SwingingTheLamp

More research is always good, as it can deepen our understanding, but the basic outline of what's going on is already known. A lot of people just don't want to believe it, because we're all stuck on the metaphor that we're all captains of the ship inside our own heads. You see it in this thread; people want to blame non-voters, as if millions of people all had perfect information and all made decisions based upon it through conscious reasoning. Because they're just—I dunno—bad people? (Which is a completely bonkers belief when you start to dig into it.)

Actually, neuroscience tells us that consciousness doesn't really exist, except as an emergent phenomenon of sensory experience. Brain scans show that thoughts, feelings, and decisions occur before we're consciously aware of them; the conscious mind is basically a rationalization machine, inventing narratives about why we did a thing or felt a certain way, only after the fact. And, it's notoriously bad at it. (The Misattribution of Arousal is one of the classic examples.) So, if you can affect the way that somebody's brain works, you can in many ways control what the they think and feel.

And that's exactly what authoritarian demagogues do.

98% true.

(The other 2% is historic districts and college towns.)

It's kind of the natural result, because cars are good for:

• navigating a landscape designed to exclude anything but cars
• conspicuous consumption
• identity signaling

And they're really bad for:

• people
• the environment
• transportation

Do an honest evaluation, and "don't use cars" is the inevitable conclusion.

What a weird thing for her dad to say.

Muskegon

Google Translate for Conservativese:

LAW ➡️ The exercise of state power, or its agents. e.g. "The law is at the door."

ORDER ➡️ Social hierarchy. e.g. This pardon restored order by putting this woman a back in the social hierarchy where a white conservative belongs, rather than at the bottom, under the bootheel of the law, with the brown people.

A friend years ago clued me in to the Rosetta Stone for understanding conservatives: At base, they have a deep, abiding self-hatred. Yes, people often say it's fear, but everybody's motivated by fear of something. The conservative is motivated specifically by fear that they're worthless, that they don't measure up.

It makes so much sense when you game it out: They're constantly needing external validation that they are good, or at least, better than somebody else. The basis of racism becomes clear as day in this light, and the desperate need to be special is just kind of axiomatic.

Yeah, nobody's buying this bullshit.

Good comment, but this bugs me:

*Reagan

Regan was Reagan's chief of staff for his last couple of years in office.

I like the metaphor of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam in the cold water a mile from shore. He's losing body heat, and eventually hypothermia will set in and he will drown. But if he lets go and starts to swim for shore, he'll lose body heat even faster, use up his energy, and he probably won't make it. The "harm reduction" argument says that he should reduce his heat loss, and stay clinging to the flotsam. He's safe right now, while attempting to get to shore is difficult and dangerous.

Of course, by the time that the fallacy of that strategy becomes apparent (*gestures at current events*), he's too cold and weak to even attempt the swim.

In my city, we have a barely-there progressive, third party with a presence in the city and county government. It's all that remains of an attempt to in the 1990's to launch a Midwestern political party based on an electoral reform called "fusion voting," which would allow a candidate to get the endorsement of multiple parties, and appear on the ballot multiple times as a candidate under each of those party banners. That way, the candidate would know where their support came from, without the "spoiler effect." I learned from the Wikipedia page that it was an important tactic in the movement to abolish slavery.

But, in this case, the Democratic Party (technically, the Democratic Farm Labor Party) went to court to shoot down that idea, arguing that it was too confusing to voters. The American left isn't just sitting here waiting for someone to start a revolution, it has two major political parties actively suppressing it.

Amusingly, one tidbit of information that I just now learned from that Wikipedia article, presented without further comment:

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the heyday of the sewer socialists, the Republican and Democratic parties would agree not to run candidates against each other in some districts, concentrating instead on defeating the socialists. These candidates were usually called non-partisan, but sometimes were termed fusion candidates instead.

Voters do have a say.

That's why I vote third party.