Super Tuesday Open Thread

Ah, sensible!

Also:

Congratulations to Weirwoodtreehugger and all our other Minnesotan commenters and readers. Your state was alone in picking the least evil of the three Republican candidates.

@OoglyBoggles

Okay, more confusion. Did you try to refute me linking to an article about Bernie’s denouncement of the BernieBros and indicating that their misogyny doesn’t reflect on him by linking to an article about Bernie’s denouncement of the BernieBros and indicating that their misogyny doesn’t reflect on him? I… Huh?

I have a headache already, can somebody else work this one out for me?

I don’t trust Hillary[…] She’s not going rock the boat, and we really need to roll it over

How do you suggest we “roll it over”?

@SFHC

Assuming good faith, I read that more as a “Supporting women’s rights in the abstract doesn’t mean you can’t be sexist in practice” sentiment. It’s meant to retort to the kind of self-righteousness that a lot of lefties have regarding equality issues.

@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs

I’m stating that unlike Trump and Hillary.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/us/politics/gloria-steinem-madeleine-albright-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders.html?referer=&_r=0

When Bernie has a problematic fanbase problem, he is addressing that he won’t stand for that.

Nope, the BernieBros need a wake up call, not excusing their behavior in the least, Bernie has already asked them “cut out that crap”.

I’ll be happy with another President Clinton, just think Sanders is more ambitious in regard to change, and less beholden on the “powers that be” who stuff Hillary’s box full of cash.

Dr. Altemeyer wants this to be disseminated, free of charge.

Donald Trump and Authoritarian Followers

Bob Altemeyer*

In 1998 I tried to explain why social scientists who are worried about our freedoms have focused on the crowd that would lift a dictator aloft rather than the autocrat himself.

Wanna-be tyrants in a democracy are just comical figures on soapboxes when they have no following. So the realthreat lay coiled in parts of the population itself, it was thought, ready someday to catapult the next Hitler to power with their votes.

That apprehension was well-founded, it turns out. Research suggests that 20-25% of the adults in North America are highly vulnerable to a demagogue who would incite hatred of various minorities to gain power. These people are waiting for a tough man on horseback who will supposedly solve all our problems through the ruthless application of force. When such a man gains prominence, you can expect the authoritarian followers to mate devotedly with the authoritarian leader, because each gives the other something they desperately want: the feeling of safety for the followers, and the tremendous power of the modern state for the leader.

I would not say that all of the people trying to carry Donald Trump to the presidency are authoritarian followers. But they likely compose his hard core base. Furthermore, many authoritarian followers presently support Senator Ted Cruz for religious reasons. You can expect most of them to slide into the Trump ranks once Cruz drops out of the race. By summer, the vast majority of authoritarian followers in the United States will likely be for Trump. And so will many others for various reasons.

We know a lot about authoritarian followers, but unfortunately most of what we know indicates it will be almost impossible to change their minds, especially in a few months. Here are a dozen things established by research.

1) They are highly ethnocentric, highly inclined to see the world as their in-group versus everyone else. Because they are so committed to their in-group, they are very zealous in its cause.

2) They are highly fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experiencing stronger fear than most people do.

3) They are highly self-righteous. They believe they are the good people and this unlocks a lot of hostile impulses against those they consider bad.

4) They are aggressive. Given the chance to attack someone with the approval of an authority, they will lower the boom.

5) They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic majorities, non-heterosexuals, and women in general.

6) Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions. They have highly compartmentalized minds, in which opposite beliefs exist side-by-side in adjacent boxes. As a result, their thinking is full of double-standards.

7) They reason poorly. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they dont pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent.

8) They are highly dogmatic. Because they have gotten their beliefs mainly from the authorities in their lives, rather than think things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.

9) They are very dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know, almost every news broadcast they see, almost every radio commentator they listen to, tells them they are. That is, they screen out the sources that will suggest that they are wrong.

10) Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them. And thinking they are the moral majority supports their attacks on the evil minorities they see in the country.

11) They are easily duped by manipulators who pretend to espouse their causes when all the con-artists really want is personal gain.

12) They are largely blind to themselves. They have little self-understanding and insight into why they think and do what they do.

I hasten to add that almost anyone would become more ethnocentric, frightened, self-righteous, and so on if their situations, or our countrys situation, changed enough. And studies find examples of these twelve things in lots of others, not just authoritarian followers. But not as consistently, and not nearly as much.

If, as you went down this list of things experiments have discovered about authoritarian followers, you found yourself saying, Yeah, you can sure see that in the Trump supporters, and if you believe that a President Trump would be a very stiff test of democracy the United States, then what can you dowithout becoming a highly ethnocentric person yourself?

Well, its not going to be easy changing highly aggressive, dogmatic, insular people who will dismiss you out of hand as the enemy? They have been that way for most of their lives, and they have built a lot of supports, including straight-out denial, to keep their views intact.

Authoritarian followers in America today are tremendously energized by fear and anger. Theyre scared, and they want someone really strong and confident to protect them. Its a very natural, understandable reaction. As well theyre intensely angry about the way their country is changing, and most pointedly furious with the Republican Party which has won many elections because of their support, and then utterly failed to get things right again. So they feel betrayed, and that is a very powerful motivator.

One suspects they will feel even more betrayed if Trump becomes president and turns out to have been conning them all along too. But he is going to keep telling them hes one of them, and keep them scared and angry while selling himself as the Toughest Guy They Ever Met. Authoritarian followers are always waiting for The Leader, and now they firmly believe theyve found him.

But let me not stoke your fears too high, for we do have to fear fear itself. There is a simple way out of this situation: Others can outvote them. But even though most of the American electorate says now that they would never vote for Trump, hell become the next President if those folks stay home on election day. If Trumps opponents do not get as energized as Trumps very loyal followers are, his supporters will carry him on their shoulders to the highest office in the land.

Dr. Altemeyer has requested that this be disseminated, free of charge.

*Bob Altemeyer is a retired professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba in Canada. He studied authoritarianism for over forty years during his academic career. His research on authoritarian aggression won the Prize for Behavioral Science Research awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. An accessible, non-technical presentation of his findings on authoritarian followers and leaders is available in The Authoritarians, a free online book available at home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

There’s something missing there: why are they voting for Trump and not Cruz? Cruz is the one with extensive religious leadership support (Trump is gaining but that postdates him being massively popular among evangelicals) and that’s where I’d expect people meeting the description to turn if dissatisfied with the Republican party leadership. Cruz should be in the perfect position for an internal power play, but he’s trailing.

Is anyone surprised by the seeming lack of manosphere attacks on Clinton? I thought that there’d be article after article on Alpha Game, Return of Kings, the Spearhead, Stares at the World etc. about she’d be an awful president because women have stupid emotionally-driven ladybrainz etc. and she’ll let in all those alpha male Muslim refugees because she secretly wants to get raped by them because Bill is a beta male, blah blah, but I don’t think David has reported any thus far. (Of course, maybe there are plenty of such articles and David is choosing not to report them, but I can’t stomach going into these websites to check myself). If she DOES win, what do you think the manosphere’s response will be then?

Yeah, we have this aggravating tendency to believe our own lying eyes and ears . . .

@msexceptiontotherule Thanks for the suggestion, here goes–any thoughts would be appreciated. I wear my hair short (1-2″ long more or less). I have completely straight, thick heavy hair (more than one hairdresser has called it ‘horsehair’). It was originally medium brown but I’ve been going gray for several years now and for a while has been at that half gray/half brown stage that I’ve been finding really unattractive but haven’t got around to doing anything about, and it’s really time I did–all gray might be fine, if I thought it suited me, but I just don’t like the way the two colours mix. This is pretty close to what my hair looks like, except brownish instead of blackish:

http://gvenny.com/images/short-hairstyles-for-older-women-with-gray-hair/short-hairstyles-for-older-women-with-gray-hair-84-15.jpg

I get my hair cut every 1.5-2 months, but other than that would prefer not to go through much maintenance. When I was younger every once in a while I’d get a colour that would wash out in a couple of months, so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting it redone constantly, but these days I don’t see a lot of variety in the colours available that do that, and I’d like something that’s clearly not natural. I have blue/gray eyes and am white, the colours I seem to look best in are maroon, olive and blue/gray.

So, looking for advice–what kind of colours do I want–what sticks to both gray hair and brown hair? Are there semi-washable colours in non-natural shades? (I used to do a kind of blackcherry red and/or deep purple, but am not sure that’s what I want now even if I could still find them.) What colours should I think of trying? Now that I’ve written this all out I’m wondering if I should try some shade of blue. What else might I want to think of?

Thanks in advance 😉

Getting hyped for tonight’s continued GOP trainwreck. Carson is finally dropping out, so it’s just the three head boys and Kasich left on stage. Let’s see what new levels of low they’ll sink to this time.