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  • Originally posted by zraver View Post
    Russian Collusion, Vast Rightwing conspiracy, Iraq was about the US controlling Iraqi oil, adult anatomical males have the right to undress in front of girls, socialism works.... The left certainly is smug, it is not intellectual. The reliance on pathos to the absolute exclusion of logos precludes them being intellectual unless you mean in the absinthe drinking talking about talking sort of way.
    Russian Collusion, check.
    Vast Rightwing conspiracy, check. (It was originally called the Arkansas Project. Look it up.)
    Iraq was about the US controlling Iraqi oil, check. ("The war will pay for itself," said the ex-oilman.)
    adult anatomical males have the right to undress in front of girls, huh? Did you just make that up?
    socialism works, sometimes. Ask Sweden or Singapore.
    Trust me?
    I'm an economist!

    Comment


    • considering our current Prez, the discussion of Lefty pathos over logos is pretty funny.

      in any case, my examples are based on very specific and recent right wing conspiracy theory. the closest recent lefty equivalent is probably vaccines. again, focus of the ideologies is different, and they appeal to different groups.

      but in this regard our President is bipartisan: he has talked about both birtherism and the dangers of vaccines...
      There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

      Comment


      • Definitely a lot of whacko conspiracy theories on the right. A lot of the folk I talk to are still obsessed with Vince Foster.
        "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

        Comment


        • Originally posted by GVChamp View Post
          Definitely a lot of whacko conspiracy theories on the right.
          This is one area that the Right cranks up the dial to 11, no question about it.
          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

          Comment


          • LOL, the right wing conspiracy nuts are out in force again I see on some sites. Since McCabe retired, resigned, quit, was fired or was forced out (pick one to win the Lotto) it is now firm proof that he was biased towards Trump and protective of Clinton. Can't wait to read Z's take on this...

            Comment


            • Originally posted by tbm3fan View Post
              LOL, the right wing conspiracy nuts are out in force again I see on some sites. Since McCabe retired, resigned, quit, was fired or was forced out (pick one to win the Lotto) it is now firm proof that he was biased towards Trump and protective of Clinton. Can't wait to read Z's take on this...
              Wray went to the House on Sunday and read the memo, he forced McCabe out within 24 hours. Then the Federalist runs an article on a book that names him as a major anti-Trump leaker and false news source. He has lost his retirement and will hopefully face charges. His name goes on the list of other top FBI/DoJ officils removed, transferred or sacked for partisan political acts in public office including Comey, Strozk, Paige and Ohr.

              Comment


              • Originally posted by DOR View Post
                Russian Collusion, check.
                Vast Rightwing conspiracy, check. (It was originally called the Arkansas Project. Look it up.)
                Iraq was about the US controlling Iraqi oil, check. ("The war will pay for itself," said the ex-oilman.)
                adult anatomical males have the right to undress in front of girls, huh? Did you just make that up?
                socialism works, sometimes. Ask Sweden or Singapore.
                Yeah, Sweden. It workz....
                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkUsJWBEysc

                Socialism doesn't work because it relies on the lowest common denominator which always leads to tribalism. Its regressive in its nature and thus it seeks to annihilate itself. On the rightwing side, when lead to the extremes, it too creates self destruct mechanisms that arise from asynchronous development. What is needed is the balance between these two. Its like a driving a car, if you can turn only right you will go in circles same as if you turn only to the left.
                Last edited by Versus; 30 Jan 18,, 11:43.

                Comment


                • Commentary: I study liars. I've never seen one like Donald Trump.

                  I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Donald Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people's.

                  In research beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. They handed them in to us with no names attached. We calculated participants' rates of lying and categorized each lie as either self-serving (told to advantage the liar or protect the liar from embarrassment, blame or other undesired outcomes) or kind (told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else).

                  At The Washington Post, the Fact Checker feature has been tracking every false and misleading claim and flip-flop made by Trump this year. The inclusion of misleading statements and flip-flops is consistent with the definition of lying my colleagues and I gave to our participants: "A lie occurs any time you intentionally try to mislead someone." In the case of Trump's claims, though, it is possible to ascertain only whether they were false or misleading, and not what the president's intentions were.

                  I categorized the most recent 400 lies that The Post had documented through mid-November in the same way my colleagues and I had categorized the lies of the participants in our study.

                  The college students in our research told an average of two lies a day, and the community members told one. (A more recent study of the lies 1,000 U. S. adults told in the previous 24 hours found that people told an average of 1.65 lies per day; the authors noted that 60 percent of the participants said they told no lies at all, while the top 5 percent of liars told nearly half of all the falsehoods in the study.) The most prolific liar among the students told an average of 6.6 lies a day. The biggest liar in the community sample told 4.3 lies in an average day.

                  In Trump's first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post's tally. That's about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump's false statements — the ones he makes publicly — so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.

                  That rate has been accelerating. Starting in early October, The Post's tracking showed that Trump told a remarkable nine lies a day, outpacing even the biggest liars in our research.

                  But the flood of deceit isn't the most surprising finding about Trump.

                  Both the college students and the community members in our study served their own interests with their lies more often than other people's interests. They told lies to try to advantage themselves in the workplace, the marketplace, their personal relationships and just about every other domain of everyday life. For example, a salesperson told a customer that the jeans she was trying on were not too tight, so she could make the sale. The participants also lied to protect themselves psychologically: One college student told a classmate that he wasn't worried about his grades, so the classmate wouldn't think he was stupid.

                  Less often, the participants lied in kind ways, to help other people get what they wanted, look or feel better, or to spare them from embarrassment or blame. For example, a son told his mother he didn't mind taking her shopping, and a woman took sides with a friend who was divorcing, even though she thought her friend was at fault, too.

                  About half the lies the participants told were self-serving (46 percent for the college students, 57 percent for the community members), compared with about a quarter that were kind (26 percent for the students, 24 percent for the community members). Other lies did not fit either category; they included, for instance, lies told to entertain or to keep conversations running smoothly.

                  One category of lies was so small that when we reported the results, we just tucked them into a footnote. Those were cruel lies, told to hurt or disparage others. For example, one person told a co-worker that the boss wanted to see him when he really didn't, "so he'd look like a fool." Just 0.8 percent of the lies told by the college students and 2.4 percent of the lies told by the community members were mean-spirited.

                  My colleagues and I found it easy to code each of our participants' lies into just one category. This was not the case for Trump. Close to a quarter of his false statements (24 percent) served several purposes simultaneously.

                  Nearly two-thirds of Trump's lies (65 percent) were self-serving. Examples included: "They're big tax cuts — the biggest cuts in the history of our country, actually" and, about the people who came to see him on a presidential visit to Vietnam last month: "They were really lined up in the streets by the tens of thousands."

                  Slightly less than 10 percent of Trump's lies were kind ones, told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else. An example was his statement on Twitter that "it is a 'miracle' how fast the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police were able to find the demented shooter and stop him from even more killing!" In the broadest sense, it is possible to interpret every lie as ultimately self-serving, but I tried to stick to how statements appeared on the surface.

                  Trump told 6.6 times as many self-serving lies as kind ones. That's a much higher ratio than we found for our study participants, who told about double the number of self-centered lies compared with kind ones.

                  The most stunning way Trump's lies differed from our participants', though, was in their cruelty. An astonishing 50 percent of Trump's lies were hurtful or disparaging. For example, he proclaimed that John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey, all career intelligence or law enforcement officials, were "political hacks." He said that "the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close." He insisted that other "countries, they don't put their finest in the lottery system. They put people probably in many cases that they don't want." And he claimed that "Ralph Northam, who is running for Governor of Virginia, is fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs & sanctuary cities."

                  The Trump lies that could not be coded into just one category were typically told both to belittle others and enhance himself. For example: "Senator Bob Corker 'begged' me to endorse him for reelection in Tennessee. I said 'NO' and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement)."

                  The sheer frequency of Trump's lies appears to be having an effect, and it may not be the one he is going for. A Politico/Morning Consult poll from late October showed that only 35 percent of voters believed that Trump was honest, while 51 percent said he was not honest. (The others said they didn't know or had no opinion.) Results of a Quinnipiac University poll from November were similar: Thirty-seven percent of voters thought Trump was honest, compared with 58 percent who thought he was not.

                  For fewer than 40 percent of American voters to see the president as honest is truly remarkable. Most humans, most of the time, believe other people. That's our default setting. Usually, we need a reason to disbelieve.

                  Research on the detection of deception consistently documents this "truth bias." In the typical study, participants observe people making statements and are asked to indicate, each time, whether they think the person is lying or telling the truth. Measuring whether people believe others should be difficult to do accurately, because simply asking the question disrupts the tendency to assume that other people are telling the truth. It gives participants a reason to wonder. And yet, in our statistical summary of more than 200 studies, Charles F. Bond Jr. and I found that participants still believed other people more often than they should have — 58 percent of the time in studies in which only half of the statements were truthful. People are biased toward believing others, even in studies in which they are told explicitly that only half of the statements they will be judging are truths.

                  By telling so many lies, and so many that are mean-spirited, Trump is violating some of the most fundamental norms of human social interaction and human decency. Many of the rest of us, in turn, have abandoned a norm of our own — we no longer give Trump the benefit of the doubt that we usually give so readily. Link
                  ______________

                  It's a given that politicians lie. It's what they do, it's practically woven into the very fabric of their being. But Trump...well, he's always considered himself an overachiever. He's certainly nailed it in this category.
                  “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                  Comment


                  • Fire and Fury Author Michael Wolff 'On the Media' interview: https://www.wnyc.org/story/michael-wolff-go-back

                    My favorite quote BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] Now, early last year, speaking to Brian Stelter on CNN, you said that the media was at war with Trump, that the press was being hysterical and making fools of themselves in their anti-Trump zeal.

                    [CLIP]:

                    MICHAEL WOLFF: He in every situation seems to be provoking an overreaction, so we go into a fit of apoplexy and as we try to go after his credibility, our credibility becomes equally a problem.

                    Bernie Sanders on NPR this morning "Yes. I think it's absolutely imperative that we do more than just talk about Trump day after day. And some of us have been trying to do that. Well, I have to tell you it's sometimes hard to get that stuff out through the media."

                    I don't like Trump's attack's on the media or the fake news, but to hear the media is under attack in this country as oppose to say Venezuela, Cuba China Russia. Not so much.

                    The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. It doesn't guarantee that you have to love the press or answer their questions or even have customers accept your presentation as unquestionable fact. I think the media tries to get it right but like all of us it sometime falls short of perfection. To paraphrase Voltaire " Cable news channels are not news. Opine 5 hours a week eventually you are going to have make up some stuff.

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
                      Commentary: I study liars. I've never seen one like Donald Trump.
                      Basically what we're seeing is the revival of what the Germans called der große lüge.
                      "Every man has his weakness. Mine was always just cigarettes."

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by DOR View Post
                        Russian Collusion, check.
                        Vast Rightwing conspiracy, check. (It was originally called the Arkansas Project. Look it up.)
                        Iraq was about the US controlling Iraqi oil, check. ("The war will pay for itself," said the ex-oilman.)
                        adult anatomical males have the right to undress in front of girls, huh? Did you just make that up?
                        socialism works, sometimes. Ask Sweden or Singapore.
                        No proof of Russian collusion, not even any circumstantial evidence, let alone an actual crime.

                        VRWC; nope, just principled opposition

                        Iraq; not about oil, the US never controlled Iraq's oil profits or extirpated its revenues.

                        No I did not make up the Trans demand that they be provided access to dressing rooms where kids change such as a public pool.

                        Sweden and Singapore... two small examples what about Venezuela, Soviet Union, Mao's China, Cambodia, Cuba, Zimbabwe....

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by zraver View Post
                          No proof of Russian collusion, not even any circumstantial evidence, let alone an actual crime.
                          So, what are all the investigations about?

                          VRWC; nope, just principled opposition
                          Right, starting before WJC even took office ...

                          Iraq; not about oil, the US never controlled Iraq's oil profits or extirpated its revenues.
                          Tell that to the Bushies. The fact that they utterly failed doesn’t mean they didn’t intend to steal the oil.

                          No I did not make up the Trans demand that they be provided access to dressing rooms where kids change such as a public pool.
                          You just made it sound like a DNC platform plank. Fake News!

                          Sweden and Singapore... two small examples what about Venezuela, Soviet Union, Mao's China, Cambodia, Cuba, Zimbabwe....
                          It only takes one example to disprove an absolute.
                          Trust me?
                          I'm an economist!

                          Comment


                          • Originally posted by DOR View Post
                            So, what are all the investigations about?
                            politics


                            Right, starting before WJC even took office ...
                            He was shady before he took office. He ended up being impeached for lying about an act in a suit about an event that occurred before he took office.


                            Tell that to the Bushies. The fact that they utterly failed doesn’t mean they didn’t intend to steal the oil.
                            Delusional


                            You just made it sound like a DNC platform plank. Fake News!
                            Nope, all too real


                            It only takes one example to disprove an absolute.
                            Neither of your examples is working very well

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by zraver View Post
                              No proof of Russian collusion, not even any circumstantial evidence, let alone an actual crime.
                              Shirley havin a larf?

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by snapper View Post
                                Shirley havin a larf?
                                At you. Prove it!
                                Chimo

                                Comment

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