What a Lousy Party
Political parties, religion, gangs and even sports teams are at the heart of what's wrong with humanity. I've often defined the fundamental inner turmoil at once unique to and endemic amongst human kind as a conflict between the desire to be accepted by a group, and the need to establish one's own identity as an individual. The problem is, your individuality has to be recognized and reinforced, often in terms that point out your difference from and superiority to others, and this comes from your in-group...your friends, your teammates, your party members, the church choir, your homies, or your advisers...whoever. Meanwhile, they expect the same from you, and there you are locked in a feedback loop, reinforcing each others prejudices, repeating the same tired logic, defending the same ideas and rejecting anything that threatens your little worldview. Never looking objectively at all the facts and weighing them equally.
Well, it turns out that my little insight has some grounding in the physiology of the brain...to wit : "Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning..."
Read the whole story here.
So a partisan brain is an unreasonable, unthinking emotional animal. I've known this all along. When you disagree with Republicans, they assume you must be a Democrat, employing the false dichotomy so famously used by Bush to lump all of us who didn't vote for him in with the terrorists, since "if your not with (him), you're with them." I even had a friend accuse me of being an unwitting pawn of the liberal media because I suggested that there were detainees killed by American agents during interrogation, as discovered by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act request. Whether the über-Liberal ACLU got the info or not, it's the U.S. government's own data!
And, when you disagree with a Democrat, they'll start calling you a Dittohead and a Republican before you can even complete a sentence. By the time you can spit out "all government is coercive violence," they've accused you of scheming to convert Alaskan endangered Caribou into fuel for your Hummer while giving Haliburton the no-bid contract to pave a highway through their backyard. Nobody cares what's right or wrong, Clinton governed like a Republican, balancing the budget, reforming welfare, signing free trade agreements, schtupping the interns, locking up more potheads on Federal charges than any administration before or since, lying, having his shady dealings and tawdry intrigues covered up, being dishonest, then starting a few wars (er...emergency deployments) to distract the people, followed by more lying. He was reviled by the G.O.P. Bush has governed like Stalin, keeping an enemies list, destroying the Constitution (it was Lincoln who first said he had "a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy," Bush and Lincoln have a lot in common) illegally spying on citizens, freezing their assets and taking their property, expanding the reach and size of government at a pace that would make FDR cringe, passing a 500 BILLION dollar expansion of the welfare state, wresting control from the states over education in order to create yet another centralized Federal beaureacracy, and Democrats hate him. He is their wet dream made corporeal, but they can't stand him...and they loved Clinton.
People (and by "people", I mean the sheeple, aka, "most people") just want to feel like part of a group, with an identity that differentiates them from others, yet with the legitimacy that only a larger group can afford them. They will contort time and space, at the expense of reason and their principles (should they have any to begin with), to justify it. Thinking for themselves never crosses their minds, since they'd actually have to be thinking first, besides, conformity becomes a distinction in this twilight zone, and those who most rabidly toe the party line are often rewarded with power and prestige. This primitive tribalism is a vestige of our primordial past, but it will destroy us if it persists, and it shows no signs of abatement. As we speak, Islamic fundies are burning buildings because of a few bad cartoons.
We're all doomed.
Let's have a drink...or 6!
GULP!
Here's to run-on sentences and parenthetical asides. Cheers!
Well, it turns out that my little insight has some grounding in the physiology of the brain...to wit : "Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning..."
Read the whole story here.
So a partisan brain is an unreasonable, unthinking emotional animal. I've known this all along. When you disagree with Republicans, they assume you must be a Democrat, employing the false dichotomy so famously used by Bush to lump all of us who didn't vote for him in with the terrorists, since "if your not with (him), you're with them." I even had a friend accuse me of being an unwitting pawn of the liberal media because I suggested that there were detainees killed by American agents during interrogation, as discovered by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act request. Whether the über-Liberal ACLU got the info or not, it's the U.S. government's own data!
And, when you disagree with a Democrat, they'll start calling you a Dittohead and a Republican before you can even complete a sentence. By the time you can spit out "all government is coercive violence," they've accused you of scheming to convert Alaskan endangered Caribou into fuel for your Hummer while giving Haliburton the no-bid contract to pave a highway through their backyard. Nobody cares what's right or wrong, Clinton governed like a Republican, balancing the budget, reforming welfare, signing free trade agreements, schtupping the interns, locking up more potheads on Federal charges than any administration before or since, lying, having his shady dealings and tawdry intrigues covered up, being dishonest, then starting a few wars (er...emergency deployments) to distract the people, followed by more lying. He was reviled by the G.O.P. Bush has governed like Stalin, keeping an enemies list, destroying the Constitution (it was Lincoln who first said he had "a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy," Bush and Lincoln have a lot in common) illegally spying on citizens, freezing their assets and taking their property, expanding the reach and size of government at a pace that would make FDR cringe, passing a 500 BILLION dollar expansion of the welfare state, wresting control from the states over education in order to create yet another centralized Federal beaureacracy, and Democrats hate him. He is their wet dream made corporeal, but they can't stand him...and they loved Clinton.
People (and by "people", I mean the sheeple, aka, "most people") just want to feel like part of a group, with an identity that differentiates them from others, yet with the legitimacy that only a larger group can afford them. They will contort time and space, at the expense of reason and their principles (should they have any to begin with), to justify it. Thinking for themselves never crosses their minds, since they'd actually have to be thinking first, besides, conformity becomes a distinction in this twilight zone, and those who most rabidly toe the party line are often rewarded with power and prestige. This primitive tribalism is a vestige of our primordial past, but it will destroy us if it persists, and it shows no signs of abatement. As we speak, Islamic fundies are burning buildings because of a few bad cartoons.
We're all doomed.
Let's have a drink...or 6!
GULP!
Here's to run-on sentences and parenthetical asides. Cheers!
posted by Dylboz at
9:58 PM
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