That's right, ignore the fact that your article misrepresents the magnitude of the problem. I think we can all agree that one child homeless is one too many, but you'd rather be dbhyperbole.
By Steve Neumann This Is Your Brain on Outrage: How Political Rhetoric Is Making Us Crazy Should we expect conservatives' big win on Tuesday to make them any less angry? Definitely not, and here's why. Photo Credit: PathDoc/Shutterstock.com November 8, 2014 | Now that the Republicans have taken control of Congress, we can expect a dialing downof the vitriol they’ve been spewing at President Obama, their Democrat congressional counterparts and the American left generally. Right? Wrong. As history shows all too clearly, political rhetoric never sleeps. John Lennon once asked us to imagine a world without religion. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever. But what if we lived in a world without rhetoric? It’s definitely possible to imagine, but I’m afraid it has about the same chance of happening as a world without religion. I believe this because the conservative commentariat loves to indulge in a specific type of rhetoric, the rhetoric of outrage. What’s worse, they even seem to enjoy it. “Rhetoric” is one of those words everyone throws around, usually pejoratively, without knowing its original or even its full meaning. It hasn’t always had this bad reputation—as William Penn opined in 1682: “There is a Truth and Beauty in Rhetorick.” And the concept of rhetoric goes at least as far back as Socrates in ancient Athens. Around the time of Socrates’s career as public gadfly, a new profession emerged: TheSophists were self-described “professional educators who toured the Greek world offering instruction in a wide range of subjects, with particular emphasis on skill in public speaking and the successful conduct of life.” Socrates didn’t much care for them, though. It wasn’t the fact that they were ostensibly offering an increase in knowledge for their “clients,” something Socrates himself was dedicated to, it was more the Sophist’s emphasis on the powers of persuasion that bugged him—in other words, rhetoric. People who sought out the Sophists were primarily interested in furthering their political careers. Socrates didn’t think that rhetoric itself was bad—after all, he utilized it in order to cajole and enlighten the good citizens of Athens—but he did denigrate the kind of rhetoric that just sought to flatter instead of educate. And that’s just what the likes of Fox News and the rest of the conservative affrontosophere are doing—pandering to their base’s biases and stirring the pot of outrage. But what is most perplexing to me is this apparent enjoyment of outrage, of willingly putting oneself in a perpetual state of indignation. It just doesn’t seem healthy. From time immemorial, the sages of the ages have all claimed that human behavior is defined by a pursuit of pleasure and an avoidance of pain. So how can this orgy of outrage be explained? A study from 2007 investigated the seemingly paradoxical notion that people enjoy negative or aversive stimuli. The study focused on people who get their kicks from watching horror flicks, with the authors concluding that “horror movie viewers are happy to be unhappy.” Though they conceded that their work didn’t directly address the mechanisms of this phenomenon, they did offer some speculations based on the results of their studies. They said one possibility is that negative emotions represent “a reliable source of arousal, one that can be continuously converted into positive affect as long as people place themselves within a given protective frame.” This protective frame can actually take several forms: it can be that the individual feels the danger of the stimulus but has the confidence to overcome it; or that a “safety zone” is created, where the individual places herself sufficiently away from the danger; or, finally, that the individual observes the danger but simply doesn’t engage with it. When you consider the environments in which people seem to enjoy being in a perpetual state of outrage, it’s easy to see that they live in one of these protective frames. Judging by the pontifications of various pundits, it’s obvious there is no shortage of confidence to deal with the perceived problems; everyone knows exactly what needs to be done to rectify things and bring the world around to its senses again. At least they think they do. And virtually everyone in the affrontosphere is sufficiently distanced from immediate harm. Obama’s “Starbucks Salute” to a marine? Doesn’t affect you in the least. Yet the outrage from that episode was more deafening than all of Starbucks’ coffee grinders in the world going off at once. The third protective frame—witnessing the danger but not engaging with it—well, that clearly doesn’t apply here. But the word from that study that aroused my interest is the word “arousal” itself. The researchers called it a “reliable source” of pleasurable feelings so long as the individual was within a protective frame. This idea of “arousal” shows up in another context, this time in the work of political psychologist Philip Tetlock. An article in Psychology Today, summarizing Tetlock’s work, notes that outrage is an emotion made up of three components: first, it’s a bad feeling; second, it has “high arousal”—that is, it’s a powerful emotion; and third, it occurs “when people experience a violation of a moral boundary.” The violation of a “moral boundary” is the violation of what someone believes is a “sacred protected value,” as Tetlock calls it. A sacred value is a belief or principle that a person simply cannot allow to be violated. Conservatives listen to and watch Fox News,Rush Limbaugh and the Drudge Report all day long because they speak to their sacred values. They excel at pointing out real and perceived violations of so-called sacred values—and the violations are reliably met with outrage. The Psychology Today article also notes that the expression of outrage signals affiliation—we know you’re on our side if you exhibit the same level of indignation at the same perceived violations. And since there is safety in numbers, when we see and hear the thousands of comments in our respective echo chamber we know we’re not alone—and this is likely what gives us such confidence to deal with those violations. We enjoy feeling outrage because it increases our sense of camaraderie with like-minded fellow believers. And as Tetlock says, true believers “seek reassurance from each other that their beliefs are not mere social conventions but rather are anchored in backstop or sacred values beyond challenge.” [bold mine] That’s a powerful cycle of mutual reinforcement, and it ends up with them being stuck on an umbrage carousel, traveling round and around in a circle without ever actually getting anywhere. The rhetoric of today prevents real discussions of the issues because this state of emotional arousal inhibits the ability to have rational conversations. The solution is dialectic—Socrates’s preferred method of discourse. As the helpful siteThe Forest of Rhetoric describes it, dialectic is concerned with “persuasion and logical proof and takes into account opposing viewpoints on a given issue.” But, unlike rhetoric, dialectic is “restricted to issues of argumentation, proof, and the methods and fallacies of logical reasoning,” and doesn’t concern itself with the emotional aspect of discourse—it specifically aims to avoid “high arousal.” Dialectic is concerned with getting at the heart of things instead of just jerking at the heart strings. Going from a climate of rhetoric to one of dialectic will require a considerable amount of personal risk. They risk losing the security and solidarity of a like-minded pack—they risk losing the very confidence that enables them to immerse themselves in the toxic radiation bath of outrage. Can they do it? Can we imagine a world without rhetoric? How about just a world of less rhetoric and more dialectic? We can certainly imagine it, but can they wean themselves off this teat and, as those cute bumper stickers say, wag more and bark less?
No, nothing will change. Their brains are different. Conservatives, more likely to have an enlarged amygdala, would tend to process information initially using emotion. According to Kanai, Conservatives respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions. This heightened sensitivity to emotional faces suggests that individuals with conservative orientation might exhibit differences in brain structures associated with emotional processing such as the amygdala. So, when faced with an ambiguous situation, conservatives would tend to process the information initially with a strong emotional response. This would make them less likely to lean towards change, and more likely to prefer stability. Stability means more predictability, which means more expected outcomes, and less of a trigger for anxiety.
Breitbart Criticizes Wrong Loretta Lynch By Andrew Hart Posted: 11/09/2014 10:50 pm EST Updated: 11/09/2014 10:59 pm EST In a now-removed article criticizing Loretta Lynch, President Obama's nominee for attorney general, conservative news site Breitbart achieved two remarkable feats: it attacked the wrong Lynch, and issued one of the best correction notices of all time. Breitbart alleged that Loretta Lynch, the New York federal prosecutor Obama has nominated, was a part of the defense team for former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 Whitewater scandal. She wasn't. Breitbart cited a 1992 New York Times article that "reported that Lynch was one of the Clintons' Whitewater defense attorneys as well as a 'campaign aide.'" But the Loretta Lynch in the 1992 Times article is a California-based attorney and formerCalifornia Public Utilities Commissioner, and not Obama's attorney general nominee, as Media Matters points out. The Lynch nominated for attorney general never worked for the Clinton campaign. During the Clinton administration, Lynch served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and went on to become Brooklyn's top federal prosecutor, as HuffPost's Ryan Reilly reported. Obama announced Lynch as his pick to head the Department of Justice on Saturday, saying of her, "It’s pretty hard to be more qualified for this job than Loretta." If confirmed by the Senate, Lynch would be the first black woman in the job and would follow the first black attorney general. Breitbart updated the Whitewater story along with another that also referred to the wrong Lynch, Talking Points Memo notes. The Whitewater article was taken downlate Sunday night. But before the article alleging "Obama's Attorney General Nominee Loretta Lynch Represented Clintons During Whitewater" was removed, it was given a correction notice, placed at the bottom. Here it is, in all its splendor: Correction: The Loretta Lynch identified earlier as the Whitewater attorney was, in fact, a different attorney.
So republicans have a problem controlling their unreasoning outrage, do they? I somehow missed the fact that those were conservative republicans rioting and looting in Ferguson and demanding a lynching for George Zimmerman. And those amnesty advocates who were disrupting congressional town hall meetings? Conservatives no doubt. And who knew that conservative republicans staged those violent anti-globalization riots? You learn stuff every day here.
Department of Loons, IBD Division: Just what happened last week on Election Day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead? The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States. Such judges — perhaps including Supreme Court justices — would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of "we the people" only a distant memory and a painful mockery. And so on and so on and so on . . .
How do you libtards feel about being lied to and being used like mindless sheep to disseminate the lies?