I don’t know why I believe the things I believe. I’d like to think I’ve thought them out rationally but probably I believe them because my parents believe them or because of tribalistic identifications I make or because Megan McArdle and Gregg Easterbrook don’t believe them (maybe this last one does fall under “thought them out rationally”).
Anyone who tells you that they’re sure they’ve come to their conclusions fairly and rationally is lying. Not lying that they’ve come to their conclusions fairly and rationally, but lying that they’re sure that they have. There’s no way to know. This was one of my favorite Atrios posts of all time:
You should be congratulated for choosing a candidate after carefully and rationally analyzing the situation.
Everyone else should be ashamed of themselves for letting their irrational emotions dictate their choices.
Of course, total belief in one’s own innate ability to be reasonable is one of the hallmarks of our contemporary Very Serious People. This from Andrew Sullivan almost made me laugh:
I’m not taking this position because – to count some of the milder terms thrown in my direction in the last few days – I have internalized homophobia, I want to leverage others’ suffering for web traffic, I have never done anything to advance gay equality, I am a hypocrite/privileged white male/barebacker/Uncle Tom, and on and on. I’m taking this position because it is my honestly thought-out view.
How can anyone claim to know this about themselves?
One of my favorite twists on this is the Very Serious Person who dismisses all his critics as uninformed partisans, but then screams LIBERAL ELITISM when anyone points out, say, that ignorance of where the Crimea is located correlates with support for US military involvement there:
Academics' study proves: Americans too dumb to participate in policy debate. http://t.co/Psuphh5qtz #InstinctualCondescension
— Charles Lane (@ChuckLane1) April 8, 2014
This is what makes things tough for conservative VSPs: the whole VSP thing is based on elitist condescension to the plebes, but many conservative arguments are based on the idea that reg’lar Murkinn plebes don’t need no book learnin’ to know better than their hippie overlords.
Scott P.
Please tell me the title is intended as a Way to Eden reference.
WereBear
@Scott P.: It’s the Kinks.
And now I’m sorry you reminded me of my least favorite episode evah.
DougJ
@Scott P.:
Yeah, it’s the Kinks.
dubo
The closely related correlary is how the thoughtful, serious, nonpartisan, even handed, unbiased analysis of our great Chief Justice without fail determines that gosh, the lobbyists for the Chamber of Commerce are just much better at understanding the Constitution than 200 years of Constitutional historians, legislators, and courts
NotMax
McGuffey weeps.
NotMax
@WereBear
Herbert!
Zam
Isn’t one of the main attributes of a well reasoned rational person their own willingness to admit they could be wrong, or that there is something they simply don’t know the answer to? Like in that creationist debate where Bill Nye said if he were shown physical proof of evolution being wrong he would admit it and move on, and the creationist said there was nothing that could possibly change his mind. So I would say that anyone who argues their position flows from “logic” or “reason” without at least an attempt at setting out the evidence from which they logically came to this conclusion is probably using the word in the sense of “I’m right” or “it’s just common sense’ but these words make it seem like there is actually something there behind what is essentially a gut feeling.
WereBear
@NotMax: Some people hate Spock’s Brain, I find it campy fun. But there’s no good to be had in that episode.
agorabum
Scientists: most people don’t know what they are talking about. We have the evidence that they can’t even find this place on the map (and the ones that are reflexively aggressive to ‘Russia’ are the ones witht he least understanding of where countries actually exist on this planet)
Lane: Grrr, you science nerds with your condescension, hate your faces. Just because people don’t know things doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to and print their opinions as if they are Serious and Worthy of discussion. If we were all ‘hey, maybe we should act rationally’ then there wouldn’t be as much exciting war stuff to cover! TLDR? Dumb rules, smart drools!
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Scott P.:
Hippies in Space!
NotMax
@WereBear
Never had a problem with that episode, other than at the time thinking it a strange choice to open the new season, moreso as the previous season’s opener could have been titled Spock’s Hormones..
Tractarian
@dubo: This.
Andrew Sullivan is just humbly calling balls and strikes, dontcha know.
I bet he does so while doing that humble half smiley-frowny thing that Roberts does.
patroclus
I’m beginning to think that Andrew should keep his honestly thought-out opinions to himself. Eich is an anti-gay bigot and should not be the CEO of a influential internet corporation which tries to market shit to gays. Period. I’m not seeing Andrew’s view here – what am I missing?
WereBear
@NotMax: It was Season Three, which had new people in charge, and I suspect they were pouting most of the time.
Groucho48
I have fairly and rationally come to the conclusion that you are overstating things. Take man made global warming, for example. Back years and years ago, when it first appeared on my radar, I read up on the evidence for and the evidence against and decided that there was overwhelming evidence supporting global warming. If the evidence showed that there were mechanisms that would counter the warming so it would be limited, I would have believed that. Same kind of process with evolution and all sorts of other scientific things.
Now, if you move more into the human and political arena, I do think your statements are more accurate. I believe a strong safety net helps the economy, overall. I would say that there is plenty of evidence supporting this, but, I will also admit I am biased in favor of helping folks that need help, so, I may not be weighing the evidence in a completely neutral way.
gbear
@DougJ: My beloved Kinks!
Schlemizel
damn I hate word press. I am not going to type that all in again.
Mike E
@Certified Mutant Enemy: omg those hippies had it coming, with their “live for today” attitudes and their devotion to method acting!
patroclus
Okay, I read all of Sully’s post – he wants me to stop calling anti-gay bigots anti-gay bigots and thinks that I am less likely to win the argument about equal protection and marriage equality if I do. I disagree. He also sets up some sort of strawman in claiming that I want to shut people up from expressing their anti-gay bigotry. This is wrong – what I want is equality under the law in all aspects of federal and state jurisprudence; shutting the bigots up would only be a bonus.
He didn’t mention Eich and his anti-gay bigotry at all – somehow, the fact that Eich is an anti-gay bigot is seemingly eluding Andrew.
Hill Dweller
So, Hillary went to an education “reform” summit with Jeb Bush, and praised him for his “reform” efforts. And Bubba went to a basketball game with Jeb’s war criminal brother.
Are they trying to rehabilitate the Bush name? Is this some form of triangulation? I’m already exhausted with their bullshit, and the campaign hasn’t even started.
Laertes
@patroclus:
What you’re missing is the fact that, at bottom, Andrew fucking hates Liberals. He’s never more than two drinks away from calling us “fifth columnists.”
He more or less gets that the modern Conservative movement is batshit insane, but he’s not at all happy about the company that sanity compels him to keep. His head is over here, but his heart is still over there, and he can’t help hasing a sad any time a Liberal gets his way.
Turgidson
@patroclus:
Eich is an Important Person, not a prominent liberal, and doesn’t use cuss words. Thus, his support for institutionalized discrimination (which he has not disavowed throught this fracas, IIRC) should be discussed in polite, measured terms, understanding, with compassion and conciliation. Anything else is THE INQUISITION.
Alec Baldwin, on the other hand, is history’s greatest monster for using an ugly anti-gay slur, in spite of his well-documented support for LGBT causes. Why? Liberal-left intolerance ZOMG! And let’s not forget Hillary Clinton suxorz!
Sullivan has been working overtime to keep his “monitor and mock as needed” credentials lately.
JPL
@Hill Dweller: Magically, if Hilary is elected President, the repubs will kiss her feet because she is friends with the Bushes. Of course, there is the possibility that she doesn’t run but endorses Jeb. Either scenario could happen because they are the Clintons.
kbuttle
That’s why I love Thomas – the guy doesn’t even pretend to listen to or engage in the arguments before the court; he’s just like ‘yeah, I already know how I’m voting on this’, and in adopting that posture he just mercilessly exposes the mockery that is the “thoughtful and deliberative” approach taken by the likes of Roberts and Alito. Because c’mon, don’t you think Thomas is really saying ‘yeah, I already know how I’m voting on this . . . oh, and I know how you guys are voting too’.
hoodie
@Hill Dweller: I wondered about that, too. Is it some kind of cultural triangulation, inoculating Hillary by showing her as associated with the right folks, rather than those black squatters currently overstaying their welcome in our White House?
NonyNony
@Laertes:
Sullivan is a conservative. Period the end. If he were not gay he would be a bog standard conservative whose views about the world would never be challenged. Because he’s gay he occasionally has these flashes where his ox gets gored by conservatism and so he can’t embrace it all the way like most conservative pundits do. But he’s fundamentally a conservative and anyone who expects him to do anything but bitch about liberals, progressivism, “political correctness”, taxes or any of the other things conservatives hate is hoping for too much.
(This is at the heart of his stance about Eich and the backlash he received, by the way. Conservatives hate “political correctness” and always side with the rich asshole corporate executive over anyone else. This is a bread-and-butter issue for conservative punditry, and in Sully’s heart he “knows” that the rich guy is always right even when the rich guy thinks you’re a subhuman undeserving of basic human rights because of your sexual orientation. That desire to bend at the knee in worship of your rich betters even when you know that they hate you is strong in conservatives of Sully’s stripe.)
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear: “We reach”
Villago Delenda Est
@patroclus: He’s a Tory shitstain…defending assholes who have CEO as a title goes with the territory.
On Edit: I think I just summarized NonyNony’s post above.
Which of course is why Sullivan’s head would look much better on a pike than on his shoulders.
Turgidson
@Laertes:
Yes, this. My armchair psychologist’s diagnosis of the Innumerate Tory Clown is something like this – he has recently come to realize (to his credit, I suppose) that the ideological tribe he spent most of his life marching with is a gruesome blight on the country’s and the world’s body politic. He is upset by this, but is calling it how he sees it more and more. Yet he spent most of his adult life lobbing childish potshots at a “Left” that existed only in his and the right wing’s imagination. So there’s some sort of Lady MacBeth “out damned spot” thing going on with him, and one of the ways he copes with his, uh, complicated past, is to periodically conjure up his familiar old nemesis, the “Left,” and smack it down again, to make himself feel better about having been a proud member of the goon squad that is working 24 hours a day to turn the world into a shithole. Kind of a “both sides do it” triple-axel.
So we get the kind of blubbering he’s been spewing out lately, deliberately missing numerous points in order to make an enemy of the “Left” and to declare himself the most enlightened man in the room.
Just wait until Hillary is the nominee, running 80-90% as Obama’s third term, and Sullivan needs to figure out a way to rationalize and explain his inevitable support for whatever bile-soaked hairball the GOP primaries cough out as the nominee (unless it’s Palin). That’s going to be EPIC, I tell you.
Roger Moore
@patroclus:
Sullivan is a classic conservative: interested in defending the status quo until his ox is being gored. Now that his marriage is safe, marriage equality is no longer as pressing an issue as punching hippies and defending the rich and powerful. Same old, same old.
bobbo
People who think an IUD is abortion, and that teh ghey marriage is bad for teh children, and that Obamacare has death panels, and that illegal immigrants are taking away our jobs, and that the best defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, and that the earth is 6000 years old, are just expressing their honestly thought-out view.
Amir Khalid
@hoodie:
It could just be that, regardless of their political differences, the Bushes and the Clintons (that is, Bill and Hill) belong to a particular milieu — namely the political elite in America — and are expected to show civility to their fellows. Both Bill and Hillary have post-public-office things going on that require they retain their membership in the elite.
Villago Delenda Est
@bobbo:
The beauty in this is that “thought out” is so simple to diagram with these types.
MomSense
We supposedly live in an information age and yet…
MomSense
@NonyNony:
Isn’t there also some perceived persecution that he experienced in UK that he describes as being punished for being successful? I think it had to do with taxes IIRC.
WereBear
@MomSense: The information is available. Doesn’t mean certain people use it.
Also, am I the first one to mention the cool blue buttons? Or did I miss the bitch session when they appeared?
Laertes
@MomSense:
He remains extremely bitter about the fact that not everyone liked Thatcher as much as he did.
Which is pretty horrifying, now that I think about it. The only thing worse than an angry old conservative is an angry young conservative. What a pill he must have been.
Calouste
I think this is the place to point out that one of the main glibertarian publications out there is called Reason.
Gene108
@JPL:
How many Republicans have the Clinton’s endorsed and/or actively campaigned for?
I think the list is either short or non-existent.
Bill went hard left, in 1993, and failed at getting the lefty stuff through Congress – healthcare reform and gays in the military come to mind – while the only liberal legislation he did get passed, the Assault Weapons Ban, probably did as much to turn the South into a Republican stronghold, it is today, than anything else.
In the 1990’s, GA, SC, AL, etc. had Democratic statewide office holders.
Amir Khalid
I lost my patience with Andrew Sullivan and quit reading him, long before he paywalled himself in, because I sensed he was a silly person who had fooled others and himself into believing he was a serious thinker. Brendan Eich is free to think what he will of gay people and their right to marriage. But as the public face of Mozilla, he embarrassed his colleagues and offended the company’s business partners. That’s called failing at his job, and if you fail badly enough you get fired. Sullivan must be a really silly person not to understand that.
And speaking of silly persons, is this Greta van Susteren person serious? She’s arguing that if it hadn’t been for all the media coverage, there wouldn’t be a massive search going on for MH370. It’s like hearing a rooster argue that his crowing made the sun rise today.
Joe Bleau
Not for nothing, but it’s hardly a shock that Sullivan would see parallels between the utter unfairness of Eich’s dismissal from Netscape at the hands of the all-powerful Leftist cabal of totalitarian Orwellian thought police, and his own smackdown by the intolerant Progressive Hippy Brigade of Political Correctness merely for being willing to entertain the proposition — purely in the interests of advancing academic thought and dispassionate scientific progress of course! — that African blacks are inherently stupider than European whites.
DougJ
@Hill Dweller:
My friends in education also praise Jeb for his efforts on education. He stuck his neck out supporting common core, which is very unpopular.
JPL
@Gene108: I don’t know of any repubs that they directly supported to date. I do know that Bill had no problem playing the race card during the 2008 campaign,though.
Schlemizel
@Roger Moore:
THATS IT!!! thank you so much. I was trying to figure out what had changed from a few years ago when little andy was calling for a boycott of some anti-gay bigot. Its so obvious once someone points it our, Little Andy got what he wants fuck all the rest of ya’all. Serious Roger, thanks.
Mandalay
@patroclus:
The thing that Sullivan sees and you don’t is the surge in mouse clicks visiting his web site.
Don’t think of Sulllivan as a gay man, or an intellectual, or a pundit, or an idiot (though all of that may be true in varying degrees). Think of him as a person who increases his income through increased visits to his web site when he makes controversial remarks. Throw in a large dollop of attention seeking and it all makes perfect sense.
While his political views differ from (say) Malkin or Coulter, his modus operandi is very similar: make an outrageous comment and sit back as the attention and $$$ soar.
smintheus
Conservative HS classmate on FB posted a crazy gun-nut blurb (‘550 rapes and 1,100 murders are prevented every day in the US because would-be victims defended themselves with guns’).
Me: Those are made up numbers.
Him: Every number we don’t like is made up.
Schlemizel
Sadly, I don’t think he is working at it at all. If he actually worked there would be a lot less to mock.
Violet
The uneducated dumbass 27%-er conservatives still tend to look up to people who have been to Ivy League schools. As much as they decry that elitist education, they admire it. The wingnut VSP who can navigate that tightrope of sounding smart, having the quality education, but still pandering to the 27% is the one who will go the farthest.
People like Bobo tend to do it reasonably well because they have that soothing tone that takes the most horrific conservative argument and makes it sound like plain old common sense. He’s a bit too stick-up-the-butt for the huntin’ and fishin’ crowd, but he makes things easy to understand and that has its place.
Betty Cracker
@Turgidson:
Exactly right.
NotMax
@DougJ
Call me cynical, but more likely that his stance is more for any policies/curricula that his brother Neil’s educational software company can service or profit from.
smintheus
@Amir Khalid: It’s even simpler than that. Eich gets to protest against gay marriage, and others get to protest against him. How does it make any kind of sense to argue that he and his allies get to try to harm gays, but nobody gets to try to harm them in return? What, are they off limits just because they’re malicious and malice only gets to go one way?
Schlemizel
@Mandalay:
I disagree about one part. His views are really no different than Malkin or Coulter. He expresses them more elgantly and in an acerbic tone but it is the exact same ugly shit. Hitchcock talked about how a rational sounding & acting madman was so much more scary than a lunatic. Little Andy is that guy.
smintheus
@Zam: Some people are happy to be given new facts or better facts that oblige them to change their views. Others are unhappy about it but will change their opinions at least grudgingly. And others will ignore or reject facts they don’t care for, or cling to disproven “facts” they prefer, rather than change their opinions.
Betty Cracker
@DougJ: I could set fire to my house and then put it out with my garden hose, but it wouldn’t make me a hero firefighter, you know? I think something similar is at work with Jeb! and Common Core.
It is unpopular with the retrograde shitheads Jeb! and company have spent so much time and money empowering, so it’s a bit rich that he gets credit for standing up to them. Frankenstein is grappling with his monster, huzzah!
Also, Florida is ranked 39th in the country for its public school graduation rates, and the gap between minority student achievements remains a chasm. I guess being ahead of Mississippi and Alabammy, etc., is great, but it’s rather a thin reed to hang Education Governor on, as Jeb! is busily doing, all the while shoveling money to his shady brother Neil’s e-learning scams.
Schlemizel
@Violet:
Brooks is the prefect conservative for the oh so good-hearted hater, The NPR Republican. He isn’t a flintskined evil bastard, he is a reasoned nice guy who just happens to support the worst neocon bullshit and makes it acceptable to the NPR-con crowd.
Dave
@smintheus: 1100 murders a day do people not even look at the absurdity of their numbers? They actually believe that guns prevent more murders every two weeks than happened in the entirety of 2013? I mean I’m not surprise but…. nope trailing off almost as bad as the first time I realized people actually believe the Universe is less than 10,000 yrs old I have nothing.
Baud
@smintheus:
On the other hands, 500,000 men accidentally shoot their dicks off with guns each year, so you have to balance it all out.
smintheus
@Dave: Yep, a normal person would laugh out loud at figures like those. But these types don’t even notice (and don’t like to have it pointed out) that 1,100 = 550 X 2.
Poopyman
@smintheus: It has always been thus. Sling all the mud you can, but if any little bit comes back scream bloody murder. Working the refs, it is.
Not exactly OT, but did anyone notice that on that map of where Crimea supposedly is, did anyone else notice that someone thinks it’s along the Ohio River somewhere in Indiana/Kentucky territory?
NotMax
@smintheus, et al.
2 good reads excoriating Sullivan:
God, Andrew Sullivan Can Act Stupid
No, Andrew Sullivan, Calling Out Bigotry is Not ‘Intolerance’
smintheus
@Baud: And 73.5% of statistics on the internet are not accurate.
Mandalay
@Schlemizel:
I concede the point, and thought the same after I had posted.
My larger point remains: Sullivan, Coulter and Malkin all make a living by pretending to be apoplectic, and Sullivan differs only in that he is not constantly apoplectic.
Their income level depends on their outrage. If they admit to seeing more than one side to an issue, and become reasonable, their income will plummet.
Joe Bleau
@smintheus:
Here’s the difference – despite the fact that his actions caused material harm to thousands of people, pretty much all of whom form a cohort to whom Sullivan ought to be prima facie utterly sympathetic, he is nonetheless Better People than his tormentors.
We know this because he is smart and successful, he seems to come from a cultural background that frequently exhibits these qualities, and he very possibly doesn’t even actively hate gay people or even think bad thoughts about them. Meanwhile, the thoughts of those Dirty Orwellian Hippie Lefties are demonstrably polluted by the desire to eradicate all evil thoughts and force everyone to conform to their own homogeneous culture and agenda.
Remember, its the purity of your Inner Cathedral, not the consequences of your actions, that determine whether or not you are a Bad Person and deserve the Bad Things that happen to you.
Schlemizel
@Mandalay:
OH, Absolutely! Your main point is exactly right.
SatanicPanic
@smintheus: Wait, so your friend is alleging that without guns there would be 1,100 per day? 401,500 murders per year? That would be almost ten times the current highest count in the world- India, a country of over a billion people, at 49K. How is that even remotely plausible?
Turgidson
@smintheus:
As other have pointed out, part of it is probably just his Toryism at work (in addition, of course, to my diagnosis above): To wit,
Eich, a successful entrepreneur, is Sully-approved. He’s the kind of guy Sullivan might meet at a cocktail party and have a poite conversation with. So, he just can’t be intolerant, you see? Just like Chunky Bobo Douthat, who papers over his support for the codification of bigotry with pretty words about traditionalism and cultural norms. He’s so soft-spoken and polite about it! Sullivan will not say an ill word about Douthat.
Those damn PC police hippies and their fatuous celebrity supporters on the Liberal-Left are another matter. They probably don’t know which wine glass to use for a good Port, or which fork is supposed to be used for a Nicoise salad, so obviously they’re monsters.
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense: Had more to do than he’d never, ever sit in the House of Lords because, you know, he’s one of them.
He’s Irish.
Just One More Canuck
@DougJ: thanks for the Kinks reference – it pushed a truly horrible earworm out of my brain
Jamey
@DougJ: Sullivan and Lane: Dedicated Followers of Fascism.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid: She’s on Faux. She’s paid very well to be an utter buffoon.
Villago Delenda Est
Atrios’ link to this thread is hilarious.
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: His brother Neil should be rotting away in prison for bank robbery back in the 80’s.
Of course, when you’re in a suit and an executive at the bank in question, they never call it bank robbery. But a bank robber is precisely what Neil Bush is.
Jamey
@smintheus: Please ask him if the Ft Hood shooting victims would be alive today if the facility they were in allowed users to carry hand … oh, right, it’s a military installation.
mclaren
@Zam:
No, the hallmark of the well reasoned rational person is the ability to study all the available evidence and then come to the reasoned logical conclusion that anyone who disagrees with them is mentally ill or a tool of satan or a heretic.
As, for example, the marvelously rational well-reasoned people on this forum who encounter my list of documented facts and dismiss them as “he’s off his meds.”
mclaren
@Jamey:
This is the nub of the problem. Clearly the military personnel on that base weren’t carrying lethal enough weapons.
The real solution to gun violence is to pass a law requiring that everyone carry a flamethrower at all times. Then we’ll be safe.
Citizen_X
@SatanicPanic:
Well, they’re not allowed to carry guns in England, and they have 100,000 murders per year. {/wingnut}
Roger Moore
@smintheus:
As far as I can see, he thinks they’re off limits because they tried to get their way through the ordinary political process. If you want to defend marriage equality, you need to do it by countering their political campaigns and mounting your own, not by personal attacks outside of politics. It’s a superficially plausible argument that falls down when you realize that the situation is asymmetrical. Gays are actually having their lives ruined by the politics involved, while it’s just a hobby for the bigots.
RSA
@Roger Moore:
I think “I retract nothing” is a good summary of how Sullivan’s views change with events in the world.
smintheus
@Roger Moore: Right you are. The bigots are bullies. They know there’s zero chance of gays turning around and ramming through laws to prevent heterosexuals from marrying. So the bigots think they can punch down at the gays, and presume that the gays can’t/won’t punch back. The stunned look on Eich’s face as he got turfed out reminds me of nothing so much as the look of the school bully who’s gotten punched out by his intended victim.
Roger Moore
@RSA:
They have obviously changed in this case. Sullivan was perfectly happy with tracking down Prop 8 donors when it had just passed, but he’s angry about it today. Something must have changed his mind in the interim.
RSA
@Roger Moore:
Okay, you’ve got me there. Still searching for the grand unified Sully theory.
Ian
I couldn’t have trolled better.
LittlePig
@Laertes: You have perfectly encapsulated poor Sully. Magnificent.
brantl
@DougJ: Their “other Darryl brother” Neil, is very involved in computerized programs for testing, that suck, too.
Nathanael
“Anyone who tells you that they’re sure they’ve come to their conclusions fairly and rationally is lying. Not lying that they’ve come to their conclusions fairly and rationally, but lying that they’re sure that they have. There’s no way to know.”
This is one reason I save my strongest political advocacy for opposing HOLY-HELL-THAT-IS-INSANE ideas, rather than actually advocating my own ideas. If it’s a mind-bogglingly awful idea, I can probably prove that it is. If it’s a good idea, I probably can’t prove it…