Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person, Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, February 3, 2015
If you’ve been following the news recently, you know that human beings are terrible and everything is appalling. Yet the sheer range of ways we find to sabotage our efforts to make the world a better place continues to astonish. Did you know, for example, that last week’s commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz may have marginally increased the prevalence of antisemitism in the modern world, despite being partly intended as a warning against its consequences? Or that reading about the eye-popping state of economic inequality could make you less likely to support politicians who want to do something about it?
These are among numerous unsettling implications of the “just-world hypothesis”, a psychological bias explored in a new essay by Nicholas Hune-Brown at Hazlitt. The world, obviously, is a manifestly unjust place: people are always meeting fates they didn’t deserve, or not receiving rewards they did deserve for hard work or virtuous behaviour. Yet several decades of research have established that our need to believe otherwise runs deep. Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can – but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.
Hence the finding, in a 2009 study, that Holocaust memorials can increase antisemitism. Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.
Lunging towards lunacy. What has happened to conservatism? Rudolph Bush, Dallas Morning News, February 3, 2015
For a long time, the right has been creeping towards the embrace of ignorance and fear. The creep is over. It’s a wild lunge now.
How far we’ve come from the conservatism that attracted me when I was younger – the cool of William F. Buckley and the whole thing built on the steady mind of Edmund Burke.
“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint,” Burke wrote.
He went on: “Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.”
Where is the restraint in toting assault rifles into a chicken joint where people bring their families to eat? Where is the wisdom in scaring people to make your message?
It’s noise and foolishness.
How does the Anthropic Principle change the meaning of the universe? George Dvorsky, io9, March 8, 2013
One of the more extraordinary things about the universe is that it has produced beings who can observe it — namely, us. Its laws and constants are so precise that, if they were even slightly modified, no human would be here to see it. Many cosmologists and philosophers have wondered if we should read anything into all this preciseness: Are the finely-tuned physical laws that surround us mere coincidence, or does it imply that we are somehow meant to be here? That’s where the Anthropic Principle comes into play.
The Anthropic Principle (AP) is that hazy grey area where philosophy meets science. And in fact, many scientists loathe it for this very reason. It’s untestable, they argue, and tautological — a skewed form of reasoning in which the principle is basically being used to prove itself.
The Ugly Conservative Tactic of Brutally Attacking Individuals, Even Kids, Instead of Ideas, Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet, January 29, 2015
One of the more unfortunate trends of the 21st century is the increasingly ugly right-wing strategy of singling out individuals—usually those who have somehow offended them by having liberal opinions—and subjecting them to grotesque smear campaigns and a deluge of abuse. Recent examples include Michelle Malkin‘s smear campaign against a 12-year-old who testified in favor of SCHIP; the bizarre multi-year campaign to discredit climate scientist Michael Mann; and the relentless haranguing of feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian. The goal often seems to be to “take out” the target by making the price of continuing to speak out in public so high that they quit entirely.
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So why do they do this? Michael Mann published a paper titled “The Serengeti strategy: How special interests try to intimidate scientists, and how best to fight back” that examines this question for the January edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Using his own experience as the punching bag conservatives hit when they want to take potshots at climate scientists, Mann argues that attacking individuals while leaving the larger group intact doesn’t seem to make sense initially, but there is a purpose to it.
“This is a classic ad hominem attack, consisting of innuendo and obfuscation, often focusing on irrelevant items, whose net effect is to direct attention away from the merits of an argument and instead to the character of the person making it,” Mann writes. “This approach appeals to feelings, emotions, and prejudices rather than intellect—exactly the point when the attacker is on the wrong side of the facts.”
He calls it the “Serengeti strategy” because the strategy reminds him of how a lion hunts zebra. Rather than trying to take down an entire herd of zebra, the lion reaches out and grabs one, often an individual who is perceived as a soft target for some reason. One is all that is needed to satiate the lion’s appetite, and one is much easier than trying to kill all of them.
In this case, the “herd” is the idea: Climate change, feminism, liberalism. Conservatives know they can’t kill off the herd. Their arguments are crappy and their beliefs often off-putting. So instead of trying to take on the herd, they target individuals. The idea isn’t to stop the debate over whether or not climate change is real or feminism is a good idea, because that’s a debate they know they can’t win. Instead, they try to make the debate about the individual’s character. They make that person the face of the idea they hate and hope that, by smearing that person, the idea will be smeared by proxy.
