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Quote of the Day – Reason
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into. ― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science
Wonder why Harris isn’t ten percentage points behind Donald Trump? However egregious the Donald is, Harris is worse. The performance records of both – if one is amenable to reason – clearly show Trump superior to Harris. That is not necessarily an endorsement of Trump. Kamala Harris is simply so bad that no person aware of the performance and positions of both – and aware of the advantages of free markets and decentralization over command economies and centralized government – could reasonably conclude Harris would be the superior President.
Those who oppose Trump and support Harris are not reaching a reasoned position. They are acting out of emotion. They either dislike Trump so much they are willing to ignore Harris’s flaws or so afraid of being thought to belong to “the wrong camp” that they unthinkingly cling to Harris. Giving the issue thought and reasoning out a conclusion is simply too painful.
The arguments for Harris and against Trump are both emotion-based. Support Harris because it is brat. (What a nonsense term.) Vote Harris because “joy.” Trump is “literally Hitler.” So is Vance. (So was DeSantis, but he is out of political play right now, so his “literally Hitler” status is on the shelf.) Never mind that Hitler’s positions (corporate socialism, lock up your political opponents, and separate people by ethnicity) were a lot closer to that of today’s mainline Democrats than that of Trump or populist Republicans. Trump and Vance are the worst. They are so the worst that even killing them is acceptable. No thinking. All emotion.
How do you deal with it? I really do not know. I believe countering with an even stronger emotional appeal is counterproductive. When both sides are sufficiently demonized civil war results. Appealing to reason usually fails because you cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
On the other hand, appealing to reason does sometimes work. The emotional hysteria the Harris campaign depends upon is exhausting. It is also debilitating. It makes people physically sick. It is one reason so many young people today have emotional and mental problems. The Two Minute Hate is draining – and today’s progressives expect it to be maintained for hours at a time. Most people eventually ask themselves whether it is worth it. Reasoning with people at that stage often works. It is the basis of the walkaway movement.
I also feel Harris’s reliance upon emotion will prove less productive than the Democrats believe. Politics, media and entertainment are all industries where the ability to manipulate emotion is the coin of the realm. They are also Harris’s power base – pretty much her only power base. Yet emotions are based on perception – and reality has an ugly way of intruding.
Years ago I had a boss who kept telling me, “You have to understand, perception is everything. It is all that matters.” To which I would reply, “If the perception is the plane is flying straight and level at 10,000 feet and the reality is you are spinning in at 500 feet, your perceptions are going to get a reality check within a minute.” I suspect the Democrats will get a reality check within 60 days.
Published in Group Writing
We a living among insane delusional people .
After Obama gave us triple the cost of medicine and a weaponized spy state that sensors , persecutes and imprisons at best , misdemeanors and innocents . Then Biden (obama 2 ) unleashed the Just Us dept and disastrous policies .
I could go on . Like I said insane delusional times . Woe is us if we can’t wake these people up .
I am confident that several of them will check in here to tell me how awful Trump is compared to Harris.
Take comfort. Insane delusional people have made up a significant portion of the population throughout history. In the past reality weeded them out pretty quickly. It still does. It just takes longer.
Unless they are reasonable people. Then those positions tend to be the easiest to reason them out of.
Is there a genetic component to the trait or whatever produces reason and emotion in people as two different paths for reaching what will determine individual opinion and/or behavior?
What is different between the sexes in opinion and behaviors within cultures. It seems a major contrast in our lifetimes during the 20th century existed between the Chinese, illustrated by the preference for male children under the one-child program, while in America we had an unofficial feminist movement that has influenced opinions and behaviors regarding human reproduction.
This seems to say cultures are different and that then seems important.
Dunno.
It’s my belief that in the world before the fall . God intended for both liberal brains and conservative brains ( your term may vary ) to compliment each other . When the fall occurred the great deceiver using our sinful proclivities perverted everything .
As our culture and Gov expunged God . Havoc reigns in the liberal mind .
Triggered.
That phrase must have come from some 70s or 80s Total Quality Management program, because I had a boss who said exactly the same thing. I loathed the guy. I came into work one morning at Allegheny General Hospital to discover that–overnight–my beloved former boss–the Director of IT who reported to the CEO–had been fired, and the CEO had hired several new layers of IT management from his friends who had just been let go at Price Waterhouse. Basically, one high-level administrator had been replaced by about four, and several others were scattered through the middle-management tier (where I was), none of whom had ever actually worked in a corporate healthcare environment before they appeared.
My thoughts, exactly. Long story short: No matter how brilliant the CEO and his minions perceived their management to be, at what was a very large state-wide health care system, reality begged to differ. It didn’t end well, and they collectively drove the place into the ground–The Patient Died: A Post-mortem on America’s Largest Nonprofit Health Care Failure . Fun times, but fortunately I left before the worst took effect. Such stories I could tell.
My favorite exchange with this “perception is all that matters” guy, though, came during a performance review. (Mine had hitherto been stellar.) This one wasn’t so great, and one of his points, both written, and spoken to me during its course was, “You’re just too argumentative.”
My response? “No I’m not.”
Proud.
The Leninists knew they couldn’t defeat the USA militarily, so they had a plan for us to defeat ourselves. Their target was American exceptionalism. If they could make pride in our country seem like arrogance, people would reject that pride.
They had three targets: journalism, education and entertainment. It took longer than the Soviet Union would survive, but they succeeded in taking over those three institutions and using them to indoctrinate generations of Americans. Obama was the first President who did not believe that America is a force for good in the world. Biden didn’t care; he was a grifter at the head of a crime family, and would go along with anything that maintained his grift.
With the constant gaslighting from the three captured institutions, we are down to the core of America, the sensible center that looks at their nonsense and says, “You can’t really mean that.” Everything else has been peeled away.
If Trump can’t beat the magic ballot machine and loses the election, we will never be able to elect another Republican president. The pendulum is starting to swing in the right direction. We’ll see if it has swung far enough. It’s critical. The Leninist plan is out in the open now and ready to move in for the kill.
Great minds think alike, She. Or maybe they run along the same gutters.
If so, “perceptions are everything” represents the dead opposite of what TQM is supposed to be about. TQM is supposed to be about reality, not perceptions. You are supposed to develop a set of measurable standards and stick to them. Perceptions are not measurable.
TQM used properly is a truly useful manufacturing tool. It was why Japanese automakers were eating the Big Three US automakers’ lunch in the 1970s. On the other hand, if used improperly as part of a management bafflegab toolbox, it is worse than useless. Unfortunately it was more often than not management bafflegab during the 1980s.
We have only survived so long because of the incredible power of the US economy. It’s allowed all that nonsense to flourish without Soviet bread lines and rampant crime everywhere. And yet the last two Democrat administrations have actually been able to push us to the breaking point by importing a ready made criminal underclass. We are teetering on the edge, trying to keep our balance. It’s a toss up whether we will survive or not.
I think the Constitutional form of governing has helped extend our survival, the productive free economy being its foundation.
@douglaspratt They had three targets: journalism, education and entertainment. It took longer than the Soviet Union would survive, but they succeeded in taking over those three institutions and using them to indoctrinate generations of Americans
They did this in the marketplace using lots of money, including taxpayer dollars, because they knew they could not get there through changing things Constitutionally. Too much out in the open and subject to debate. That’s why TDS is epidemic today.
I don’t disagree. When it comes to “manufacturing” and if it’s properly implemented, there’s nothing better.
It’s what you call the “management bafflegab” that mucks things up, along with the inability to recognize the difference between “widgets” and “people.” I went through I dunno how many iterations of versions of TQM at two different health care systems. The only one I thought remotely accounted for the environment and the people was The Studer Method. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better, for healthcare, than the rest, and it actually resulted in some corporate and cultural improvements.
In the early 90s the small college I worked for got a new president. In her first year she introduced TQM training on a voluntary basis. My job was a one-person gig and I was always busy so I avoided any training not mandated. After the first year, volunteers, mostly staff looking for a break from their cubie jobs and young managers kissing up, dried up, so they started mandating TQM training that ran a full 40 hour week away from your actual job. Most of it was sloganeering and vocabulary changes. “Don’t question the process” was one of my favorites. Pro and Con became Plus and Delta, etc… It was, as a coworker said, “Eight hours of training crammed into forty”. As I entered the busiest time of my work year, I was summoned to my manager’s office and told where and when to report for training. At the end, nothing changed, but the president got an award from some higher education institute for her implementation of TQM. To add insult to injury, a month after I completed TQM training, while still catching up on the backlog in my work, I was called by the president’s assistant asking me to take another week away from my job to help train the next group of employees in TQM. Being an army veteran, various iterations of the universal adjective ran through my mind as I formulated my response, not saying “Are you (expletive deleted) kidding me?!?, instead saying I had a demanding job and bowed out, hoping they’d not lean on my boss to change my mind. If that happened, I never heard about it.
I would make it necessary to take a test before being able to vote. Because your average person hates thinking and research they will not focus on politics as much and we can make American politics about policy again. The acronym MAPAPA is maybe a little too wordy but that’s kinda the point.
I ask these questions because it could help in understanding how to react and deal with those people who try to control others, in other words, compel others to certain behaviors. Perhaps in some it is natural with good intentions and in others it is contrived with only the personal interest of the manipulator involved.
What do you think “fundamental transformation” was? Just a lefty dog whistle?
Our minds are based on violent tribal superstitious apes. We did not need a full to be apes.
With everything I have read about genetics and hereditary I would say yes.
When the USAF begin implementing TQM it was soon mandatory for everyone to be trained in it. Somehow I missed every single TQM class ever offered without trying. Honest. I was always sick or deployed.
The years rolled by, I remained TQM ignorant, and then I was selected to be in the unit self assessment team. We had questionnaires, used them to survey different sections, and added up the scores.
I did my best to evaluate honestly, but got some heat because I scored every category lower than my team mates. When everything was added up the team leader was horrified. The total score was so high for an initial evaluation that there was no room for improvement. It simply wasn’t credible.
The whole thing had to be re-scored and the team had to make sure the scores were low enough to be believable. My scores, previously too low, were now just right. We generated a respectable score that was not outrageously high.
That is my complete experience with TQM.
I always knew what it meant but I think progressives thought it meant people standing around in robes like Roman Senators contemplating their navels.
Why not? Maybe if we stop apologizing for making a sane choice we’d be more convincing.
I keep thinking surely the last 3+ years of Democrat control will be enough to have people exercise the secrecy of the ballot and make a rational choice, even if they won’t advertise it. And then I walk the dogs past a home where I’ve spoken to the owners about their newly planted berms (trying to convince them to be on the tour next year — I failed), which has since come into full bloom — beautiful. And tragically marred by the only political yard sign I’ve seen in my neighborhood of any kind. . .for Harris/Walz. Then I round the corner and see a bumper sticker which reads: “Dictator or Democracy: that’s the choice.” And I think — yeah? Which one is which?
Apparently they haven’t been mugged hard enough by reality — yet. If Trump doesn’t pull out a miraculous beat-the-cheat win, Harris will oblige. . . good and hard. Unfortunately the whole world will suffer the consequences.
If only you are right.
I suspect, and have long predicted, the opposite. Trump has a ceiling of about 48%, Republicans don’t cheat and we don’t own the AFT. We have nothing going for us except logic which sadly, is not enough.
This election is going to be a Democrat blow out. POTUS, both houses of Congress. Prepare for eight more really bad years for America.
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My planning to isolate myself from the stupidity of others seems to be working out okay. I’ve done fine with FJB, in some ways better than if Trump had another term, but I voted for Trump in 2020 because I put the good of the country above myself.