Category Archives: Random Blogging

What the Hell is Epistemic Closure?

Epistemic closure is a fancy term for the practice of defining–or redefining– reality in ways that support your pre-existing ideological preferences. Most of us think of it as “creating and living in a bubble.”

A recent report from Political Animal illustrates the concept perfectly. Consider this result from a recent PPP poll:

There continues to be a lot of misinformation about what has happened during Obama’s time in office. 43% of voters think the unemployment rate has increased while Obama has been President, to only 49% who correctly recognize that it has decreased. And 32% of voters think the stock market has gone down during the Obama administration, to only 52% who correctly recognize that it has gone up.

In both cases Democrats and independents are correct in their understanding of how things have changed since Obama became President, but Republicans claim by a 64/27 spread that unemployment has increased and by a 57/27 spread that the stock market has gone down.

Another poll–also referenced in the linked post–is even more illuminating: approximately 60% of Republican respondents said that the economy had declined since 2008; but that number jumped to 80% when the question was phrased differently– not in terms of how the economy had performed since 2008, but “since Obama was first elected.”

In 2010, the New York Times book review section had an extended essay devoted to the phenomenon, and in the Age of Trump, it is reasonable to assert that matters have only gotten worse.

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history. First used in this context by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute, the phrase “epistemic closure” has been ricocheting among conservative publications and blogs as a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation.

Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com — referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin and Glenn Beck — have “become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.” (Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

As a result, he complained, many conservatives have developed a distorted sense of priorities and a tendency to engage in fantasy, like the belief that President Obama was not born in the United States or that the health care bill proposed establishing “death panels.”

In his recent speech to Rutgers’ graduates, President Obama included an eloquent rejoinder to those who wish to construct their own realities:

… when our leaders express a disdain for facts, when they’re not held accountable for repeating falsehoods and just making stuff up, while actual experts are dismissed as elitists, then we’ve got a problem.

You know, it’s interesting that if we get sick, we actually want to make sure the doctors have gone to medical school, they know what they’re talking about. If we get on a plane, we say we really want a pilot to be able to pilot the plane.

And yet, in our public lives, we certainly think, “I don’t want somebody who’s done it before.” The rejection of facts, the rejection of reason and science — that is the path to decline. It calls to mind the words of Carl Sagan, who graduated high school here in New Jersey, he said: “We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”

“Epistemic closure” is a more elegant phrase than the ones that come more readily to mind: “The big lie.” “Propaganda.” “Bullshit.”

Or–perhaps most accurate of all–“bat-shit crazy.”

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The Circle of Political Life

When we study history, it isn’t difficult to see repeating patterns. Not that events or eras actually recur, but–humans being what we are–contending impulses and beliefs about the proper way to construct a society often create situations that look familiar. Sometimes, eerily so.

The other day, I was reading an essay on Spinoza, and I was struck by the following paragraphs:

Much of Spinoza’s philosophy was composed in response to the precarious political situation of the Dutch Republic in the mid-17th century. In the late 1660s, the period of ‘True Freedom’ – with the liberal and laissez-faire regents dominating city and provincial governments – was under threat by the conservative ‘Orangist’ faction (so-called because its partisans favoured a return of centralised power to the Prince of Orange) and its ecclesiastic allies. Spinoza was afraid that the principles of toleration and secularity enshrined in the founding compact of the United Provinces of the Netherlands were being eroded in the name of religious conformity and political and social orthodoxy. In 1668, his friend and fellow radical Adriaan Koerbagh was convicted of blasphemy and subversion. He died in his cell the next year. In response, Spinoza composed his ‘scandalous’ Theological-Political Treatise, published to great alarm in 1670.

Spinoza’s views on God, religion and society have lost none of their relevance. At a time when Americans seem willing to bargain away their freedoms for security, when politicians talk of banning people of a certain faith from our shores, and when religious zealotry exercises greater influence on matters of law and public policy, Spinoza’s philosophy – especially his defence of democracy, liberty, secularity and toleration – has never been more timely. In his distress over the deteriorating political situation in the Dutch Republic, and despite the personal danger he faced, Spinoza did not hesitate to boldly defend the radical Enlightenment values that he, along with many of his compatriots, held dear.

The ability of our own era’s “Prince of Orange” to capture the GOP nomination is evidence that the assault on Enlightenment values is alive and well these many centuries after Spinoza.

Whether enough of us are willing to “boldly defend” those ideals–which lie at the very heart of America’s constitutional system–remains to be seen.

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This is Called Reality

The Presidential primaries are effectively over. Both parties have chosen their candidates (and it is worth reminding everyone that primaries are party affairs, not exercises intended for the general/unaffiliated public).

I am reluctant to re-enter the toxic primary debate between the “Bernie bots” and the Hillary supporters, and I will preface this post with a disclaimer that will no doubt be ignored: this is not an “endorsement” of either of them. I tend to agree with most–not all– of Sanders’ positions, and I have never been a particularly enthusiastic supporter of Hillary–not because I consider her corrupt or dishonest (I don’t), but because, despite her resume and formidable policy chops, she is a defensive and not particularly inspiring candidate.

I will support Hillary. Had Bernie emerged as the Democratic candidate, I would have supported him. But that is a far cry from believing that he would be the stronger candidate against The Donald.

A recent article from Slate spells out what most politically active people know: polls at this juncture in the campaign are absolutely meaningless. The reason Hillary’s negatives are high is that everything that the Republicans could possibly throw at her has been thrown (repeatedly) for the past 25 years. There won’t be any surprises.

Bernie, on the other hand, would go into this election facing the national GOP smear machine for the first time–and given that Trump is head of their ticket, that machine would undoubtedly go into overdrive. The Slate article spells out just some of the more obvious attacks (and no, they need not be fair or accurate–just as many of the efforts to bring Hillary down have not been fair or accurate). Just a few examples from the article:

[Sanders] has never been asked to account for his relationship with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, for which he served as a presidential elector in 1980. At the time, the party’s platform called for abolishing the U.S. military budget and proclaimed “solidarity” with revolutionary Iran. (This was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis.) There’s been little cable news chatter about Sanders’ 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where he reportedly joined a Sandinista rally with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere/ The Yankee will die.” It would be nice if this were due to a national consensus on the criminal nature of America’s support for the Contras. More likely, the media’s attention has simply been elsewhere….

Imagine an ad drawing from the old Sanders essay “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death.” First it might quote the candidate mocking taboos on child nudity: “Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others [sic] sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing!” Then it would quote him celebrating girls who defy their mothers and have sex with their boyfriends: “The revolution comes … when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has ‘taught’ her and accepts her boyfriends [sic] love.” Finally, it would remind viewers that Sanders was one of 14 congressmen to vote against the law establishing the Amber Alert system and one of 15 to vote against an amendment criminalizing computer-generated child pornography. The fact that these votes were cast for entirely principled civil libertarian reasons is, in the context of a general-election attack, beside the point…..

As the nominee, Sanders would have to address his former opposition to public schools and praise for parents who believe that it is “better for their children not to go to school at all than for them to attend a normal type of establishment.” He’d have to explain whether he still feels that sexual repression causes cancer, whether he still opposes the concept of private charity, and whether he still supports the public takeover of the television industry.

Anyone who believes that the GOP would not use–and abuse–these currently little-known positions from Sanders’ past, or that such attacks wouldn’t be highly effective, is being willfully naive.

Bernie Sanders has done the Democratic party an enormous service during this primary campaign. He has raised issues that needed to be raised, and he has moved Hillary Clinton from her more cautious and much more incremental positions. His arguments will strongly influence the party platform. He has brought enthusiastic young people into the political process, and I for one believe he will put the issues above his ego and work hard to keep them involved.

As an old political warhorse, I can tell you that winning an election is not the same thing as winning the argument. The “Bernie bots” can console themselves that he has already won that.

Finally, for those still insisting that Bernie can still win the nomination, or in the alternative, that he was somehow cheated out of winning, please read this.

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Is It All Palin’s Fault?

My brother-in-law, a life-long and pretty conservative Republican, recently commented that Trump’s primary victory reminded him of an old saying. Paraphrasing, it went something like this: the man who knows, and knows he knows, can be trusted; the man who doesn’t know, and knows he doesn’t know, can be trusted; but the man who doesn’t know and doesn’t know he doesn’t know is dangerous, and cannot be trusted.

The Donald, of course, doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. If anyone had any doubts, his suggestion that he would “negotiate” the nation’s debt with creditors, and “do a deal” in which they would take less than they’re owed, should put those doubts to rest. (Among the multiple things he clearly “doesn’t know” that he “doesn’t know” are the importance of America’s creditworthiness to global fiscal stability, and the inconvenient fact that the majority of the nation’s creditors are its own citizens–including, importantly, those depending on Social Security.)

In the wake of the Indiana primary and Trump’s emergence as the GOP nominee-apparent,  the internet has been inundated with “analysis” and theories about how this happened, who’s to blame, and of course, “what the hell happens now.”

So far, one of my favorite (albeit dubious) theories lays the blame with Sarah Palin–or more accurately, with John McCain, who elevated the Wasilla Wacko to national prominence.

In this view, the damage Palin wreaked was in getting Republicans to lower their standards for what a vice-president or a president ought to be. Suddenly, what one writer called a “meaningful and valuable norm” no longer controlled public opinion.  Palin was embarrassingly unqualified for the job, but she was endorsed by McCain and establishment Republicans–and the result was that the bar was lowered so far that for a number of Republican voters, Donald Trump was no longer unthinkable.

I’m sure there are as many theories as there are pundits. Americans who are appalled at the prospect of electing someone so manifestly unprepared and unsuited for the Presidency are trying to make sense of it all (and in most cases, looking for someone–anyone–to blame).

There’s lots of blame to go around, of course. But while we are trying to make sense of the crazy situation in which we find ourselves, we’d better spend the time between now and November doing whatever it takes to ensure that voters understand the difference between voting for the winner of American Idol and the person who will be occupying the Oval Office.

We may or may not be enthusiastic about our other choices–but there are degrees of unthinkable, distasteful and very, very dangerous.

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Tupperware Trump

Oh, Donald. Tacky, tacky, tacky…..

We’ve all become familiar with the various kinds of pyramid schemes operating in the U.S. Most aren’t as monumental as the Bernie Madoff ponzi-scheme variety, and some even sell arguably useful products, but they all share certain characteristics: they’re based on recruiting an increasing number of “investors,” and typically, those new recruits pay a sum of money to join the “program” and become a distributor of a product or service. They’re told they’ll make money based on the number of new recruits they bring in. The basic idea is that the higher up on the pyramid you are, the more money you’ll make.

In reality, what happens is that only the originators of the pyramid scheme make money and the rest lose theirs when the pyramid scheme collapses.

Evidently, in-between bankruptcies, bottled water and steaks, Donald Trump engaged in a pyramid scheme to sell a “diet product” to the desperate/credulous:

The company’s flagship product was called the PrivaTest, which supposedly relies upon a mail-in urine test to determine one’s individual nutritional needs and create a custom vitamin formula (about $140 for the test; $70 per month for the vitamins; $100 to retest every 6 months).

From a scientific viewpoint, urine tests do not provide a legitimate basis for recommending that people take dietary supplements. Moreover, even if they could, the nutrients in the so-called customized formulas can be obtained far more inexpensively in retail stores. The Trump Network also acquired a weight loss program called The Silhouette Solution, which consisted of a book promising to lose the weight you want and have the silhouette you choose, which was included in the starter weight loss kit, all for a whopping $1,325. The package was marketed as “a complete eight-week program that contains everything you need to achieve your short and long term weight loss goals.” In it, they send you eight weeks worth of low-calorie food….

But it gets better….you could also purchase the $400 “business kit” and market the product to your friends and family, ala Tupperware. Trump sold Privatest and the Silhouette Solution in 2012 to a company called Bioceutica, LLC., apparently due to concerns about liability. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported on Trump’s claim that his involvement with Ideal Health merely allowed them to use his name for marketing purposes and that he was not involved in the company’s operations.

But statements by him and other company representatives — as well as a plethora of marketing materials circulating online — often gave the impression of a partnership that was certain to lift thousands of people into prosperity. In fact, within a few years, the company fell on hard times, leaving some salespeople in tough financial straits. It ultimately was acquired by another firm.

But when Trump joined forces with Ideal Health, he was enthusiastic about its future.

“When I did ‘The Apprentice,’ it was a long shot. This is not a long shot,” Trump told a Trump Network convention of at least 5,000 people in Miami in 2009, his face projected onto a giant screen. “This is going to be something that’s really amazing.”

Yep. Amazing. You’ll be thin and rich.

And this is the charlatan who’s going to “Make America Great.”

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