TQ White II

I know everyone is dying to know...

I'm calling this one for The Donald, Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio. 

The Donald kept his aggression but lost his bellicosity. He was a tiny bit more thoughtful and seemed less like a gigantic asshole. He showed some humor and, almost, a little self-deprecation.

Carly Fiorina is incredibly articulate. She is focused, knowledgable and smart but, even more, she is able to express herself with amazing clarity.

Marco Rubio deserves a mention. He seemed relatively solid and composed. His presence on a national stage didn't seem like a bizarre non-sequitor this time.

Most of the rest showed some improvement, as one would expect. They have experience now. Still, none of them seemed to deserve to have a boost in the polls.

Ben Carson's prominence continues to amaze me. He just doesn't seem smart. He doesn't have any ideas. He is conciliatory and kind of dumb. Scott Walker was much better this time. Still an empty suit, but last time he really seemed like an idiot. 

Chris Christie is said to have had a stronger performance but, I don't really see it. He was fine, but who cares. Jeb! was still without inspiration and, to me, seemed a little desperate to be taken seriously.

Huckabee and Cruz continue their role as the cruel, evil ones. Rand Paul is, imho, a cipher.

Two other things struck me.

First is the amount of increased weaseling. Again and again these people repudiated their previous positions. There was no one, except, sort of, The Donald, who stuck to their guns.

The other thing came to me in the final segment. The question asked how the world would "look different" after their presidency. Only The Donald answered the question. The rest talked about themselves or criticized Obama. The Donald said something to the effect, "It will be great. America will be great. More jobs. More money. More everything. We will be respected. It will be great."

Now, I know that's entirely bullshit but, it does show, ironically, that he has the confidence and vision to talk about something other than himself. Based on those answers, for the rest of them, the most important thing about their potential presidency is them. For Donald Trump, the most important thing is that "It's going to be great."

I think that's why he's doing so well and it's a lesson I hope that Hillary can learn. It's odd that this weird egomaniac can offer a lesson in selflessness and it's benefits as a campaign tactic.

The conservatives bedeviling our society do not have wrong ideas. They do not disagree with you. They are not influenced by logic or fact. They live in a world of fearful emotion. When confronted by these contradictions, their huge amygdalas perceive contradictions with normal expectations and cause them to have alarming ideation and fight or flight hormones are secreted.

I have long thought that this country was heading toward violence. The change in partisanship. The viciousness and intolerance of the religious right. Economic polarization. Traumatic feelings of fear about climate change. Destruction of the unions and condemnation of the very idea of social action among labor. The use of "liberal" as a deep and effective slur. The list of intractable influences causing desperation among the working and under class people in our country is long.

As technology progresses, we are going to need fewer and fewer workers. There are always going to be substantial numbers of people who cannot get jobs.

Let me help you out. One of them has already spent eight years in the White House, six years as a Senator and four as Secretary of State. One of them built and ran a solid national organization (her 2008 campaign).

Once again, my wife has had to jump through hoops to deal with the Wells Fargo Bank's failure.

In this case, she triggered an important payment on the 16th of the month. The money was immediately removed from her account. As it promised, on the 23rd of the month it said the payment was "delivered".

On the 30th, she got a notice that her payment was late.

On the 31st, the payment actually got there.

On another occasion, a payment was lost for months because, we eventually learned, of their paperwork problems. In that case, we had to argue with the cable tv company every month to prevent them from turning off our internet, etc. Their computer had no way of dealing with the fact that the banks records had a clear (but mislabeled) record of them receiving the money.

Wells Fargo is, of course, a huge, horrible company. But, I'm accustomed to these sorts of companies being at least marginally competent. I am wrong. Wells Fargo lost the cable tv money for several months. Just lost it and caused a huge amount of hassle. Their Bill Pay service is unreliable. It takes your money. Says it's made the payment but doesn't.

I suggest you avoid Wells Fargo like the plague.

For hundreds of years until just less slightly recently than this, crimes were solved even though cell phones did not exist. Somehow society managed to survive. 

The change in police capacity that we experience is not that they cannot get into cellphone data. It is that they can use it to violate our privacy to an unprecedented extent, even without being able to overcome encryption.

"Until very recently, this situation would not have occurred."

http://tqwhite.org?68E02B

To some, the fact that women by substantial margins, choose lesbian and gay porn (according to stats from Pornhub, a large porn website) is surprising or entirely explained by the anti-feminist content of most straight porn. 

http://tqwhite.org?547C48

Years ago (and I wish beyond all measure that I could find the it), I read an NY Times article that talked about a functional MRI study they did of people watching porn. Showing gay and straight porn to gay and straight women they found...

Gay mens brains lit up when they saw gay porn but not straight porn

Straight mens brains lit up when they saw straight porn by not gay porn

Women brains lit up no matter what kind they were shown

The responses were, of course, nowhere near as clearcut as that but, the study concluded that the female response to porn definitely worked along a spectrum while the male response was fairly binary.

I don’t know any more if the article suggested, or I had the idea and have just integrated into the memory, but it seems clear, both from the study and from the responses of women I’ve known, that female sexuality *is* a spectrum thing. That women are, again allowing for all human variation, by and large, neurologically bisexual. For some women the response to other women is so small that they consider themselves hardcore straight and others, well, others are not-only-neurologically bisexual.

This fits with of common experience, too. As power dominated as the ‘girls kissing in bars’ thing is, it is hard to imagine a publicly acceptable coercion that would be sufficient to cause most men to tongue kiss another man. Or, three-way sex and the mythology of elaborate rules about ‘crossing swords’ that is absent from situations where women form the majority. Even the differences in casual physical contact, sleepovers, etc, that are apparent in some adult women would seem to fit.

It makes sense, too, when you consider evolution. When we were mere prehistoric beasts, women were smaller and stuck with the babies (oh, how times have changed ;-)). It is easy to imagine that the females who were repelled by huddling under the mammoth hide with the other females got a lot colder and died sooner. Perhaps ones who didn’t socialize properly during such cold spells were at a survival disadvantage and, considering how horny people are in general, it’s easy to imagine there being a sexual component of that, too.

This makes huge sense to me.

(http://tqwhite.org?EC974D)

Imagine, if you will, that you're alone in a house. A really weird noise happens. You immediately get a cold sweat and worry that something bad is happening. You have instant, negative ideation that highlights the worst case. Nobody hears that noise and thinks, "That is a weird mouse." The alarm is coming from your brain's early warning system, the amygdala. It's job is to inspire defensive reaction to events and does so by adding worrisome ideas to your thoughts.

This is, obviously, almost metaphorical in its simplicity but, it captures the high level consequence of the amygdala's contribution to your life.

So, now imagine a person being faced with a really weird noise in the form of an idea that doesn't fit with their preconceptions (just as the weird house noise doesn't fit with your expectations of quiet or gentle creaking at most). If that person has an enlarged amygdala that is more active, those discordant ideas result in an amygdala contribution and that contribution is alarming ideation.

When you say to a conservative 'abortion', it's disagreement with their already settled view that it is bad gives their amygdala reason to engage. It induces a defensive feeling of being attacked and adds horrible elements to their ideation. Liberals think, saved lives of young, used to be pregnant girls. Conservatives think, immoral whores doing whatever they want. Liberal think, tens of thousands of children who will not grow up unwanted. Conservatives think, dead babies everywhere. Etc.

In addition to the alarming ideation, the defense against attack aspect (useful if a saber tooth tiger is a real possibility, not so much if it's a fellow citizen who disagrees) prevents evaluation of the other ideas. One does not rationalize a threat. One fights it. One's preconceptions are there to be protected. Their potential change is the essential threat being opposed.

So, liberals, due to their experience with brains dominated by the anterior cingulate cortex, are perplexed that conservatives take positions that are counterproductive to their views, fail to understand the essence. Conservatives only care about protecting their preexisting ideas. A policy to minimize abortion is completely unimportant to a person whose fundamental brain motivation is to adjust the environment so that the disapproval of abortion is brought to a level that is consistent with their internal view.

This is important as we move forward into an increasingly partisan world (research shows that political views are an increasing part of mating decisions; if brain structure is a strong contributor to political orientation, we have a population of young people who are breeding purebred partisans). There is no progress to be made addressing conservatives with reason or appeals to the practical consequence of their policies. An approach needs to be devised that appeals to their interest in protecting their world view.

In a simplistic way, what we need to do is figure a way to establish a religion that is consistent with the practicality of the world. An alternative where, say, a national deficit is not seen as violating every precept of self-reliance and integrity, but is, instead, seen as, say, a garden of eden gathering of resources.

That's silly. But the point is that the smart, flexible minds who have made the modern world what it is, need to start to take into account the special needs of conservative minds. Just as we no longer try to teach autistic children using the same techniques as we do other kids, we need to devise new techniques for communicating with conservatives that take into account their enlarged amygdalas.

I know that Hillary has a closer relationship with the conventional sources of power in America than does Bernie. But, I want you to notice something. The total of Bernie's listed donations adds up to as much as the bottom two of Hillary's.