Trump. If most or all of those stories kept hammering away about how Trump lies all the friggin time, constantly, the way that young Mr O'Donnell constantly does, then a lot more people might start to notice it. Trump doesn't lie skillfully enough that it's a matter of whose word you take. It's a matter of comparing one piece of video of Trump with another piece from the same day. It's a matter of paying attention. Unfortunately, most voters are too busy to spend as much time examining candidates for political office as carefully as they should. It's the press' job to help them -- not to sit back and wring their hands and say, "Oh, he's a juggernaut, he's unstoppable, there's nothing we can do!"

Sam Harris On Lawrence O'Donnell

Sam Harris is a dingbat. So is Lawrence O'Donnell. But I have something important in common with each of them: Harris and I are both atheists, and O'Donnell and I are both Democrats. If the one dingbat hadn't been on the other's show last night (MSNBC fired Olbermann and gave O'Donnell a nightly show. Paranoid Democrats should be forgiven if they occasionally wonder whether MSNBC is a fiendishly clever right-wing scheme to destroy the Democratic Party), I probably wouldn't have anything to say about him right now, just as I wouldn't have had anything to say about Michael Paulkovich if Free Inquiry hadn't published his piece on the 126.

But Harris was on O'Donnell's show last night, and the two of them were discussing Islam as if it were just like Christianity, except 700 years earlier. Harris said, for example, "It‘s as though we‘re encountering the Christians of the 14th century, armed with 21st century weapons."

Well, no, it's not like that, ya freakin dingbat. Christianity and Islam are not going through similar courses of development. And I'm going to concentrate on the development of Western Christianity here because it's clear that's what he had in mind, and not clear if he knows as many as 4 facts about Byzantium. And Islam actually began more like 600 years after Christianity did.

Let's run a while with this thesis that Islam is taking a course similar to Christianity's. 500 years after it began, (Western) Christianity was smack dab in the dark of the Dark Ages. (I'm using the term Dark Ages to mean, not the entirety of the Middle Ages between Antiquity and the Renaissance, but the period between the middle of the 5th century and the end of the 8th, which even compared to the Middle ages in general was dark.) We're talking about a welter of war, chaos, plague, illiteracy, superstition to the stage of rampant mass hallicination, etc.

500 years after Islam began it was maintaining many elements of the Golden Islam of Islam, leading the world in math, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, physics, architecture, etc, while holding off the beginnings of those barbarian invasions which we know as the Crusades. Not so much already with the parallel courses of development.

What does Harris envision with this parallax view when he thinks of Islam 400 years from now: Islam colonizing Christendom the way Christendon colonized Islam in the 19th and 20th centuries?

Okay, enough for right now about Harris and his notions, let's summarize the mess with ISIS, the so-called "Islamic State," which, let's face it, is the only reason Harris and his Islamophobic fear-mongering got onto the other dingbat's show last night: it has perhaps as many as 35,000 troops currently, and its stated ambition is to bring all of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world under its control. It's currently fighting against Iraqi and Syrian Muslims and against Kurds, who have no state of their own and are mostly Muslims, and whom Turkey is not supporting because of longstanding ethnic hostilities between (Islamic) Turks and Kurds, and also because Turkey hopes that ISIS will destabilize or even topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad (a Muslim) in Syria; however, some of the (Muslim) Syrian rebels who also oppose Assad are fighting alongside the Kurds against ISIS. And a few non-Islamic Westerners have gotten caught in the fray. Yes, it's horrible the way ISIS has been beheading Westerners, but they're only a tiny fraction of the casualties in the conflict between these extremists nuts and most of the rest of the world, which is what it comes down to, just as it would be if it came down to it with most extremist nuts, whatever their metaphysical beliefs or lack of them: the extremists versus all the rest of us. Most of the people in the world oppose extremism, and say so, but Harris is too busy cherry-picking books for justifications for his fear to raise his head and look around a bit and see that the world is much more complicated than how he's trying to tell us it is.