The "Conservative" Campaign Against Science and Expertise

With the Republican Party base now controlled by Christofascists and overt racists, the GOP is engaged in a war against science, knowledge and expertise because all of this argue against the Christofascists' fairy tale world view and racists' desperate need to feel superior to others.    The Party has gone from one that valued education, knowledge and science to one where ignorance and bigotry is celebrated both among the party base and in the White House. This war on experts and expertise is placing the nation in danger, especially as Trump pushes to reopen the economy despite the dire warnings of health experts.  Trump's sole concern is reviving the economy and his own reelection chances.  How many might die doesn't factor into the equation.  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican looks at this dangerous and disturbing phenomenon.  Here are highlights: 

It is perhaps inevitable that a problem as large and complex as covid-19 should result in a pandemic of motivated reasoning. It is a human tendency to interpret disasters as confirmation of our existing beliefs. So the coronavirus outbreak proves the need for a border wall. Or it demonstrates the urgency of Medicare-for-all. Or it resulted, in the words of Franklin Graham, from “a world that has turned its back on God.” 

The pandemic has given our health-care system an X-ray, revealing disturbing racial inequities that need to be understood and addressed. But on the whole, we are right to be wary of people who claim great tragedies as the confirmation of pet theories and previous prophesies. The convenience of an argument is often inversely proportional to its credibility.

Motivated reasoning is usually just tiresome. At its worst, it can be dangerous. Sometimes drawing the wrong lesson badly obscures a right and necessary lesson. Sometimes the interpretation of a crisis is so dramatically mistaken, so ludicrous and imprudent, that it can worsen the crisis itself.

Such is the case with conservatives who look at the coronavirus outbreak and see, of all things, the discrediting of experts and expertise. . . . . This argument assumes an intellectual fog that is just lifting. Though we are still relatively early in the pandemic, this much seems clear: The medical experts recommended aggressive social distancing to bend the curve of infections and deaths downward. Americans generally trusted the experts. By all the evidence, aggressive social distancing is bending the curve of infections and deaths downward. And places that were earliest and most aggressive in this approach have seen the best results.

This outcome doesn’t strike me as murky. It is difficult to see how experts whose advice clearly saved tens of thousands of lives can be called discredited. It is easy, however, to see how making this false claim might undermine public adherence to their advice, which still matters greatly in the crisis.

The limits of epidemiologists do not change the realities of epidemiology. The methods of science are the only way we gain access to information about the nature of disease. Judgments based on that information are not infallible. But they are always preferable to the aggregate opinion of the Internet. Even if that opinion stumbles on the truth, there is no way to be confident it is the truth.

The main failures we have seen in the coronavirus response have not been caused by excessive confidence in experts. Our problems have been rooted in the failure of political leaders to treat the warnings of experts with sufficient seriousness, and to act on those warnings with sufficient urgency. It was [Trump] the president who publicly dismissed the disease as a minor annoyance when other members of his administration knew that to be untrue. It was [Trump] the president who characterized pandemic awareness as a political conspiracy during wasted weeks. It was [Trump] the president who spouted misinformation about the disease and its treatment while horrified experts stood beside him.

From the beginning, flattening the curve was going to require heroic measures to achieve mixed results. That is the nature of reality, not a commentary on public health expertise. The experts have earned our trust. And continued progress depends on believing them.

Trump - A Study in Ignorance

One of the dangers of having a malignant narcissist in the White House is that Der Trumpenführer thinks he is smarter than everyone else and, perhaps even more dangerous, he is so self-absorbed that he refuses to see his own ignorance on a host of issues. His emotions and views become "facts" even when utterly wrong.  Sooner or later, this will have likely catastrophic consequences, especially since the man has surrounded himself with sycophants and ideologues to whom true facts are likewise irrelevant.  A column in the New York Times looks at the disaster(s) down the road.  The take away? Be very, very afraid.   Here are excerpts:

How prepared is our president for the next great foreign, economic or terrorist crisis?

After a little more than two months in office, President Trump has raised doubts about his ability to deal with what the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously described as the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns.”

“President Trump seems to have no awareness whatsoever of what he does and does not know,” Steven Nadler, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote me. “He is ignorant of his own ignorance.”

During his first 63 days in office, Trump made 317 “false or misleading claims,” according to The Washington Post.

The FBI, the Treasury Department and two congressional committees are probing whether Trump’s campaign aides and advisers — including Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn — were complicit in alleged Russian interference.

Without an obvious mandate (as the world knows, he lost the popular vote by 2.87 million), Trump has proposed a profound retrenchment of domestic policy.

His 2018 budget, the potential impact of which he does not seem to grasp, calls for cutting $54 billion from programs that pay for education, housing and child care assistance for low- and moderate-income families, protection against infectious diseases, enforcement of environmental, worker and consumer protection regulation, national parks and a host of other social programs.

Trump proposed these cuts in spite of what Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, described in as essay titled “The World Without America” as threats to “the domestic foundations of American Power,” including “crumbling infrastructure, second-rate primary and secondary schools, outdated immigration system, and slow economic growth.”

In addition, Trump has antagonized the leaders of allied countries like Mexico, Australia and Germany, and he has repeatedly demonstrated an extraordinary lack of knowledge about foreign affairs.

This is the president who faces what Warren Christopher, President Clinton’s first secretary of state, called problems from hell. . . . . How dangerous is the situation that the United States faces?

Steve Nadler of the University of Wisconsin had more to say:

Donald Trump and the people with whom he has filled his cabinet are perfectly unqualified and unprepared to handle any and all of those developments and trends. The lack of experience and understanding of the world, especially of our historical and contemporary relationship with our European allies and rivals is frightening, especially in today’s world, where the stakes and the dangers are so much greater than ever.

Andrew Bacevich, professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University and a retired Army colonel, wrote that Trump is “utterly unqualified, both intellectually and by temperament, for the office he holds,” adding that “The possibility that Trump will disastrously mishandle” foreign policy “is real.”

Of the multiple international tensions that could turn into crises at any time, North Korea could lead the way.

Toby Dalton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment, focuses on this growing threat. In an email, he writes:

Between an impulsive president who seems uninterested in details, an advisory systems that does not (yet, at least) produce good advice, a general lack of respect for expertise, and a distrust of intelligence, a crisis with North Korea could go very poorly.

The current situation is not stable, Dalton said

David Bell, a historian at Princeton, emailed his thoughts on Trump’s capacity to handle the difficulties that will face his administration:

Trump himself is abysmally ignorant about both international and domestic affairs, and he is nearly always guided by a single principle: his own self-interest.

Given the magnitude of the problems that lie ahead and the embedded contradictions that make them difficult to solve, we face precisely the kind of world President Trump is least equipped for, mentally and morally.

And let's not forget the two groups responsible for the dangers now facing America: evangelical Christians and racist working class whites who refused to grasp their own shortcomings and prior bad decisions. They wanted to say "Fuck you" to the system, but in the process have likely fucked over them selves and the nation.  They need to be held responsible.  They deserve no respect, deference or attempts to understand them.  They are deplorable. 

Trump Versus the Constitution and Free Speech

One of Donald Trump's latest Twitter tirades - it is difficult to keep track since there are so many - involves flag burning.  Per Der Fuhrer, " . . . .there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”  I have always found it telling that for the far right - including most evangelical Christians - they find burning an American flag much more distressing than seeing starving children or Muslims being murdered by brutal dictators in the Middle East and elsewhere. It speaks volumes about their moral bankruptcy and the toxicity of their foul version of Christianity.  But back to Der Fuhrer.  Trump's Twitter outburst reveals many things, not the least of which is that the man is clueless on constitutional rights of citizens or the fact that a Supreme Court ruling upheld flag burning as a right of freedom of speech.  The New York Times, with which Trump has love/hate relationship schools Trump on constitutional realities.  Here are excerpts:

When Donald Trump, hand on the Bible on Jan. 20, swears to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, we the people will have good reason to doubt he knows what he’s talking about. Consider what he tweeted out on Tuesday:

“Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

Here’s where we explain what shouldn’t need explaining. Flag-burning is constitutionally protected speech. The Supreme Court has made this clear, in a ruling joined by Mr. Trump’s favorite justice, Antonin Scalia. It’s popular to want to punish flag-burners — pandering politicians, including Hillary Clinton, have tried. But the First Amendment exists to protect unpopular, even repulsive forms of expression. As the Supreme Court said in a 1990 decision finding a federal law against flag-burning unconstitutional, “Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered, and worth revering.” It’s interesting that so many of the people who are eager to punish flag-burners, like Mr. Trump, are at the same time so untroubled by speech that offends minorities, women and other Americans. They rail against any concern about that kind of speech as “political correctness.” But in this country, flag-burning is about as politically incorrect as anything you can do. Where is their courageous defense of speech now? Isn’t Mr. Trump the man who stood up for the freedom to say brutally unpleasant things? Who said, at the Republican convention: “I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.”

The court, by the way, has also declared that citizenship cannot be stripped away, not by Congress or the president, not in this democracy.

But we don’t have the luxury of merely mocking someone who is now as powerful as Mr. Trump. Before you tune him out, remember what the right-wing propaganda site Breitbart was celebrating on Tuesday — that Mr. Trump’s social-media presence allows him to get his message to millions, bypassing “corporate media.” He has more than 16 million Twitter followers. With Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, he can feed lies and ignorance directly to 36 million people.

He tweets, he posts, he incites. He trolls. He commands a global platform and will soon be America’s commander in chief. But it has to be said, and said again: This is not normal. It demeans the presidency.

 Be very afraid of this man and what his gang of henchmen and Republican sycophants in Congress are poised to do to this country and the rights of citizens.

Advisers: Carson Doesn't Understand Foreign Policy Issues

While many of the white Christofascists of the Republican Party base have surprisingly rallied to Ben Carson (surprising because they loath a black man in the White House in general) thanks to Carson insane religiosity, the GOP debates and the growing complexities of foreign affairs issues are exposing Carson's ignorance, especially in the area of foreign policy.  Even his advisers are admitting that Carson is over his head - I'd say WAY over his head - and the question becomes whether his increasingly obvious unfitness and lack of knowledge will finally end his luster with the portion of the GOP base most out of touch from objective reality.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Carson's adviser's efforts to deal with the man's blatant ignorance.  Note that Carson's only paid foreign policy adviser is out of Liberty University, a continual embarrassment to the Commonwealth of Virginia and gathering place for Christofascist nutcases. Here are article excerpts:

Ben Carson’s remarks on foreign policy have repeatedly raised questions about his grasp of the subject, but never more seriously than in the past week, when he wrongly asserted that China had intervened militarily in Syria and then failed, on national television, to name the countries he would call on to form a coalition to fight the Islamic State.

Faced with increasing scrutiny about whether Mr. Carson, who leads in some Republican presidential polls, was capable of leading American foreign policy, two of his top advisers said in interviews that he had struggled to master the intricacies of the Middle East and national security and that intense tutoring was having little effect.

“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” said Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security. He also said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so “we can make him smart.”

As the deadly assaults in Paris claimed by the Islamic State reframe the presidential race, the candidates’ foreign policy credentials are suddenly under scrutiny. And Mr. Carson has attracted extra attention because his statements give rise to questions about where, as a retired neurosurgeon without government experience, he turns for information and counsel on complex global issues. 

But the briefings do not always seem to sink in, Mr. Clarridge said. After Mr. Carson struggled on “Fox News Sunday” to say whom he would call first to form a coalition against the Islamic State, Mr. Clarridge called Mr. Williams in frustration. “We need to have a conference call once a week where his guys roll out the subjects they think will be out there, and we can make him smart,” Mr. Clarridge said he told Mr. Williams.

Once written off by political insiders, Mr. Carson has rocketed to the top tier of candidates and has traded off a lead in recent polls with Donald J. Trump.

But the stress of his ascent has revealed an inexperienced political operation and a lack of connections to informed and respected advisers. Whereas Jeb Bush can call on dozens of experts from the foreign policy establishment who once worked for the administrations of his father and brother, Mr. Carson so far has only one paid national security adviser, Robert F. Dees, a retired Army general on the staff of Liberty University in Virginia.

On Facebook, where the campaign connects to its vast grass-roots army, two of his top campaign aides posted a video on Monday highlighting his “Fox News Sunday” interview with no hint of Mr. Carson’s private acknowledgment that he had performed poorly. The Facebook page included what it said was supporting evidence of Mr. Carson’s claim of Chinese involvement in Syria: a satellite image of a purported Chinese-made radar system in Syria, and a Syrian soldier posing on a Chinese-made armored vehicle.

But the effort to claim that Mr. Carson had meant only that there was Chinese-made matériel in Syria, not military personnel, was contradicted by his top Middle East adviser, Mr. Clarridge.

Carson is truly frightening and, in my view, needs a mental health care intervention.  The man is supremely confident that he knows everything and is seemingly unable to recognize his own limitations and shocking ignorance on a host of matters.  We do not need him anywhere near the White House. 

 

Ben Carson: Ignorance and Arrogance

The idiocy and arrogance of Ban Carson continues to be on display as even the right wing Wall Street Journal called out Carson for his wrongly claiming the Founding Fathers "had no elected office experience" even though many had held elected positions in colonial assemblies and other offices.  What is perhaps most disturbing about Carson is his arrogance when caught in a lie of false statement that even political neophytes understand to be untrue.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

It's one of those things you learn when you first get a feel for politics: the things that count, that get stuck in people's minds and affect real outcomes are not necessarily or even often the most important ones. They're ones that resonate with basic, familiar or humorous parts of our common experience - like pyramids. I doubt very many people remember that Ben Carson also said that he believed that Satan encouraged Charles Darwin to write The Origin of Species, a claim that is at least as nuts as the pyramids comment and frankly, quite a bit more evil. But pyramids is different, even though it's completely irrelevant to basically anything. Everybody knows about the pyramids. . . . . you don't need to be a genius to know that of all the places you might try to store grain, inside a rock would be one of the most challenging. 

But there's something else that I think is important about the pyramids flareup for understanding Carson and his candidacy. For his supporters, one of Carson's greatest attributes is his soft-spoken humility. Yet what we really see in Carson is a compounding mix of ignorance and arrogance. Some of Carson's views are rooted in his religious subculture. They may seem odd or even crazy to people outside of that subculture. But they're different beliefs, not ignorance per se. But that's not the case with imagining that pyramids are hollow and used for grain storage.

It's not the case with claiming that none of the country's founders had experience in elected office - a demonstrably ridiculous claim. It's not the case with claiming that half of Medicare spending goes to fraud. The exception that proves the rule came earlier this week when Carson conceded he really wasn't familiar with US-Cuba immigration policy - a very striking gap in knowledge for a contender for the GOP presidential nomination.

When you watch Carson navigating the public square you see someone who is remarkably ignorant about huge swathes of human knowledge and particularly information about US government and public policy. But you also see someone who's quite confident he's very knowledgable. So he's both remarkably ignorant and either stunningly unaware of his ignorance or totally indifferent to it. You might even say he is militantly ignorant. In all aspects of life, that is a dangerous combination. And the combination is almost always rooted in arrogance.

The key is having some realistic grasp of what you do know and what you don't know. 
That not only helps you avoid big mistakes and embarrassing gaffes, it also helps you learn. Because you can't learn about things you think you already know.

One of the things that stood out to me about the pyramid debacle was "secular progressives" are welcome to ridicule his theory about the pyramids. But Carson really has no 'theory'. He says that the ancient Egyptians stored grain inside solid rock. That makes no sense. . . . the issue here is less ignorance than arrogance, something which, paradoxically, many of Carson's supporters believe is a bad trait he lacks.

To me it is not surprising that the Christofasicts love Carson.  The reason is simple.  They embrace ignorance daily and more or less celebrate the fact that they do so as they utter nonsense  about the Bible being "inerrant" or the "devine word of god" even though its was first written by ignorant herders and many of its claims have been proven untrue by science.  Both Carson and his supporters are very, very scary.