Morning Ed: Politics {2018.08.23.Th}

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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22 Responses

  1. Saul Degraw says:

    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

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    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

    • bookdragon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      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

    • LeeEsq in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      We must all worship football regardless of the sacrifice to Moloch.Report

  3. Oscar Gordon says:

    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

  4. PD Shaw says:

    [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:

    New York’s anti-mask law, reenacted in its current form in 1965, can be traced back in substance to legislation enacted in 1845 to thwart armed insurrections by Hudson Valley tenant farmers who used disguises to attack law enforcement officers. ?The “Anti-Rent era” in New York history, running from 1839 to 1865, involved a conflict over lease terms between the landlords and tenants of vast manorial estates. . . . Their livelihood threatened, tenants organized anti-rent associations to muster funds for litigation and to exert pressure on legislators. Some anti-renters formed bands of so-called “Indians,” disguised in calico gowns and leather masks, who forcibly thwarted landlords’ efforts to serve farmers with process or to conduct distress sales. ?The operations of the masked Indians commonly involved intimidation, and sometimes tarring and feathering, but also caused three deaths from 1844-45, including the death of a sheriff.

    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

  5. dragonfrog says:

    [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

    • Jaybird in reply to dragonfrog says:

      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

  6. Jaybird says:

    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

  7. dragonfrog says:

    Dangit where’d my comment go?

    Well, just please take it on faith that it was full of deep insight.Report

  8. dragonfrog says:

    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

  9. Michael Cain says:

    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

  10. pillsy says:

    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:

    The episode provides a window into the challenges facing the Trump-friendly right as it has struggled to build an intellectual movement that can outlast Trump — and to rid itself of bigots and fringe elements who have glommed on to some of the president’s immigration rhetoric.

    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

  11. Jesse says:

    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