Critical Thinking. Or Lack Thereof.

File under “duh.” Is what I thought when I saw the headline: “Conspiracy theorists lack critical thinking skills: New study.” But it was a slow day, so I read the article. Although it lacked a link to the study, it described what was done: giving groups of students an established critical thinking essay test and correlating results with belief in conspiracy theories. The unsurprising results, and the test itself, are stated in the article. Like I said: duh. It did make a provocative, if questionable point, saying susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking had nothing to do with intelligence. Well, okay. Maybe it’s a matter of definition. 

But that’s not the important part. The article also cited studies showing that, unlike intelligence, critical thinking can be taught. Which led to an “aha” moment. It explains the depressing scenes of demon-possessed parents at school board meetings, spouting insane falsehoods, threatening jobs and lives, based on fact-free belief in repeatedly disproved conspiracy theories. Critical Race Theory being taught in schools. Unnamed “studies” showing the ineffectiveness and dangers of wearing masks. And of vaccines. Comparing (because Tucker Carlson and the rest of Fox’s falsifiers do) mask mandates to felonious child abuse, or to the Holocaust. Threatening dire reprisals. 

Lacking, as they do, critical thinking skills, those blood-in-the-eye, crazed true believers can’t help themselves. Knowingly pushing those lies, though, the prime poisoners of their paralyzed perceptions can. Which is where the article triggered the “aha.” It’s in public schools, after all, that people begin to acquire critical thinking skills and the desire to engage them. And what Foxotrumpian leaders fear most is critical thinking.

As with the need to create distrust in free and fair elections, which they know they can’t win, so the Trumpublican Party needs to create as much distrust in public education as possible, lest too many citizens become thinkers. They’ve been working on it for decades; now, the pandemic has gifted them the perfect whipping-up boy. Vaccines. Masks. Mandates. Pure evil, right in our schools, intentionally harming our kids. Just like those child-trafficking, baby-killing, blood-drinking, liberal hangers-out at pizza joints.

But, Q dang it, critical thinking can be taught! Which imperils the con; namely, spreading lies to keep people distracted from what Trumpublicans are doing to their health, their education, their planet, their future, (in the case of infrastructure, it’s what they’re not doing), their chance at The American Dream -- in order to reward themselves and their donors.

Uncharacteristically, a guest on Fox “news” just unbagged the feline. “This is gonna be a boon, or a boom,” he said, referring to those demented protests at school board meetings, “for private schools, for charter schools, for homeschoolers, who are gonna look for an alternative other than in the public schools…” 

That’s the logic: Voters who think critically see through the grift. Critical thinking starts with public education. Ergo, destroy or dumb it down to meaninglessness. Whitewash history. Knowing it’s nothing of the sort, call teaching about slavery or the Trail of Tears, for example, attempts to get white kids to hate themselves. Describe efforts, in K-12 education, to mitigate the effects of poverty on performance, as “divisive.” Ban it from curricula. It’s “cancel culture,” multiplied times Texas. Where it’s been raised to supra-snowflake levels. 

In fairness – and I’m nothing if not fair – I’ll assume most of those furious parents believe they’re acting in their children’s interest. Because they lack the tools of resistance to Carlsonian confabulations, they’re unquestioning in their conspiratorial worldview, certain that even violence is justified. Who wouldn’t be, to protect their kids? Sadly, for everyone, they’re incapable of realizing the harm being done is coming from them. 

But, we’ve read, they’re not all stupid. Which means, had they any desire, they’re capable of exerting the minimal effort required to learn the truth. Theories abound about the attraction of conspiracy theories, and why such people prefer them. Mental illness. Loneliness. Desperation to belong. Validation of self-worth. Brains evolved to seek connections, short-circuiting into paranoia. Whatever the explanation, it’s there for exploitation by people of ill will. And if it’s always been a part of the human condition, the internet and (anti-)social media have given it the power to destroy. Nations. Democracy. Schools.

On the same slow day, I read an article about people trying to free themselves from the brain-eating bondage of Q-anon. Seeking cult-conversion therapy. Both hopeful and depressing, it describes only a small number of victims finding a way out. While others dig in deeper. 

At this point, is there a solution? Education? If only. Watch this, and decide.

A Country Gone Nuts

People who refuse masks and vaccination, who still claim the election was stolen, who see nothing wrong with voter-limitation laws, who consider climate change a hoax, who stormed the Capitol, who believe the stormers were anti-Trump, who’re high-fivin’ white-guy Tucker Carlson’s “replacement” ravings, who fear transsexuals in bathrooms, who insist Trump never lied, who accuse Hillary Clinton of child-trafficking and cannibalism, who think if we stay long enough in Afghanistan we’ll “win,”

Who “do their own research” about science, who say ignoring pandemic social behavior is about “freedom,” who think black people killed by police asked for it – even an unarmed child with his hands up, who are convinced undocumented immigrants are allowed to vote, who insist there’s never been or no longer is racism in America, who say the only racists are non-whites, who don’t mind the Republican Party becoming overtly white-supremacist, 

Who elect people to Congress who harass and lie and block but produce little of value, who drive into crowds of demonstrators (now legal in Florida), who consider Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization, who imagine Christianity is under siege and that it’s only white people who face discrimination, who fear “Sharia law” while legislating based on their personal Bible interpretations, who say the ACLU is a Communist front and that Democrats want communism, who demand we consider America a Christian nation, who call Kyle Rittenhouse a hero, who believe Democrats want to take away their religion and guns and free speech and create open borders, 

Who think it’s easy to distinguish between good guys and bad guys with guns and background checks are fascist, who are convinced vaccines are mind-control, who’ve concluded Dr. Fauci is an evil liar, who reckon the “wrong kinds” of people are voting, who impeached Bill Clinton for lying about sex but deem the impeachments of Trump political hit-jobs, who believe there’s a “deep state” in cahoots with an international Jewish cabal, who reject proof that Russians interfered with Trump’s election and colluded with his campaign,

Are the same ones insisting if assault-style weapons are banned “the government” will track them down and haul them to reeducation camps or gas chambers, and that the Second Amendment was created, expressly, to provide citizens with the muskets to stop it from happening. And that the recent spate of mass murders, added to the mounting all-time total, is reasonable, unpreventable, maybe a bit unfortunate but not-worth-doing-anything price we should be happy to pay for keeping ourselves armed against, well, that thing that will never happen.

Except it did when Trump brutally cleared peaceful protestors so he could wave a Bible at us and later sent troops to Portland and Seattle against mostly peaceful demonstrators but it’s fine because it was people seeking justice which is communism and it showed them who’s boss and wasn’t the thing they’d been arming themselves for because government gassing non-violent citizens is okay because Trump is on our side and they deserved it and also inciting deadly insurrection against the Constitution.

Half of our country is nuts. We may disagree about which half, but, surely, we do agree this ever-widening, bridgeless divide is incompatible with democracy, and that we’re nearing the impossibility of finding our way back. If half the country doesn’t check every one of the foregoing boxes, they check plenty more than a few.

If there is a way back, it won’t come from Cruz, Hawley, Jordan, Nunes, Gozar, Gaetz, McCarthy, Graham, Greene, Boebert, Cotton, Barasso, Thune, Paul, Kennedy, Hyde-Smith, Cornyn, Gohmert, King, Scott, Ernst, Blackburn, or any of the rest who prefer dissimilation and cries of “socialism” instead of producing useful ideas.

But it could, in fact, come from Pelosi, Murray, Ocasio-Cortez, Porter, Sanders, Warren, Whitehouse, or the others whom Trumpists love to hate and dismiss with prejudice, but who are offering serious, fact-based proposals, like them or not. In Congresses past, their ideas would initiate constructive, good-faith debate; leading, if you can imagine, to workable compromise. If Republicans were to stop fearing their Fox-, Newsmax-, OAN-indoctrinated supporters and rise above taking orders from their corporate sponsors, perhaps they’d remember their job is to legislate for the good of everyone. Ticking, is the clock.

Meanwhile, on Mars, NASA flew a self-driving helicopter carrying a tiny piece of the Wright brothers’ first airplane. If that doesn’t cause you to admire science, what will? How many members of the design and build team are immigrants or first-generation or non-white? Lots. Its name, “Ingenuity,” came from an Alabama high-schooler named Vaneeza Rupani. Makes a person think.

Finally, for now, one word on the Chauvin verdict: just.

Good Rant, Rachel

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About the insane bubble in which teabaggers live nowadays, she's absolutely right. I used to have a friend who, while he didn't much like President Obama, was once able to see the good things he's done.  For reasons unknown but which, for a while anyway, made me actually worry about him, he descended into non-stop paranoid birther-level babble; or at least he had until I cut him off from communication. For all I know, he's in a rubber room somewhere by now. But there are plenty like him who aren't. Who are running for (and elected to!) office or being courted by those who are. Who are given credence (and rides!) by potential presidents.

But here's the point: no matter how right Rachel Maddow is on this subject, it makes zero difference. That Mitt Romney has chosen to ferry Mr Corsi around says nothing about either of them that we didn't already know: Corsi is insane and Mitt will pander to anyone. And there's nothing, no amount of facts to the contrary, no new information, no out-pointing of their falsehoods, that will change the minds of these people. By definition. If facts made any difference to these people, we wouldn't have these people. Those who need wild conspiracies to keep their heads from exploding, those to whom the real world is just too hard to face, will never change. I feel bad for them, as a fellow human being. But as someone who lives in this country and would like to see it survive, I feel worse for the rest of us, if that sort of thinking is enough to swing elections.

Study Guide

Couple of interesting data points on the endless and ever more pocked path to truth. I like these studies, naturally, because they confirm what I believe. And what has politics become, if not the reinforcement of one's beliefs? (Mine however, as distinct from those of the RWS™ and the teabaggers who horde what they hawk, have the support of facts, of course. Like these:)

First, from a non-profit organization in Iowa supporting "public affairs journalism." (The weakness of the study is only the short time-frame over which it was carried out.) Guess what? Same-sex marriage hasn't destroyed "opposite marriage." The article is titled, unconfusingly enough, "Gay Marriage Causes No Harm To Traditional Marriage, Study Finds." If anything, you might conclude it strengthens it:

The angst over marriage in Iowa comes after a year in which the state of marriage has made a turn toward statistical bliss: more people got married and fewer split up. Divorces declined to 7,286, to lowest per capita level since 1968, according to 2009 provisional and historical data from the Iowa Department of Public Health.

Also from the article:

The IowaWatch.org study found similarities range from the way men and women often view marriage to the more mundane tasks of married life, such as doing yard work. Like people in traditional marriages, same-sex couples also talk about raising children and shielding them from the verbal slings of peers, the stability and unit-strength of a family and the value of loving relationships among parents and children, as well as legal necessities and financial security.

‘We live pretty boring lives’

The Iowa Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalized gay marriage was unanimous, but the opposition has persisted, because it is fueled by fears that that the family, the bedrock of American society, is at stake.

[...] In sharp contrast, married gays often depict a lifestyle and relationship that seems suburban stable, only now they have a marriage license like other couples.

“Not much has changed,” said Ledon Sweeney of Iowa City, who married his partner of 12 years. “We live pretty boring lives. We go to work; we mow our lawn, we pay our mortgage, and we go on vacation if we can save enough money.”

How could anyone who actually thought with their brains instead of their holy books be surprised?

Now comes the one sure to give paws. If it didn't originate from some sort of online dating service, I'd compare it to stone tablets on Mount Sinai. Ready? Check out this chart:

Okay, it's a little challenging to interpret (not to mention see), with those triangly things and all. But here's the deal: it's about reading and writing skills as compared to various religions. The "opacity" of the triangles indicates "seriousness" of the beliefs. So. The reader may discern for her/himself what it says. To me, there are no surprises.

On the other hand, I don't suppose people filling out personal data for online dating are necessarily a representative cross section, or even honorable in the biblical way (most don't, one assumes, stone disobedient children to death, for one thing.) So, never mind. Try this one:

What this research underlines is that we push back against threats to our world-views by reasserting structures of meaning with which we are comfortable.

Maybe it explains teabaggers and the non-stop conspiracy theories of the right wing. So flummoxed are they over the fact that "their" country would have elected a black guy as president; so discordant is it to see a whole family of them in the White House; so horrible is the concept that to get the things we need from government we have to pay for them; all of these blows to their most central idea, handed to them on tablets by Lord Ronnie, that the less we do for others, the less we pay in taxes, the more rewarded we'll be -- it's all but emptied their minds. With what to fill it? Comfort: There's nothing wrong with what we've believed. It's them guys that are wrong. There's a plot against us, a very very nefarious plot. God is on our side. We love America, so they must hate it.

Don't you love science?

It's True, Because It's Not

Searching for years for the perfect meme by which to take down Obama, Fox "news" has finally come up with it. It took that paragon of conservative credibility, Newt Gingrich, to do it; and whereas the idea that disgraced former speaker Newt has anything to say worth listening to is hilarious (in a non-hilarious way) on its face, as far as Fox is concerned it's a plus. Since when, after all, has credibility been a requirement for their sycophancy?

Newt's idea didn't originate with him; he's just the one misterspeakering it over to Fox, where it's been shined, redoubled, and poured down the necks of its viewers. The idea came from Distort D'Newsa, who's made a career of spit-polishing racism and selling it as something else. Anyhow, here it is:

Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D'Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.

Gingrich says that D'Souza has made a "stunning insight" into Obama's behavior -- the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama."

"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asks. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."

"This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president," Gingrich tells us.

"I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was true," Gingrich continues. "In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest."

It's perfect. That nothing in Obama's behavior actually confirms the theory, confirms the theory: he's hiding it. It doesn't get better than that, conspiratoriallywise. No matter what a person does, it proves your point. Tidy. He's out of touch because he seems in touch.

And what, tell, is "Kenyan" anti-colonialism? This: "Look, he's a black guy. And probably wasn't born here."

To thoughtful people, it's as laughable as the idea of Newt still being given credence by anyone. In other words, it'll fall like Halloween candy into the laps of the teabaggoid, and be swallowed whole. They won't be thinking like this:

In these retellings of Obama's personal history, the president's life is an epic, Marxist, sinister version of a Joseph Campbell-style heroic journey, with its hero ultimately falling, like Anakin Skywalker, to the dark side of the force. [ed note: this came after my post using a similar term]

Emerging from his sinecure as president of a small religious college in New York,Dinesh D'Souza, who has been laundering the racism of the right through an "intellectual" filter since his days at Dartmouth, gets back to where his career began.

[...]

This is birtherism with big words. This is the witchdoctor sign without Photoshop, WorldNetDaily without the exclamation points...

[...]

...it's safe to say that someone self-identifying as an "anti-colonialist" would not be escalating an American war in central Asia or claiming the authority to use the entire planet as a target range for flying robots armed with cruise missiles.

If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting financial regulation, thanScott Brown is a Kenyan anti-colonialist. If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero, thenMichael Bloomberg is a Kenyan anti-colonialist...

All of which to say is there's no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama's parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don't want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet. They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black.

Nice to know I'm not entirely alone.

Here's a very thorough takedown of the ridiculous and unremittingly false points D'Sousa made in his article, and of Newt for hawking it. But a small sample, of which there's much more:

I can’t begin to list everything wrong with the Forbes article, but here are some of the high points: (the quotations in italics are from D’Souza’s article):

The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling–but drilling off the shores of Brazil.

With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro–not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil…Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world’s energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more.

This claim is completely false. First, President Obama had nothing to do with the decision of the Export-Import Bank (“ExIm”) to give $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Petrobas for offshore Brazilian oil drilling. When the loan was approved, ExIm’s board had five members- three Republicans and two Democrats. All five individuals were appointed by… President Bush. I have not located a single quote from President Obama saying anything about the ExIm decision (for or against). Furthermore, ExIm has a very good reason for the transaction: the loan proceeds are to be used to purchase US owned equipment and services (thereby increasing US exports- the very mission of ExIm).

So, D’Souza’s first example of Obama’s anti-colonial views is something that Bush appointees approved which will benefit the US and of which Obama had nothing to do. Off to a smashing start and we aren’t even to the third paragraph.

(This might be a good place to point something out. Not that logic has anything to do with it, but, looking back, was America founded on colonialism or anti-colonialism, by colonialists, or anti-colonialists? Just askin'.)

Quoting from another article connecting to the first, and once again reinforcing the central theme of this blog:

Gingrich was once the most powerful Republican in America and remains an influential figure within the party. D'Souza has done stints at the most prestigous conservative think-tanks. The line between man and kook is getting harder and harder to discern.

The insanity is so obvious. And yet, it's dipped and sipped as if it were the finest oolong. Oh, how we are screwed.

Man Of La Manchuria

A person I know writes to me and says,

What drives me nuts with you, honestly, is that you cannot see that BO is here by design, from his handlers in Islamic nations who financed his election, who paid for his campaign, to cut us down and destroy us as a nation. He is a Muslim or at least a black Marxist fundamentalist extremist...with a smooth delivery and a good looking face which bought your dollars and those of Soros and others.

I'm quite certain he's serious.

So let's consider how this works: clearly the indoctrination would have had to start when he was in Indonesia, when he lived amongst them; probably at that non-denominational school. Maybe, even, they selected his father in Kenya; probably would have had to, really. So then they must have also picked his mom, back here in the USA, and somehow got her to comply. For the sake of brevity, I'll not detail how either of those must have been pulled off.

So, lessee, then what? Well, for starters they had to be so sure they had the right baby, they planted news of his birth in Hawaii, and put the fix in, forty years later, with the Republican governor of that state to lie about seeing a piece of paper. They selected a black kid because back then it was clear that, while the US was still hosing blacks and siccing dogs on them, by the time he grew up we'd be ready to elect one. They did this, I suppose, because it was a surer thing than picking a white Muslim.

Somewhere along the line they convinced him, against his fervent Muslim beliefs, that it was worth it, for the deception, that he and his whole family would be going to hell in order to get him to eat pork and drink alcohol, marry outside his religion, get his kids baptized. Strong stuff, but, hey, who needs virgins: unless they re-grow their hymenoptera, he'd be done with them in a couple of months. Black guy: maybe a couple of days.

Then, the same guys who were so prescient and powerful had to get their Manchurian candidate into Columbia, Harvard, get him on the law review, then elected president of it. (Would it have been the same guys, or, by then, their progeny?) Turn down a million dollar job to head back to Chicago. Not a problem; I know I'd have. Hooking him up with a minister who'd later be reviled was a brilliant move; somehow they just knew it wouldn't affect his electoral chances. After all, they also picked the shoe bomber and the underpants guy.

Which is where the true brilliance comes in: first, they have him run against a really big name in Chicago politics, and get trounced. That, they figure, should naturally get him to the US Senate within a couple of years. In order to do that, they engineered the marital infidelity of his main opponent, and then -- the most brilliant stroke of all -- got Alan Keyes to carpetbag his way into the race and run the most ridiculous campaign of all time. Smooth. (Come to think of it, there'd have been no way they could have been certain of this nefarious plan unless they'd chosen what's-his-name [Ryan] long since, too, and cultivated in him his penchant for infidelity. On the other hand, it can't have been hard to convince Keyes of anything crazy, so they knew they had that in the bag years earlier.)

And here's the best part: in order throw us off the track so he could "cut us down and destroy us as a nation," they hypnotized him into saving the US auto industry, making us the last western country finally to provide health care for its citizens (I admit I'm a little suspicious here, because he did it by enriching Republican health care CEOs, including ones who've paid billions in fines to the government for their frauds), and, for the first time since our recent wars, providing somewhat adequate help to our vets. And, just to really nail it down, improve our electrical grid, set aside money for high speed rail and alternative fuels and research on electric cars; and give money to states to save the jobs of teachers, cops, and firefighters. Dastardly, that. It sure as hell fooled me.

Which brings me to my response to my emailer:

In fact, there's more evidence that GW Bush is an al Queda plant, given that everything he did in his presidency served their purposes and weakened America while handing AQ more recruits than they could handle. What wreckage there was left, smoking and dying, at the end of his eight years of reign: economy in shambles, military exhausted (and its wounded uncared for), while his oil buddies (and their Arab cohorts) made out like Ted Haggard with a pretty boy. Coincidence? And the historical coziness of the Bush family to the bin Laden family does nothing to diminish the theory. So, you pick your conspiracy, and I'll pick mine. Except mine has facts to support it (and even so, I don't believe it.)

So, who's right? Teabaggers notwithstanding, certain facts are pretty clear: the state of the union at the end of Bush's presidency was immeasurably worse than when he started, by any standard you can name; and, by nearly all measures, the state of America now is better than when Obama began. Not all that great, but better than the disaster that was his baseline. Auto companies, stock market, military care, health care, banks, Wall Street regulations... all to the gooder. The one thing that's clearly worse is deficit/debt. But Obama's portion thereof is small compared to that of GWB: and GWB's deficits didn't need to happen. They were all about greed and voodoo economics, as his dad once so accurately argued. Virtually all economists agree Obama's had to -- and of his critics, many are saying he didn't go far enough, rescue-wise. And let's not forget: Obama has consistently said that when the time is right, deficits will be addressed. He even appointed this guy to get working on it. Bush, on the other hand, through the guy who pullled his strings, repeatedly told us "deficits don't matter." (A chestnut carried forward even now, by those most loudly railing against them: turns out it's deficits created by tax cuts for the wealthy that don't matter.)

There are lots of bad things I believe about Obama: he caved too easily to Congressional Rs on the stimulus, over and over; his health care plan gives away too much of our money to insurance companies; he should have stood up to the Gitmo nimbys; he shouldn't have continued GWB's rendition policies; he should get the heck out of Afghanistan or do a much better job of explaining why we need to stay (especially since the CIA just announced the biggest AQ threat now resides in Yemen); he should have forcefully defended the location of the non-ground zero non-mosque and explained why.... there's more, too.

But the idea that he's a Muslim or any sort of extremist, bent on destroying the country, is laughable on its face (how can you be an extremist when you have both political extremes in this country pissed off at you?) and dishonors anyone who claims it.

But maybe the emailer was kidding.

(He wasn't.)