July 14, 2016

WaPo: If you remind people they're going to die one day, they tend to like Trump better

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/27/this-might-be-the-darkest-theory-yet-about-why-donald-trump-keeps-winning/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_2_na

This might be the darkest theory yet about why Donald Trump keeps winning

The reminders aren’t explicit, and they probably aren’t part of an intentional strategy. All the same, much of Trump’s rhetoric could have the effect of bringing his viewers’ omnipresent fear of death closer to their conscious minds, according to Sheldon Solomon, a psychologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

That includes his emphasis on terrorism, unsurprisingly, but also his preoccupation with immigration. This focus might be helping Trump, since Solomon’s recent research shows that people who are thinking about death are more likely to say they support him. Study subjects who were prompted to talk about their own death later rated their support for Trump 1.66 points higher on a five-point scale than those who were prompted to talk about pain generally.

“I’m not suggesting that any of this is calculated, but almost everything that he does is demonstrably effective for raising these non-conscious, existential concerns that in turn make his kind of candidacy all the more alluring,” Solomon said.

July 8, 2016

Remember when Sharon Angle in Nevada talked about "2nd Amendment Remedies" to oppression?

This is what Dallas was yesterday. Americans, following open carry laws and feeling under threat by their own government, gunned down 11 public servants, men who were only keeping the peace and protecting Dallas citizens, both protestors and their nearby fellow-citizens. Five of those police officers have died so far. A couple of others are in critical condition still.

This is what the gun nuts' scenario of a people's militia rising up against government oppression looks like. This is the NRA's fantasy brought to life. Almost certainly the upshot of this is that more people are going to be murdered. Maybe it'll be a copycat. Far far more likely it'll be a white cop with now intensified feelings of isolation and suspicion about all black Americans will over react to some nonviolent street encounter and gun down another black man. And then the NRA and the murderous extremists in Dallas will have won.

You cannot destroy all this hatred with more hatred. We can only fight it with active, engaged, and inclusively-minded love. The murderers in Dallas probably want to provoke a race war. We can only beat them by standing resiliently for peace and inclusion. The cops who killed Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile believed that all African Americans are suspect and need to be controlled by excessive violence. We can only beat them if we insist that there is equal protection for all Americans under the law.

We are taking dangerous steps down a broken road that leads to the destruction of our civil society. We need to deliberate together to find a different path. The first thing we need to do is break the voices pushing for more division and more escalation and more suspicion against one another. We need to defeat those voices by embracing even those we disagree with and accept them as fellow citizens. We can't fight suspicion and paranoia with accusations and rising tempers. We can only fight suspicion with the earning of trust and the demanding of an honest discourse on how to make our world a better place.