And . . . They Suck By: Mark W Adams

Monday: 43 Iraqis Killed, 75 Wounded

MarKOS writes about the GOP discovering that they have become splintered into competing interest groups, "Welcome to our hell."

See what happens when you try to be an inclusive Big Tent Party. All kinds of riff-raff spoil the neighborhood. That's what really underlies the "I'm more conservative than thou" nonsense we're seeing lately. But where KOS get's it wrong is in an earlier post comparing the relative despicableness of Malkin and Coulter. When someone has absolutely no redeeming qualities, the fact that one of them realizes this and the other does not, is not in and of itself a redeeming quality.

They both suck.

But Kaus Blows . . . Goats is moving up the google-bomb heirarchy, with my Kos Diary coming in just below the frontrunning Media Matt.

But on to being impressed, once again, by Paul Rosenberg over at Open Left. Again he writes a multi-part analysis of of the right/left divide. But this time it's not liberals and conservatives who have switched sides, liberals now advocating a position in favor of conserving the institutions (liberal institutions when they were created) that guarantee our freedoms I wrote about here and here.

• This time, it's The Truth-Free Zone, Part 1: Truth And Lies Switch Places

This is the "Big Lie" theory, where it's repeated enough times in enough places to take on a certain credibility. Rosenberg uses the treatment of Al Gore as a serial exaggerator and yet the mendacity of George Bush isn't questioned lest Pandora's box gets opened.

• Not Even Wrong: The Truth-Free Zone, Part 2

Here he opens up Pandora's box, the "War on Terror" itself, "something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it." It's not that it's the wrong response/solution/policy, etc. -- the question itself that the lies address is not even valid. ". . . We are way past Orwell's 1984 here."

• Inherently Illogical Statements: The Truth-Free Zone, Part 3

No, his final post on the matter does not discover what "truth" is. What he does discuss is how nonsensical, almost tautological statements get twisted because the environment for rational discussion has been obliterated.

Rosenberg uses the "Support the troops" meme to illustrate the point.

In sum, "supporting the troops" is supporting whatever Bush wants to do. But we don't say, "supporting whatever Bush wants to do."

We say, "Support the Troops." Whether that means putting them in harms way for no damn good reason, without proper armor, rest, or medical care when they come back home -- resisting these atrocious practices somehow means you are not supporting the troops.

His analogy of the tribalism Bush apologists suffer from being akin to sports fans is apt. Many of them are casual fans at best, not really knowing the X's and O's of the game yet rooting loudly as they can.

They operate at the most basic level on which fandom is built: repetitive chants, group-coordinated body movements, team colors, etc. None of these is about communicating reality-based information. It is about self-expression in the service of strengthening social bonds. Which perfectly describes-at least from one angle-the way people use the expression, "I support the troops."

Alas, this type of cheerleading is not, I repeat, not strictly found on the right. I've run across far too many partisan zealots lately preaching the utter goodness of their candidate without question or any pretense at critical analysis. They can be found at Daily Kos every day, many are my fellow Edwards supporters that cannot tolerate dissension in the ranks. I tend not to engage them anymore. It's useless. (And if you're an Edwards supporter and think I'm talking about you, you may be right.)

Cheerleading has it's utility, but don't tell me to "shoosh" and expect me to sing your tune. Homey don't play that game. If your singing doesn't bother me, leave me alone to beat my drum my way. [And yes, spending too much time in the Kos Komment sections makes me a little touchy now and then, which is why I and the great majority of the blogosphere don't bother with the trench warfare going on there.]

It's here, the cheerleading, that Rosenberg brings it together, and in a way brings together the themes of his previous series that caught my eye. Yes, we're back to the Deep Thought stuff of cognitive awareness. He again describes three basic types of thinking and reasoning ability, Sequential, Linear, and Systematic.

Our tribalist are Sequential thinkers, not even aware of other forms of thought. They just don't know what they're missing. They "have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences."

Linear folks "get" cause and effect, but it's limited to hierarchical structure and logical flow; where Systematic awareness understands that there may be multiple causes and multiple unintended consequences. "The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects."

Concentrating on the cave-dwelling conservative Sequential thinkers, Rosenberg notes these important aspects,

• No natural desire to investigate causality. Events transpire, without much interpretation of how they come about. The attention is occupied by one item at a time, and there is little spontaneous effort to relate them to other items or to a general context.
• The sequential thinker is not really aware that the world may appear differently to other people, and he or she has therefore a limited ability to take the perspective of others.
• Sequential thinking are not analytic. Because such relations are non-rational, there is nothing rational one can say or do to change them.
• Their perceptions, however, can change. O'Reilly and Limbaugh can provide them context to change the appearance of events, but logical consistency is still something they aren't bothered by.
  

This is why a slogan like "Support the Troops" by people who vilify Max Cleland and John Kerry makes a mockery of language when used by their authority figures, yet has traction within their community. As long as Bush or Limbaugh "say" they are making a logical argument, these sequential thinkers will not apply their own logical abilities to test the veracity of the claim. They just accept it on it's face, even from the guy who coined the phrase "Phony Soldiers."

People who comprehend the world at this level can't even imagine what they are missing. The very notion of logical incoherence makes no sense if you have no reference frame of logical coherence to compare it to. And that's precisely the situation they find themselves in, although they may not realize it.

What a kind way to say they're fucking stupid. All that matters is that something, no matter how absurd, is presented as a logical argument. If B follows A, it must be true, sequentially. It doesn't matter to them that B has nothing whatsoever to do with A. They can't be bothered with the relationships between the propositions. If the baseball game follows the National Anthem, and the seventh inning stretch comes after that, they accept without question that singing the National Anthem causes the stretch. If Cheney says so, that's good enough for them.

With misguided models of logical analysis in place, such people are doubly protected from the real thing. First, they lack the necessary cognitive development to actually understand what it is. Second, they already think they know what it is, and thus they have no interest in looking into it, should the matter ever come up.

It also describes why they have such an abiding hatred of liberals, who don't consider conservatives the enemy, just misguided.

The use of sequential ideas both reflects and helps promote a social environment in which complex loyalties simply are not possible. Which means that if you are not blindly loyal, then the only alternative is that you are a traitor.

That's why they're really at war with liberalism, and fight terrorists and drug runners and corruption only when convenient. The immigration battle that polarizes the right and leaves liberals shrugging their shoulders is where we really see the difference between conservatives who choose to be so on principle, and their underdeveloped, xenophobic and racist brethren. On that issue, we have the luxury to be clinical observers, with a bit of schadenfreude mixed in.

That also is what occasionally gets me in trouble with the folks who are blindly loyal to the same guy I support. When you step out of line, even to the smallest degree, you are an enemy. Don't believe me -- boy could I tell you some stories, but that really would make me an enemy, wouldn't it.