tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post85012152345014420..comments2023-04-07T04:37:37.374-07:00Comments on Sojka's Call: Why Trump is PresidentSojka's Callhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18194255866195398776noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-62752415375027451752017-02-17T11:44:19.181-08:002017-02-17T11:44:19.181-08:00Michael: "Understanding those drivers give us...Michael: "Understanding those drivers give us tools to predict how they will react to different messages. And, we also get to understand why to one group what looks perfectly reasonable and moral to another group looks like insanity and morally abhorrent."<br /><br />It would be valuable to understand the cognitive processes of literally dozens of major populations, but I wonder how levels of psychological development are determined. I would be interested in people who are underemployed, unemployed, or long term unemployed, or those seeing no job future that will lead to a middle class lifestyle. There are many things to look at, such as differences between white/black/Hispanic/Asian unemployed workers with no HS Diploma, HS Diploma, AA degree, some vocational training, extensive vocational training, age factors and reemployment prospects. Workers downsized due to automation or globalization. <br /><br />But I agree that all these groups need to be reached and helped to get work and or training. Also in political campaigns, they will tune out if they are not receptive to messages. It appears that many unhappy Americans, and many people in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy are listening to messengers that are promising them jobs and giving them slogans such as "Only I can make America great again, trust me". Wayne Wilsonhttps://www.facebook.com/wayne.mo.wilsonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-30883313334797216532017-02-17T10:42:31.433-08:002017-02-17T10:42:31.433-08:00Wayne - I agree with your list of the concrete boo...Wayne - I agree with your list of the concrete boots-on-the-ground reasons Trump won and the actions that cost Clinton. And, definitely Bernie got the shaft from Dem Party stalwarts who thought Clinton would easily win. <br /><br />My analysis and the reason I read wilber's 80 page essay was that Wilber is the only guy looking at the different groups/stratas of the US population and trying to parse exactly the levels of psychological development they are at in order to understand their basic instinctual drivers. Understanding those drivers give us tools to predict how they will react to different messages. And, we also get to understand why to one group what looks perfectly reasonable and moral to another group looks like insanity and morally abhorrent. <br /><br /><br /><br />Sojka's Callhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18194255866195398776noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-15237766577756135262017-02-17T09:07:18.540-08:002017-02-17T09:07:18.540-08:005. FBI director Comey cost Clinton many millions o...5. FBI director Comey cost Clinton many millions of votes in the early summer of 2016 by violating FBI and Justice department protocols by explaining the reasons in detail as to why there were insufficient grounds to prosecute her for any crimes. Normally when a prosecutor declines to bring charges, no explanation is given. This gave Trump and Republicans daily ammunition to go after Clinton. He repeated this mistake 11 days before the election, stating falsely that there may have been classified information that Clinton provided on Anthony Weiner's laptop. This drove Trump supporters and Republicans crazy, giving them more impetus to show up at the polls to vote for Trump, and probably cost Clinton a few more million votes.<br /><br />6. Several million supporters of Sanders voted for Trump, or voted for 3rd party candidates, or didn't vote at all. This was a critical loss for Clinton in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, in which she lost the electoral college by a combined 79,000 votes.<br />Wayne Wilsonhttps://www.facebook.com/wayne.mo.wilsonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-44496123039264440182017-02-17T09:06:02.077-08:002017-02-17T09:06:02.077-08:00A lot of comments above to read and digest. I did ...A lot of comments above to read and digest. I did not read Ken Wilber's "deep-think" analysis, as I have already read several dozen analyses of the Trump phenomenon, and how he got elected. I do enjoy reading comments about Trump, and I have my own conclusions as to how he got elected. I appreciate having a blog like this one to give my opinions.<br /><br />1. Sanders would have been the better candidate, with strong support from high energy millennials and a committed base of tens of millions that would have worked hard to turn out the vote for him if he had won the nomination. Sanders would have won by 6-10 million votes. Clinton supporters were blind to Clinton's weaknesses and Sanders' strengths.<br /><br />2. Clinton underestimated the rage of rural and rust belt state whites who saw their manufacturing jobs disappear. Sanders understood this rage. She should have focused her campaign primarily on how she would help unemployed and underemployed Americans get jobs, education, and training, and how she sympathized with their fears. Rural and Rust Belt Whites tuned out Clinton's campaign, which focused on Trump's sociopathy/fascism/racism/misogyny,and immigrant bashing. She lost these people by the beginning of summer 2016 as they were listening and believing Trump's message that he would bring back the lost jobs and "Make America Great Again".<br /><br />3. Trump ran a brilliant campaign, appealing to the large segment of Americans that are anti-semites, Muslim haters, racists, white nationalists, populists, Christian religious fundamentalists, and Obama haters. He got 95% of those voters. The United States is a center right country, which many "progressives" are in denial about, and about 30-40% of voters really are racists, Muslim haters, religious fundamentalists, etc. I encountered many of these people on Washington Post comment sections over the last 4 years. Many of them are people who read the stuff on Breitbart and dozens of other racist and alt-right websites. They never recognized Obama as a legitimate president, and public polling shows that significant numbers of Republicans really do believe that Obama is a "Marxist, Kenyan, Muslim". Many Trump supporters saw Clinton as a continuation of Obama.<br /><br />4. Putin was successful in helping Trump and hurting Clinton with hacking Podesta's emails and having them pop up daily for 6 weeks by Wikileaks. Also, Russians and their supporters/collaborators in England and other countries worked with dozens of people, many of them Americans associated with alt right websites (or freelancers looking to make $10,000/month with Facebook clicks on their Clinton fake news posts), who mounted massive social media campaigns with hundreds of fake news stories about Clinton. You all know about the social media campaign reposted by General Michael Flynn and his son about Clinton and Podesta being at the center of a child trafficking ring in the Comet Pizzeria in Washington DC, and how a Trump supporter believed the stories and drove for 3 hours from his home in NC to the Pizzeria with guns and shot up the place before being arrested. The Comet Pizzeria story was just one of hundreds spread by social media to literally tens of millions of Trump supporters, who believed many of the fake news stories as truth, driving them to the polls to vote for Trump.<br /><br />Wayne Wilsonhttps://www.facebook.com/wayne.mo.wilsonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-77298935363584798522017-02-15T12:00:21.081-08:002017-02-15T12:00:21.081-08:00I am going to do a second blog post because my res...I am going to do a second blog post because my response is too long for comments. Sojka's Callhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18194255866195398776noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-5316430438441872422017-02-15T11:56:45.125-08:002017-02-15T11:56:45.125-08:00Regarding societal evolution. I guess I am not to...Regarding societal evolution. I guess I am not too sure I understand the concept as well as you do. Evolving to what? What are the characteristics that differ or can be compared to human evolution which is improvement in adaptation environmentally exhibited by higher intellectual capacity. is it the ability to maximize our intellectual capacity in ways that benefit mankind's survival as a whole? Which brings us to the Reds vs the Greens. Why does it seem that the greens have progressed towards maximizing their intellectual capacity more than Reds -Oranges? Or is that just a contextural elitist bias. We are all born with this intellectual capacity that makes us superior to the animal kingdom intellectually. So why do some people become greener than others? Is it an organic brain formation, environment ? Clearly, some parts of the country are more Red than others, but you can find greens amongst them and vice-versa for greens. Some points to ponder.Keithnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-44381307411232258622017-02-15T11:55:46.113-08:002017-02-15T11:55:46.113-08:00Brin is a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking her...Brin is a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking here. Clearly the abolitionist did not have the ability to forecast the future and felt a sense of immediacy in remedying a situation that was counter to the statement in the Declaration of Independence, a realignment of our values. After all the abolition movement began in the early 1830s and entire generation before the Civil War actually took place. After nearly 30 years they saw no light at the end of the tunnel and since the war was a struggle for human liberties vs economic survival the South was not going to relinquish their lifestyle unless they could replace an agricultural and cotton based economy with something else. Just as we are locked in some sort of destiny today for reasons outlined in Strauss and Howe the Civil War was inevitable and unavoidable. If people are still unenlightened today on this topic, as they are, then there was no way it was going to change without force. All other western societies found ways to end slavery without tearing themselves in half. Britain took a stand at the beginning of Victoria's reign in the 1840's when the abolition movement was in full flower. But they did not rely as heavily on slaver to sustain their economy. But then again they had India which later became almost as bad as slavery in the South the subjugation of which existed up to the time of Gandhi. Keithnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-77907411334143936062017-02-15T11:54:56.363-08:002017-02-15T11:54:56.363-08:00We will survive because there are loyal legacy sta...We will survive because there are loyal legacy staff people in the White House who are making sure the truth is getting out to the press much to the consternation of the Trump camp. Everything is moving so fast and the leaks are so pervasive that Congress will take action before he can do too much international <br /><br />One thing that struck me regarding Wilbur's piece was how his description of Trump supporter belief-truth based system so well describe our friends on the right. <br /><br /> guess that is what I am saying. What we see today was the same set of circumstances as in the 30s preceding WWII. We even had people like Charles Lindberg take a very public stand on resisting immigration of Jews fleeing Germany, as well as supporting Hitler's Reich development. It was also a time of white supremacy stemming from the Eugenics Movement from the 1920s. And Strauss and Howe take things back to Roman times but really the cycle during the 1400s. I think society can and does evolve but as part of a cycle of going backwards before going forwards again. The parallels of pre-war Germany now seem so out of time and a giant step backwards. I take solace in seeing progress forward advances us more than we regress as that pendulum swings, but it does appear we are destined to revisit a recent period of in-enlightenment with each Crisis before starting a new High. We don't completely regress back to our most primitive societal thinking. Keithnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-52607352365939302972017-02-15T11:52:37.271-08:002017-02-15T11:52:37.271-08:00Trump worries me only to the extent he could get l...Trump worries me only to the extent he could get lots of people killed. Beyond that, I think he is a course correction and in the end (if we survive him), he provides some kind of societal inoculation against going that way again. And, maybe enough of the PC people will realize they have to get off the throats of those who are acting innocently and actually be able to tell the difference between someone acting innocently at their own level vs someone dangerous who is going to physically harm you or yours who does need to be constrained. For instance, leave the Fundamental Christians alone but the mafia guys go to jail. Both ethnocentrists but operating at vastly different levels of the damage they are doing. <br /><br />Like your stance about not engaging the Trumpers and our experience with people on the right, we have learned that there is no amount of data, analysis, reasoning, logic, or discussion that we can engage them in that changes their mind. Once we stripped away false beliefs, desported bad data, showed their logic fallacies, etc they still didn't change their minds - they just became very emotional (angry, fearful, sad, disgusted) and further withdrew into their ethno/ego-centric selves. They literally cannot fathom the world-view you and I take completely for granted. We are not stretching ourselves to see over the wall. We are already standing on the other side. Those guys are on the other side of the wall from us and can hear us and though we keep throwing them a periscope and keep describing the landscape over here, they cannot conceive of this place.<br /><br />Maybe not the best analogy but the only one I have right now. <br /><br />The only other area of this that I still am not sure of where you are coming from is the belief in societal evolution. Are you saying you don't believe our society can evolve and that there is a median we always come back to and the media point is unchanging? Reference your comment "I think that Strauss and Howe in the Fourth Turning, captures in their minds, as a product of the cycles of history which they explain to my satisfaction the why's and mechanisms that apparently repeat and have repeated throughout history. Since this is a cyclical process I would not agree with the idea it is evolutionary. At best evolutionary and de-evolutionary, ie cyclical."<br /><br />And finally, for now, very astute observation about the waves from our civil war still affecting our society today. As Brin has stated many times, what would have happened if the abolitionists had not pushed things to a breaking a point? Slavery would have gone away and it might have taken a little longer but there would not be the negative consequences of hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the subjugation of the south, and the economic destruction of the south and their complete way of life in such a short time. All other western societies found ways to end slavery without tearing themselves in half. I guess I am bringing this up because it ties back to the Elitist Green meme - so many of them are so sure of themselves they are willing to sacrifice everything to prevent, for instance here in Mt Shasta, a fucking water bottling plant. Or, in other places, stopping logging of forests that are nothing but giant tree plantations anyways. Don't get me wrong, we need to leave the few old-growth places left alone because scientists still don't understand truly how these work, but, some of this shit people just need to let it go. I say, let them cut the forests that were logged out 50 years ago and are just going to burn anyways if we don't cut the trees. But, leave the old-growth forest alone and study how they really work. In most cases, I think humans can have their cake and eat it too. Sojka's Callhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18194255866195398776noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-62099710253710909062017-02-15T11:49:52.782-08:002017-02-15T11:49:52.782-08:00So o in the last paragraph what is the problem. I...So o in the last paragraph what is the problem. It is all about education. If someone wants to remain in the dark ages there is not much I can do about it and any further discussion with that person is a non starter. I guess this is where these great divisions begin. We tend to cluster with those who we find have most in common. So it is about the numbers. As long as we can promote good education opportunity we as greens will ultimately prevail. <br /><br />Actually I don't know if Wilbur or yourself are worried about this administration or perhaps the lag time in the fast changing atmosphere takes a bit of time to catch up. I was worried on inauguration day, but with all the latest developments I am heartened by the reactions from the streets and the implosion going on within the White House inner circle capping it all off with the slow growth of disaffected GOP Senators. It is now spectator sport. What I am not doing however is to antagonize the few Trump supporters I know. I will measure their level of sustained loyalty by their diminishing mention of Trump. First is was wearing the red hat, then mention of cherry picked executive orders that seemed unoffensive and now the discussion is just about the local weather. It will eventually become blatantly obvious that they were duped and I will choose to save them from any further embarrassment by bringing up the topic. Trump supporter need to quietly figure it out for themselves. <br /><br />As always I am glad we are on the Left coast far away from Washington. I am also surprised at how much Arizona is against the wall and how much the Senators McCain and Flake have spoken out against Trump. There is room for optimism. We live in interesting times. <br /><br />Keithnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-39134454951405261082017-02-15T11:45:52.148-08:002017-02-15T11:45:52.148-08:00Hmmm. I fit the description accept the PC insiste...Hmmm. I fit the description accept the PC insistence and I am fine with that including the elitist label whatever it means.Keithnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7238065871527577968.post-48963920874321016422017-02-15T11:45:00.680-08:002017-02-15T11:45:00.680-08:00Ok - great place to start a discussion and clear u...Ok - great place to start a discussion and clear up misconceptions. First on page 69 Wilber addresses that there are universal truths and that those need to be used to keep amber and orange under control and honest. The idea that "my truth" is "the truth" and there are no universal truths, is the belief Wilber says many Greens/progressives hold. And man have I seen that! It ties in with the elitist label of many greens. Those greens see injustices that someone at red/orange cannot comprehend. What Wilber was trying to show there are certain behaviors red and orange can be held accountable for and some you cannot. So, for instance, a red/orange is never going to understand that someone can be so sensitive to micro-aggression in speech because say you called someone an Indian instead of Native American - that kind of PC stuff is the attitude that elected Trump because there was a real backlash against PC enforcement by green. On the other hand there are universal truths that red/orange must be held accountable like basic human rights. <br /><br />The greens being labeled elitist are the ones who 1) shove the PC crap down everyone's throats 2) will stop all economic progress to save the red frogs in one lake 3) seem to delight in denigrating those stuck at amber and Red, 4) belittle those levels belief in organized religion 5) are quick to call all types of behavior racist even when it is not, and I think you get the picture. So while those green folks can see the injustices and stupidity of base beliefs their approach in dealing with those people has been downright mean - I see this all the time. The liberals/progressives will turn let's say something like a evolution denier (believes literal Bible translation that Earth is 5K years old) into someone labeled stupid, uneducated, racist, greedy, sheeple, etc instead of just recognizing that that person lacks the ability to perceive that information properly. <br />Sojka's Callhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18194255866195398776noreply@blogger.com