This is why the Tea Party will be much harder to deal with than any of us will stop and consider

[Peacetrain]

This is true not only for Democrats, Progressives, Greens the whole litany that makes up the center left to far left.. but also the established Republicans. This is something that bears repeating. This is also how horrific political movements such as the Nazis, Pol Pot, even the Taliban and Al Qaeda can take over a general populace.

The only way to defeat it.. is to turn light on it.. like cockroaches.. it will scurry, only to come back again when we least expect it. So we must be ever vigilant, generationally . No one generation will ever completely rid us of it


http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=4

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.

[Mister Ed]

1. A good article, and worth reading all the way through. n/t

[Peacetrain]

2. It really is.. It is how people can listen to things like Limbaugh etc and believe

that a 10th of the navy went with the President to India.. that they are spending more in a day on that trip that what is spent in a day on the wars..

People turn a blind eye to the truth because it does not fit a pre existing scenario in their mind

[On the Road]

Good Research and Good Article

Unfortunately, the author's recommendation is not based on the experiment itself. It seems possible that if partisans aren't swayed by facts, then they may not be swayed by attempts to shame those that confirm their views.

On the other hand, shaming seems to work better for social issues, on which Democrats have made greater gains in the last few decades. It's easier to shame someone for gender discrimination than for a hawkish foreign policy.

[Peacetrain]

4. Even on that.. we are dealing with fact based denials.

I have put this in here many time.. but we just went through that in Iowa.. and Vanderplatts, who if you had asked me last year, was just done in completely.. joined forces with the tea party people and values votes and tea party people got together and threw out our judges who gave us equal marriage last year.

It is just the beginning.

They have their own special facts and we went hard to wall here.

http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/news/state-and-regional/article_36cdb858-4a71-57df-bb0d-72656e8debe1.html

I wonder with specialized media to support your pre set point of view.. if anything will get though.

My biggest hope now is that something like Scopes will do a weekly or daily media program that actual reporters will start to resource.

Truth has taken a hard hit lately

[On the Road]

3. dupe

[TwilightGardener]

5. Confirms what I've suspected--facts have no relationship with beliefs and opinions

for many people. And correcting people makes them dig in even more--they simply distrust the correction and look for some other source to reinforce what they believe. The difference between now and 20-30 years ago is that we are no longer all getting our news (facts) from the same handful of sources. Now you can find any number of "news" outlets and blogs to reinforce what you already think, factual or not.

[Peacetrain]

6. Absolutely.. it is that in so much of a nutshell.

And I hope we as a group, party etc.. do not make the mistake we did with AM radio and cede a media as "old school" to the right.

And by that I mean, hands on group in person up close and personal gatherings. We still do campuses.. but we have given the church, the halls, any place people gather to the right for their own.. thinking we had the new media in our pocket.

We cannot afford to cede anything.. Now the right is using things like twitter facebook..*(we should have seen this with AOL) to do sort of a personal handshake in the Internet..

We need to be up close and personal with people. Not just we are here to solve those big problems but..also, how is it going with you today.

[TwilightGardener]

8. I don't know that the left "ceded" radio and TV to the right, so much

as RW outlets declared relatively objective radio and TV news sources as "liberal". In other words, facts have a known liberal bias, as Colbert says, and the RW outlets like Fox and Limbaugh declared war on objective factual news (liberal bias) and won. And now true objectivity (devoid of spin) is impossible to find.

[rufus dog]

7. K and R

Good read

[Shallah Kali]

9. Dr. Robert Altemeyer, author of The Authoritarians 'Comment on the Tea Party Movement'

imo a must read analysis of how and why tea partiers and similar groups think and act the way that they do. here are a few characteristics:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fhome.cc.umanitoba.ca%2F~altemey%2Fdrbob%2FComment%2520on%2520the%2520Tea%2520Party.pdf




1. Authoritarian submission. Authoritarian followers submit to the people they consider
authorities much more than non-authoritarians do. In this context, Tea Partiers seem to believe
without question whatever their chosen authorities say. Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, various
religious groups, the House and Senate GOP leaders, Sen. Grassley from Iowa, Rep. Bachmann
from Minnesota, and of course Sarah Palin can say whatever they want about the Democrats, and
the Tea Partiers will accept it and repeat it. The followers don‟t find out for themselves what the
Democratic leader truly said, what is really in a bill, what a treaty actually specifies, or whether
taxes have really gone up. They are happy to let Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin do their thinking
for them. It has gotten so bad that their leaders casually say preposterous things that are easily
refuted, because they know their audience will never believe the truth, or even hear about it.

2. Fear. Fear constantly pulses through authoritarian followers, and Tea Partiers are mightily
frightened. They believe President Obama is a dictator. They also think the country will be
destroyed by its mounting debt. They readily believed the health care proposals provided for “death
panels” that will euthanize Down‟s syndrome babies, “put Grandma in the grave,” and place
microchips in each American so the government can track us. When Rep. Paul Brown (R-GA) said
that Obama‟s plan to expand such things as the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps was really intended to
create a Gestapo-like, brown-shirt military force in the United States, his followers accepted this.
Conservative leaders especially vilify Barack Obama, recently calling him in the space of two days
(April 7 and 8) the “most radical president ever” (Gingrich) who is “inflicting untold damage on
this great country” (Limbaugh) and is inviting a nuclear attack on the United States by indicating
we won‟t hit back (Palin). The people who orchestrate the Tea Party movement know well what
button to push first and hardest among social conservatives, and they work it overtime. And they
know spreading fear “works” with others as well. Sometimes it seems they are all trying to out-
boogie-man each other.

snip

4. Hostility. Authoritarian aggression is one of the defining characteristics of authoritarian
followers. Do Tea Partiers seem particularly aggressive? The behind-the-scenes organizers of the
protests often provided the “words” for the protest through talking-points they distributed. But the
protestors put the feeling into the song, and the feeling was often hostility. They angrily called
people who disagreed with them at the town halls “Liars,” “Communists,” and “Traitors.” They
booed and booed until opposing speakers simply gave up. They lashed out at elected representatives
who tried to engage in dialogue. If you look at some of the videos of last August‟s protests, you can
see veins bulging in the necks of some of the Tea Partiers as they vented their fury.


5. A lack of critical thinking. Authoritarian followers have more trouble thinking logically
than most people do. In particular, they tend to agree with sayings and slogans, even contradictory
ones, because they have heard them a lot. Thus Tea Partiers reflexively, patriotically thump that the
United States is the best country on earth, but as well that it is now an Obama dictatorship. They
also have extra trouble applying logic to false reasoning when they like the conclusion. A ready
example can be found in Tea Partiers‟ assertion that Obama is a socialist. They have heard this over
and over again from Rush Limbaugh, etcetera, and “so it must be true.” But Obama has never
advocated state ownership of an industry. He certainly did not advocate state ownership of health
insurance, and eventually even backed away from the “public option” (that most Americans
wanted) which would have let the government as well as private companies offer health insurance.

[DailyGrind51]

10. Establishment Republicans will be the first to go.

Ernst Roehm and his S.A. were exterminated the year before Kristalnacht!