How America Went Haywire - Kurt Andersen

Link to the article:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/

This short video can serve as introduction:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=131&v=15ovRt5IW6Q

Spoiler
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In 1968, a UC Davis psychologist named Charles Tart conducted an experiment in which, he wrote, “a young woman who frequently had spontaneous out-of-body experiences”—didn’t “claim to have” them but “had” them—spent four nights sleeping in a lab, hooked up to an EEG machine. Her assigned task was to send her mind or soul out of her body while she was asleep and read a five-digit number Tart had written on a piece of paper placed on a shelf above the bed. He reported that she succeeded. Other scientists considered the experiments and the results bogus, but Tart proceeded to devote his academic career to proving that attempts at objectivity are a sham and magic is real.

In an extraordinary paper published in 1972 in Science, he complained about the scientific establishment’s “almost total rejection of the knowledge gained” while high or tripping. He didn’t just want science to take seriously “experiences of ecstasy, mystical union, other ‘dimensions,’ rapture, beauty, space-and-time transcendence.” He was explicitly dedicated to going there. A “perfectly scientific theory may be based on data that have no physical existence,” he insisted. The rules of the scientific method had to be revised. To work as a psychologist in the new era, Tart argued, a researcher should be in the altered state of consciousness he’s studying, high or delusional “at the time of data collection” or during “data reduction and theorizing.” Tart’s new mode of research, he admitted, posed problems of “consensual validation,” given that “only observers in the same [altered state] are able to communicate adequately with one another.” Tart popularized the term consensus reality for what you or I would simply call reality, and around 1970 that became a permanent interdisciplinary term of art in academia. Later he abandoned the pretense of neutrality and started calling it the consensus trance—people committed to reason and rationality were the deluded dupes, not he and his tribe.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”


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Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers, and to recruit more. False beliefs were rendered both more real-seeming and more contagious, creating a kind of fantasy cascade in which millions of bedoozled Americans surfed and swam.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say. Our marketplace of ideas became exponentially bigger and freer than ever, it’s true. Thomas Jefferson said that he’d “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it”—because in the new United States, “reason is left free to combat” every sort of “error of opinion.” However, I think if he and our other Enlightenment forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.


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Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of results. For instance, beginning in the ’90s, conspiracists decided that contrails, the skinny clouds of water vapor that form around jet-engine exhaust, were composed of exotic chemicals, part of a secret government scheme to test weapons or poison citizens or mitigate climate change—and renamed them chemtrails. When I Googled chemtrails proof, the first seven results offered so-called evidence of the nonexistent conspiracy. When I searched for government extraterrestrial cover-up, only one result in the first three pages didn’t link to an article endorsing a conspiracy theory.


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But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016, wrote last year. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.” The party’s ideological center of gravity swerved way to the right of Rove and all the Bushes, finally knocking them and their clubmates aside. What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.


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He doesn’t like experts, because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts, to feel the truth. He sees conspiracies everywhere. He exploited the myths of white racial victimhood. His case of what I call Kids R Us syndrome—spoiled, impulsive, moody, a 71-year-old brat—is acute.


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Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites. In 2011, he became the chief promoter of the fantasy that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a fringe idea that he brought into the mainstream. Only in the fall of 2016 did he grudgingly admit that the president was indeed a native-born American—at the same moment a YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that a majority of Republicans still believed Obama probably or definitely had been born in Kenya. 
Conspiracies, conspiracies, still more conspiracies. On Fox & Friends Trump discussed, as if it were fact, the National Enquirer’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’s father was connected to JFK’s assassination: “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, before the shooting? It’s horrible.” The Fox News anchors interviewing him didn’t challenge him or follow up. He revived the 1993 fantasy about the Clintons’ friend Vince Foster—his death, Trump said, was “very fishy,” because Foster “had intimate knowledge of what was going on. He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide … I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder.” He has also promised to make sure that “you will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center.” And it has all worked for him, because so many Americans are eager to believe almost any conspiracy theory, no matter how implausible, as long as it jibes with their opinions and feelings.


I wasn't going to post this because the whole thing is long as fuck and I doubt people will read everything, but I think the article is too relevant to something else that I've saw:

Spoiler






Sauce:https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/896326301832925184

Last bumped on Aug 17, 2017, 10:37:45 AM
Shit, some of those tweets are ignorant as fuck.
GGG banning all political discussion shortly after getting acquired by China is a weird coincidence.
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Xavderion wrote:
Shit, some of those tweets are ignorant as fuck.

It's just another twitter racist. Deposit posts in nearest garbage bin where they belong.

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re: the main topic, seems like an interesting discussion that is marred entirely by political speech. The assertion that the main reason for a Trump presidency is fantasy is plainly incorrect and a cheap dig at "the other". There is likely a small percentage of Americans that live outside conventional reality on both sides of the political spectrum.

I would wager that the number of people convinced that Obama was going to try to take away everyone's guns (fantasy #1) is not dissimilar from the number of people convinced that HRC's e-mails were faked (fantasy #2). Or that the number of people convinced that the Clinton family kills people to keep things quiet (fantasy #3) is roughly the same as those that honestly believe the recent push-poll about Republicans wanting to postpone elections (fantasy #4).

When the dust clears, the baser truths remain. Truths about the amount of taxation people want to manage, or how many resources we have or need, or how much environmentalism we care to support at some cost, or what kind of people should sit on our Supreme Court.

The main thrust of the article is that we have to return to reality, which seems like a good thing to hope for. Curious advice from a novelist that writes for The Atlantic, though, and who was a teenager in the generation when it all "went wrong".

Also I enjoyed the nice little paragraph about how libertarianism is infantile and based solely on Randian philosophy. What a guy.
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Thomas Jefferson said that he’d “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it”—because in the new United States, “reason is left free to combat” every sort of “error of opinion.” However, I think if he and our other Enlightenment forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.
We do not have too much of that good thing. Does reason remain free to combat unreason? If you're a member of the press, I guess so; if you're an engineer at Google, not so much. I would remind Mr. Anderson to check his privilege.

Still, this is why God founded Anonymous. Reason might not be free to invade the echo chambers of the left, but anyone can go into the echo chambers of the right and debate them. But do people do this? For the next few days, yes, to signal their virtue (ScrotieMcB said hypocritically). But as someone who argued with national socialists on the regular pre-Charlottesville, I can say confidently that reason has been really slacking off when it comes to combatting unreason.

So soneka, have you considered the possibility the maybe /pol/ needs to read your post more than we do? You too can be Anonymous. But maybe hold off for a few days. Like I said, lots of virtue signallers currently.
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“The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016, wrote last year. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”
The mainstream media convinces people the mainstream media cannot be trusted. Have you already forgotten WMDs in Iraq, much less 2016 coverage that reading Wikileaks is illegal or the preelection polling? They have a clear bias and deserve to be viewed with a critical eye.

The problem is this: once the conservative anti-MSM propagandists tear the golden statue of Wolf Blitzer down from its pedestal, what happens to that exalted position? Is it replaced with the bust of Alex Jones, a new fountainhead of premature enlightenment to be swallowed on blind faith? (For the record, I don't believe InfoWars is significantly worse than CNN, but it most certainly is an upgrade.) Trust should be earned, and a great many in the alternative media have not earned it.

You're not really "woke" if you're conscious enough only to move from the bedroom to the living room sofa then pass out again; you're still in dreamland, you're just laying in a different bed. We've got mainstream media liars and alternative media liars. The false dichotomy. The pincer attack. Poison as food and poison as antidote.



Re: tweets... Affirmative Action is 1) law and 2) discrimination against white males. In order to "justify" it on fight-fire-with-fire grounds, its supporters must claim extralegal discrimination against women and ethnic minorities equal to or greater to Affirmative Action currently exists. But I don't believe anything can be justified by discrimination against those who have not necessarily discriminated against anyone.
When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Aug 14, 2017, 4:29:26 PM
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pneuma wrote:
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Xavderion wrote:
Shit, some of those tweets are ignorant as fuck.

It's just another twitter racist. Deposit posts in nearest garbage bin where they belong.

Yup, agreed.

As for the article, a lot of overly opinionated mental flagellation.
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▒▒▒▒░░░░░ cipher_nemo ░░░░░▒▒▒▒ │ Waggro Level: ♠○○○○ │ 1244
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He writes well. His magical thinking, however doesn't really fly with anyone who is even slightly informed on the subject.

Let's take his comments:

"Why are we like this?

The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible."


Has Kurt Andersen never traveled outside the United States? When he did travel, did he talk to people who live in these other countries? There is no one country with a monopoly on unusual ideas, and what people consider the truth depends on their background, locale, education, personal experiences and so on.

Sadly, Kurt isn't alone in his false equivalencies, where he subjugates observation and documented facts to personal biases. Even well educated professionals are often deluded by their bias to overlook key data.



Compare his lackadaisical logic with real science:

Perceptual Biases in Relation to Paranormal and Conspiracy Beliefs


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482736/


From the abstract:

"Previous studies have shown that one’s prior beliefs have a strong effect on perceptual decision-making and attentional processing. The present study extends these findings by investigating how individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are related to perceptual and attentional biases. Two field studies were conducted in which visitors of a paranormal conducted a perceptual decision making task (i.e. the face / house categorization task; Experiment 1) or a visual attention task (i.e. the global / local processing task; Experiment 2). In the first experiment it was found that skeptics compared to believers more often incorrectly categorized ambiguous face stimuli as representing a house, indicating that disbelief rather than belief in the paranormal is driving the bias observed for the categorization of ambiguous stimuli. "

The research study goes on to demonstrate biases in both styles of thinking, and categorizes them as global-to-local interference effect or local-to-global interference effect.

A rundown of what that entails can be found here:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00539/full

Kurt conveniently ignores that the vast majority of humans have believed and still believe in some things that are scientifically questionable. His brain isn't wired better than those who do. Nor are the brains of the scientists who do such studies and keep reporting "contradictory" conspiracy beliefs.

There was another article I was reading on this, where they writer calmly and falsely claimed that any two ideas were less likely to be true than one of those ideas alone. Had he taken his logic a step further and asked - is it less likely that the Earth is round because the speed of light is fixed? He could have discovered that things that are true, don't have a likelihood of being true - they are or they aren't. Further, if things are related in a cause and effect manner (Fixed Gravity, Wind resistance resulting in terminal velocity) than unrelated ideas can become logically intertwined. Whether that logic is sound or whether the relationship actually exists, and why the subject believes a relationship exists should be the focus of their studies.

For "scientists" to assume that all people should think the same way is bad thinking. It is almost as if they didn't believe in evolution and the diversity of the species.

Its essentially all fun and games now anyways, just about everything these experts are supposing will be rewritten with measurable, repeatable data from PET scans. The experts WON'T be happy with what they find.
PoE Origins - Piety's story http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2081910
Last edited by DalaiLama on Aug 17, 2017, 10:40:23 AM

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