Topic: Yale Professor Surprise: Tea Party Supporters More Scientifically Literate than (Read 5479 times)

Actual LOLs on "...tell them eat it!".

Aristotle (you know, from like thousands of years ago) documented the basic phenomenon in his study of Tyrants. The Tyrant, as part of his toolkit, divides his enemy by getting them to fight each other. I've been trying to get people over in the Political Stripes thread to cotton on to this, they're responding by continuing with the whole "gee, it turns out I'm much more specifically Liberal-Socio-Capitalist than I ever imagined!!!!1" sort of thing.

NWO should raze this place to the ground, I'm just about ready to turn. Anyone from Globalists Inc., PM me, I'll gladly help out herding them into the FEMA camps or whatever. Anything's better than trying to herd them into thinking with their very own personal mind.

i'd be very curious to know how subject selection was done here....

 The same people who hijacked occupy hijacked the tea party using the previously discussed Levin model. Their nightmare is the 2 groups realizing how much they actually have in common. Their only hope to conquor us is to divide us into more and more radicalized smaller sects. At the core of these groups are normal every day intelligent people who want rule of law and an end of corruption. On either ends are the radicals who are either placed there to astroturf, are missing a few nuts and bolts, or are kool-aid drinking true believers. Remember when occupy lost momentum? It was EXACTLY when they started to organize along side the tea party, then POOF... whats occupy?

 I guess my point, and the point that this doctor who did the study is trying to make is that science helped him peel back the bullshit and look at reality. Reality is often shocking and not what you expected. Humans are fallible and have limited perceptions. The moment you think you KNOW something for sure you are instantly wrong. Even if you don't watch the media everyone around you does, and they effect your perceptions. The collective conscious is like a virus infecting all of us like it or not. If you can accept this you might get a chance to have a free thought before you die. When they offer you the next shit sandwich and ask you if you want it in liberal or conservative, don't just pick your preferred flavor of shit sandwich... tell them to eat it!

Sorry, I son't see Republicans as Libertarians, there's Ron Paul, but he just seems crazy town...

I've label myself as "liberal" as long as I remember, then I learned it is a political statement in US, I've studied US "liberals", I don't identify with them!!

But, as you have been saying, labels are what they are, and I need one for me.

Anyway, I'm too drunk to type...

i'm inclined not to believe this, but go Tea Partyers! you sure don't look intelligent! 

April 13, 2010 - http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/outcrazying-the-crazy-how-a-prankster-plans-to-infiltrate-and-destroy-the-tea-party-movement

 Meet Jason Levin, quite possibly the scariest man in the tea party universe. An Oregon technology consultant, Levin is the leader of Crash The Tea Party, a plan to take down the tea party from the inside. Levin says he's got a growing cadre of supporters across the country, and conservatives from the message boards to the set of the Sean Hannity's show are getting nervous.

"Our plan is not to shout them down," Levin told me yesterday, "but to infiltrate them and push them farther from the mainstream."

The scheme reads like a sequel to "Being John Malkovich": Levin's group of protesters plan to get in the heads of tea partiers at the Tax Day Tea Parties nationwide Thursday and manipulate them right out of relevance. They'll dress like tea partiers, talk like tea partiers and carry signs like tea partiers. In fact, according to Levin they'll be completely indistinguishable from tea partiers, except for one thing -- they won't be out-crazied by anyone.

"Our goal is that whenever a tea partier says 'Barack Obama was not born in America,' we're going be right right there next to them saying, 'yeah, in fact he wasn't born on Earth! He's an alien!" Levin explained. He said that by making the tea parties sound like a gathering of crazy people -- his group's goal -- the movement will lose its power.

Levin said he got the idea from a counter-protest to the infamous Westboro Baptist Church group held outside Twitter headquarters in January. Levin said the Westboro group broke up after counter-protesters showed up holding signs "even crazier" than the ones held by the Westboro group. "They realized they couldn't get their message out, so they just left" Levin said.
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SOROS Money VS KOCH Money.

For whatever reason, people outside the US get the bible-belt impression of the Republicans, whereas inside the US, the broad Libertarian message is just a way to hook the more rational voters (although actual use of the L-word is rare in the mainstream, the concepts just get borrowed and dumped as the user deems fit). If the Libertarians get any reference made to them at all outside the US, they are labelled "extremists" or "the far-right", as mind-bendingly weird as that sounds. Libertarians are of course much closer to the center ground (in the intellectually repellent left-right spectrum), but that doesn't stop news media from misrepresenting the truth.

A good example is a great quote from Terry Gilliam on his dystopian comedy movie "Brazil". He basically says that the popularity of "Brazil" with the American far-right took him by surprise. I don't know for sure whether he's being knowingly ignorant, but it stretches credulity to think an actual American could possibly be so foolish to truly believe they were making an accurate statement saying something like that.

looks about right TO ME!!!

Well I wouldn't say it disproves that hypothesis, it simply does not provide good evidence for or against it. (In addition to the problems of unknown sample quality, and the disparity between 'having a brain' and 'being scientifically literate', as FirstAscent implied)

@ibminer, Carlton Banks

Thanks for taking the time.

I'm not a US citizen, but I follow US politics as much as I can, it is much more "entertaining" than my country, everything seems a major battle in US, here gay marriage was approved, some minor religious groups protested, and Catholic Church, but everything went smooth and life goes on, in the US is/seems an ongoing battle.

I understand what you described about mainstream media, I stopped watching TV a few years ago.

But, and again about GOP, somethings I recall from memory, obligatory vaginal ultrasound, ongoing battle against abortion, "legitimate rape", "honest rape", "gift from god rape", 10 commandments in public places, "marriage is between a man and a woman like god intended", isn't/wasn't Michelle Bachmann a very important figure in the party and her husband was a cure gays with faith preacher?

I'm can't remember more stuff, but I'm pretty sure the Intelligent Design/Creationism people are right wing.

I do understand that these people don't represent the all pie, but they have power and are very vocal about this stuff.

Plus this quote from Barry Goldwater:

Another classic in the political subversion toolkit, exaggeration of the extremists.

It's kind of reminiscent of tactics in manipulating financial markets; there's more to be made from the wildest swings, as long as you've got a good track on where the true mean and the true trajectory both lie.

Actually, even the noise says something, which is that the idea that "All Tea Party types are morans who need to get a brain" is false, as the survey does not show that, and at best shows that they're just scattered all over like everyone else.

 

In the main, the people the Occupy movement are fighting against are the people who are bankrolling the Tea Party. So, no.
Now, if you're talking about the Tea Party realising that they SHOULD be biting the hand that feeds them... well, that's a different story.

Meanwhile, to the study itself: it does indeed have something to say about how people's preconceptions colour their interpretation of data. But not what everyone is saying. On the contrary, it's all rather meta, the interesting thing is how people are trumpeting this study that really DOESN'T say anything useful at all.

Here's why I say that:


Ahem. In case you didn't catch that,


That's practically noise, and the p=0.05 doesn't really mitigate that. (Actually I dismiss p=0.05 for completely different reasons - it's a long story, but the TLDR version is I'm a Bayesian).

I wonder when the actual survey was taken. I live near DC, and saw some of their protests. They also get reported on the local news. When the thing started, a whole lot of their members were atheists, agorists, objectivists, libertarians, etc. Though that whole lot maybe accounted for half of all of them? I don't know. I know a lot of members quit the party in disgust, and don't want to be associated with it (they're still libertarians, agorists, objectivists, etc), but the party has moved extremely to the right into bible-thumping, "Obama is a secret muslim nazi" territory.

I would say that maybe it's a lesson for the next party of people like agorists, objectivists, and libertarians to take into account, in case they want to set up an actual grassroots movement (instead of astroturfed one) to fight for economic freedom and liberty...
But then I remembered that most of those types aren't for the silly government things anyway. Let them steep and brew and fight. We'll just step back and opt-out with bitcoin and other tech 

+1.

Remember in the Life of Brian when all the freedom fighters spend more time fighting each other than the Romans? "Brothers, we should be coming together to fight the common enemy!" "The Judean Peoples Front?" 

This is what I'm partly trying to describe in the thread about political affiliations. The two different ends of the spectrum have been contaminated with extremism, if you throw one set of freedom advocates in with a set of people in favour of restricting behaviour on your artificial political spectrum, then it makes it easy to dismiss, for instance, US Republicans as racist, insular, bible crazed creationists.

But how do you sell that to the potential Republican voter? You need to present a more rational, grounded prospectus to your grass roots, as the extremists are actually in the minority. When you look at the arguments made in favour of moderate Republicanism, it sounds like common sense good values. Except that they're better at talking about these principles than practicing them, as once the Republicans get into office, the Tea Party freedom oriented rhetoric goes out the window and the crazies take over. Happens the same with the Democrats too, the principles are sound (with the major exception of their promotion of the whole government concept), and when they get elected, it's all about spending a huge amount of money that does little tangible benefit to the public, but great for the corporate contractors who implement it.

And really, the American system is a simplified version of what happens in all election cycles the world over. The principle sounds just great, "what a smart set of ideas as an alternative to what we have now". Then they win, and "circumstances mean we have to do all this authoritarian, uh, I mean necessary stuff". Again and again, it happens each and every time.

Ya know, the day the Tea party and Occupy wall street figure out they are fighting the same people is the day entrenched power collapses.

Word

I realize you may or may not be joking with this comment... but I am going to respond anyway! 

Some of the GOP media seemed to start heading in this direction after Glenn Beck started getting decent ratings and started down that path.  Towards the end of his run on fox news, it was bible thumping & preachers almost every day, and I think it carried on a bit after he left... haven't really watched anything recently, been a little busy with life and can't deal with the idiotic political system we have. 

In the end, its all perception... most people accept the perception that is given to them through whatever media channels they watch or read or whatever groups they associate themselves with & hang around.

If the media started airing stories of several [insert party name here] party members that were seen playing candy crush during 'working hours', and they could produce a few pictures of this... the perception may be that nobody in that party is doing their job. The media could have everyone programmed right now to make comments like 'Wasn't the entire party too busy playing candy crush'
(I probably could have thought of a better analogy)

People shouldn't change their beliefs when the media/news stories entice them to. At least, I know I don't. I have an understanding that there are millions of people involved in each party, and the talking heads we see on TV, writing in papers, and the financial supporters that support them are a very small percentage of the 'people'... so I take everything they say with a grain/bag of salt and look towards the actions of people themselves to provide a larger statement of what 'the people' believe in or want.

In addition, most reporters/media outlets are attempting to 'entertain' as well as provide actual news... and anytime a dramatic spin can be put on something, it will, no matter what perception the dramatization or entertainment causes to people watching, sometimes intentional perception is created, sometimes not. If there is something they can do (or leave out) to the story to support the message of a particular party they lean towards, they will also do this. Whoever gets their story/message out first usually grabs the perception of people as the original factual story. Or, for those that stay with only one news organization, thats the only perception they may ever get... (narrow-minded).

All sides seem to like selectively leaving out parts of the story to suit their message or intent. It typically depends on who gets their message out the loudest and who does a better job at presenting their 'case' to the people about a story/event/person... the best stories are the ones with not much evidence or information, good time to bring 'speculation' into the picture and spin it whatever way you want to.
*Reminds me of the scene from Black Sheep when Mr. 'my friends call me cash' gets pictures of Chris Farley setting a building on fire, when in reality he was trying to put it out... just depends on which pictures they wanted to pay for and which ones made it to the 'media'.

This is why every time I see a news story (especially on TV), I have a series of questions before I can come to any reasonable conclusion over what actually happened. Even on the internet, I have to see multiple stories from multiple sources to try and establish a full picture of what happened before I draw my own conclusion.

They just want you to accept what they are saying and not ask questions. So, in the end, you can say the entire GOP was hijacked by preachers and Bible thumpers... but in reality, I am sure there are plenty of people that associate themselves with republicans that are not bible thumpers/preachers. The media turned their spotlight to these Bible thumpers/preachers

I really don't care if they are bible thumpers or atheists, I just want the opinions of each party on a specific situation/issue/event and be able to draw my own conclusions about which direction to support. If those opinions entail character attacks/name calling/etc, its not useful to me. The media likes to put simple labels on organizations or individuals, to give ammunition for all of their party drones to repeat and use against opposing party members. The labels are usually based on what their 'party' has determined to be true, based on their party's opinions & "research".

Can't tell you how many times I got called a bible thumper & racist for casually mentioning I supported some of the tea parties principals, and I have maybe read about 10% of the Bible. Although, I do plan to at some point, because its knowledge I want to have.  By the way, these same people couldn't tell me anything about the tea party or even list one belief held by the tea party... just that they were 'bible thumpers' and 'racists' who cannot handle having a black president.   DRONES!          (..... If only they knew I voted for Obama)

Sorry for the rant, nobody will probably read it... and I may have even made some ignore lists, but I feel better typing it.   

Doesn't prove much. You can know a heck of a lot about physics, mathematics, and logic, and still be woefully dumb about important issues that are scientifically important.

Wonder how much money the Koch brothers bankrolled into this 'analysis'?