Morning Ed: Politics {2018.08.23.Th}
[Po1] Trump is making gains among black voters.
[Po2] Dress for the job you want, as they say.
[Po3] Adam Gurri hails the Ideologically Turing Test, which is in my opinion the most important test in political discussions.
[Po4] Why conservatives find life more meaningful than liberals.
[Po5] According to a study, political leaders are not actually very responsive to public opinion. (But elections are.)
[Po6] Liberals have embraced the term liberal, libertarian-minded folks are calling themselves classical liberals, and Sam Bowman says that centrists should adopt the label. I’m old enough to remember when being “liberal” was something people ran away from.
[Po7] Samuel Hammond writes about Viktor Orban and his pro-natalist policies, and what social conservatives here might learn about them.
[Po8] This is not comforting.
[Po9] We’ve seen this recently with anti-KKK laws being used against Antifa. Sometimes the laws are worth it, but you really do need to take a step back and think it through.
Po4: I don’t think the liberal outlook is wrong or worse here but I have a hard time accepting things because of tradition or what not.Report
This sounds like a horrible way to spend a weekend
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/08/worst-imaginable-ways-spend-weekend
The Board of Trustees for OSU could not bring themselves to significantly punish Urban Meyer for violating Title IX. Not being present at three games is no punishment at all. But sports is Moloch in the United States and everything comes after winning college sports.Report
In central Ohio especially. I graduated from a high school in a small town just up the road from Columbus. One of my neighbors had OSU buckeyes laminated into his garage door. Another replaced his American flag with an OSU flag on game days – and flew it at half-mast if they lost.
Honestly, I’m only surprised that there was even a token punishment.Report
I think token is doing heavy lifting here. His only punishment is not going to games. He will still be doing lead up coaching.Report
We must all worship football regardless of the sacrifice to Moloch.Report
Po3: In a discussion a few days ago there was a lot of back and forth over if liberals understand conservatives & vice versa. The ITT is a great way to suss that question out.Report
[Po9] Anti-mask laws predate the KKK though. This is from a Court of Appeals decision upholding a New York anti-mask law, being challenged by the KKK as a First Amendment infringement:
So that would be an example of a law directed at the criminal fringe of what we would probably consider a leftist movement, being used against the KKK 150 years later.Report
[Po4] and connectedly [Po3] – I suspect without having any way of proving, that the difference in a lot of those answers is about subtly different cultural meanings given to words.
Like the thing about conservatives self-reporting as slightly happier than liberals even though liberals are observed to be slightly more likely to give genuine smiles suggesting felt happiness. Interpretation: the average self-identified conservative means a slightly different thing by “happiness” than the liberal – so there is a range of experiences and feelings in the lives of both that get counted by the conservative’s reckoning as “happy” and under the liberal’s as “certainly not unhappy but maybe not quite happy”.
And then there’s the headline finding, about “meaning” and “purpose” – well good heavens. The conservative and all their friends have read The Purpose Driven Life and it was great, and talk in terms of purpose. The liberal – well, they’ve got deeply held values that guide their actions, they have goals and motivation to achieve them, but an “underlying purpose to life” – that’s some Jedi mumbo jumbo right there.
And to a certain extent, toward the centre, the politics of the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ might not even check out, so to speak. There are probably self identified ‘conservatives’ whose politics are on the whole to the left of self identified ‘liberals’ – where their self identification is more about their social circles and activities and whether Fox News bloviators would make fun of their choice of sandwich condiments.
Which gets to the connection to [Po3] – that a cultural conservative who’s actually rather liberal would probably get Ideologically Turing Tested as ‘conservative’ more readily than a cultural liberal who’s actually to the right of them on a lot of issues, because of their phrasing in expounding arguments rather than the semantic meaning of their arguments.
In other words, the test subjects in an ITT would be judged to a significant degree on their pronunciation of “Shibboleth”, because the judging panel in an ITT would to a meaningful degree be self selected on the same basis.Report
Well, there are some fairly *OBVIOUS* ITT failures. “So, what you’re saying is that you hate minorities and that you want to maintain your position in society even though it’s getting browner.”
Merely being able to restate an opponent’s position in such a way that would get them to nod and say “yes, you have apprehended the concept I was trying to communicate” is something that, you’d think, would be achievable in theory.
(But a lot of our assumptions involve this being something that Both Sides see as potentially having mistakes that can be overcome with enough application of Enlightenment Kinda Thought. If you see Enlightenment Kinda Thought as a deliberate tactic on the part of the other guys to slip trojan horses into your tribe’s intellectual frameworks, ITTs are just another trick.)Report
Po1: In 1988, HW got 11% of the African-American vote. In 2012, Der Mittler got 6%.
The fact that there is regression to the mean is not particularly remarkable.
If you’re in the Democratic Leadership, however, and you thought that you’d have 2012 numbers forever? I suppose that that is somewhat remarkable.Report
Dangit where’d my comment go?
Well, just please take it on faith that it was full of deep insight.Report
That’s twice now. Is it in moderation or something?
Let this be a lesson to me – stick with the flippant and half baked observations from now on.Report
Comments keep getting stuck in pending- it’s been happening for a few weeks. I approve as soon as I’m able but there are no more in pending from you so it may have been eaten.Report
They appear to be in the trash? (I don’t have the permissions to untrash them.)Report
Not sure I do or not… will try.Report
Ta-Daaaa.Report
Thank you!
And just like that, there goes my claim to deep insight.Report
I restored it, see if it shows nowReport
Alright I’ll try again. If my original post comes back, feel free to delete one or the other…
On [Po4] and then [Po3] – I suspect that in Po4, a lot of the differences in self reported ‘happiness’ and ‘sense of purpose and meaning’ are based in culturally different uses of language.
e.g. the conservatives reporting slightly higher levels of ‘happiness’ even though liberals are slightly more likely to give genuine smiles indicating felt happiness: there’s a range of experience that is more likely to fit the average conservative’s criteria of ‘happiness’ than the average liberal’s, even though they feel the same way.
And the headline finding, about ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ in life – that’s almost entirely a Shibboleth. The conservative and all their friends are way more likely to have read The Purpose Driven Life and found it helpful. So of course they find ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ in life because that’s the language they use. The liberal on the other hand has core values that guide them, has goals and the motivation to achieve them. But ‘an underlying purpose to life’? That’s some Jedi mumbo jumbo. Git outta here with that.
And I suspect some of the self identified ‘conservatives’ probably are to the left of a lot of the ‘liberals’ on the whole, but they’re ‘cultural conservatives’ and ‘cultural liberals’ based on their social circles and hobbies and reading lists and whether their preferred sandwich condiments would give a Fox News bloviator conniptions.
Which brings me to the Ideological Turing Test – the test subjects are likely to be judged to a large degree on their wording, not the accuracy with which they present the arguments. It would be to a significant degree a test of how the test subjects pronounce ‘Shibboleth,’ because the judging panels would themselves be selected based on how they pronounce ‘Shibboleth’.Report
Po1: It would be nice if there were a regional, or even better a state, breakdown. There are only a few places where such a swing makes a difference this year.Report
Politico has an article about The Claremont Institute [1] having its mailing list blown up by white nationalist ranting from Charles Johnson. There are many remarkable things about the piece, but this paragraph kind of stuck out:
How strange that they might be having trouble with that.
[1] Which published Michael Anton’s notorious “The Flight 93 Election” a couple years back.Report
I think it’s entirely possible Trump has gained some small measure of black support and…what all of those polls are keeping track of is basically, as far as subgroupings in polling goes, whether two or three black people who approve of Trump happen to pick up the phone.Report