Who will Harris pick as VP? It’s Walz!!

Or....events have been planned for weeks and someone smart put things together in advance of Vance...Hmmmmmm?

 

Well, I guess it is good news that it takes a hotter fire now to burn books.

 

So your position is the presumptive presidential nominee and her VP selection are following around the GOP's VP selection? Extraordinary claims require evidence. Have any?

I do not think the Dems consider Vance that much of a threat.

 

Ey, give a guy a break. I'm laggin after a day of travel and stuck in Euro time.

 

Are you serious? You think he already planned to be in these cities on these specific days before Kamala announced her tour?

 

I don’t think either is an insult.

He does look like a larger version of Wallace Shawn:



And the gun community has a whole meme about Fudds (the people who love to tell you “I support the Second Amendment, but…” and then start talking about hunting), that meme takes the form of a drawing of an old bald man in glasses and an orange sporting hat, and it was pretty entertaining when this guy shows up and in his first speech as the presumptive VP nominee starts taking about how he’s “a gun owner and a hunter, but…”:

 

I appreciate your skeptical attitude toward scientific theories. Indeed, evidence can be marshaled to defend most beliefs, and even today there’s not 100% agreement on what makes a scientific theory superior to its rivals.
Still, it has to be the case that some theories are actually superior. Even if you don’t like a particular explanation, the alternative you endorse must be defended against the same possibility that it is simply a reification of a prior belief. Or if we take Foucault too seriously, we can end up in a postmodern wasteland where all ideas are equally valid, but it doesn’t appear that is what you are suggesting.

I think one of the keys that makes science progressive is a critical attitude of the community of scientists. As someone obsessed with bias, I am sympathetic to Foucault’s insight. However, even if scientist A sees herself under the microscope, another scientist, B, gets to look and should not see scientist A. Instead, they should see B. Here the two views must remain separate in perpetuity, where there can be no truth, or these two views can be combined into a unified vision, which is informed by both viewpoints but is not a simple reflection of either. This is where I think objectivity lies, even if this objectivity isn’t the equal of truth.

Anyway, the evidence for flawed reasoning based on identity is voluminous, and largely comes from modern psychology.

This study use fMRI to find that threatening information about one’s own preferred political candidate induces very different changes in the brain than when the info threatens the opposing candidate.

Dan Kahan’s most famous study finds that partisans lose the ability to even do math once the math problems concern political topics. Here liberals couldn’t admit that a data set suggested crime increases when guns are controlled, and conservatives couldn’t admit the opposite.



This poll found that many liberals and conservatives switched their views on the economy as soon as Trump was elected.


As for having animosity toward outsiders, no study seems to have improved on Tajfel’s original studies from the 70s which found that people would pay to punish strangers once they were just told that the other people were overestimators of numbers of dots after they were told that they were underestimators. That’s all it took.

This result mirrored the development of group selection theory in evolutionary biology in the 70s, which was an attempt to explain why individuals would be altruistic, when Darwinian math showed that altruistic lineages should always go extinct when competing against selfish ones. American George Price developed an equation that showed that altruism could be explained by individuals simply trying to make their group successful, as long as there were other groups competing with it. Today, the idea that group selection (now a more sophisticated theory called multilevel selection) shaped human evolution is accepted by a large fraction of anthropologists.

This kind of result culminated in the development of the field of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, your earlier criticism of the science has some merit in this field, as their appeals to explain the evolutionary origins of certain behaviors are much more explanatory than falsifiable. However, this doesn’t much matter for our purposes, as the important part for us is that these tendencies exist regardless of why they exist. As Nassim Taleb points out, the theory explaining why muscle gain occurs has changed over time, but the fact that muscles get bigger after being weight training has always been true regardless.

We can also just look around to see that political disagreements rarely remain dispassionate analyses of data. Instead, the “dims” are so dumb that only they could think theory A is true. And the Maghats are so brainwashed their views are those of a cult. Look at Trump’s tweet that rt posted:



At no point does Trump even approach a reasoned argument here. It’s just name calling, as it has been from the beginning where Trump told his supporters there would be so much winning they’d get tired of it. Notice the framing: winning, suggesting the other side must be losing.

You speak of framing with my use of tribalism as well. Perhaps it is the way I’m describing it that is part of the problem? I’m happy to adopt another framing, such as identity politics or myside bias if those seem preferable. The key point is that, if we are going to dismiss the idea that we are biased toward our own groups, we must dismiss a tremendous amount of rigorous scientific data.

 

If he killed this dog right after the picture was taken, he would blend in more with the current Maga crowd.

Also, you can support 2A and not be an ammosexual. Wasn't the last president to ban assault weapons a Republican?

 

Wait, are you actually disputing that he is doing this? This was the strategy that their campaign is using. It was well reported several days ago. I am sorry that you disagree with their strategy but reporting accurately that they are doing this strategy is not bias.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/05/jd-vance-campaign-schedule-00172605

 

My neighbor and shooting instructor has that kind of dog. Legit birder. Walz is the deal.

 

I think we are biased toward our own groups, but we as human beings are part of innumerable groups at any given time, many of them exist only as abstract ideas - some are less so like families. As I said, I remain skeptical of the idea of science attempting to reify this fairly inane observation, as if we are hardwired any certain way. I think the more we accept the validity of this argument with the seal of almighty science, the more we will be locked into the sort of way of thinking you think is harmful. Science says we are like this after all, so what are we to do? If the world cant be changed that would seem to serve the powerful and those at the top of existing hierarchies. Anyway, I was intrigued by a book I read recently as I'm always looking for the intersections of dialectics, materialism and science:

Biology as Ideology

Not a recent book, but written at a time when "The Bell Curve" was all the rage among certain people.

 

Trailing in the polls - trailing on the road. As it should be.

 

I think Walz is significantly more formidable as a VP candidate than Kaine.

 

Wallace Shawn is an actual socialist, unlike this Walz guy

Why I Call Myself a Socialist: Is the World Really a Stage?

 

I do too, great dogs. And he may be quite the hunter, was just noting that the Second Amendment has literally nothing to do with hunting and, given that he came out and immediately hit the Fudd script, it’s entertaining that he happens to look like the Fudd meme guy.

 

Bill Clinton? No.

 

Given the alternatives what is the more egregious error, providing free school lunches to kids who really do not need them or denying free lunches to children who are in need of the assistance?

 

No matter who the pick was, they would cry woke/radical/leftist/DEI etc. It's gotta be about what the pick brings and not about what the pubs will whine about.

 

Moreso a ref to ChynaR0n.