For Conservatives... an Advantage? (Part 1)

I started writing this back before the election. I was thinking the whole time, "Wow, this is so important for people to read. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Gotta blog on this baby!" Then I started thinking of insights I wanted to share about the way Catholic Conservatives versus Catholic Liberals are dealt with by the Church. So I put off posting it, and I kept putting it off until now. [Note: I wrote this paragraph on Tuesday, 2/12/19]

Yes; I put this off several more days because I kept thinking of more things to say. Finally I decided to break this up into smaller pieces, this being the main one. So hopefully next week I'll post more thoughts—I have to travel again.

This is a very insightful Quillette article by Matthew Blackwell written about a year ago. Blackwell It examines temperamental differences between conservatives and liberals (Blackwell uses the term progressives). Excerpt:

Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse. Rather, they seemed to put moral ideas into the mouths of conservatives that they don’t hold. To put it bluntly, Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives. This he calls the ‘conservative advantage,’ and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.

Haidt’s research echoes arguments made by Thomas Sowell in A Conflict of Visions and Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate. Both Sowell and Pinker contend that conservatives see an unfortunate world of moral trade-offs in which every moral judgment comes with costs that must be properly balanced. Progressives, on the other hand, seem to be blind to, or in denial about, these trade-offs, whether economic and social; theirs is a utopian or unconstrained vision, in which every moral grievance must be immediately extinguished until we have perfected society. This is why conservatives don’t tend to express the same emotional hostility as the Left; a deeper grasp of the world’s complexity has the effect of encouraging intellectual humility. The conservative hears the progressive’s latest demands and says, “I can see how you might come to that conclusion, but I think you’ve overlooked the following...” In contrast, the progressive hears the conservative and thinks, “I have no idea why you would believe that. You’re probably a racist.”

Does this ring true to me? Certainly, and I am glad we now have scientific evidence to prove what we have experienced as outspoken conservatives for years. I can vividly recall the fierce accusations of a hardline leftist in a heated interaction; most of the heat was coming from his side. When trying to reason with him about why conservatives dislike the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), he told me "You just want people to die!" Had I responded, "Well, you just want to have everything for free, bite the hand that feeds you, and..." then that would be a response in kind, and this "argument" would fall flat. But I rarely hear this sort of rhetoric on the right, and when I have, there is an immediate distancing by other conservatives in the vicinity. Thinking conservatives do not want to be lumped in with unconstructive accusation.

[Side note: In fact, most conservatives do not want to be "lumped in" at all with anything. That is why MAGA hats are such a new phenomenon.]

My friend Nate noticed the same tendency in a very good recent post on his blog, Rotten Chestnuts:

Both sides often make relevant points about important data, and both sides seem to avoid what the other one is addressing leading to a frustration of everybody talking past each other. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that the [Trump] fans seemed to make an effort to confront the counter arguments a bit more often – the [Trump] skeptics rarely so. In fact the skeptics seemed to go out of their way to [avoid] even acknowledg[ing] competing evidence.

(I hope Nate doesn't mind my slight correction – it is what I think he is trying to say. We all could use an editor.)

My theory is that there are really two possible reasons we conservatives don't respond in kind as I described. One is that we don't presume to know motives. I don't really know that someone pushing for Obamacare is trying to stick it to the man and get handouts. The other one is that even if I suspect that this might be his motivation, there is no rhetorical value in throwing this at him. He reduces his chance of winning the argument by accusing me of murderous intent, but I'm not about to give ground by assertions of larcenous intent. Even if I was right I would lose in the mind of onlookers who thought my opponent's motives were pure.

Two conclusions from the leftist's behavior are easy for me to imagine. The first conclusion: the liberal has no desire to convince me I'm wrong or a bit "off" in my thinking. He just means to assert his opinion, usually loudly and in a derisive way which is difficult to rebut. He wants to silence my voice. Whether I shut up out of shame or out of frustration, this is his best hope of "winning" — a forfeit from his opponent. I believe this is why we were all so gratified to hear Brett Kavanaugh swinging back at the "coordinated effort to destroy [his] good name" by false accusations in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. He wasn't having any of it; he wasn't going to give up. We're use to people on our side sitting by and "taking their lumps".

The second possible conclusion: he really does want to convince me he is right and thinks this is the best way to go about it. This is less likely in my opinion, but I admit it is possible. It would mean that I have to "change my mind" in a sort of nominal way to be able to go with the flow — his flow. There is still no logic involved, and probably no real willful change of heart or mind. Maybe the liberal imagines he can pull off the ol' Jedi Mind Trick?

Going back to Blackwell's beginning paragraph:

When I disagree with a conservative friend or colleague on some political issue, I have no fear of speaking my mind. I talk, they listen, they respond, I talk some more, and at the end of it we get along just as we always have. But I’ve discovered that when a progressive friend says something with which I disagree or that I know to be incorrect, I’m hesitant to point it out. This hesitancy is a consequence of the different treatment one tends to receive from those on the Right and Left when expressing a difference of opinion. I am not, as it turns out, the only one who has noticed this.

I remarked to my wife last night that reading this made me want to be even more empathetic in by use of rhetoric and conciliatory in my tone when I debate with anyone, especially liberals. I never ever want to respond in kind. It is obvious that Trump is not so worried about this, but I don't think we have to imitate him by any means just because he is the de facto head of the more conservative political party. But typically the people in the Trump Resistance camp are even worse at seeing the other side because they respond in kind almost reflexively and with barely any self-awareness. It's like Cleveland talker Mike Trivisonno famously stated two years ago, "The people who hate Trump the most don't realize how much they're like him."

[In my next installment, I'll talk about the effect this phenomenon has had on the Catholic Church.]

White Liberals Parrot Talking Poiints

This is a few years old, but still applies to the current situation in our society. White liberals are taught that we need to be extra conscious of how hard black people have it. Except they don't know any real black people.



Requiring identification in order to vote should be a no-brainer to help prevent voter fraud. And someday it will be, I'm sure. As real white racism continues to recede into America's past, the argument that voter ID laws discriminate against blacks will eventually cease to be convincing. A small minority will continue to pretend it's true. As always.

Reverse engineering the narrative of Ahmed's clock

Obviously, it's a clock

Instead of saying much myself about what appears to be a very clever passive-aggressive hoax designed to bring sympathy to North Texas Muslims in general and fame and hard cash to the Mohamed family central to the whole thing in particular, I'm just going to put up a series of links that highlight anomalies in the Ahmed narrative either not or under reported elsewhere.

Gina Cassini has put the two main elements together, that the clock was not an invention but rather a reassembly of old clock parts in an aluminum pencil case, a setup that - odd for a clock - concealed the digital clock face. In other words, a jumble of electronic parts in a closed box: of course, "It's a clock".

The other element was the early reaching out for legal aid.

CNN reveals that Ahmed has already scored close to $10,000 out of a goal of $100,000 from his ordeal. If Ahmed makes his goal, a scholarship to MIT will be moot.

Running a story on Sarah Palin, extensive pictures at the British Daily Mail reveal the pre-designed-in Muslim angle to the affair.

Here's a YouTube video of Bill Maher's show including, among others, North Texas billionaire Mark Cuban

Taken together, the entire collection of facts of the case suggest a brilliant passive-aggressive ploy which sucked in as its accelerant everyone from local publisher Wick Allison's lily-white empire to the President of the United States.

Credit in this affair should be extended to both the local high school and police department, who simply did their jobs as detailed and didn't backpedal or otherwise allow themselves to be Ahmed like the rest of the media. Even the the Islamic Association of North Texas, which operates the Mohamed family mosque, put out a statement saying

"We're not pointing a finger at the school district or the police department," Hamideh said. "Under the current climate that exists in this country, you can't really blame them because when they see something like that, they have to react."

So Keith, you now ask, where should I be placing my future wagers?

I'd say

100% that the liberals double down and dig in on this

50%/50% whether or not the Mohamed's try to squeeze some lawsuit money out of the affair

Pretty sure that anything substantial in the way of the offers (Facebook, Twitter, MIT, etc.) will quietly fade away with the news cycle.

100% that we now have a new verb: to be/have been Ahmed.

UPDATE (as they say): 

50%/50% whether the family really wants any more close inspection of Ahmed's clock, or of any other facts of the case for that matter:

Officer James McLellan said Thursday the family is free now to recover the clock that was seized as evidence, but the family has not kept appointments for meetings to do so.
 :
Irving Independent School District Communications Director Lesley Weaver said there is more information, but it cannot be released without a privacy waiver from the family. “All they have to do is sign a release form and we’ll be able to give a different perspective of what happened that day in the classroom and the hours following,” she said.
:
Mohamed family members declined to discuss a privacy waiver. They were still considering possible legal representation over the incident and national television interview requests Thursday.

  
UPDATE 2:

More of the Mohamed Family's Zany Sense of Humor: "Twin Towers Transportation Corp."

Incidentally, I pulled this last link from the site of Rod "#IStandWithAhmed" Dreher, founder of the Benedict Option, my prime candidate for sockpuppet Benny, founder of the now abandoned fake Catholic, pro-Benedict Option newsletter The Benedict Post, and all around beloved Moses who will lead us all into the Benedict Option land of Safe Spaces, but not until the Easter Bunny appears to him in a dream wearing a hijab and pointing the way.