Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

[huckelberry]

i hope I am not being annoying if I digress a moment upon Morley's art history lessons. My eyes were a little out of focus when first looking at the new painting. I thought oh dear he found another I could not identify. Spatially and it's shape combinations almost looked Picasso. It is just different enough that no not him. Perhaps some American in the last fifty years that I don't recognize. A Puzzle. Then I found my correct glasses. Why it is Heironymus! Nice selection on the format of the detail. It is almost like something new coming out of the painting.

[cinepro]

I'm not sure how this thread became the place to make this post, maybe I missed something,

It was just pointing out how, while some exMo communities try to present themselves as places of open discussion and honest inquiry, the discussion and inquiry can be tightly controlled and monitored along these ideological lines.

In fact. a far more inclusive and infinitely less offensive statement might be to leave stereotypes about gender out of it entirely and just say:

"in exMo forums where my race and gender are known, some people can be very quick to respond and end the conversation..."

It's possible that it's a coincidence that these shut-downs have always come from women and that information is irrelevant. If I was being too specific, I apologize.

[Mayan Elephant]

It was just pointing out how, while some exMo communities try to present themselves as places of open discussion and honest inquiry, the discussion and inquiry can be tightly controlled and monitored along these ideological lines.

thank you, cinepro.

I think that it is also important to highlight that the point was about communities, and not just THIS community. Or, at least, that was my understanding.

[Lem]

I'm not sure how this thread became the place to make this post, maybe I missed something,

It was just pointing out how, while some exMo communities try to present themselves as places of open discussion and honest inquiry, the discussion and inquiry can be tightly controlled and monitored along these ideological lines.

In fact. a far more inclusive and infinitely less offensive statement might be to leave stereotypes about gender out of it entirely and just say:

"in exMo forums where my race and gender are known, some people can be very quick to respond and end the conversation..."

It's possible that it's a coincidence that these shut-downs have always come from women and that information is irrelevant. If I was being too specific, I apologize.

I think there is no need to be coy. Being "too specific" was not the problem, using a sexist stereotype that "women ..end the conversation" on the basis of your anecdotal assessment was what i was commenting on.

Since you seem to not understand, let me clarify.

It seems your personal experience in various communities has been that while you "think [you're] pretty good at treating everyone the same," and that you are sure you "never say anything that is specific to their race or gender," the shutdowns of your opinions "have always come from women."

First, let me point out that just because you personally may have been shut down by some women, or possibly are even regularly shut down by women online, the assumption that "women.. end the conversation" is still sexist. Your anecdotes don't define an entire gender.

Second, it's not difficult to read your description of how only women shut you down, and wonder if you may be less successful at not making gender inappropriate comments than you think.

And finally, although a number of people here have made what I consider to be sexist statements, the conclusion that "men on this board" make sexist statements would be an absolutely inaccurate and extremely inflammatory statement, one i would not only never make, but one i do not believe. I would expect the same level of manners from you, at least with regard to your public statements. You certainly have a right to privately be sexist, but please have the decency to not air it here.

It just doesn't make sense. How does an adult, presumably educated male post on a discussion board like this that, in his opinion, "women...end the conversation" ? How does it escape your notice that that is a sexist comment in which you have stereotyped an entire gender, on the basis of your personal experience only?

Your excuse is you were "being too specific." No, that's incorrect. You were making a sexist assumption, based on a stereotype you think holds because of your personal anecdotes where you assure us you NEVER say anything sexist or inappropriate.

And you tell us this in a post that includes your sexist and inappropriate conclusions. Hmmm. Might want to rethink your anecdotes.

[Morley]

If the social sciences are, as you suggest, more natural to learn, why did Galileo precede Freud?

Ha! Well, one could counter that Homer preceded Euclid. I take Physics Guy's point, though perhaps with a slightly different formulation. I would say that is more like the difference between learning to play the piano as compared to the violin. The piano is much easier to learn in the beginning because one only needs to press the finger against the keys to make a series of sounds on the scale, which is a motor action one does all of the time. Someone with no training can do that just by going one after the other and putting the fingers in the right place, though not as smoothly or with the control of someone with years of finger training. One cannot do that on a violin, however. Just to play a scale requires a certain amount of training. But when it comes to playing either well and at a high level, that initial difference does not matter at all.

Beautifully done.
.

[Morley]

i hope I am not being annoying if I digress a moment upon Morley's art history lessons. My eyes were a little out of focus when first looking at the new painting. I thought oh dear he found another I could not identify. Spatially and it's shape combinations almost looked Picasso. It is just different enough that no not him. Perhaps some American in the last fifty years that I don't recognize. A Puzzle. Then I found my correct glasses. Why it is Heironymus! Nice selection on the format of the detail. It is almost like something new coming out of the painting.

Ha! Well played.

[Ramus_Stein]

People get politics and religion mixed up all the time partly because the separation of the two is, in the long span of history, a recent thing. It is not surprising that a lot of people want them to reunite. The problem is that the reuniting of the two does not help insure that all different religious views will be respected, and when the two sides are out of alignment, i.e., when your religious views are not shared with those at the levers of power, then life can be a lot more difficult. This realization helps me value the separation of church and state. Those who want government to act in accordance with the views of their religion are throwing caution to the wind and assuming that the loss of that wall would never be a problem for them. I don’t think you can count on that.

ETA: Oh, Morley, I love your avatar. Kandinsky, right?

[Analytics]

Here's an example of what I mean: the progressive scholars of US history writing at the turn of the last century had some very radical ideas for the time about the origin of the country (Charles Beard, for example, is often incorrectly characterized as Marxist, because he often reads that way). Yet even critiques like his, which basically interpret the United States as a project of the propertied classes against the masses in order to enrich themselves, did not mean, to the progressive historians, that America was a fundamentally evil creation. Not so with our progressive historians today. Merely flying an American flag will in many parts of the country—and in certain institutions where historians are lucky enough to be paid—will be interpreted as an assertion of white supremacy and endorsement of genocide and exploitation...

That's an interesting perspective. I happen to live in Kansas, which is pretty far on the conservative end of the scale. For example, in 2005 the state board of education decided that evolution had been proven false and Intelligent Design would now be taught in high school biology classes. Or the 2012 "Kansas Experiment" where some Republican true-believers apparently sincerely thought that by giving massive tax cuts to rich, business owners would "shoot adrenaline" into the state economy, which would magically balance the budget.

Perhaps my liberal bias is best explained by an old Scott Adams observation--the stupidity surrounding you is easier to perceive than the stupidity in the distance. Maybe if I was on a college campus dominated by unchallenged liberals who thought America was fundamentally evil, then I would be oversensitive to liberal stupidity.

But isn't a fundamental part of this simply tribalism? People choose a side, and then their views across the board are molded into the views that are preached by that side. People didn't sit down and rationally decide they were in favor of obscene military spending, prayer in school, cheap energy (with a dirty environment), low taxes for the rich, and an inefficient healthcare system; they didn't then shop around and become Republicans. Rather, for psychological and sociological reasons they came to the conclusion that Republicans were the God-fearing true patriots, and conformed to what "their" side--the good side--was preaching. It isn't a coincidence that, for example, Sean Hannity begins his show with patriotic music, continuously compliments the patriotism of his guests, and is never seen without a flag pin--these are all deliberately engineered cues for his audience about his side's righteousness.

Given how that tribe has so annoyingly appropriated patriotism for their partisan purposes, it shouldn't be surprising that their antagonists knee-jerk against it.

This was illustrated by something I read this morning in the fair and balanced New York Times. There was a book review of THE ENGAGEMENT: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage by Sasha Issenberg:

Issenberg’s book, then, serves as a 900-page case study of what the sociologist Tina Fetner refers to as the “symbiotic” relationship between conservatives and queer activists. The religious right told us we couldn’t have marriage, so we decided we needed it.

If that’s the case, gay couples owe no organization more than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In great detail, Issenberg demonstrates exactly how the Mormon Church constructed a secretive campaign in Hawaii, built an ecumenical alliance of anti-marriage churches and led the mammoth crusade in favor of Proposition 8, the California ballot proposal that added a gay marriage ban to the state Constitution in 2008. In that brawl, Mormons contributed half of the $40 million raised to support the measure. Later, after being accused of “money laundering” and concealing the sheer magnitude of their political activism, the Latter-day Saints paid a fine of just over $5,000 to California’s Fair Political Practices Commission. (Emphasis added)

Not the party but the primary voters and especially the donors. Campaign finance reform was a terrible idea. It has made the parties extremely weak by historical standards....

I don't disagree with what you said, but I think you missed my point. The ability of a member of Congress to actually do anything is dependent upon their party's leaders. Republican or democrat, you can't get anything done without the support of the party establishment. They control what is debated, who leads the debate, what is voted on, what committees you are assigned to, etc. And they also control an outsized amount of campaign money. The result is that if an individual representative wants to have any influence in Washington, he or she has to play ball with their party.

Oh, you're serious?

All American media is fear mongering and entertainment. Everybody now is following the Fox News model because it is the only profitable one. These are goddamn media companies, not public services.

Of course they are. The problem is that the Fox News model hasn't worked with liberals. Liberals have tried. For example, they tried to launch an "Air America" radio network that did for liberals what Limbaugh and Hannity did for conservatives, but it went out of business. Fox News has several times the viewership of anything liberals do to cash in on their model. I don't watch very much TV, but it seems to me there is a qualitative difference between the Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow and the Adelphi University dropout Sean Hannity.

By the way, do you remember the STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All?

They found that someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer 1.04 domestic questions correctly compared to 1.22 for those who watched no news at all. Those watching only "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" answered 1.42 questions correctly and people who only listened to NPR or only watched Sunday morning political talk shows answered 1.51 questions correctly.

By the way, have you ever read Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent?

And also, how much C-SPAN do you watch? I don't mean a call-in show like Washington Journal or even the televised performances in Congress but the lectures at think tanks, interviews on Book Notes, and so on. One can see discussions and questions that aren't filtered through narratives—everything the media do is couched in narrative—and you will find many, many smart people in government or academia or in institutions connected to government who have worthwhile and persuasive things to say...

I just added Manufacturing Consent to my reading list. Thank you. I don't watch much T.V.

I got the impression that my self-deprecating humor may have been too subtle. If I may tell a story....

A few years ago, I was at a professional conference where Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation was invited to speak. Butler's speech was informative and persuasive, of course. But I was genuinely wondering how much of it was partisan propaganda crafted for a highly educated audience, vs. how much of it was sincere.

The chair of the meeting's organization committee was a friend of mine. After Butler's speech, my friend invited me to have lunch at a restaurant with Butler and 4 other actuaries. We were talking about things, and the question of how Butler got into the Think Tank business came up. In this impromptu, non-recorded conversation among friends, Butler talked about how much real-world damage to real people he'd seen up close in Eastern Europe that was caused by socialism, and about how he feared what socialism could possibly do here. He was palpably earnest as he explained this, and his eyes actually teared up, just a little bit. It was clear he isn't an actor or a tool. He is sincere.

My position is that the world is an incredibly complicated place, and there are huge tradeoffs, risks, and unknowns across policy positions. Navigating and weighing these risks and tradeoffs is in fact extraordinarily difficult. Reasonable, informed, sincere people can in fact come to different positions. My Utopian vision of America is a political system that recognizes the complexity of our problems and is dominated by well-informed sincere debate that is driven by an effort to govern well and solve problems rather than by scoring political points for one side or another. I end up reluctantly supporting democrats most of the time because I see them as the lesser of two evils, but if you look at where my political donations and lawn signs have gone, it's been universally to people such as Evan McMullin or Barbara Bollier who to me represent thoughtful conservatism.

But like I said, such a vision is Utopian in nature. The sad reality of the American experiment is that political power goes to the people who are more successful at manipulating voters, and this can and does lead to perverse incentives for effective government. When political parties and their corporate supporters enter into these symbiotic relationships in the pursuit of power and wealth, a biproduct is individuals buying into a myths and tribalism. And that biproduct is what's ripping the nation apart.

I'm suggesting the whole thing is best understood through a game-theory model that is driven by psychology and sociology.

[Dr Exiled]

But like I said, such a vision is Utopian in nature. The sad reality of the American experiment is that political power goes to the people who are more successful at manipulating voters, and this can and does lead to perverse incentives for effective government. When political parties and their corporate supporters enter into these symbiotic relationships in the pursuit of power and wealth, a biproduct is individuals buying into a myths of tribalism. And that biproduct is what's ripping the nation apart.

I'm suggesting the whole thing is best understood through a game-theory model that is driven by psychology and sociology.

I agree that the problem is that corporate interests have too much power. Their goal is to maximize profits for shareholders which in turn equates into herding the masses into sales zones. I think the movement to tribalism and myth is reflective of how the english controlled India for years, playing one side against the other so the population wouldn't see who the real enemy was.

I'd like to see you expand on the game-theory model you suggest.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

"The fringes of the political spectrum seem to be tearing us apart, and taking every community apart at the same time." It is not just that one side is worse/better than another. It is that both sides are full of crap and staging a war of ultimatums.

...

The ranting lunatic fringe are merely entertainers for their silos of sycophants that are funneled by Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Forums are merely micro-silos.

... Elections are no longer credible. Media is not credible. The sorting algorithms are not credible. And self-victimization is more powerful than vitamins.

I’d like to point out that the only raving lunatic on this thread and the split-off thread has been, ME. “Elections are no longer credible.”

- Doc