There is a famous psychology experiment which deals with how humans resolve conflicts between intuition and reason. The spoiler is – not very well. But the experiment goes like this:
The subjects are given this simple problem. A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Most people’s intuition quickly tells them that the ball costs 10 cents.
However,
…if the ball costs 10 cents, that would mean the bat costs $1.10, so the two together would be $1.20 — violating the first piece of information you had. A little algebra, or a little more thought, reveals that the ball must have cost 5 cents. Oops.
So, we are not good at math, so what? The interesting part is what comes next. Most subjects can be talked into accepting that the ball costs 5 cents, but it takes a long time, and some work to overcome the initial intuition. More work than it should. Think about the implications of this for Teabags.
Now, compound the psychological problem facing Republicans by layering on a linguistic and cultural problem we have with arguing in the United States. In the US we use the word “argue” to mean two different things.
1. give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea, action, or theory, typically with the aim of persuading others to share one’s view.
2. exchange or express diverging or opposite views, typically in a heated or angry way. To fight.
So, essentially, we have people (Republicans) having wrong information and making bad decisions based on their intuition with a built in resistance to changing their minds, and we have them not understanding that “argue” can mean something other than “to fight.”
A fundamental requirement for a democracy is that we have parties that can be swayed by a well reasoned argument. We don’t have that now. We don’t have it on a national stage and we don’t have it on this small stage called Delawareliberal. We have plenty of teabags who have made up their minds based on their faulty intuition which is guided by a corrupt media establishment, but we don’t have any that are willing to have their views changed in light of new evidence.
That’s why I’ve been less and less tolerant of Republicans as the years have passed. It is clear to me that there are some Republicans want to try to use words here as a proxy for fists (as I’ve said before, they just want to fuck shit up), and there are some that want to pretend to be taking part in a legitimate “argument” but they can never really get there. It is just the nature of blogging, and the nature of politics in America in 2013.