Some insight into women who voted for Trump.
“I think he’s a really good man, deep down. This guy has such potential, and I truly believe he cares about our country and wants to help everyone.”
Well, by everyone, you mean “those exactly like me.” Actually, how about “just me”.
“But I had an 8-year-old who was totally on the Trump train. He talked me into taking him to a Trump rally.”
Original at truthdig.com
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, Republicans are taking the opportunity to scold progressives about living in an echo chamber and failing to take a moment to sample thought patterns of the Right.
Well I did, but I came to the conclusion that most is still complete rubbish. In fact, according to Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of everything is crap. So don’t take it personally.
You might be the subject of political pandering if:
A politician who never tires of scapegoating a feared group, or a feared outcome is undoubtedly pandering. Or a demagogue. Or both. Whether it’s Mexicans, or Jews, or Muslims, or gay people, they never seem to stop talking about why you should be afraid of someone or something.
One of the most striking features of the GOP front-runner is his special fondness for conspiracy theories. From the (non-existent) connection between vaccines and autism to the “real culprits” behind 9/11, he shows the typical clustered endorsement of multiple conspiracy theories.
The question about whether this a form of pandering or a genuinely held set of perspectives is interesting, though barely relevant. In the former case, the abandonment of reason to achieve a political goal is an egregious fault. In the latter case, it sheds considerable light on crucial decision-making capacities. Endorsement of conspiracy theories requires a set of cognitive biases that fundamentally hobble evidence-based decision making.
An ingenious study using the massive Weibo network revealed insights into the spread of certain emotions through social networks. Weibo is a social network platform not unlike Twitter. It is also hugely popular in China with millions of users making it an ideal platform for understanding how emotional states between socially-connected users correlate with each other.
But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui and co say anger strongly influences the neighbourhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about 3 hops or degrees. “Anger has a surprisingly higher correlation than other emotions,” they say.
It was recently reported in the Washington Post that the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia had ties to a secret society of hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus and that several of the guests at the Texas ranch where Scalia died were members of this group.
Surely I’m not the only one that finds this a bit weird. A secret society of hunters? I don’t know the first thing about hunting but from I’ve seen, the only thing secret about hunting is sneaking up on an animal so you can kill it.
During a February 6, 2016 debate, U.S. presidential aspirant Donald Trump claimed that: “Right now we’re the highest taxed country in the world.”
Well, living in a country with much higher tax rates, I can tell you that his statement is patently false.^[Maybe he’s referring to the corporate tax rate which is quite high; but even that is irrelevant to the fact that all sorts of deductions and exclusions on the U.S. corporate tax return put the U.S. effective tax rate much lower than that of most counties.]
“I actually called her, and she never mentioned my name. You know, I - when I sold - oh, did I get a call from one of the Environmental Protection Agency, they couldn’t find it because it comes out in big globs, right, and you say to yourself, ‘How does that help us?’”
Trump is one of the most amusing orators in the history of presidential politics in the the U.S. But I wondered what would happen I took the text of a few of his speeches and fed it into a algorithm that uses Markov chains to shake things up a bit.
