A Time To Weep
by Theodore Sorensen

Full text of commencement address to the New School University on May 21, 2004.

"Future historians studying the decline and fall of America will mark this as the time the tide began to turn -- toward a mean-spirited mediocrity in place of a noble beacon..."

"...The stain on our credibility, our reputation for decency and integrity, will not quickly wash away..."

The Politics of Victimization
by Mel Gilles

Mel Gilles, who has worked for many years as an advocate for victims of  domestic abuse, draws some parallels between her work and the reaction of many Democrats to the election.-- Mathew Gross

"Listen to George Bush say that the will of God excuses his behavior.  Listen, as he refuses to take responsibility, or express remorse, or even  once, admit a mistake. Watch him strut, and tell us that he will only work with those who agree with him, and that each of us is only allowed one  question..."

From CommonDreams.org.
 

"This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play." 

2.  Statistical concepts are more often than not not understood: if they were widely understood, gambling casinos and lotteries would be extremely rare. 

4.  Testable hypothesis: The very sharp split in the American electorate in 2004 is caused by the sharp differences in intellectual abilities needed to critically evlauate (and effectively use) information--perhaps the most important function of education.  (Preference in the election should strongly correlate with readership in Consumer Reports?)

5.  The election of 2004 appears to be the erosion of democracy that John Platt warned about more than 40 years ago: "What We Must Do"

Short Tales from Bizarro World 
by William Rivers Pitt

From Truthout.org.

"I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met  him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him  maps the better to target those guns." --George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, 05/17/05    You know things have gone more than a bit around the  bend when it takes a British MP with a hard Scottish brogue to throw a little truth  against the walls of the U.S. Senate chamber to see what will stick."

The oversimplification is that of cherry-picking the facts -- it's the "Prove Anything Ploy" (PAP), it's the power behind propaganda (and Orwell's "newspeak" and the GOP's "Newtspeak").

It's also steeped in the ubiquitous inverted implication, the bizarre responses we make, and observe others making, when we immerse ourselves in, for example, that simple-but-difficult puzzle of selecting cards, Wason's Card Puzzle.

If you feel strongly that someone is making some point that is fundamentally irrational, but you can't quite put your finger on exactly what's wrong with it, odds are that implications are getting imiproperly inverted; odds are that unnoticed oversimplifications are being made that render the argument meaningless; and the odds are very good that you can get some flashes of insight (EUREKA!) about it by looking deeply in these "places that you never before thought to look." 

Do we concentrate on confirmations?

"We are going to ignore the UN to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the UN cannot be ignored.

"We are going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war..." 

A man's hand rose disembodied from the bottom of the heap of corpses to rest on the belly of a man near the top. A blue stone in his ring glinted as an Iraqi orderly opened the door of the morgue..." 

"As long as the nation is at war, then, it will be hard to get the public to notice what the flagwavers are doing behind our backs."

Well, it turns out that, far from being on the verge of destroying Western civilization, Saddam and his 21st century Gestapo couldn't even muster a half-hearted defense of their own capital. The hawks' cakewalk disproves their own dire warnings. They can't have it both ways. The invasion has proved wildly successful in one other regard: It has unified most of the world — especially the Arab world — against us.

"But I think the real problem, and the reason for Bush's popularity, is that the American people basically don't have a clue about what's really happening.  The mainstream media are not communicating it." 

"...why have you not supported Canada? Why have you turned your back on us?  Why have you and your country proceeded in a reckless, arrogant manner which is  100% guaranteed to substantially increase terrorism and volatility around the world...

Why have you launched into this foolhardy aggression that will cause hundreds of millions of Muslims to hate and despise Westerners for generations into the future, with potentially cataclysmic results, for  ourselves, for our children and for our grandchildren?" 

"When the outrage over the story refused to go away after the looting subsided, a cover-up began."

He knew what I was referring to. His blunt answer left my jaw hanging. 

"Everyone knows he lied about weapons of mass destruction being the point of the war." 

Anti-intellectualism:  ethnocentrism, egocentrism, punitive morality, hierarchical ranking, superficiality and multiple-parameter simplemindedness—coupled with opinion shaping by PAP, propaganda, Newspeak ("Newt Speak") riding on gullibility and wishful thinking. 

Anti-democratic vision:  ethnocentrism, egocentrism, punitive morality, hierarchical ranking, superficiality and multiple-parameter simplemindedness—coupled with opinion shaping by PAP, propaganda, Newspeak ("Newt Speak") riding on gullibility and wishful thinking. 

"...by the time the invasion began, fully 72 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, without a shred of credible evidence to support such a claim."

"What is becoming increasingly clear is that if the president and his closest advisors knowingly lied in making the case for a preemptive war based on Iraq constituting an imminent threat to the security of the United States, this is assuredly an impeachable offense of the highest order of magnitude, manifestly greater than the constitutional abuses of Dick Nixon or the sexual lying of Bill Clinton."

These differences exist because different people develop a variety of mental mechanisms for understanding complexities and subtleties  Colorblindness, dyslexia, and map difficulties are abilities a bit inferior to the norm in some specific way.  Math skills, critical logic insights, synesthesia, and spatial visualization sometimes get honed sharply enough to give a person uncommonly powerful insights; the insights that lead to modern science,  but also to artistic excellence, diplomatic skills that might pacify a fiercly belligerent world, perhaps even healing skills for a societal bedlam bordering on mutually reciprocal self-destruction.

The events of the first part of the year 2003 polarized populations.  Opinions were seen as ranked, not so much as "better" or "worse," but more as "good" or "evil."  And "good" got too often defined as "US."  "Evil" got defined as "THEM."  Nevertheless, some opinions really were superior in the sense that they were driven by better insight into subtlety and complexity.