A pandemic of conspiracies

I have to admit that COVID-19 has me a little skittish.

I know all the reassuring bits -- that most people who contract it have few or no symptoms, that the mortality rate is only 2% (contrast that with 70% mortality rate for a monster like Ebola-Zaire), that the flu is worse and we don't panic about that every year.

But.  I've read The Stand and watched Outbreak, and the similarities are alarming, not in the symptoms or severity, but in how the government is handling it.  Outright incompetence, coupled with attempts to muzzle the news media, along with reassurances that are almost certainly false ("a vaccine will be widely available soon").  There was a cluster of cases in Kirkland, Washington -- where I lived for ten years -- and just this morning there was the confirmation of a case...

... in Manhattan.

So at the moment I'm oscillating between "guarded" and "freaking right the fuck out."

At least I keep telling myself to go back to the facts -- what the CDC has discovered about the virus, recommendations for avoiding getting sick, maps of actual cases.  Which is more than I can say for a few other people.

Situations like this always seem to be prime breeding ground for conspiracy theories.  My explanation for this is that people are happier believing that there's a cause for Bad Stuff Happening even if the cause itself is kind of horrifying than they are believing that bad things just happen because they happen.  Global evil is, for some reason, more comforting than simple chaos.

But still.  There are some people who should, in Will Rogers's words, never miss a good opportunity to shut up.

Top of that list is New Zealand-based evangelical Christian preacher Brian Tamaki, of the Destiny Church of Auckland, who said this weekend that COVID-19 wasn't actually a virus, it was an airborne demon, and that therefore True Believers were immune.

"Satan has control of atmospheres unless you're a born-again, Jesus-loving, Bible-believing, Holy Ghost-filled, tithe-paying believer," Tamaki said, with special emphasis on the "tithe-paying" part.

"You're the only one that can walk through atmospheres and have literally a protection, the PS-91 protection policy."  PS-91, by the way, isn't a medication.  It's code for Psalm 91, wherein we read, "Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare or the deadly pestilence."

Because that worked out so well for people during the Black Death.

Tamaki, though, was hardly the only one who's been saying that coronavirus wasn't an ordinary epidemic.  The announcement by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 is now officially a pandemic was followed nearly immediately by Donald Trump announcing at a rally that the outbreak is a "hoax" by the Democrats to discredit him.  How the Democrats created a virus in China and then spread it all over the world is a matter of conjecture, but the MAGA-crowd isn't exactly known for their critical thinking skills, so there was an immediate outcry against those evil Democrats trying to damage Dear Leader.  Then when someone pointed out that it was odd, if the epidemic was caused by the Democrats trying to gain political advantage, the first states to have confirmed cases were strongly liberal-leaning -- California, Oregon, Washington, and New York.

"No," the MAGAs responded.  "The Democrats did that on purpose!  They're making themselves sick so they can blame it on Donald Trump!"

Because that's how evil we liberals are.  Mwa ha ha ha *cough, hack, sneeze* ha ha ha ha ha.

But no one has a better conspiracy theory (and by "better" I mean "completely batshit insane") than the one my wife found a couple of days ago.  Because a summary wouldn't nearly do it justice, here it is in all its glory:

"Digitized RNA activated by 5G waves."  "Remote assassination."  "Smart dust from chemtrails."  "ID2020."  "Weaponized technology from the Space Force."

And, of course, rejecting vaccines.

Look, I know it's scary.  I know it's natural to try to find reasons for things, because once you see the reasons, you can control the fear.

But that is no excuse for making shit up.

Let's all just calm down, take as many precautions as we can (including, most importantly, wash your damn hands).  Panicking and inventing crazy fairy tales and conspiracy theories doesn't solve anything or help anyone.  There's no reason to overreact.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm off to put on my hazmat suit and enter my underground bunker for the next three months.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Lying to our faces

Why are humans so prone to falling for complete bunk?

I ask this question because of two rather distressing studies that I ran into a while back, but which (understandably, when you see what they're about) didn't get much press.  Both of them should make all of us sit up and take notice.

In the first, a group of medical researchers led by Christina Korownyk of the University of Alberta studied over 400 recommendations (each) made on The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors, medical talk shows in which advice is liberally dispensed to listeners on various health issues.  The recommendations came from forty episodes from each show, and both the episodes and the recommendations were chosen at random.

The recommendations were then evaluated by a team of medical scientists, who looked at the quality of actual research evidence that supported each. It was found that under half of Dr. Oz's claims had evidential support -- and 15% were contradicted outright by the research.  The Doctors did a little better, but still only had a 63% support from the available evidence.

In the second study, an independent non-partisan group called PunditFact evaluated statements on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN for veracity, placing them in the categories of "True," "Mostly True," "Half True," "Mostly False," "False," and "Pants On Fire."  The latter category was reserved for statements that were so completely out of skew with the facts that they would have put Pinocchio to shame.

Fox News scored the worst, with only 18% of statements in the "True" or "Mostly True" categories.   60% of the statements on Fox were in the lowest three categories.  But before my readers who are on the liberal side of things start crowing with delight, allow me to point out that MSNBC doesn't win any awards for truth-telling, either.  They scored only 31% in the top two categories, and 48% in the lowest three.

Even CNN, which had the best scores, still only had 60% of their statements in the "True" or "Mostly True" categories!

Pretty discouraging stuff. Because far too many people take as gospel the statements heard on these sad examples of media, unquestioningly accepting what they hear as fact.

I think the reason is that so many of us are uncomfortable questioning our baseline assumptions.  If we already believe that liberals are going to lead the United States into ruination, then (1) we'll naturally gravitate toward Fox News, and (2) we'll hear lots of what we already thought was true, and have the lovely experience of feeling like we're right about everything.  Likewise the liberals who think that the Republicans are evil incarnate, and who therefore land right in happy MSNBC fantasy land.

And as the first study shows, this isn't confined to politics.  When Dr. Oz says, "Carb-load your plate at breakfast because it's heart-healthy" (a claim roundly contradicted by the evidence), the listeners who love waffles with lots of maple syrup are likely to say, "Hell yeah!"

What's worse is that when we're shown statements contradictory to our preconceived beliefs, we're likely not even to remember them.  About ten years ago, two of my students did a project in my class where they had subjects self-identify as liberal, conservative, or moderate, and then presented them with an article they'd written containing statistics on the petroleum industry.  The article was carefully written so that half of the data supported a conservative viewpoint (things like "government subsidies for oil companies keep gasoline prices low, encouraging business") and half supported more liberal stances (such as "the increasing reliance on fossil fuels has been shown to be linked with climate change").  After reading the article, each test subject was given a test to see which facts they remembered from it.

Conservatives were more likely to remember the conservative claims, liberals the liberal claims.  It's almost as if we don't just disagree with the opposite viewpoint; on some level we can't even quite bring ourselves to believe it exists.

It's a troubling finding.  This blind spot seems to be firmly wired into our brain, again bringing up the reluctance that all of us have in considering that we might be wrong about something.

The only way out, of course, is through training our brains to suspend judgment until we've found out the facts.  The rush to come to a conclusion -- especially when the conclusion is in line with what we already believed -- is a dangerous path.  All the more highlighting that we need to be teaching critical thinking and smart media literacy in public schools.

And we need to turn off the mainstream media.  It's not that one side or the other is skewed; it's all bad.

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Free speech and consequences

A couple of days ago I broke my cardinal rule -- arguing with strangers about politics on the internet -- when someone posted a snarky reply to a comment I'd made on Twitter.

The comment was about a recent story featuring the spectacularly out-of-touch-with-reality Rush Limbaugh, wherein he said that liberals staged the shootings in New Zealand to make conservatives look bad.  The exact quote is, "There's an ongoing theory that the shooter himself may in fact be a leftist who writes the manifesto and then goes out and performs the deed purposely to smear his political enemies."  Interestingly, Limbaugh admits this claim is too bizarre even for Fox News: "[I]f that's exactly what the guy is trying to do then he's hit a home run, because right there on Fox News: 'Shooter is an admitted white nationalist who hates immigrants.'"

There are a couple of things that came to my mind when I heard about this, the first of which is that the word "theory" doesn't mean "some random idea I pulled out of my ass just now."  But that's a minor point, really.  The other thing that crosses my mind is that it's telling that Limbaugh thinks posing as a white-supremacist wacko and shooting immigrants would make conservatives look bad.

But anyhow, after I saw this story posted on Twitter, I responded, "It will be a good day when anyone who makes a statement like this is immediately shouted down."

Well.  You'd swear I just suggested violently overthrowing the government, or something, judging by the responses.  The one that stood out, though, was a guy who said, "Just like a liberal.  To hell with free speech.  If someone disagrees with you, they deserve to be silenced by whatever means necessary."

Which is packing a lot into a small space.  First, I wasn't saying Limbaugh should shut the hell up because I disagree with him on political matters, but because he had (1) made a claim that was demonstrably false, and (2) encouraged the beleaguered siege mentality that's becoming increasingly common on the Right.  And nowhere did I say he deserved to be "silenced by whatever means necessary."

But the most important point is that he seems to believe that free speech means you can say whatever you want with zero consequences.  Free speech refers to your right to state your opinion; it doesn't mean that you have a right to avoid the repercussions.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Simon Gibbs from London, United Kingdom, Free speech reason progress, CC BY 2.0]

As a simple example, consider people who've made disparaging comments about their bosses on social media, and gotten fired.  Sure, it was entirely within their rights to say what they said.  But the boss was also entirely within his/her rights to fire the employee.  What this guy seems to be claiming is that people bear no responsibility for the results of their actions -- odd since most conservatives claim to support personal responsibility.

To quote physicist and writer Brian Cox: "The problem with today's world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion and have others listen to it.  The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored, and even be made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense."

This is exactly the situation with Limbaugh's case; the logical consequence of publicly uttering a ridiculous statement is that he'll be ridiculed.  What I was saying is that it'd be nice if everyone hearing such dangerous fiction would recognize it as such and respond by telling him to shut up -- and by extension, encouraging his sponsors to stop advertising with him.  This isn't a curtailment of free speech.  It's the natural result of being an asshole.  In a fair world, you get your public forum taken away.  You're still free to say whatever you like; it's just that no one's listening any more.

After all, there's no such thing as "conservative truth" and "liberal truth."  There's only the "truth," and it'd be nice if more people on both sides of the aisle cared about it.

But honestly, I should have known that posting on Twitter, and then (worse) responding to someone who objected, was a fruitless pursuit.  The exchange didn't change either of our minds, it just resulted in two people being even more pissed off than before.  This is the danger of social media -- it tends either to turn into a battleground or an echo chamber, neither of which is conducive to change.

A lesson Donald Trump has yet to learn.

So I'm once again making the decision not to get in online arguments with strangers.  I just don't have the energy or patience for it.  I'll continue to try to facilitate change where I can -- such as writing here at Skeptophilia -- but I've recognized a losing battle for what it is.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a look at one of the most peculiar historical mysteries known: the unsolved puzzle of Kaspar Hauser.

In 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a military station in the city of Ansbach, Germany.  He was largely unable to communicate, but had a piece of paper that said he was being sent to join the cavalry -- and that if that wasn't possible, whoever was in charge should simply have him hanged.

The boy called himself Kaspar Hauser, and he was housed above the jail.  After months of coaxing and training, he became able to speak enough to tell a peculiar story.  He'd been kept captive, he said, in a small room where he was never allowed to see another human being.  He was fed by a man who sometimes talked to him through a slot in the door.  Sometimes, he said, the water he was given tasted bitter, and he would sleep soundly -- and wake up to find his hair and nails cut.

But locals began to question the story when it was found that Hauser was a pathological liar, and not to be trusted with anything.  No one was ever able to corroborate his story, and his death from a stab wound in 1833 in Ansbach was equally enigmatic -- he was found clutching a note that said he'd been killed so he couldn't identify his captor, who signed his name "M. L. O."  But from the angle of the wound, and the handwriting on the note, it seemed likely that both were the work of Hauser himself.

The mystery endures, and in the book Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson looks at the various guesses that people have made to explain the boy's origins and bizarre death.  It makes for a fascinating read -- even if truthfully, we may never be certain of the actual explanation.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Giving no quarter

As of this morning, six explosive devices addressed to prominent critics of Donald Trump have been discovered, one of them (the one mailed to former CIA director John Brennan) found at the headquarters of CNN.  Fortunately, all of them were intercepted and rendered harmless.  As of the writing of this post, it is yet to be determined if any of the devices were capable of detonating, but officials say that they "contained some of the components that would be required to build an operable bomb" and the potential danger was being studied.

Trump was quick to disavow any responsibility for what happened.  In a speech given at the White House, he said, "In these times we have to unify.  We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America."

Fine words from a man who has repeatedly vilified the men and women who were the targets, and done whatever he could to sow division, paranoia, and polarization.  Just last week he praised Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte for body slamming a reporter.   He initially condemned a neo-Nazi gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia that resulted in one death and nineteen injuries, but quickly backpedaled, saying, "I think there is blame on both sides.  You look at both sides.  I think there is blame on both sides."  He has called CNN and other members of the mainstream news media "enemies of the people" over and over.  Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, called it correctly.  'There is a total and complete lack of understanding at the White House about the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media.  The President, and especially the White House Press Secretary, should understand their words matter.  Thus far, they have shown no comprehension of that."

Then Trump's cronies joined in the fray.  CNN was just "getting what it deserved" for "spewing hate speech 24/7."  "Democrats are worse," one man on Twitter commented, then quoted Cory Booker's comment, "Get in their face," Maxine Waters's "No peace, no sleep," and Hillary Clinton's "We can't be civil until Democrats win."

Because this, apparently, justifies receiving a pipe bomb in the mail.

While other networks were covering the incidents, Fox News was discussing how outrageous it was that Mitch McConnell got heckled in a restaurant.  In fact, Meghan McCain equated getting heckled in a restaurant with receiving a pipe bomb in the mail, in a conversation with Joy Behar on The View.

"Every time [Trump] says things like the press is the enemy of the people, his entire party needs to stand up against him and say something," Behar said.  "Mitch McConnell, where is he?  He’s the leader of this party."

"He’s getting harassed and heckled when he goes out in public to have dinner with his wife," McCain responded.  "So are we."

It didn't take long for a bunch of right-wing talking heads to say not only that liberals were responsible for the pipe bombs because they encourage violence, but that the liberals sent the pipe bombs themselves to make the Republicans look bad.  Chris Swecker, former analyst for the FBI, said in an interview on Fox, "It could be someone who is trying to get the Democratic vote out and incur sympathy."  Pro-Trump media personalities John Cardillo, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and Bill Mitchell were quick to agree.

But no one is capable of throwing gasoline on a fire like Rush Limbaugh.  "Republicans just don't do this kind of thing," Limbaugh said.  "You’ve got people trying to harm CNN and Obama and Hillary and Bill Clinton and Debbie 'Blabbermouth' Schultz and, you know, just, it might serve a purpose here."

Okay, you get the picture.

Words matter.  This has progressed far past the usual fractious partisan rhetoric and posturing that has gone on as long as there have been elected offices.  This is a leader -- the President of the United States -- who has over and over used inflammatory rhetoric to stir up his supporters, leading the cry of "lock her up" against Hillary Clinton (who has never been tried for, much less found guilty of, anything).  Ted Cruz, who evidently thought it was a good idea to take a page from Trump's playbook, said that Clinton and Cruz's opponent Beto O'Rourke could "share a double-occupancy cell."

Apparently now it's a crime to be a Democrat.

It's taken a lot to get me involved in politics.  I've said before that I hate politics because half of it is arguing over things that should be self-evident and the other half arguing over things that probably have no feasible solution.  I'm the child of two staunch Republicans, with whom I sometimes disagreed but always respected.  Personally, I've always been kind of a centrist; one of my besetting sins is that I see most things in shades of gray.

But if you still support Donald Trump, you are aiding and abetting someone who not only lies compulsively, not only is a homophobic, misogynistic narcissist, but is appealing to the worst traits in the American personality -- the tribalism, the xenophobia, the racism.  Not only appealing to them, encouraging them, inflaming the fear and the hatred and the polarization.  I usually try to find common ground with people I disagree with, but I'm beginning to think there is no common ground here.

If you voted for Trump, I get it.  He's very good at telling people what they want to hear, convincing them he's got all the answers.  If you still support him, I have nothing more to say to you other than that I will fight what Trump and his cadre stand for with every breath I take.  I'm done with being bipartisan, with trying to be polite to folks who want people like me erased from the earth.

At some point, you have to stop being nice and say "enough."  If there's still dialogue to be had, if they're still convincible, it's still worth talking.  But if not?  The only thing left is to push back with everything you've got.  I'll end with a quote from William Lloyd Garrison: "With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men, I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost."

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

Safety shift

It's simultaneously amusing and a little frightening how sure we all are of our own opinions.

When challenged, we tend to react either with incredulity or with anger.  How on earth could anyone believe differently than we do?  Our own beliefs arise, of course, from a careful consideration of the facts, of the world as it is.  If you think differently, well, you're just not putting things together right.

And not only do we use our certainty in our own rightness to make judgments about others, we also use it to cement our own conclusions over time.  I recall with some discomfort the time I was being interviewed on a radio program, and the host asked me a perfectly legitimate question for someone who is a self-styled skeptic, namely: has there been a time that I have been challenged in one of my beliefs, and after analysis, turned out to be wrong?

Well, it was a fair knock-out.  I could only recall one time that, in the (then) five years I'd written Skeptophilia, that a reader had posted an objection that changed my mind.  (If you're curious, it was about the efficacy of low-level laser therapy on wound healing; she came at me with facts and data and sources, and even if I'd been inclined to argue, I had no choice but to admit defeat and retreat in disarray.)

But other that that?  When I get objections, I tend to do what most of us do.  Say, "Oh, how sad for you that you don't agree with me," and forthwith stop thinking about it.

What's so appalling about this is how easily those seemingly set-in-stone root beliefs can be changed by circumstances outside of our control, and often, without our even knowing it's happening.  Which brings me to a simple but elegant experiment done at Yale University by John Bargh, Jaime Napier, Julie Huang, and Andy Vonasch that appeared in the European Journal of Social Psychology late last year.  The experiment springboarded off a longitudinal study done at the University of California that showed that the more fear a child expressed over novel situations in a laboratory at age four, the more conservative (s)he was likely to be twenty years later.  Conservatives, it has been found, are more likely to regard the unfamiliar with suspicion, and in fact, have higher activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with anxiety.  Liberals, on the other hand, have a greater degree of trust in the unknown (whether justified or not), and tend to be less fearful of new people and new experiences.

So what Bargh et al. decided to do was to see if the opposite might hold true -- if changing people's sense of being safe would alter their political stances.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And they did.  Bargh's team guided participants through an intense visualization exercise, which for some participants was about having the ability to fly, and for others being invulnerable and safe from harm in all situations.

The results were dramatic.  In Bargh's words:

If they had just imagined being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to social change in general. 

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents.  And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats.  Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.

This study has a couple of interesting -- and cautionary -- outcomes.

First, the researchers did not look at how long-lasting these changes were, so even for those who think the changes were a good thing (probably my left-leaning readers), there's no guarantee that the leftward shift was permanent.  Second, consider the fact that the shift occurred by having people visualize an imaginary scenario -- i.e., something that isn't true.  Even if the shift was long-lasting, I have some serious qualms about changing people's beliefs based on having them imagine a falsehood.  That, to me, is no better than having them persist in erroneous beliefs because of a lack of self-analysis.

But to me the scariest result of the experiment by Bargh et al. is to consider how this tendency is exacerbated -- or, more accurately, manipulated -- by the media.  Conservative news sources thrive on inducing fear.  (As one example, think about the yearly idiocy over at Fox News about we atheists' alleged "War on Christmas.")  By the same token, liberal media tends to focus on stories that make you feel better, at least about the usual left-wing talking points -- stories, for example, of immigrants who have succeeded and become model citizens.  In both cases, it's powered by our tendency to shift rightward when we feel threatened and leftward when we feel safe -- and, in both cases, to keep listening to the news sources that reinforce those feelings.

I'm not at all sure what to do about this, or honestly, if there's anything that can be done.  We all have our biases in one direction or the other to start with, and we're pretty likely to seek out news sources that corroborate what we already thought.  A combination of confirmation bias and the echo-chamber effect.  But what the Bargh et al. study should show us is that we can't become complacent and stop considering our own beliefs in the sharpest light available -- and always keep in mind the possibility that our own opinions might not be as carved in stone as we'd like to think.

Unity in diversity

A couple of days ago, NPR ran a piece about conservatives who are leaving liberal areas so they can live amongst like-minded folks.  The article, by Vanessa Romo, is entitled "Texas Becoming a Magnet for Conservatives Fleeing Liberal States Like California," and tells the story of people like 36-year-old Tim Stokes, who is upping stakes and moving along with his pregnant wife and three children.

The reason, Stokes said, is that he is tired of "feeling like an outsider" in his hometown.  He's a Republican, has staunchly supported conservative causes, and has the sense of being marginalized in a community that is largely liberal Democrat.  And he's not alone; the article projects that by 2050, twenty million people will have left their home states to be in places that align better with their political stances and religious beliefs.

It's not that I don't understand this.  I tend to have a liberal bent (which, I'm sure, will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia), although I try to avoid politics when I can because I find arguing about it to be rather pointless.  I live in an area where liberals outnumber conservatives, although if you continue down the highway where I live toward the south and the city of Watkins Glen, the numbers flip completely.  During the last election, if you took the road past my house, you could see the blue Clinton signs thinning as the red Trump signs increased in numbers, mile after passing mile.

I get that it's nice to have like-minded folks near you.  Believe me, being a liberal atheist from southern Louisiana, I know what it's like to feel like you're on the fringe in your own home, and the situation must feel similar for conservatives in strongly liberal areas.

But I think what Tim Stokes and his family (and, apparently, a great many other people) are doing is unequivocally a bad idea.

We need to be around people who disagree with us, who challenge and question us.  I'm not saying we should seek out hostile interactions, or (worse) provoke them; but I contend that if you live in the contented, self-satisfied little bubble of only hearing the opinions you already have reflected back at you, you will never have the opportunity to suss out places where your thinking is wrong-headed -- or things that you haven't thought about at all.

Fortunately, there are influential people who are saying exactly this.  George Fuller, the (conservative) mayor of McKinney, Texas (near Dallas), said of what Stokes and others are doing, "I think instead of just trying to kind of put together pockets of the like-minded, I would think energy is better spent trying to figure out how to live and exist together and find productive solutions going forward versus insulating yourself from different thoughts and ideologies."

Norman Rockwell, Golden Rule (1961) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is it exactly.  If there's one thing I've found to be consistently true, it's that it's much easier to demonize someone if you have no personal contact with them.  Over and over, I've seen stories of the devoutly religious who hated LGBT individuals -- until a child or a friend came out to them.  They're forced into realizing that the labels and the hatred allow them to ignore the humanity of an entire group, and that they're being presented with a choice between love and narrow-minded bigotry.  (I realize those situations don't always end this way, and there are cases where the bigoted choose to embrace their prejudice instead; but it's encouraging the number of times it's gone the other way.)

In fact, prejudices of all kinds evaporate when you take the time to get to know people different than you are, and realize that your commonalities far outweigh your differences.  And if you segregate yourself voluntarily into a little echo chamber where everyone looks like you, votes like you, and attends the same church as you, you'll never have the chance to do what Kathryn Schulz calls "moving outside of that tiny, terrified little bubble of having to be right about everything."

In fact, I'll go a step beyond that; you should not only be accepting of opportunities to interact with people who aren't like you, you should seek them out.  The leaders of our country are, by and large, accelerating the polarization of the American people, pushing us into believing that anyone who isn't like you is either a hopeless idiot, or else an evil creature dead-set on destroying the very fabric of the United States.

We have to work tirelessly against this mindset.  And, for cryin' in the sink, don't you think we'd get it by now?  We're a nation that in the past has prided itself on being a "melting pot."  I'm a good example; I have in my ancestry recent immigrants from the southeast of France, Jewish refugees from Alsace, Cajuns exiled from Nova Scotia, Dutch settlers who came to New Amsterdam in the 1600s, and Scottish peasants who ended up in the hill country of southwestern Pennsylvania.  Virtually all of us are the product of such amalgams.  And yet, the way things are going, we're rapidly heading toward a society where we not only don't interact with people who aren't like us, we almost never see them.

So do yourself a favor.  Find some people of different ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, or political values, and sit down with them to have a conversation over your favorite libation.  Don't just talk; listen.  Chances are good that you'll find out that this person, so different than you are, just wants the same things you want; a secure home, food on the table, a safe environment to raise children, the freedom to speak without judgment, the freedom to be who they are without fear of censure, ridicule, or violence.

And who knows?  Maybe you'll come away not only having learned something, but having made a friend.

The geography of belief

When I first read Richard Dawkins's fiery and controversial diatribe The God Delusion, one of the points he made that struck me the most strongly is that religion is for the most part dependent not on its adherents choosing a particular schema of belief because of its appeal or its inherent logic, but because of simple geography.  Dawkins writes:

If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents.  If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Dawkins's point is that this is a strong indicator that specific religions are held by their followers not because of choice, but primarily because of cultural and familial traditions.  There are adult converts, of course, who are choosing a belief system, but most people who are religious belong to the dominant faith in the place where they live.  (In fact, a Pew Research poll just released last week estimates the percentage of Christians who are in the faith because of conversion as adults as less than 6%.)  In other words, for most religious people, they believe it's true not because they were convinced by the evidence, but because it's what they were told by the people around them when they were children.

And now, a team led by Matthew Feinberg of the University of Toronto and Alexa M. Tulett of the University of Alabama has shown that the same thing is true of political beliefs.

In a paper in PLOS-One called "The Political Reference Point: How Geography Shapes Political Identity," Feinberg et al. looked at the spectrum of political stances regionally, and whether geography correlates with not only party affiliation but how terms like "conservative" and "liberal" are defined.  The authors write:

It is commonly assumed that how individuals identify on the political spectrum–whether liberal, conservative, or moderate–has a universal meaning when it comes to policy stances and voting behavior.  But, does political identity mean the same thing from place to place?  Using data collected from across the U.S. we find that even when people share the same political identity, those in “bluer” locations are more likely to support left-leaning policies and vote for Democratic candidates than those in “redder” locations.  Because the meaning of political identity is inconsistent across locations, individuals who share the same political identity sometimes espouse opposing policy stances.  Meanwhile, those with opposing identities sometimes endorse identical policy stances.  Such findings suggest that researchers, campaigners, and pollsters must use caution when extrapolating policy preferences and voting behavior from political identity, and that animosity toward the other end of the political spectrum is sometimes misplaced.

Which makes it all the more interesting how fervently people believe they're correct on political matters.  Just as with religion, a person in rural Kansas who grew up staunchly conservative would likely have grown up liberal had he been raised in San Francisco.

The problem with this argument, though, is that this doesn't fix the problem that most people see their own beliefs as based on sound, well-considered thought, and everyone else's as based on indoctrination.  Instead of recognizing that all of us are more a product of our regional culture than of any kind of systematic examination of our own moral, ethical, and political matrix, it's easier (and on a lot of levels, more comforting) for the rural Kansas conservative to say, "Of course if I was raised in San Francisco I'd be liberal.  I'd have been brainwashed by the damn left wing Democrats before I had a chance to form my own opinions."  (And vice versa, of course.)

So I'm not sure where the research of Feinberg et al., and even the observations of Dawkins about religion, get us.  All of us still tend to cling like mad to our own preconceived notions (and I am very definitely including myself in that "all of us").  But if this line of thought can persuade some of us to re-examine our beliefs, and consider the extent to which we were shaped not by evidence, logic, or rational argument but by geography and family influences, it might be a first step toward not only helping us to think as clearly as possible, but understanding those of us whose beliefs differ from ours.

Left-wing conspiracies

The rather regrettable human tendency to assume that everyone in Our Tribe is honest and clever and valiant, and everyone in the Other Tribe is dishonest and cunning and weaselly, makes up for in appeal what it lacks in any kind of supporting evidence.

The fact is, all of us, regardless of tribe, are capable of exhibiting the full spectrum of human behavior.  I got a stern reminder of that yesterday from (of all places) Buzzfeed, a site which I had honestly stopped looking at because of their tendency to publish sensationalist, overhyped garbage.

But this particular article, called "Behind the Rise of the Anti-Trump Twitter Conspiracy Theorists" by Charlie Warzel, is unusually well researched -- and has a cautionary conclusion for any of us on the Blue side of things.  Warzel lays out clearly the fact that although the left is awfully quick to point out the conspiracy theorists on the right -- people like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, for example -- they seem to be blissfully unaware when they're engaging in exactly the same kind of behaviors themselves.

"[T]he Blue Detectives," Warzel writes, "are increasingly active in theorizing that Trump and his associates are involved in a dizzying multidimensional plot — and, crucially, are always 10 steps ahead of the American public... which suggests a cunning on the part of the Trump administration and Russia to distract, dodge, and outwit the American public while bolstering its coffers and power."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Warzel cites people like Adam Khan, who tweets under the handle @Khanoisseur, and specializes in linking together facts and figures and other people's tweets into what looks like a massive flow chart.  Khan insists he's not a conspiracy theorists, but is "merely asking questions."

"I’m not manufacturing anything new," Khan says.  "But I’m taking this piece of reporting from this journalist and showing clearly how it aligns with something else out there.  And put together, I think it shows there’s a bigger story.  If nothing else, I hope my work leads to more people doing their own investigative journalism."

The problem is, just as with people on the right like Rush Limbaugh (and Trump himself) saying "I'm just asking the question," the result is almost never "people doing their own investigative journalism."  The ones who are primed to believe whatever explanation is being offered tend to swallow it without question.

Thus confirmation bias rears its hideous head once again.

The tendency is not confined to bloggers and tweeters.  Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich slipped into that dangerous territory himself last week, with a claim that Breitbart and ultra-conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos had engineered the riots at Berkeley to give impetus to Donald Trump to tighten his grip on college campuses:

There is the possibility that Yiannopoulos and Breitbart were in cahoots with the agitators in order to lay the groundwork for a Trump crackdown on universities and their federal funding... Hmmm. Connect these dots...  I don’t want to add to the conspiratorial musings of so many about this very conspiratorial administration, but it strikes me there may be something worrying going on here.

Of course, Reich never lays out his evidence for all this, because he doesn't appear to have any.  It's merely "likely speculation."

And his disingenuous "I don't want to add to the conspiratorial musings" doesn't impress me at all.  If you don't want to add to "conspiratorial musings," you keep your damn mouth shut until you have some hard evidence.

The irony isn't lost on conservative blogger Mike Cernovich.  "It’s even happening to people who have reputations in the media for being pretty normal," Cernovich said.  "I saw this great meme the other day that said if there’s ever a terrorist attack in America under Trump, the left is going to go full Infowars. And I think that’s totally true..  Honestly, that’s why I’ve pivoted with my brand, and my trolling today compared to a year ago is mild.  They’ve adopted that fringe-level mentality aggressively.  People on left are making themselves look ridiculous and so I see it as an opportunity to look reasonable by comparison."

The sad truth is that none of us is free of bias, so it is even more important to question stuff you hear from Your Tribe -- because that's what is most likely to hoodwink you, most likely for you to accept without question.  That tendency simply to go, "Yeah!  Right on!" when we see something that appeals to our preconceived notions blinds us to the truth, and prevents us from correcting our errors even when they're right in front of our faces.

So do what I always tell my Critical Thinking students to do; make sure you're getting your news from a variety of sources.  If you're conservative, watch MSNBC every once in a while.  If you're liberal, watch Fox.  You probably won't agree with what you hear, and it might even piss you off, but it'll pull you out of the comfy little echo chamber where most of us are content to live our lives.

And don't just listen -- consider what they're saying carefully.  Training yourself to think about what you're hearing and seeing is good practice, and not something that comes naturally.  It'll make you far less likely to fall for unfounded conspiracy theories -- no matter on which side of the aisle they originated.

Red truth, blue truth

At the same time that social media has opened up possibilities for long-distance (and cross-cultural) contact, and allowed us to befriend people we've never met, it also has had the effect of creating nearly impermeable echo chambers that do nothing but reinforce confirmation bias about our own beliefs and the worst stereotypes about those who disagree.

This is being highlighted in a rather terrifying fashion by The Wall Street Journal in their feature "Blue Feed, Red Feed," which they describe as follows:

To demonstrate how reality may differ for different Facebook users, The Wall Street Journal created two feeds, one “blue” and the other “red.”  If a source appears in the red feed, a majority of the articles shared from the source were classified as “very conservatively aligned” in a large 2015 Facebook study.  For the blue feed, a majority of each source’s articles aligned “very liberal.”  These aren't intended to resemble actual individual news feeds.  Instead, they are rare side-by-side looks at real conversations from different perspectives.

It's worth taking a look.  Here's a small sampling of a "red feed" for the recent "alternative facts" interview with Kellyanne Conway:

AWFUL LIBERAL Hack Chuck Todd Attacks #Trump – Kellyanne Conway Rips Him Apart (VIDEO)
Jim Hoft Jan 22nd, 2017 10:39 am 273 Comments
The liberal media today is in the sewer.
More Americans believe in Sasquatch than the crap coming from the liberal media.
After eight years of slobbering all over failed President and liar Barack Obama the media has suddenly decided to take on this new administration.
Today Chuck Todd went after Donald Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway on Meet the Press.
Kellyanne Conway ripped him a new one.
Notice how this condescending ass snickers as Kellyanne answers his question!

The Trump administration should boycott this horrible show immediately.

Contrast this with the "blue feed" on the same topic:

If you are puzzled by the bizarre "press conference" put on by the White House press secretary this evening (angrily claiming that Trump's inauguration had the largest audience in history, accusing them of faking photos and lying about attendance), let me help explain it. This spectacle served three purposes: 

1. Establishing a norm with the press: they will be told things that are obviously wrong and they will have no opportunity to ask questions. That way, they will be grateful if they get anything more at any press conference. This is the PR equivalent of "negging," the odious pick-up practice of a particular kind of horrible person (e.g., Donald Trump). 

2. Increasing the separation between Trump's base (1/3 of the population) from everybody else (the remaining 2/3). By being told something that is obviously wrong—that there is no evidence for and all evidence against, that anybody with eyes can see is wrong—they are forced to pick whether they are going to believe Trump or their lying eyes. The gamble here—likely to pay off—is that they will believe Trump. This means that they will regard media outlets that report the truth as "fake news" (because otherwise they'd be forced to confront their cognitive dissonance.) 

3. Creating a sense of uncertainty about whether facts are knowable, among a certain chunk of the population (which is a taking a page from the Kremlin, for whom this is their preferred disinformation tactic). A third of the population will say "clearly the White House is lying," a third will say "if Trump says it, it must be true," and the remaining third will say "gosh, I guess this is unknowable." The idea isn't to convince these people of untrue things, it's to fatigue them, so that they will stay out of the political process entirely, regarding the truth as just too difficult to determine. 

This is laying important groundwork for the months ahead. If Trump's White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as this, just imagine what else they'll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. It's gonna get real bad.

It's not like they're looking at the same thing from two different angles; it's more like these people aren't living in the same universe.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Add into the mix a paper published this week in PNAS Online by Michela Del Vicario, Alessandro Bessi, Fabiana Zollo, Fabio Petroni, Antonio Scala, Guido Caldarelli, H. Eugene Stanley, and Walter Quattrociocchi of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science in Lucca, Italy.  The study, called "The Spreading of Misinformation Online," not only describes the dangers of the echo chamber effect apropos of social media, but the worse problem that it insulates us from correcting our own understanding  when we're in the wrong. The authors write:

Digital misinformation has become so pervasive in online social media that it has been listed by the WEF as one of the main threats to human society.  Whether a news item, either substantiated or not, is accepted as true by a user may be strongly affected by social norms or by how much it coheres with the user’s system of beliefs.  Many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction...  Our findings show that users mostly tend to select and share content related to a specific narrative and to ignore the rest.  In particular, we show that social homogeneity is the primary driver of content diffusion, and one frequent result is the formation of homogeneous, polarized clusters.  Most of the times the information is taken by a friend having the same profile (polarization)––i.e., belonging to the same echo chamber...  Users tend to aggregate in communities of interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation, and polarization.  This comes at the expense of the quality of the information and leads to proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust, and paranoia.

It would be easy to jump from there to the conclusion that there's no way to tell what the truth is, that we're all so insulated in our comfortable cocoons of self-approval that we'll never be able to see out.  That's unwarrantedly pessimistic, however.  There is a method for determining the truth; it involves using evidence (i.e. facts), logic, and an unrelenting determination to steer clear of partisan spin.  Giving up and saying "No one can know the truth" is exactly as unproductive as saying "my side is always right."

Still, all kind-hearted ecumenism aside, I'll end with a quote from the eminent Richard Dawkins: "When two opposing points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie somewhere in the middle.  It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."

Nuance and overgeneralization

A post I saw on Twitter yesterday called to mind one of my particular pet peeves, which is blaming a person's general assholery on belonging to a particular political party, religion, ethnic group, or nationality.

This particular example was referencing a comment by Hussam Ayloush, executive board member of the California Democratic Party and executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, about the wreck of a Russian jet Christmas morning that killed 92 people.

Ayloush tweeted, "I'm sad about the crashed Russian jet.  The TU-154 could have carried up to 180 military personnel instead of 92!"

The response I saw on Twitter said, and I quote: "Democratic party leader wishes for more dead in Russian crash.  Typical nasty liberal hypocrisy."

Hussam Ayloush [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, first of all, I haven't seen anyone, Democrat or Republican or anyone else, defending Ayloush's statement.  Indeed, the backlash from all sides has been pretty strident, to the point that Ayloush deleted the original tweet and followed it up with a piss-poor half-apology: "Deleted an earlier tweet I posted abt a Russian military jet that crashed on way to Syria before knowing it included non-combatants."

Because that evidently makes it okay that he wished more innocent people dead.

What galled me about the "nasty liberal hypocrisy" tweet, though, was that it somehow implies that Ayloush speaks for all liberals, a claim that five minutes of research would have put to rest.  Ayloush has made inflammatory statements before, and been roundly criticized for it -- that the United States was directly responsible for 9/11, that Islam should prevail over all other ideologies, and that the U.S. government under Donald Trump needed to be overthrown.  (If you want exact wording or citations on any of these, you can find them at the link provided above.)

It's not that you couldn't find liberals who might agree with any or all of those; it's that those are hardly standard liberal talking points.  It would have at least made a modicum of sense if the person who posted the remark had attributed Ayloush's statement with his being the director of CAIR -- a Saudi-funded group that has ties to radical Islamic extremism.

But no, this individual wanted to use it to slam liberals in general, so apparently any blunt weapon will do.

It's not just liberals that this applies to, of course.  Conservatives get tarred with one brush just as often.  All it takes is one Republican to be found in violation of an ethical standard or law, and the crowing starts immediately about how inherently crooked Republicans are.

I'm sorry, but life is just not that simple.  If you want obvious villains and heroes, stick to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.  To understand real people, with all their combinations of virtues and vices, requires a little more nuanced view -- especially if you're trying to characterize entire groups.

All ministers aren't guilty of hypocritical false piety just because Jimmy Swaggart was.  All Catholic priests aren't child molesters just because Gilbert Gauthé was.  All atheists don't hold religious people in contempt just because some do.  All religious people aren't anti-intellectual and anti-science just because some are.  If it comforts you to make blanket judgments based upon the actions of a few and forthwith stop thinking, knock yourself out -- but make no mistake about it, you will be wrong 99% of the time.

So yes, Hussam Ayloush shows every sign of being an asshole, and if I were on the California Democratic Party Executive Board, I'd want to have a serious discussion about why he's a member.  But assholery is no respecter of political party, religion, or any other demographic you want to pick.  If you want to call Ayloush out for his horrible statement, I'll be right there with you.  But when you start claiming that his ugly invective is representative of close to 50% of American citizens, I'm calling bullshit.

Five channels plus the facts

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University has pioneered research into what he calls the "five channels of morality" -- the five foundations of human morals and ethics worldwide.  These are compassion/harm, fairness/cheating, in-group loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation.

As Haidt describes in a wonderful TED talk called "The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives," liberals tend to have a "two-channel" model of morality (placing emphasis on compassion and fairness) whereas conservatives have a "five-channel" model (placing nearly equal emphasis on all five moral bases).  (And if you decide to listen to his talk, especially those of you of the conservative persuasion, don't get pissed off and shut it off after the first five minutes -- because it sounds like he's hammering on the conservatives at first, but takes a rather surprising right-hand turn halfway in and makes a powerful point that we all have something to learn from the other side.)

Four researchers at Cornell University have used Haidt's model to analyze why some people are so reluctant to take action on climate change, and to see if there's a way to frame the problem that might be more successful at convincing the folks who are currently sitting on their hands.  Janis Dickinson (Natural Resources),  Poppy McLeod (Communication), Robert Bloomfield (Management and Accounting), and Shorna Allred (Natural Resources) released a paper last week in PLOS-One called, "Which Moral Foundations Predict Willingness to Make Lifestyle Changes to Avert Climate Change in the USA?"  Their research found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that an identification with morality based on compassion and fairness predicted a desire to act on climate change, whereas an emphasis on in-group loyalty, authority, and purity predicted a reluctance to act.

The unsurprising part is that, by and large, the liberals have been pushing for action for years and the conservatives resisting it.  (An overgeneralization, I realize, as there are exceptions on both sides, but it's largely true.)  And since Haidt showed that the two-channel model corresponded to a liberal outlook and the five-channel model a conservative outlook, it's not to be wondered at that the correlation holds with respect to climate change.

What I still don't get, however, is why so many conservatives still don't believe in climate change.  I mean, consider it this way.  Suppose there's good reason to believe that there's a violent intruder, bent on causing you harm, in your house.  There are various courses of action you could take -- hide, flee, fight back, call the police -- but under no circumstances is it helpful, or even logical, to pretend that the intruder doesn't exist.

This seems to me to be the stance being taken by the vast majority of the conservatives currently in congress, not to mention the leaders of the incoming administration.  The evidence is at this point completely incontrovertible; not only is the world warming and the climate destabilizing, but the cause is fossil fuel burning, and we are fast approaching a point of no return, if we haven't already gotten there.

Consider just one metric, which is on my mind because the latest report just came out a few days ago -- the extent of polar sea ice.  The Cryospheric Science Laboratory at NASA announced that both the Arctic and Antarctic ice pack are currently at record lows -- and that air temperatures in the Arctic, in November, are 35 degrees above average.

Yes, you read that right, and it's not a typo.  Last week it was raining near the North Pole, in November.

The climate scientists themselves are in no doubt about what this all means.  "The interaction between Arctic ocean temperatures and the loss of ice formation leading to continuing record minimums is clearly a climate change signal," said Thomas Mote, Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia.

[image courtesy of NASA]

I can understand, even if I disagree with, the stance that we shouldn't act on climate change.  The arguments could be from the standpoint that divesting from fossil fuels would destroy our economic infrastructure, that renewables aren't currently set to take up the slack and/or would be too expensive to install on a national scale, or even that it's too late to do anything anyhow.  I've even heard people (Matt Ridley comes to mind) say things like "humans have weathered much worse than this before now, we'll be fine."

All of those things we can talk about.  They're a little like deciding what's the right approach to the intruder in my earlier analogy.  But the stance that congressional leaders like James Inhofe, Lamar Smith, and Dana Rohrabacher are taking is not to question what we should do about climate change, but to question whether it's happening at all.

And that, honestly, has nothing to do with Haidt's "five-channel" model of conservative morality.  That's simply insane.

I do think that the research by Dickinson et al. is valuable in that both conservatives and liberals have a lot to learn about talking to each other in a way that the other side will understand and respect.  In many ways, neither side speaks the other's language.  But at some point, there's the issue not simply of talking policy, but taking the attitude that what the science tells us is true.

And that is neither conservative nor liberal nor anything else.  Despite what the politicians would have you believe, scientific facts have no spin.

Ugliness filters

What is it about elections that makes us treat each other so horribly?

This election has been a bad one -- divisive and petty, appealing to our basest impulses -- but really, it's hardly unique.  And we let the nastiness seep into everything, turning us against others simply because we disagree with them.

"Republitards."  "Damn-o-craps."  "Republican'ts."  "Libtards."  "Demoncrats."  Just a few of the ugly names I've seen bandied about in the last few days.  Calls for candidates to be "taken out" (and no one is in any doubt as to what that euphemism means).  Threats of violence -- more than likely against innocent civilians -- if their team doesn't win.

Have we really come to the place where we are so tribal, so fearful of the "other," that we will without hesitation demonize and threaten violence against close to half of our fellow Americans?  It reminds me of the wonderful quote from Kathryn Schulz: "This is a catastrophe.  This unwavering attachment to our sense of being right about everything keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely have to, and causes us to treat each other terribly."

This all comes up because of a story that should be heartening -- a Democrat-led crowdfunding campaign that raised over $13,000 in 24 hours to help rebuild a GOP office in North Carolina that was firebombed.  Proof, I felt, of a contention I've long held; that the majority of humans are kind, compassionate, and just want what all of us want -- shelter, food, clean water, friends, family, security.  We may differ in our ideas about how to achieve those goals, but fundamentally, we're far more alike than different.

So this story was posted on Facebook, and a guy I don't even know -- a friend of a friend -- posted a snarky comment about how no way would Democrats do something this selfless, that it was clearly a hoax or a set-up.  And I did something I almost never do: started an argument on the internet with a stranger.

I said:  "You are really scared and angry enough that you can't conceive that people who disagree with you might be capable of something unselfish and compassionate?  If so, I truly feel sorry for you."  He responded with a dismissive, "I wasn't talking about the firebombing," (neither was I), and "no anger intended or inferred."

Which is kind of disingenuous, isn't it?

Note that I'm not talking here about what you think of the candidates and their positions.  You might be vehemently against the stance of one of them (or both!), and that's just fine.  What I'm talking about is how you speak about the people around you, because it's all too easy to fall into the trap of "I disagree with you, therefore you are unworthy of respect."  Unfortunately, during this election, that kind of behavior has become almost normal.  So I'm going to issue a statement and a plea, and I'd ask that you consider them carefully -- not as a liberal or a conservative, but simply as a human being.

Your political beliefs do not define who you are as a person.  There are kind, compassionate Democrats and kind, compassionate Republicans; there are some people of either stripe who are selfish, nasty, and unpleasant.  Neither party wants to "destroy America" or "take away people's rights" or "round up anyone who disagrees," regardless of what you'll hear from the extremely partisan talking-heads whose entire raison d'être is getting people stirred up so they'll tune in.  Most people in both parties are just ordinary folks who want what ordinary folks want.

So here's the plea: stop posting and forwarding ugly stereotypes that make the other team look like idiots or crazies at best and demons at worst.  All you have to do is look around you and you'll see that this isn't true.  There are both Democrats and Republicans (and Libertarians and Socialists and people who don't give a damn about politics at all) in your schools, churches, businesses, and clubs, and most of us get along pretty well.  None of us have horns, and damn few of us want to get rid of everyone who disagrees with us.  Maybe you can't change the beliefs of the extreme fringe who live to capitalize on such assumptions, but you can stop those ideas from spreading.  You can dedicate yourself not to being a Pollyanna who sees only the best in everyone, but a realist who understands that most of us, most of the time, are doing the best we can.

The election will be over in three weeks, but we'll be dealing for months with the results of the partisan rhetoric we've been exposed to, unless all of us -- right here, right now -- vow not to let such ugly invective rule our lives.  You don't have to agree with the people you meet, but you can speak about them with respect.  Most importantly, you can choose not to look at the world through lenses that filter out everything but the worst side of everyone.