Interesting article…

Doing some research and I ran across this…

The Ideological Turing Test

According to Krugman, liberals have the ability to simulate conservatives, but conservatives lack the ability to simulate liberals:

Full article, HERE at Econlib.org

To take a step back, let’s look at the definition of ideology from Merriam/Webster-

1: aa manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture
    bthe integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program
    ca systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture
2visionary theorizing
I think this is pretty much the definition of the various ‘isms’ out there. Conservatism, libertarianism, communism, socialism, etc. fit the definitions of both 1 a and b. I think the systematic body of concepts is a bit harder to quantify, but those could possibly equate to religions, specific cultures (asian, islam, christianity, and ???)
One of Krugman’s fallacies is that the left is always ‘better’ at understanding the right’s ideas/ideals than the reverse, and can talk coherently about it because they ‘listen’…
From what I’ve seen, the opposite is, at least in my limited view, more correct. When confronted with facts, the left relies on ad hominems, changing the subject, or deflecting the questions rather than an actual discussion. Or they default to ‘talking past’ whomever they are conversing with.
The other thing that I find interesting is the various things that impact a person’s perceptions/viewpoints. Age, family, location, education, travel, media, etc. all tend to ‘modify’ people’s perceptions as they get older. People do change perceptions/viewpoints depending on what they think is important. To me, probably the biggest ‘change’ occurs as a person ages and their ‘needs’ change (in other words, THEY have to pay the bills).
The division we are seeing today doesn’t bode well for us as a country, IMHO. We are being driven apart by internal and external forces bent on forcing their various isms down our throats thinking that just because we aren’t saying anything means we agree.
They don’t realize that we (boomers/silent majority/whateverthehellyouwanttocall us), don’t scream and yell about things. We sit quietly on the sidelines, using the system, such as it is, to counter them, until the system no longer accepts our inputs. When that happens, it will go rodeo.
I think Virginia ‘may’ be the first shot fired in response to the left, possibly even literally…
Your thoughts?

Comments

Interesting article… — 23 Comments

  1. Leftists always get everything backwards.

    The Left has been quite open and honest about their goals for generations. They want us dead and gone, our culture not merely destroyed but erased.

    And we, collectively, have done not one darned thing to stop them, or even slow them down.

  2. “…as a person ages … in other words, THEY have to pay the bills.”

    We are seeing two distinct responses to this generational shift of responsibility onto their shoulders: One is to look at the source of the bills and try to make them smaller or less frequent – What can I change about what I do, so as to incur fewer of those costs?
    Besides changing personal consumption, shall I vote down the next levy? Move out of range of local funding for a local government boondoggle, or a failed city?

    The other is to believe that I should always be able to do as I please, and when the bills come due, to whine about how paying them off should be reconfigured into a collective responsibility.

  3. I’ve quit arguing with liberals. Winning an argument with one is like winning a race in the special olympics. You realize you’ve only beaten a retard.

  4. McC- Point… sigh

    Guy- Excellent point, and sadly the ‘typical’ response today seems to be the second option.

    Houston- Some days… yeah…

  5. Krugman can simulate a caricature of a conservative, not an actual conservative, which isn’t the same thing at all.

    Krugman, while pretty much never right, is never unsure of himself.

    • Ah, Paullie “The Beard” Krugman! Can’t be wrong, but is never right (unless he’s off his ‘game’).

  6. Liberals don’t biologically reproduce sufficiently to keep their numbers up. They rely on conservatives to send their children to universities to be turned.

  7. Liberals tend to base their beliefs on theory over real world data. Conservatives tend to base their beliefs on what has happened versus what is possible.

    The media can spend the whole day arguing over how many angels can sit on the head of a pin. Most of us have better things to do with our lives.

  8. I was really interested in the Turing Test, until I saw Krugman’s name. It started out condescending, which was hard to wallow through, and his name was a hard stop. No. Just no.

    As to acting leftist (I use ‘leftist’ to describe what people call ‘liberal’ because it isn’t liberalism, it is leftism, words matter) vs acting conservative. He’s wrong. It’s like that ‘Star Trek’ episode with the transporter accident where Kirk and a small handful get transported into a barbaric version of their universe and have to act the barbarian.

    See, conservativism is a learned concept. We start out pretty liberal (meaning seeing all sides of things) when we’re born. And we are all happy go-lucky. And then we are supposed to learn that losing sucks, that might does make right, that a boy is a boy is a boy and a girl is, well, you get the drift. We are supposed to learn to depend on ourselves, to trust but verify, to turn the other cheek but sell our robe to buy a sword.

    Thus, the conservative is actually the one who knows more, who has experienced more, who is intellectually superior to the leftist. The conservative is the true liberal, able to see both sides of any argument (because that is called analytical thought, something leftists do not do well at at all.)

    Back to the ‘Star Trek’ reference. A Conservative-Man(woman/whatever) can act as a leftist. Say stupid things, spout radically stupid beliefs, turn three-quarters of his brain off while letting half the remaining think about song lyrics and still make liberal sense of any situation.

    A leftist-whatever, on the other hand, can only see the side of the argument it’s been told to believe. It’s whole mind is totally engaged in seeing fault, slights and horrors in other Conservative People where there are none, completely missing the real faults, slights and horrors amongst its fellow Leftists. If the leftist’s overlord changes it’s mind, then the leftist will suddenly start spouting the new party line, totally ignoring what it was spouting just a few moments ago.

    And here’s the kicker. Conservatives can and do blend into Leftist Culture. Just look at Hollyweird, where every month or so it is found out that someone who’s been acting all Leftist has secretly been Conservative all the time. It’s not that we can’t hide as a Lefty. It’s because we finally get tired and don’t want to any more.

    Case in point. I have a friend who’s a librarian at a local learning institute. She’s smart, neat, funny, but anything to the right of Mao makes her become a hateful, spitting, intact-female-dog-of-breeding-age. So, around her, I can dial back ConservativeMan and blend in to her and her people’s line of bullscat until I choose to upset the apple cart. They can’t accept that Obama sucked male-moose-reproductive-organ, but I can accept that God-Emperor Trump does have faults.

    And… Abortion. Try to explain to a leftist your stance on abortion and if it is anything less than ‘Total Abortion on Demand All Day Long, all Hail Moloch, all Hail Bael!’ then you are listed as the enemy. Adoption over abortion? Enemy. Safe Sex over abortion? Enemy. No Sex? Enemy.

    Conversely, like a Vegan, a Lefty can’t shut up about it’s preprogrammed party beliefs. All day long. At night, when they are sleeping, it oozes out of their minds as mental emissions and transmissions, able to be picked up by any passing sentient being. Seriously, walk by a flaming lefist asleep and you still know they’re a leftist.

    It’s like a conservative’s car, hard to spot unless they don’t give a copulation. Conservative’s car is stealthy, unmarked, could be a rental or another family member’s vehicle. A Lefty, on the other hand, marks up their car with bumper stickers and stupid stuff. So, that particular car there, no stickers, no slogans, no glued on ‘art.’

    We can play leftist. They cannot play conservative.

    Just like civilized folk can act barbaric, but barbarians can’t act civilized.

  9. Aaron/Houston/Sam- Agreed!

    LL- Ouch, but true… Dammit…

    Gerry- point!

    Beans- Ah yes, Hollyweird… And conservatives… They DO take on the protective ‘coloration’ if you will. An amazing number of the ‘techies’ are conservatives… Gun nuts, car nuts, etc. but you’d never know it from seeing them at work.

  10. They also do not understand that we are PEACEFUL. We understand to be peaceful, you have to be capable of great violence. Otherwise you are merely HARMLESS.

  11. A) We have done things to slow them down, or stop them, but they were not the grand ideological gestures that their theology enshrines as the keys to the kingdom.

    The WWII generation quietly rejected a bunch of things that could have permitted the communists a victory.

    Look, the NRA are squishes, but just on gun rights alone Americans have persisted in fighting. Absent that fight, all the other unsung little wars and sabotage, the communists would have won the cold war, or liquidated us in 1992.

    We got the refugees from a lot of the communist take overs. They, our neighbors, quietly let us know the real truth, what was coming for us if we surrendered. Some of us realized and listened. McChuck, we have fought, and it has born fruit. Sure, your generation was not able to leave mine the perfect anticommunist utopia. But you bought time for me to grow to adulthood. Time I may have squandered, but we are not murdered yet, and there is hope where there is life.

    We don’t have to know what we are doing, or recognize our successes to beat the communists. The communist believe that they know what they are doing, and can predict the results well enough to follow a path to inevitable victory. There is more than one result of seeking to live by the path of denying their faith.

    B) It may be arrogant of me to think this, but I can not help but see one’s children going communist from mere university as a failure on one’s part.

    There are many paths into the economy. One’s moral obligation to one’s children includes optimizing their survival odds by preparing them for several, and to search out opportunities flexibly as necessity dictates.

    Spending time around teachers in a public school mostly teaches one path.

    I personally see very few subjects worth studying at a university, and would only attend if I had sufficient interest in a such a subject.

    So, if you kid has that interest, what then? Say it is engineering. Lot of engineering faculty were born overseas. Spend some time around international graduate students pursuing a faculty career. What are they like?

    They are sort of a hard working intelligent mirror to the education majors. They get where the are by doing very well in school, and often enough have preconceptions about class that someone who grows up American should aspire not to have.

    So, if your kids wind up thinking that teachers and professors don’t reflect a very narrow range of economic activity, you haven’t exposed your kids to enough different people, and made certain they learned to see how people are shaped by their backgrounds.

    That is an essential background for two reasons. One, the skill to sort out conflicting claims from different people. Two, they are more likely to respect, and hence learn to do, a wide range of paths into the economy.

    This notion that this path of get credential add government money is the only way into the economy is all too plausible if you have only ever been around a bunch of teachers, and also your parents.

    My answer that child labor is better than conventional education may well be both crazy and wrong. But it may well be that not raising a fool is worth taking time and energy away from your main occupation to do some meaningful economic activity with your kids so that they know a second path very well.

    • No, an apprenticeship or ‘child labor’ is a great educational tool. Good educators know how to encompass practical skills into school skills so the student has a reason to learn, and a base of understanding to tie the learning to.

      Not to mention, quite frankly, more ‘kids’ need to go to trade schools and practical schools. Even ‘coders’ and other high-techies. Few actual ‘engineers’ actually engineer. They end up as high-priced draftsman or high-priced tech workers.

      Funny thing is… many tech programs can scrape up partial to full funding for a good applicant, and take far less time than 4 years.

      Heck, if a kid likes climbing and isn’t a complete idiot, entering into a Lineman Apprentice program to work on electric lines pays the applicant during the learning process.

      Tech schools. We need to defund ‘arts’ magnet high schools and turn them into tech magnet high schools.

      Reminds me of Brevard Community College in John Ringo’s “Troy Rising” series. Turns into basically Space Worker Technical School.

  12. “Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains.”

    ― Winston S. Churchill

  13. I don’t think people change that much. What has changed is the speed at which we can communicate. Along with that the amount of information we can access.

  14. Bullsh*t.
    “I find it easy to simulate liberals.

    I think of a conservative, and I take away reason, and accountability.”

    >mic drop<

    – Melvin Udall

    Tip your waitresses. Try the veal.

  15. It’s funny how a lot of folks are way too smart to be liberals, yet they persist in being so. Their knee jerk reactions, idealism and lack of critical thinking skills is puzzling for those that should be able to do better. Maybe, as some state, it’s a genetic malfunction!

  16. None of my four kids went to college, so they have no “degrees” per se. Three of them decided to stay doing what they had been raised doing. What was that? Working for me in the LPG gas business. They have now taken it over, about 25 years ago, and it is now a 3.5 million dollar concern. I taught them all the manual skills I had learned about cars, trucks, airplanes, how and why the guts work as they do.
    They learned to operate a Bridgeport lathe/milling machine, and can make virtually anything that is needed for repairing a multitude of things.
    They are all excellent carpenters, rough as well as finish. They each built their own houses. They all drive whatever car/truck tickles their fancy. They can stick weld as well as use a TIG or a MIG welder.
    Just because of their abilities to do mundane things like that, they have developed the reputation as the ‘GO TO’ guys if you want something fixed, repaired, or remanufactured!
    They learned early that hard work won’t kill you, and that by doing that ,they have prospered. The school of hard knocks is a bitch, but it readies young people for what is to come in their lives.
    College? NOT a necessary evil for all humans. You would be hard pressed to find many University/ College profs able to do much of anything useful with their hands except maybe wipe their asses! And I wouldn’t be to sure of that being done well.
    Oh yeah, that fourth kid? He makes hundreds of K’s of $$ delivering yachts , power and sail, all over this blue orb we live on!

    Can you tell I am proud of them? And all without setting a foot in the Hallowed Halls of higher learning!

  17. All- Concur. Ev- Yep, PRACTICAL skills will never go out of style, regardless of what the leftist may believe. We will still be around, making/building things while they starve to death in their elitist towers.

  18. First thought: I like my life happily boring, not interesting.
    Second thought: I’m past the point of caring if people agree with me or not.
    Third thought: I’m less inclined than ever to put up with one or more people trying to “take care” of me by regulating what I may or may not do.
    Fourth thought: If things have to get interesting, let’s go on and get it over with so I can go back to gardening, barbecuing and trying to finish writing at least one book before I “shuffle off this mortal coil.”