Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
“People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?” Rodney King 5/1/92
The arguments and divisions politically here and throughout this country are rampant and destructive. Anger and hatred of others of differing opinions rises at times to fever pitch and I admit that I am part of the problem as much as anyone else is. This is a somewhat different piece in that I am going to present some national problems, as I see them and elicit your comments on them, in an attempt to discover whether there is some common ground agreement, on some things plaguing our society. While I am more interested in whether or not people agree that these are indeed problems for us all to consider and work to solve, it is certainly apropos for people to comment on what they believe the solutions to be.
This is an experiment on the viability of people agreeing on the premise that a problem exists in a given area. We cannot begin to resolve issues, unless we first agree that they are issues to be contemplated by the entire body politic. My hope is to engender real, civil discussion and perhaps at the end reach something like consensus. This is not a plea for Bi-Partisanship because to me that is a fantasy, whoever may utter it. To be “partisan” is to hold strong opinions and srong opinions do not resolve themselves into agreement. The resolution reached by “partisans” is always one of compromise, without either side changing their core beliefs, but agreeing to take part of the loaf. I am “experimenting” to see if many of the diverse viewpoints represented here can at least agree that a specific issue is indeed a problem, or if it is indeed an issue. Beyond writing this, I will not take part in the ensuing discussion, since the formulation itself indicates my views on whether these are indeed problems. I will limit my questions to legal issues, with no particular order of importance intended.
A. Does the fact that we have the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world indicate a problem?
B. Given the overcrowding and long delays inherent in our legal system, do we need to do something to reform it?
C. Have our Constitutional Rights been diminished?
D. Has the policing authority both State and Locally been extended beyond permissible bounds.
E. Has the War on Drugs been a failure and added to addiction rather than restricting it?
F. From the perspective of criminal/civil procedure, has the Right to Privacy been terminated and/or restrictively diminished?
G. Does State and Federal Government have the right to criminalize non-coercive sexual acts between adults?
H. Should the States and Federal Government admit the “War on Drugs” is a failure and seek new methods to deal with addiction?
As an illustration of what I am looking for I will present this. FFLEO and I both voted for Barack Obama, even though FFLEO and I have very different political and partisan beliefs. Yet we both agree that he has been an awful President. Where we respectfully disagree is that he has stated he will never vote for Obama again and I have stated I might, if there are no alternatives that seem viable. The most important element is that we, though vastly different politically, agree on the nature of the problem. With that agreement, there comes a mutual respect and a future hope of resolution, even though one is not now apparent or even likely. If there is no agreement on whether something is at least a problem, then the legacy of that disagreement is ongoing, unresolved strife.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Roco,
Your comment at 4:56pm is correct – there’s nothing wrong with agreeing with someone you consider right, sorry. However, I don’t think that there’s much question who the big dog on our side of that particular fight was (not saying that you couldn’t have done it – just that it was Bob that picked the fight and me who enthusiastically accepted). By the way, speaking of the cause and mechanism, I thought of a way to model the collapse to test which of the crush-up, crush-down, etc. models is correct (I’ll send you an email about it). Anyway, I’ve tried to offer an olive branch on several occasions, but the only place Bob seems to want to bury the hatchet is in my skull.
Bob,
I know when you’re attacking me and you know when you’re attacking me and no one else cares. For you to accuse me of lacking specifics is laughable given our history. I don’t care to put any particular effort into any comment directed at you, so I’m just repeating the accusations without the evidence – we both know that the evidence is there, though… Beyond that? You think I’m childish?
I know you are but what am I? 😉
How not to carry on an argument by Kevin/Slartibartfast.
And on this thread in particular no less; oh the irony.
Bob, exercising restraint, attempts to make Kevin aware of his incompetence in forming a cogent argument.
Bob asked: “On the topic of paranoid delusions, show us the attack Kevin.”
Does Kevin point out where Bob allegedly attacked Kevin “on this thread?”
Of course not. Thus we’re forced to just take Kevin’s word for it:
Kevin: “You’re a naive idiot if you are unaware of your attacks on me”
If you can’t show us this horrible attack I allegedly committed against you on this thread, then how is the term ‘paranoid delusion’ inappropriate?
Did I lash out at you with a slew of ad hominems; like you did to me above?
Or are you just making things up to justify your childish behavior?
Slartibarfast:
How do you know I wasnt the big dog in that particular yard? You may know math but you dont know the other parts. And anyway, I already knew what happened. It was interesting to sit back and watch you and Bob go at it. Most of which was extraneous detail and distraction to the real cause and mechanism. But it was interesting.
Slartibartfast:
I disagree with Bob on some things and agree with him on others. That particular yard I agreed with you. But I had done my own research and had come to my own conclusions. I must say however that seeing the both of you go at [when it was positive] was very interesting. I have directed more than one person there to read the pros and cons. It is probably one of the most comprehensive examinations in existence from both sides.
I think you were right but I could see why Bob thought otherwise.
It has nothing to do with who is the bigger dog, it has to do with who is right in my opinion.
I even agree with some of what you to say on economic and political issues.
Bob is a bad actor: My definition (or my opinion, if you prefer).
Bob is intellectually dishonest: I’ve given examples of this on numerous occasions.
Bob is scientifically ignorant: Bob argued that work does not transform energy from one form to another – this is, quite simply, willful ignorance of basic mechanics (it’s willful because I repeatedly explained it to him…). Furthermore, he suggested the tracing of heat backward – something which is mathematically impossible. “Scientifically ignorant” doesn’t seem off the mark.
Bob is disingenuous: See intellectually dishonest.
Bob’s arguments are full of logical fallacies: See intellectually dishonest.
Bob is a stalker: I said you stalked me around the blog – which you did. I’ve never complained about it – just called it out for what it was.
Bob is little more than an anarchist: My opinion.
Bob takes up positions completely at odds with the laws of physics: See Bob is scientifically ignorant.
Bob is like a birther: In the way I described, yes. You can prove me wrong on this one, by the way – just give me a sincere compliment.
Bob went out of his way to attack Kevin: You have. On multiple occasions. Again, not complaining – just pointing out the facts.
Bob wants to show everyone just what a horrible person Kevin is: My inference from your behavior – attempting to sully my reputation here seems to be a hobby of yours. Maybe because of what the things I’ve said here have done to your reputation here (and maybe not – I don’t really care about your motivations at this point).
Bob said:
“On the topic of paranoid delusions, show us the attack Kevin.”
You’re a naive idiot if you are unaware of your attacks on me (I don’t think this to be the case). My dictionary defines paranoid as:
“• unreasonably or obsessively anxious, suspicious, or mistrustful ”
Since I suffer no anxiety on account of Bob the only question is whether or not my suspicion and mistrust are reasonable. Obviously I think they are, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion on this. What is not a matter of opinion, however is that I am not deluded about Bob’s attacks on me – those are here in this blog for any to read.
Roco,
I was just pointing out that you seem to be very friendly with the big dog in the same yard you happen to be in – regardless of what you’ve said about them before – or what you say about them later (not that you were insulting Bob the way I was, but you were certainly telling him he was wrong…)
Bob Esq:
true is true, I agree with most of your legal analysis. You come at it from an individual liberty perspective and are most always on the right side of legal issues. At least in my opinion.
But since I am not a lawyer I am just talking out of my ass. Mespo asked me or someone if their ass ever got jealous of what came out of their mouth. I laugh every time I think about that one.
Slartibartfast:
Since he likes Kant, I, as an Objectivist, need garlic and a dollar sign to ward him off. It is how we are programed or didnt you know that?
Roco,
That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the kind words.
Thank you.
Slartibartfast:
Bob Esq doesnt care for me, he is not on my side and never has been.
Let’s recap:
Bob is a bad actor; Bob is intellectually dishonest; Bob is scientifically ignorant; Bob is disingenuous; Bob’s arguments are full of logical fallacies; Bob is a stalker; Bob is little more than an anarchist; Bob takes up positions completely at odds with the laws of physics; Bob is like a birther; Bob went out of his way to attack Kevin; and Bob wants to show everyone just what a horrible person Kevin is.
On the topic of paranoid delusions, show us the attack Kevin.
Meanwhile; what say you Dr. Jung?
“Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naïvely suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. . . . All the contents of our unconscious are constantly being projected into our surroundings, and it is only by recognizing certain properties of the objects as projections or imagos that we are able to distinguish them from the real properties of the objects. . . . Cum grano salis, we always see our own unavowed mistakes in our opponent. Excellent examples of this are to be found in all personal quarrels. Unless we are possessed of an unusual degree of self-awareness we shall never see through our projections but must always succumb to them, because the mind in its natural state presupposes the existence of such projections. It is the natural and given thing for unconscious contents to be projected.”– C.G. Jung, [“General Aspects of Dream Psychology,” par. 507.]
@slarti,
“In case you missed it, OS and myself were using the D-K effect as a way of snarking at people. We were not using it as a filter in the way I suggested (that was just a crazy idea of mine). ”
I am taking you at your writtten word, rather than my anticipation of what your post hoc justification will be.
What you were clearly trying to do was discredit Tom’s argument with an ad hominem instead of engaging his argument. As a bonus, you were able to imply he was an idiot and by extension that you aren’t. That’s how this game of yours gets played.
“On the topic of filtering – you have no idea what my level of expertise on the subject is nor what I have done or am capable of doing. I’m guessing that you are underestimating me…”
The topic of filtering is irrelevant. Your expertise related to analyzing the difficulty of the task (finding a political solution to the problem at hand) is what is relevant. I offered no opinion as to this expertise so I cannot have underestimated anything as you suggest.
kderosa,
In case you missed it, OS and myself were using the D-K effect as a way of snarking at people. We were not using it as a filter in the way I suggested (that was just a crazy idea of mine). On the topic of filtering – you have no idea what my level of expertise on the subject is nor what I have done or am capable of doing. I’m guessing that you are underestimating me…
Roco,
Maybe you missed the part where I said that I get to define what I think a bad actor is… Bob is intellectually dishonest and scientifically ignorant and has said nothing in any of his exchanges with me that was worth the time it took to read it, let alone respond. While I don’t doubt his expertise on the law, his disingenuous nature makes me look to other sources – his arguments to me were full of logical fallacies – why should I assume his writing on the law is any different? You seem to forget (you, of all people…) that my grudge against Bob comes from his repeated bad actions, not the other way around (not to mention his grudge against me… I’m not the one who has stalked him around this blog in the past). Bob is little more than an anarchist who seems to like throwing bombs more than he cares about any argument he’s ostensibly supporting (usually, he’s just throwing bombs while maintaining plausible deniability regarding his actual positions – which seems like a pretty obvious warning sign that he is a bad actor to me…). I will remind you that in our initial interaction, it was Bob that took offense (due to my arrogance, a mistake I made that I admitted, and his own misinterpretation of an assertion of mine) and proceeded to take up a position completely at odds with the laws of physics because he apparently cannot admit that I was ever right on even a single point (kind of like the birthers and President Obama…).
Finally, you said:
“Bob Esq is probably the only one on this blog who behaves himself and doesnt go out of his way to attack people.”
Bullshit – Bob went out of his way to attack me ON THIS THREAD! He’s stalked me around the blog on one occasion just to tell everyone what a horrible person he thought I was. If I want Bob to post, it seems that all I have to do to chum the waters is to become engaged in a topic and he will appear (probably once he sees my gravatar on the recent comments list…). I guess you base your judgements regarding people’s actions on whether or not they’re on your side right now… is that really the image you wish to project?
@slarti
“It’s a matter of filtering – the D-K effect provides a sort of crude pre-filter to information (i.e. the more someone emphasizes their expertise the less substantial it is likely to be).”
You haven’t analyzed the difficulty of the task and you have no way of knowing whether you have the expertise to do such an evaluation (assuming the DK effect is accurate). Subsequent research has shown this to be an important factor:
“OS raised the question of the efficacy of this method of filtration relating to posts on this site.”
OS is one of the worst offenders on this site for throwing his credentials and expertise around. By your theory, his views should be filtered out by the crude DK pre-filter. But, let’s continue anyway.
“If his analogy isn’t apt, then surely one of you should have no problem providing a counterexample (or some sort of evidence that he’s wrong). Can you do that?”
Roco already has. In case you missed it.
Experts can also miscalibrate their capabilities by being overly confident.
Chi (1978) found that the experts (as compared to both the novices and the intermediates) overestimated the number of chess pieces they could recall from coherent chess positions (see Figure 9, left panel, Chi, 1978). Similarly, physics and music experts overestimated their comprehension of a physics or music text, respectively, whereas novices were far more accurate (Glenberg & Epstein, 1987).
It seems that experts can be overly confident in judgments related to their field of expertise (Oskamp, 1965). Of course, there are also domains, such as weather forecasting, for which experts can be cautious and conservative (Hoffman, Trafron, & Roebber 2005).
Plenty of counterexamples in there for you to wade through.
The DK effect is hardly the universal rule as you and OS are trying to make it out to be.
Well done Mike S!
Slartibartfast:
Bob Esq is probably the only one on this blog who behaves himself and doesnt go out of his way to attack people. In my opinion he knows more about philosophy and the law and the interconnection between the 2 than anyone on this blog. He comes at all of his opinions of the law from a philosophical basis and uses principles as a method of understanding the law. He is rarely wrong in his analysis of legal cases.
Personally I wish he would post more often, he actually has something worth reading.
You may have a personal grudge against him and think he is a bad actor but that is only your opinion. Which in this case is not enough to form a hypothesis because of the personal animosity you hold.
Mike Spindell:
Personally I have been called a sociopath one too many times. I have seen others who hold similar views accused of being in the grips of the Dunning-Krueger syndrome and worse.
Why is that?
You belittle Ayn Rand every chance you get, I dont belittle Rabbi Hillel. From my vantage point they both say the same thing. Although I doubt the Rabbi was a capitalist but then again he may have been, the Jewish people do quite well under that system.
In my opinion the left is all about compromise but they want the right to be the ones to do it.
I saw an interesting story today on Thompsonreuters (via the howappealing blog): The 2nd Circuit has issued a ruling that “appears to be the first time a federal appeals court has changed direction as a result of last year’s Supreme Court decision that found suspects must explicitly assert their legal right to remain silent.”
The 2010 USSC case involved Miranda warnings and (according to the article) ruled that “suspects must explicitly assert their legal right to remain silent.”
The point is that one could argue that the 2010 USSC decision diminished our constitutional rights. Of course there is another argument: Miranda is not in the Constitution and Miranda itself expanded our constitutional rights.
Oh the beauty or the curse that is the living constitution.
Mike said,
“Some very intelligent people comment here and that goes for all parts of the political/social spectrum. How often though, via ego and ideological rigidity, do our discussions devolve into name calling and snark? I am certainly not absolving myself of guilt in this, because I have done it myself on too numerous occasions to recall. Once this vituperative behavior sets in, any discussion becomes impossible. The issue of the thread becomes lost and innumerable comments of back and forth insults result, until exhaustion sets in.”
Thank you for this fascinating experiment – I learned a lot from it. I think I’ve made my hypothesis that productive discussion cannot survive bad actors clear, so now (if I’m the scientist I claim to be) I must put that hypothesis to the test (by the way, Bob, I’m the one making the hypothesis, so I get to determine what constitutes a bad actor in that regard). To that end, I am in the process of creating a private forum as a place to discuss topics of interest with what I hope will be a diverse group of interesting people. While I have only the greatest respect for Professor Turley and the ideal of free speech that he demonstrates with this blog, the pragmatist in me just wants to be able to get something done. Looking back on the time that I’ve put in to commenting on this blog, I think it’s clear that I have spent more time responding to one bad actor (Bob [and his flying monkeys, Robert and Duh {or should I say Bdaman?}]) than on all of my other comments combined. I chose to do this at the time, but you know what they say about doing the same thing and expecting different results… and I really don’t think that Bob and his ilk deserve any more of my time. I look forward to doing a detailed analysis of this thread at some point in the future, though…
Thank you everyone for participating in this experiment. I posed the particular questions I did with the thought that were there issues that most here could identify with and in that identification reach a modicum of common ground. How does does a people begin to solve the fierce divisions we see in our country today, if we can’t agree on some core, what to me are apolitical issues? By agree I didn’t mean on the solution, since I assumed that people from differing political perspectives would have different concepts of solution. Problem solving, in even totalitarian societies is reached through compromise. Human egocentricity is such that even absolute Dictators have to deal with the will to power of their underlings, or things begin to break down. Politics essentially then must become an art of compromise if a society is to maintain stability.
Political ideology and or religious dogma often are antithetical to compromise. Plato’s cave is a good analogy of how we humans view our
environment, but so is the ancient fable of the blind men and the elephant.
When we become subsumed by ideology and dogma it is as if we are in the cave. Dogma, blinds us to the range of options available to deal with any issue and to make the compromises necessary to at least move towards viable problem solutions. The founders of our country understood this and they were highly intelligent people, with a wide variety of beliefs. Our Constitution is a document of compromise, written with the expectation that the future of this country would rise or fall on the basis of our being able to compromise, or not.
Some very intelligent people comment here and that goes for all parts of the political/social spectrum. How often though, via ego and ideological rigidity, do our discussions devolve into name calling and snark? I am certainly not absolving myself of guilt in this, because I have done it myself on too numerous occasions to recall. Once this vituperative behavior sets in, any discussion becomes impossible. The issue of the thread becomes lost and innumerable comments of back and forth insults result, until exhaustion sets in.
In the main in the first half of comments on this thread the discussion was on the point and civil. However, the original concept became lost in an issue of personality and personal insults. It is now finally wending its way towards exhaustion. I draw the conclusion that there are points of agreement for most of us across a broad political spectrum, at least as to some of the problems that plague this country. Dealing with these issues is quite another matter, but some compromise can be reached, if people are willing to do so. That is mildly promising I think though that the anger engendered by political battles, manufactured in all instances by the propaganda and mythology of opposing interests, is so palpable as to make the possibility
of political compromise unlikely. I remain cynically optimistic for the future, but admit that could well be an oxymoron.
As a final note let me say that my comments, in this instance, are not meant to pertain to the recent political battles, or in anyway to endorse our President’s foolish attempts at bi-partisanship. I believe those attempts are merely political rhetoric on his part, or in the more frightening alternative his actual beliefs. rather than reason.
Carry on, or not as you please.