Pixel mashup

Brilliant

Truth won't out

File this under things I assumed to be true, but hadn't confirmed.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

Glenn Beck understands this.

"How can you be outraged?"

Yesterday, Rodeo Clown took umbrage at the image of Nancy Pelosi and John Lewis locking arms to walk through a crowd of tea baggers, as if to "compare themselves to civil rights activists."

For those playing at home, John Lewis led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was a leading participant in the Selma to Montgomery marches.

Anti-capitalism gets a boost from Beck

The power of Glenn Beck.

This month, Mr. Beck proclaimed it “the most evil book I’ve read in a long, long time.”

The next day, “The Coming Insurrection,” whose authors call themselves the Invisible Committee, rose to No. 54 on Amazon’s best-seller list. In July, the book briefly reached No. 1. And even this weekend the book remained around No. 240.

Sylvère Lotringer, a professor emeritus of French language and philosophy at Columbia and the general editor of Semiotext(e), which translated and published the book, said there was no doubt that Mr. Beck was feeding what had been “in a short duration, the most books we have ever sold.”

He did not provide a sales number.

As for trying to play to Mr. Beck or the book’s other critics on the right, Mr. Lotringer said he was torn.

“I would be willing to come on the show if he had read the book, but he has never read it,” he said. “Nothing that he has said shows that he read it. He is incapable of reading it.”

Kind of like Oprah's book club, only for conspiracy-loons.

But I love the denial by the carny's spokesman that his boss hasn't read the book.

Christopher Balfe, president and chief operating officer of Mercury Radio Arts, Mr. Beck's production company, said, “Glenn read this book because he believes it is important for people to read everything, especially the titles they disagree with, so they can clearly understand all points of view and have open and honest debates.”

Beck reads "everything." Like his sister in con artistry, Sarah Palin.

Wingnuts assured they've won the daily news cycle

I'm glad they're obsessed with it.

Incoherent

I gotta admit, Katie Couric does bring out the incoherence in powerful, batshit insane people.

COURIC: No, for this show, can you explain what you mean by the white culture? Because some people say that sounds kind of racist.

BECK: Really? It’s amazing to me that, for the first time, I think in history somebody can ask a question and say, “Don’t you think that maybe we have several pieces here?” We have several pieces; George Bush says my grandmother was a typical African-American that had, that had her views bred into her. You don’t think maybe we would ask questions about that comment? How is it that the first time I think in history, you should check on it, somebody says, “Hey. There’s some red flags here maybe we should look at?” … How am I? How am I the target for asking questions?

Glenn Beck boils a frog

He is evil, stupid, and wrong. Both parts of that proverb are wrong. And I don't think that stunt is going to help his ad sales, but genius bidnessman Murdoch seems unconcerned about that.

But all that said, isn't there a Federal Law against this sort of thing? Why, yes, though up against a First Amendment challenge, there is:

18 USC 48 / PUBLIC LAW 106-152

Sec. 48. - Depiction of animal cruelty
(a) Creation, Sale, or Possession.
Whoever knowingly creates, sells, or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty with the intention of placing that depiction in interstate or foreign commerce for commercial gain, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

(b) Exception.
Subsection (a) does not apply to any depiction that has serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.

(c) Definitions.
In this section
(1) the term ''depiction of animal cruelty'' means any visual or auditory depiction, including any photograph, motion-picture film, video recording, electronic image, or sound recording of conduct in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed, if such conduct is illegal under Federal law or the law of the State in which the creation, sale, or possession takes place, regardless of whether the maiming, mutilation, torture, wounding, or killing took place in the State; and

(2) the term ''State'' means each of the several States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and any other commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States

Murdering small creatures to make "a point." What a movement the Right is creating.

Beckian

I'm so used to thinking of him merely as Glennbeck, but I wonder: What does Beck think of Beck?

Glenn Beck atop the trash heap of history

As Glenn Beck is committed to changing our lives, it's good to know about the author who changed his.

It's also good to remember that Joe McCarthy did not have a cable TV program or one of the richest media moguls in the world supporting him.

Via TPM.

9/12

I am so sorry I'm not at the 9/12 rally in Washington. The feeling of unity and warmth towards the rallyers' fellow Americans and support for our leaders must be a beautiful thing.