Is that a gun in your pocket or do you really dig my Neocon fundamentalist tea party ideas?

How is it that so many Republican men find Sarah Palin credible when she claims that we can drill our way out of the energy crisis? There simply isn’t that much oil in Alaska—anyone with a small bit of curiosity can do the math and find out that Alaska has only six months of oil to offer the rest of America. It gets much worse, of course. Republican men tend to love fact-less, self-contradictory female Republican politicians and commentators (including more than a few at FOX), especially those that push their sexuality hard based on the manner in which they dress and act. And consider the recent reactions of conservative pundits regarding the issue of whether Sarah Palin had breast implants. This anomaly leads to my question: Do Republican men really and truly think that the current crop of female Republican politicians/commentators are offering ideas that work, or are they confusing sexual arousal for patriotic fervor or intellectual inspiration? Consider that “misattribution of arousal” is well-established through numerous experiments. In 1962, psychologists Schacter and Singer told participants that the psychologists were studying the effect of vitamin injection on visual skills. This was prior to modern day ethics restrictions, and many of the students were secretly given injections of adrenaline or a placebo (to control for the effect of sticking a needle in one’s arm). Strong emotional reactions to subsequent stimuli (a “nosy” and “offensive” questionnaire) were strongest in participants who had been given the adrenaline but told that it was only vitamins and that it would have no effect on them. They misattributed their chemically-enhanced emotions to the questionnaire, whereas those who told that they were receiving the injection of a stimulant (and those receiving the placebo) did not misattribute their emotions. Here is a succinct description of the phenomenon of misattribution of arousal. (and see here). republican-babes What follows is an excerpt from Social Psychology and Human Nature, by Roy F. Baumeister and Brad Bushman (2007) (p. 187):

The intriguing thing about the Schachter-Singer theory is that it allows for arousals to be mislabeled or relabeled. That is, an arousal may arise for one reason but get another label, thereby producing a different reaction. For example, someone may not realize that what he or she is drinking has caffeine (e.g., if you think that you have decaffeinated tea when in reality it has caffeine . . .) it may create an arousal state. If something frustrating happens, someone who has this extra, unexplained arousal may get much angrier than he or she would otherwise. This process is called excitation transfer . . . The arousal from the first event (drinking caffeinated tea) transfers to the second event (frustration).
Consider that large numbers of conservative/fundamentalist men are not comfortable acknowledging the sexual arousal they feel when they see images of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter or Michelle Bachman. Therefore (as my hunch goes), when they experience intense sexual arousal that they are not comfortable acknowledging (when they “dissociate” these toxic thoughts of “inappropriate” sexual attractiveness), they are left without any obvious explanation for their increased arousal. They are thus ripe for misattribution. They are easily self-fooled that they are feeling passionate about their country or fearful about Middle Eastern “terrorists.” Whatever it is that these vapid/deceitful Republican babes are uttering, it must be true too. “Why else would my blood flow thusly whenever I hear Sarah Palin give a talk?” Why, indeed?

Continue ReadingIs that a gun in your pocket or do you really dig my Neocon fundamentalist tea party ideas?

The problem with politicians

Colin Beavan (No Impact Man) sums it up like this at his blog:

[T]he politics of Washington are defunct. The Democratic politicians want to beat the Republicans. The Republican ones want to beat the Democratic ones. They are, like the rest of us, scared for their jobs! But the American people? We just want to get along with each other and solve problems. We want happy lives and to be kind to our neighbors. We want leaders who care about us more than their own careers.
Americans are often under the illusion that we have meaningful choices when we vote in national elections, but that is dangerously simplistic. Big money and commercial media pre-designate the candidates who qualify as "serious candidates" long before the citizens vote. Those candidates who prevail are those that have given sufficient winks and nods to big money such that they continue to get well-funded. To compound things, big money likes the status quo. Hence, Barack Obama's continuing lovefest with Wall Street (Disclosure: I voted for Obama but I'm sorely disappointed--yet I still think he is far preferable to McCain-Palin). There are no easy solutions to this problem. The start of a solution, in my opinion, is to give smart, "non-connected" and non-monied people a real chance to get elected. There are several "clean money" campaign reform proposals floating about (for details on one of these, see this post by Lawrence Lessig). The purpose of clean-money elections is the radical idea promoted by the Founding Fathers: that We the People would self-govern. The topic Colin Beavan raises today is the most important political topic out there, in my opinion. Without an honest, open and self-critical deliberative process, we don't actually have a democracy. With the current system of private-money elections (especially in the wake of Citizens United), we don't have an honest, open and self-critical deliberate process. What we have instead, is what Beavan has described: a big expensive game where politicians do anything and say anything to maintain their power and perks.

Continue ReadingThe problem with politicians

What’s wrong with Americans? Are we stupid? Are we toddlers?

The list has grown too long to ignore.  We are a country that exercises almost no foresight.  We wait for disasters to occur and only then (if then) does it occur to us to do something about the problem.

Here’s an especially heinous example: our government hires numerous financial experts, of course.  Alan Greenspan was one of them.  Why couldn’t any of them see the subprime disaster long before it occurred?  Instead, our government’s experts allowed unscrupulous mortgage companies to lend out far too much money to homeowners in the form of “exploding ARMs” such that it was entirely predictable that the borrowers would fall behind on their payments after only a few years, and that many would lose their homes through foreclosure.  Our government stood by while these loans were hyper-securitized to the point where the unscrupulous mortgage companies would go belly up, tranch-laden real estate trusts (who ultimately purchased the loans) would throw their hands and claim that they were innocent and Wall Street would laugh all the way to the bank.  That is, until Wall Street failed and successfully begged the federal government to bail out Bear Stearns.  All of this was entirely foreseeable.  The real disaster is that we failed to use our brains.

For another example, think of the Minnesota Bridge collapse. Let’s see… what might happen if you don’t allocate proper federal funding to fund sufficient bridge inspections?  Of course, it’s only after a huge bridge collapses or a major levee breaks that we …

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Continue ReadingWhat’s wrong with Americans? Are we stupid? Are we toddlers?

Tim Russert is being called a great journalist merely because he recently died.

Tim Russert is dead and it is certainly a tragedy for his family and friends. May he rest in peace. Contrary to what numerous media sources are now reporting, however, Russert was not a great journalist. Rather, he was one of the many modern celebrity journalists who got so incredibly…

Continue ReadingTim Russert is being called a great journalist merely because he recently died.