Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...
  • What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.
  • This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.
  • The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.
  • The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.
  • It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.
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Monday, January 19, 2009

Why was Obama elected?

For a long time it struck me as utterly absurd that in a nation where we’ve been told for longer than I’ve been alive that we are inherently a racist nation we could be so quietly lofting a black man to the nation’s shoulders and propelled him to the White House with next to no talk about it.

He’s black. African-American. Whatever you want to call it. In a nation where white people supposedly control everything and the best of them are still contaminated by prejudice according to the liberal left (which ironically proves it through racist patronizing but that’s another matter). And he’s the prez. And no one is getting into any brouhaha. No noise. No anything that you’d expect if the liberal view were correct.

Well, we all know ourselves better than the liberals do to go by the voting record of this nation over the last fifty years as blacks have won major offices all the way to congress and now the presidency to say nothing of the explosion of black icons throughout the entertainment world, the media, popular culture, etc. Bill Cosby for a number of years could safely be called the nation’s dad and without danger of contradiction.

It took me a while and hindsight to see it. Looking back through the haze and fog of the war for the White House, I see no sign of Jowls McCain. It’s like he doesn’t exist. I see him allegedly on the field, people reporting him on the field, but… oh yeah, there he is… way way way over on the side as if… he charged Obama at the outset and Obama ran right past him with his attention on some other enemy…

That enemy was the perception of George W. Bush as created in the public mind by his opponents and the mainstream media who worked in what I find to be in retrospect obvious concert to make an idea of a satanically hellish opponent at the vanguard of a tsunami of shit that by comparison anyone opposing it could only be seen as a holy avenger at the very least. Demonization doesn’t begin to cover it.

Now it made perfect sense. Obama ran against a sitting president who was not even running. Obama ran against the public perception of a sitting president who was not even running. Obama ran against George W. Bush. Obama ran against Dubya.

That is how he got elected with as little disruption as if a dinosaur killing meteor hit the ocean at 32,000mph and made not a ripple and disappeared under the waves with nothing further seen.

Which of course consequently means that anyone who ran against that, and was seen as such a holy avenger against the ultimate evil portrayed, was given an artificially high standard to meet. Obama has to vanquish an image that at this point the public has almost entirely been convinced of utterly, and on top of that it doesn’t actually exist. That is, the problem portrayed by the image doesn’t exist. Can you repair a transmission that doesn’t exist? Heal a wound that doesn’t exist on a person who doesn’t exist?

Well, if no one ever believed the problem existed then claiming it was fixed is about as useful or hard.

The challenge is to convince the public that the imaginary problem is real, and then convince them that the imaginary problem is solved. A big challenge that is since humans are more prone to believing bad things than good. That point is why politicians sling mud and fight based on creating images of their opponents and not actually address issues whenever possible. The second part is much much harder. What criteria functions as the corroborating implication in your assertion that the non-existent problem is fixed or at least being worked on?

The second major problem of convincing people that the imaginary problem has been fixed or that it is being worked on is the human art of the self fulfilling prophecy. Tell them that the world is ending, and they will after a while cease opposing that and engage in nihilistic attitudes and thought, and start behaving in such a way that really quick, we’re headed for the end of the world. Remember the idea DON’T PANIC?

The MSM and the liberals started building this hurricane of horseshit and Bush as all four riders of the apocalypse really early on, say about five seconds after Bush’s first election. They encouraged fiscal irresponsibility in the mortgage lending market starting before that and kicked it ever higher in gear throughout Bush’s tenure. Bush to his and the rest of the NeoNeoCon discredit decided to co-opt liberal tax and spendism without the tax part with only a kindergarten idea of why Reagan’s years worked and were so good for America and did not deliver on the tax cuts to the upper class (who are the ones who invest in new and ongoing business allowing them to hire you and me) and business (the people who pay you and me our paychecks) that were necessary. They sold the country on an idea that everyone has a right to everything, from the government and whoever they blame for their condition in life, and no responsibility to anyone whatsoever, not even themselves.

Beset on all sides, and not understanding how GWB and his crew could foul up so colossally, the Republicans cracked up and some predictably went batshit insane and began advocating silly things and others wandered off to what they imagined was the center, and still others walked off the field. We conservatives have definitely failed to capitalize properly and responsibly on our own discontent by pointing out our own flaws and dedicating ourselves to their repair. We tried doing the liberal thing and proclaiming that we were the victims. To some extent we are, but in the end, you and you alone are responsible for your life which is what you make of it. The victimhood idea is a tool of the white supremacists and the liberals both. I will not accept it.

We also failed to prevent ourselves from swerving in a game of social chicken with the liberals. Their incessant refrains of doing something down here on Earth caused us to back away from exploring and colonizing space the way our species must inevitably do to survive. Their constant live simply so that others may simply live bullshit was internalized and we gave up on the principle of prosperity for all (as in prosperity of technological advancement and material wealth availability for all not handing success to people). We turned out premise of peace through freedom and democracy into a PR joust over Iraq rather than examining and documenting the reasons within human history and nature for these being greater things than tolerance of despotism.

That is how Obama got elected.

I get the impression that he’s a good man who means well but I also know he is on the left, beholden to the hard left, and not the biggest on sharp details. In that he has a lot in common with Bush (fuzzy details, beholden to political interests, not really likely to buck them).

He will almost certainly act to appease the hard left with some bones tossed which if casually chosen could be disastrous for the country for decades to come in the form of unconstitutionally to say nothing of immorally constructed intrusions by leftist fascism into the fabric of American life. Liberals getting entrenched in general is bad enough. There are certain places they can totally fuck this country up and without years of fights up through the courts to the US Supreme Court they won’t be removed. The fact is and this is something we conservatives should take to heart and teach and hammer home, the rule of law and constitution only works as long as we endeavor to make it so. Whatever is done in violation of our standards shall stand until the US Supreme Court says otherwise and in the interim anything can be gotten away with until the court stops it, and those things done can further entrench even more unconstitutional damage.

His own ideas are going to be sorely challenged by the public adoration for him which due to the nature of the imaginary enemy he fought against to win the White House is enormous to say nothing of that generated ongoing by the MSM. How do you not give in to the temptation to believe your own press? How do you act with humility and balance and not arrogance?

That’s for the messiah-elect to figure out in just under a day. Good luck B. I recommend lots of anti-anxiety meds.