The morning after the elections, we still don't know who will be our Governor. When 99% percent of votes were counted, Pat Quinn (D) still had a 0.3% lead over Bill Brady (R). It is incomprehensible for me what kind of a clueless individual could possibly vote for Brady. The guy is a crazy religious fanatic who believes that abortion should be banned in cases of rape an incest. He is scarily homophobic. He also wants creationism to be taught in schools instead of or alongside evolution. He is also completely dishonest. Every single time when he was asked during the race how he was going to deal with the state's huge budget deficit, he avoided giving a direct answer. Pat Quinn at least was honest. He said that taxes would need to be raised, even though he realized it was a very unpopular answer that would cost him many votes. Brady, however, couldn't force himself to be equally honest (he's a Republican and hoping to get a straight answer about something from these people is hopeless.) He talked vaguely about "fiscal responsibility" and "cuts," but as hard as people tried to get him to specify what exactly he was going to cut, he never did.
The State of Illinois owes a huge amount of money to my university. We have been dealing with the issue bravely for the past two years. With Pat Quinn as our Governor, we can at least hope that Illinois will remember its obligations to us and honor them. With Brady, we can say good-bye to our funding and let the university be destroyed. Republicans hate public education. Actually, they hate any kind of education because they need the voters to be as ignorant as possible. Last night, I listened to Rand Paul's celebratory seat after his Senate victory. You have to be completely illiterate and painfully stupid not to see that every single word of that speech was completely insane. Republicans are counting on all those brainwashed voters who have never opened a book or read a newspaper to vote for them. No reasonable individual could support freaks like Bill Brady, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Co.
Today, the Republicans are celebrating their huge win in the House. We will all end up paying dearly for this win. I still hope, though, that at least the Governor of my state will turn out to be the marginally reasonable Pat Quinn and not a religious fanatic, a liar, and a thief, such as Bill Brady.
7 comments:
The next governor of my state is a criminal, too -- to quote a newspaper article about him, "...whose singular claim to fame was building Columbia/HCA into a healthcare conglomerate that perpetrated the largest Medicare fraud in the history of Medicare."
"The guy is a crazy religious fanatic who believes that abortion should be banned in cases of rape an incest."
That's the consequences when older, more conservative people vote in large numbers and more liberal young people do not.
-Mike
“It is incomprehensible for me what kind of a clueless individual could possibly vote for Brady.” I would like to take a stab at this question but it will take a bit of explanation so please bear with me. Illinois shares with California the worst credit rate of all the states. The democratic incumbent, Pat Quinn wanted a small tax increase while the challenger, Bill Grady wanted no tax increases, repealing the gas tax and tax credits. The budget deficit of $13 B would be addressed by spending cuts across the board. This graphically illustrates the ideological divide between the contesting Democrats and the Republicans. It also demonstrates the “closed belief” system of the right. This is a testable hypothesis.
In the paper “Improvement of Critical Reasoning in relation to Open- closed Belief systems” by C. Gratton Kemp of Ohio State University which was published in the Journal of Experimental Education he concluded that there were three distinguishing characteristics of critical reasoning in closed belief systems: 1) Difficulties in tolerating ambiguities which leads to “closure” before full consideration is given to each piece of contributing evidence, 2) A perceptual distortion of facts resulting in a decision which does not encompass all the elements of the problem and 3) Lack of recognition or rejection of significant parts or of the whole problem in order to accommodate it into the preformed value pattern, resulting in a poor or incorrect solution. Does the assertion “Tax cuts will ALWAYS lead to an increase in tax revenue due to an increase in economic activity” and ”it worked in the past for Ronald Regan” as espoused by the right meet these criteria?
At a tax rate of 100%, the assertion is absolutely true since any decrease in tax rate will lead to an increase in economic activity. At a tax rate of 0%, the assertion is absolutely false since there could be no increase in economic activity. Between these terminal conditions, the assertion becomes progressively less true as the tax rate declines from the maximum value. When Ronald Regan was president the top marginal tax rate was 91% and today the top actual marginal tax rate is about 17% so you can see that it would probably work in 1982 and it probably wouldn’t work now. I believe that this meets the three characteristics of a closed belief system in the paper. I should mention a caveat. Due to space limitations I have demonstrated one correlation. A correlation is not causality. If you map the level of obesity in the states to the level of conservatism, there is a strong correlation. This does not imply that being fat makes you conservative or being conservative makes you pudgy. On this scale I would be pretty thin which I can assure you that I’m not.
If we identify the right as a closed belief system then we can follow this line of inquiry to a paper called “Political Conservatism as a Motivated Social Cognition” by John T. Jost (Stanford University ), Jack Glaser (University of California, Berkeley), Arie W. Kruglanski , (University of Maryland at College Park) and Frank J. Sulloway (University of California, Berkeley). They concluded that “The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat. “ I don’t want to validate Godwin’s Law but its all there in the paper. I also noticed in the CNN electoral map of Illinois for the race that the democrats did well in the urban areas while almost all of the rural areas went republican. How does this factor into my previous comments? You stated that” Republicans are counting on all those brainwashed voters who have never opened a book or read a newspaper to vote for them. No reasonable individual could support freaks like Bill Brady, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Co.” I don’t feel that all country folk are unreasonable but they do espouse the core ideology of conservatives from a prolonged exposure to a coherent world view.
“It is incomprehensible for me what kind of a clueless individual could possibly vote for Brady.” I would like to take a stab at this question but it will take a bit of explanation so please bear with me. Illinois shares with California the worst credit rate of all the states. The democratic incumbent, Pat Quinn wanted a small tax increase while the challenger, Bill Grady wanted no tax increases, repealing the gas tax and tax credits. The budget deficit of $13 B would be addressed by spending cuts across the board. This graphically illustrates the ideological divide between the contesting Democrats and the Republicans. It also demonstrates the “closed belief” system of the right. This is a testable hypothesis.
In the paper “Improvement of Critical Reasoning in relation to Open- closed Belief systems” by C. Gratton Kemp of Ohio State University which was published in the Journal of Experimental Education he concluded that there were three distinguishing characteristics of critical reasoning in closed belief systems: 1) Difficulties in tolerating ambiguities which leads to “closure” before full consideration is given to each piece of contributing evidence, 2) A perceptual distortion of facts resulting in a decision which does not encompass all the elements of the problem and 3) Lack of recognition or rejection of significant parts or of the whole problem in order to accommodate it into the preformed value pattern, resulting in a poor or incorrect solution. Does the assertion “Tax cuts will ALWAYS lead to an increase in tax revenue due to an increase in economic activity” and ”it worked in the past for Ronald Regan” as espoused by the right meet these criteria?
At a tax rate of 100%, the assertion is absolutely true since any decrease in tax rate will lead to an increase in economic activity. At a tax rate of 0%, the assertion is absolutely false since there could be no increase in economic activity. Between these terminal conditions, the assertion becomes progressively less true as the tax rate declines from the maximum value. When Ronald Regan was president the top marginal tax rate was 91% and today the top actual marginal tax rate is about 17% so you can see that it would probably work in 1982 and it probably wouldn’t work now. I believe that this meets the three characteristics of a closed belief system in the paper. I should mention a caveat. Due to space limitations I have demonstrated one correlation. A correlation is not causality. If you map the level of obesity in the states to the level of conservatism, there is a strong correlation. This does not imply that being fat makes you conservative or being conservative makes you pudgy. On this scale I would be pretty thin which I can assure you that I’m not.
If we identify the right as a closed belief system then we can follow this line of inquiry to a paper called “Political Conservatism as a Motivated Social Cognition” by John T. Jost (Stanford University ), Jack Glaser (University of California, Berkeley), Arie W. Kruglanski , (University of Maryland at College Park) and Frank J. Sulloway (University of California, Berkeley). They concluded that “The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat. “ I don’t want to validate Godwin’s Law but its all there in the paper. I also noticed in the CNN electoral map of Illinois for the race that the democrats did well in the urban areas while almost all of the rural areas went republican. How does this factor into my previous comments? You stated that” Republicans are counting on all those brainwashed voters who have never opened a book or read a newspaper to vote for them. No reasonable individual could support freaks like Bill Brady, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Co.” I don’t feel that all country folk are unreasonable but they do espouse the core ideology of conservatives from a prolonged exposure to a coherent world view.
One of my Facebook friends describes the election results this way: The dog has caught the car he was chasing. Now what is he going to do with it? [paraphrased]
This is a great comment, Canukistani. The problem is that many people don't reason. They think 'taxes - bad', 'abortion - bad' and go to the voting booths to make their choices based on these reductive statements. Then we have the results that we do.
Sad, indeed.
"The dog has caught the car he was chasing. Now what is he going to do with it?"
-The Republicans always know what to do. This something that distinguishes progressive folks from conservatives everywhere. A progressive, reasonably intelligent person recognizes the world's complexity, has doubts, looks for answers, etc. A conservative sees everything in terms of good vs bad. We can't expect them to look around and notice what's going on. They will start pushing the same old junk on us and we will have to deal with it.
“The problem is that many people don't reason. They think 'taxes - bad', 'abortion - bad' and go to the voting booths to make their choices based on these reductive statements. Then we have the results that we do.”
Ok. Here we go. With respect to political voting heuristics, there are three basic methodologies for the analysis of voter preference using inductive, deductive and reductive reasoning. A person who makes a “choice based on reductive statements” is using reductive reasoning- an attempt to explain a complex effect through a simple cause. Let’s call this the Clarissa school of voter preference since I can’t find anyone in the literature that ascribes to this point of view except to use it as a foil. The second paper which I referenced uses deductive reasoning on the part of the voters since they apply general principles, the core conservative ideology to reach specific conclusions based on the particular situation and disposition “to manage uncertainty and threat.” There is a school of thought that uses inductive reasoning in voter preferences. Lupia and McCubbins in the book “The Democratic Dilemma” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press(1998) use inductive reasoning, a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances using a traffic light analogue. The following is from wiki summary:
“Driving through an intersection would require perfect information about where all the other cars are going, but we use a traffic signal as a substitute for all this information. We can still make a rational, reasoned choice without perfect information. In politics, we frequently hear that people (voters especially) lack the information required to make good decisions; this criticism has led to serious critiques of democracy. Yet politics has much in common with this traffic signal: "Using similar logic, it follows that limited information precludes reasoned choice only if people appear to be stuck at complex political intersections and lack access to effective political traffic signals" (page 12, in chapter 1). This book's main claim is that people do have access to "effective political traffic signals."
Since you’re an expert in Latino culture, you’ll like the following quote:
‘This is largely a formalization and experimental analysis of Popkin's (1994) arguments about cue-taking and information shortcuts. For example, Popkin uses the vignette of Gerald Ford's ignorance of how to eat a tamale. As Lupia and McCubbins point out, it is significant that this gaffe didn't hurt Ford everywhere, only among those voters who (1) knew how to eat a tamale and (2) connected ignorance of Latino culture with ignorance of Latino issue concerns.”
The debate on deductive versus inductive reasoning for voter preferences continues to this day with no clear winner. I find that the deductive school is more apocalyptic and pessimistic about the future than the inductive school which is more populist and positive about “low information voters.” I suppose this could explain why the academics in the deductive school had their federal grants cut after the relevant authorities on Capitol Hill read their report. Subtext comparisons to Stalin and Pinochet don’t play well with Conservatives.
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