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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Paul Ryan condemns a "Democratic dystopia"
where "[t]here’s a kind of a gloom and greyness to things. [...] the driving force is the state."
He thinks that Democrats want to make government the dominating force in people's lives and stamp out all originality and creativity. As noted, he's an Ayn Rand devotee.
edited 18th Oct '16 7:53:21 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"What to expect from a person whose name seems to be a mix and an acronym of Ayn Rand and Ron Paul if not their unholy breed?
edited 18th Oct '16 8:19:09 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesI really want to read atlas shrugged in full so I can maybe empathize with them but it's soooo bad. I don't know how you can actually sit down and read the whole thing and then go "yes, this is a world view I can ascribe to"
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?Ayn Rand is kind of like that in general. She really wasn't a very good author and her stuff totally fails to grab anyone who doesn't already buy into her philosophy on some level. Instead of properly building a world around her philosophy, she just kind of crams it into the "real world" warping it to fit, and adding weird logical problems that mean the central conceit doesn't actually make sense.
edited 18th Oct '16 8:20:02 AM by Zendervai
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Try The Fountainhead - it's a bit stronger on being a novel and a bit less heavy handed on the philosophy essays.
I will say of Atlas Shrugged that it is a strong book for challenging a person's default beliefs. Rand was pretty bad at continuing to challenge her own assumptions after she arrived at her conclusions and her Aristotelian logic allows for no middle ground but you may also see that there's a pretty huge disconnect between what she wrote and what a lot of her supporters adhere to.
And also that when you're 16 and unafraid of thousand page novels it can kinda blow your mind.
edited 18th Oct '16 8:29:57 AM by Elle
When confronted with extreme opinions, extremists become more centrist
Not directly related to US politics, but it gives an example of something that may be usable to help the Trump supporters chill.
(A common example of this type of argument was made by people opposed to gay marriage: “if you let two men marry each other, before you know it, people will be marrying their dogs.”)
The authors set up a large-scale intervention aimed at an entire Israeli city. They delivered their paradoxical thinking intervention (which they named “The Conflict”) to residents of this city using Internet advertisements, including online banners and You Tube ads. The Internet campaign was six weeks long and was accompanied by physical billboards, which were placed in 20 central locations throughout the city.
Slogans used for “The Conflict” intervention campaign included pro-conflict messages, such as “Without it, we would not have united against a common enemy… For unity we probably need the conflict,” and “Without it, we wouldn’t have had heroes… We probably need the conflict." In addition to this intervention, the researchers also did eighteen days of field work, during which they distributed T-shirts, balloons, and brochures to residents.
After this extensive intervention, the authors determined if conflict-supporting attitudes were affected. They found that paradoxical thinking led participants to feel less attached to conflict-focused attitudes after controlling for the participants’ baseline political orientation or level of religiosity. Controlling for these two covariates was an important step in their analysis because of their influence on attitudes, as noted above.
Anyone know of possible arguments to use on the Trump supporters? Some of them (Pence) are people who think that women should be punished for having a miscarriage for fuck's sake!
It would probably depend on which Trump supporters, because I think such a strategy is dependent on there being a point where even the extremist won't cross. it might be a viable approach for the low-income voters in rural areas who otherwise feel left behind economically (going back to a previous discussion on who exactly is supporting Trump).
edited 18th Oct '16 8:39:26 AM by megarockman
The damned queen and the relentless knight.Yeah. The problem is that Trump supporters, unlike the Israeli right wing targeted by the study, are all the way into The Tyson Zone. There is no crazy that they will not stoop to.
Likudniks are generally sane. Their positions are morally abhorrent, and sometimes defended with frivolous logical claims, but sane. So really crazy bullshit is likely to turn a lot of them off.
@megarockman: If there were any Trumpites who could be scared off by a strawman, the real Trump would have scared them off.
edited 18th Oct '16 8:44:27 AM by Ramidel
pretty sure that was a control question in a survey which would align with the rule of thumb that roughly 20% taking surveys are trolling.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?Well, it's less than the proportion of Republicans who think the Earth was created ~6,000 years ago.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"What Our Sons Are Learning From Donald Trump
from the NY Times; quoted in full due to 10 article a month limit.
It’s especially striking because today’s schools and workplaces try to value something different: empathy, impulse control and collaboration. For three decades, jobs that require these social skills have grown much more than others, researchers have found. They say one reason that boys are more likely than girls to get in trouble in school and are less likely to graduate is that a narrow definition of masculinity can stunt their ability to develop these skills.
If there is a silver lining to Mr. Trump’s views on manliness, it’s that it has prompted a national discussion about the “boys will be boys” excuse for things like bullying, boasting or appraising women in crassly sexual terms. That has offered an opportunity for parents and teachers to make clear what behavior is unacceptable. Michelle Obama, in an emotional speech on Thursday, asked what message Mr. Trump’s words and behavior sent not just to girls, but also to men and boys.
“Like us, these men are worried about the impact this election is having on our boys who are looking for role models of what it means to be a man,” she said.
Even at my son’s preschool, the children’s interest in Mr. Trump led to a circle-time discussion about bullying.
There is reason for concern about the men whom boys might look up to, because boys seem to be particularly sensitive — even more than girls — to social influences and role models, a variety of research has found.
Role models, whether parents or public figures, can help boys overcome disruptive behavior. And boys are much more responsive to this kind of attention and modeling than girls are, according to a study by Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Jessica Pan of the National University of Singapore.
By calling it “locker room talk,” Mr. Trump implied that all men act this way. But the “boys will be boys” excuse, for any kind of behavior, is demeaning to boys, said Michael Kimmel, a sociologist and executive director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University.
“I think we do ourselves a great disservice when we just shrug our shoulders in resignation and say, ‘Boys will be boys,’” he said. “We only say that when boys do bad things. That’s male bashing.”
Boys are already raised with two conflicting definitions of masculinity, Mr. Kimmel said. “If you were to ask men, Republican or Democrat or anywhere in between, what does it mean to be a good man, they’ll all tell you pretty much the same thing: honor, integrity, responsibility,” he said. “But ask what it means to be a real man, and we’re talking about never showing your feelings, never being weak, playing through pain, winning at all costs, getting rich, getting laid.”
By excusing bad behavior as a boy thing, boys get the message that they can’t improve themselves.
Many educators assume that boys are hard-wired in certain ways: to be aggressive, active, competitive, impulsive and stoic. The risk of that approach is that boys are raised to think they can’t be anything else. That constrains boys, and particularly harms those who don’t fit the mold — as much as it does girls who want to be active and competitive too, said David S. Cohen, a law professor studying gender and law at Drexel University.
“We have evidence that if you shift the discourse around boys and give them the cultural support they need to solve problems with strategies other than aggression and to express their feelings without being mocked, they respond just like any human being,” said Juliet A. Williams, professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote a paper titled “Girls Can Be Anything … But Boys Will Be Boys.”
Boys can quickly learn to recognize and call out bullying, boastfulness and inappropriate sexual language, says Michael G. Thompson, a psychologist at Belmont Hill School, a boys’ school near Boston, who was a co-author of “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys.” That’s why Mr. Trump’s behavior can be confusing for some of them, he said: “They think, ‘He’s doing stuff that if I tried in school, I’d get in trouble for.’”
Preschoolers are interested in Trump?! Holy shit. Talk of him is really trickling down, so to speak, to younger and younger kids.

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You are correct. Looks like the polls are split, with a narrow edge to the challenger. This could be one race that Donald screws for his party.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.