psychology

Publicizing those worth publicizing   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology SanityProject on by

Many people on social media put their efforts into pointing out ridiculous or nasty statements. Sometimes denunciation is necessary, but it shouldn’t be anyone’s main focus. It gives publicity to bad ideas. When a lot of people do it, it makes them part of the dominant dialogue. It draws attention away from people with more reasonable and better argued positions. Some people will find the nonsense interesting and even convincing.

Focusing on people with good things to say and solid arguments behind them draws attention to them, and usually that’s helpful. People can learn something from them, which is more than they can do from the words of fools.

I’m not saying that “Any publicity is good publicity” is literally true. There have been plenty of cases where people have said unpopular things and suffered a loss of business and reputation. But repeatedly hearing an idea can make it seem more acceptable. Anyone who already felt sympathy for it might feel less marginalized.

People need to rally around good ideas more than they need to denounce bad ones. If they only hear that bad ideas are bad, they’ll become discouraged or cynical. Without good ones, you don’t even have a standard that lets you reject the bad ones. Tyranny is bad because freedom is good. Socialism is bad because individual autonomy is good. Murder is bad because human life is good. Bad ideas can be worth dissecting, but you need a framework to do it.

As George Washington may or may not have said, let’s raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.

Note: I accidentally published a fragmentary draft on freedom of expression in Bow, NH. I immediately deleted it, so probably only the people who get email notifications saw it. Sorry.

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Judicial Watch and the techniques of deception

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged ethics Judicial Watch psychology on by

I’ve written before on deceptive, demanding mailings and more of the same from Judicial Watch, an anti-immigrant organization. But they were mild compared to a truly evil one I received yesterday, painting Donald Trump as the innocent victim of the “deep state.” Evil isn’t news, but I’d like to use it to get some insight into just how it operates. To fight the enemies of American liberties, you have to know how they think.

The creator of the mailing, it says, is Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch. The central claim is that a list of prominent people, including three past presidents, “all knew that President Trump was innocent, but they smeared and spied on him anyway. It was worse than Watergate … far worse. President Trump was and is a Deep State crime victim, and all the perpetrators of this crime must be held accountable!” (Ellipses and emphasis in these quotations are from the original, unless otherwise indicated.)

The obvious question is, what is Trump innocent of? He has been accused of many things, often with strong evidence, sometimes with very little. However, the letter doesn’t name any charge against him. It gives some clues: “And as far as James Comey is concerned, the evidence is overwhelming that he violated the law, debased his high office and further corrupted the Federal Bureau of Investigation by deploying resources and personnel to pursue the leftist agenda of the ‘permanent government’ in Washington, DC.”

This refers to the 2017 FBI investigation of alleged Russian influence in the 2016 election. Comey was the head of the FBI at the time, before being fired by Trump later that year. He testified to Congress in 2020 about the investigation and was indicted in 2025 on claims of lying and obstruction. He testified that he didn’t authorize public disclosure of related information, although information had been leaked without his approval. The investigation concluded in 2019 and reported that while Russian operatives tried to support Trump’s campaign, it could not say that the Trump campaign knowingly helped the effort. It noted that a sitting president couldn’t be indicted anyway.

It’s possible Comey authorized the leak and then denied it, but the investigation didn’t make any accusations against Trump. The charges against Comey were dismissed.

Let’s look at how Judicial Watch covered this. A key technique was vagueness; it counted on readers not to remember these events in detail. (I had to do a lot of searches to get all that information.) It didn’t say what Comey was indicted for, nor that the charges were dismissed. Very likely it was counting on public confusion over the more recent and even more absurd indictment of Comey for taking a picture of seashells. It aims to make the reader think that Comey used the investigation to bring baseless accusations against Trump.

But the target of the mailing isn’t just Comey. It asks the recipients to “sign the enclosed citizen petition to the U.S. Attorney General demanding immediate investigations into all government officials implicated in the attempted ‘coup’ against President Donald Trump and our constitutional republic.” The names mentioned include Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok. It claims that “I’m sure their names ring a bell with you.” They don’t with me, that’s for sure. Back to the research… Strzok got a $1.2 million settlement and Page $800,000 from the DoJ for violating their privacy rights. McCabe also received a settlement for being improperly fired as FBI deputy director.

Why would Judicial Watch hope the readers would remember that the Trump administration had to pay out for what it did? It’s counting on people feeling embarrassed that they don’t remember. That’s really the mailing’s basic technique: saying next to nothing and pushing the reader to invent details out of fear of feeling ignorant.

The mailing calls for investigation of “Deep State officials” for “baseless smear campaigns.” If these alleged campaigns are legally actionable, they must consist of intentionally false statements. No specific falsehoods, alleged or real, are cited. In fact, no specific accusations against Trump are cited!

It’s mentioned that government “departments and offices … even raided his [Trump’s] Mar-a-Logo home!” What isn’t mentioned is that he was illegally holding highly sensitive classified government documents after leaving office and was accused of concealing them to frustrate the investigation. Again, it’s counting on readers not to remember the details.

To be sure, sloppiness about details is endemic in journalism today. But when it’s this systematic and is part of an emotion-laden call to investigate alleged “crimes” by those who have crossed Trump, it’s hard to call it anything but deliberate deception. When you add in Judicial Watch’s record of dishonesty, it has no claim to the benefit of the doubt.

Most people don’t have the time to look up information. Vagueness avoids the risk of being caught in a straight-out lie. But occasional Freudian slips come through. “It was worse than Watergate … far worse. President Trump was and is a Deep State crime victim.” In the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was caught participating in a criminal scheme and forced to resign, so Judicial Watch seems to be saying that Trump is a greater victim than Nixon. Maybe it’s counting on readers to be vague about Watergate too, or maybe it really is painting Nixon as a victim.

This all leads up to the petition, which is custom-printed with the recipient’s name and address. It calls for “investigations into all past and current government politicians, appointed officials and bureaucrats who are credibly implicated in the well-documented corruption and abuse of power to prevent President Donald Trump from being elected and re-elected President of the United States.” That casts a huge net but maintains deniability with the phrase “credibly implicated.” The only person specifically named is Comey, and there’s a new accusation here; he’s called “a key player in the effort to rig a presidential election and undermine a duly elected president.” Election rigging is a serious accusation, but there’s no other mention of it in the mailing.

Now we come to the mailing’s real purpose. A third of the petition page is a request for an “urgent contribution.” The checkboxes run from $35 to $10,000. The mailing is all about panicking the reader into sending Judicial Watch money. Perhaps the petition is no more significant than the “census” JW has used in the past; it may be just a way to scare recipients into making contributions. It’s also possible that Judicial Watch gets favors from Trump in exchange for supporting his attacks on political enemies.

It isn’t just Judicial Watch or pro-Trump groups that does these things, of course. You can see such things daily on social media from both the left and the right. Any time you get a message with vague claims and emotional language, you need to be careful. If it’s asking for money, be triply cautious.

The special nastiness of the left 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged culture liberty psychology on by

There’s no shortage of nastiness from either the left or the right these days, but it’s always seemed to me that the flavor coming from the left has something special, which is especially good at driving people away. This is separate from whether their aims are a greater threat. What I see a kind of elitism. What I’m saying here is based on my own impressions, not systematic study. Although the attitudes I’m discussing are elitist, I’m talking about ordinary people, not ones in high positions.

A lot of people on the left can be pleasant to deal with. The points I’m making here don’t apply to them all, by any means. It just doesn’t take a lot to make a lasting bad impression. I grant that if I were Mexican, Arabic, or trans, I’d experience vastly more hostility from the right.

Elitism, like populism, is tricky to identify. We all think we’re better than other people. Elitism is more than that; it’s an attitude of inherent superiority. It divides the world into the virtuous few and the despicable outsiders, and it polices its own members.

This attitude is the opposite of the populism I discussed last time. It’s manifested in attitudes of superiority to the masses. When people act this way, they’re effectively saying no one else is worthy to talk with them. However, both take a static view of people; everyone is a certain way and can’t (or had better not) change. People on the left often boast that “everyone is welcome” among them, yet in practice they have little tolerance for deviant ideas. The left and right can both come down hard on full-blown opposition, but people on the right are less likely to denounce people for limited disagreement.

Many throw accusations of “racist,” “fascist,” and “Nazi” around as freely as Joe McCarthy issued accusations of Communism. Some use the threat to keep people in line. One person threatened that people would start calling me racist if I disagreed with a proposal of hers, and she admitted the accusation would be false. Others have skipped that step and gone straight to the accusation.

People of this type like to build accusations out of nothing. The word “Gypsy” used to be commonly applied to the ethnic group now generally called Roma. It may not have been the best choice, but most people who used the term didn’t intend it as an insult any more than “Mexican” or “Chinese” is an insult. However, the notion that it was a nasty slur caught on. I recall a singer who used to have a song in her repertoire about “gypsies.” One day she came out and apologized in the most abject terms for having ever sung it. I know enough about both her and the song to know she meant nothing derogatory about it. She must have been threatened with ferocious denunciation if she didn’t get down on her knees.

I wrote a few years ago about how SFWA smeared a prominent writer by claiming she used an unspecified “racial slur.” The word she used, it eventually came out, was “colored.” Does SFWA claim that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) engages in racial smears on all its letterheads?

Giving people the benefit of the doubt and letting others defend them against accusations are basic principles of fairness. Sometimes, though, they’re unpopular ideas. A Mastodon site still bans defending people against accusations, even if they’re just “devil’s advocate” arguments. In that respect, the site is less tolerant than the medieval Catholic Church. Access to what others are saying isn’t always popular; a popular Mastodon client “rickrolls” attempts to access servers that the developers disapprove of.

Conservatives have sometimes reached out to libertarians, while the left has more often been fiercely hostile. This helps to explain why so many self-proclaimed “libertarians” have taken Trump’s side. Supporting Trump is dumb, but was it really necessary to drive us away?

In a sane society, the MAGA movement would be denounced almost everywhere, and the politicians who have pinned their careers to it wouldn’t be comfortable showing their faces in public. But that would require people who disagree on many things to agree that the current situation is so bad we need to put our differences aside for a while. Instead, there’s often a sense on the left that their purity comes above all else and anyone who isn’t fully with them deserves denunciation. That goes a long way to account for where we are.

Tribalist thinking

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology racism SanityProject on by

Tribal psychology, the tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them,” goes back to early human history. It gets its name because in earlier times, survival required loyalty to the tribe and suspicion of outsiders. In modern society, people of all kinds mix, but people still feel uncomfortable about those who are different from them. Sometimes they construct differences where there’s no real issue. Fan groups are a mostly harmless example. Red Sox fans hate the Yankees and Yankees fans hate the Red Sox, but it’s usually in fun. Science fiction fans disparage non-fans as “mundanes,” usually as a joke but sometimes with real disdain.

Problems arise when people use tribalist inclinations to treat outsiders as inferior or evil. That course can lead to violence, systemic discrimination, and legal persecution. It hurts members of the in-group as well, giving them fewer opportunities for valuable interactions and limiting them economically. It’s the antithesis of the liberal worldview, the idea that people should be regarded on their individual merits and have certain rights regardless of who they are.

People sometimes try to make sense of tribalism by reducing it to a single cause. Racism is an especially nasty form of it, but it’s only one of the foundations. Many on the left treat it as humanity’s Original Sin and ascribe all kinds of group hostility to racial attitudes, but it’s just one of the factors. Its influence has declined from past centuries. When it was acceptable, people used it to disparage groups that looked different. Today it’s less acceptable, so people define their groups in other ways.

Nationalism rose as a force in the nineteenth century, and it’s powerful today. Hostility based on foreignness is often considered acceptable, and many people have ferocious disdain for immigrants. People are often hostile to those with a different language or accent. Religion isn’t as powerful a factor as it was when you could be executed for heresy, but there’s a widespread view that (Evangelical) Christianity should get preferential legal status, and some countries still enforce state religions.

Irrational rage is useful for promoting hostility, the more irrational and enraged the better. This seems strange but makes historical sense. If an invading tribe posed a threat, the leaders had to stir the men up to fight. It isn’t easy to get calm, clear-headed people to march against people who want to kill them. The leaders of both sides needed fury to beat the other side. Today fury stirs people up even if they aren’t in combat. An enraged crowd is also good for electing candidates and forming mass protests.

It’s the “us vs. them” thinking which is at the core. The specifics of who’s “us” and who’s “them” vary with the fashions.

Alternate mental worlds 4

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology SanityProject on by

On Nextdoor I often run into MAGA thinking, which I need to look at occasionally in order to understand it. These people seem to inhabit an alternate reality in their minds. They think that the mainstream news coverage of Trump, ICE, immigration, and similar topics is fictional. The fantasy extends to their neighbors, claiming that all of us who attend protests against the government’s outrages are paid to go.

I find myself bouncing among different explanations for them. Are they brainwashed by podcasters? Has journalism gotten so bad that many people completely disbelieve the news? Do they lie to show off to their peer group? Is it to con everyone else? Have they surrendered their personal identity, and with it any concept of truth and falsehood?

There are other groups that show similar patterns. On the left side, there are the people who claim as established fact that Trump has sexually abused children. When Biden announced the novel economic theory that inflation is caused by greed rather than government policies, a lot of people quickly adopted it. Some groups, like flat Earthers, are weirder but less harmful. Some flat Earthers spin elaborate arguments that supposedly prove our world is pizza-shaped, even though hiding that “fact” would require a massive conspiracy. Other people believe that the position of stars in the sky when we’re born has a significant influence on our lives.

Most of these people seem to live otherwise normal lives, though I wonder if flat Earthers ever fly to other continents or use satellite-based devices. MAGAs, though, have a more thorough alternate reality. They believe that the election results and the reports of MAGA brutality are fictions delivered by a vast conspiracy. They think the tens of thousands of people across the country engaging in protests are all getting paid by George Soros. If they’re consistent, they’d have to think that whole court documents ruling against improper prosecution are being forged and posted. It’s a cult mindset, and the White Queen is a realist by comparison.

All of these groups have a worldview to which facts are required to conform. They’d rather throw out mountains of evidence than discard their belief. Maybe we can imagine what this is like by thinking what we’d do if something contrary to the normal, common-sense, scientific worldview happened. Suppose the events of Ghostbusters really occurred and a giant marshmallow man rampaged through the streets of New York while a hole opened in the sky. Most of us would brush it off as a hoax. Even reporting and videos by a major news outlet would leave me skeptical.

Having doubts would be reasonable. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Members of these groups just have different ideas of what’s “extraordinary.” For flat Earthers, it’s extraordinary for the world to be round. For MAGAs, it’s extraordinary that immigrants who have fallen behind on their paperwork or have seen their status arbitrarily revoked might not be killers and rapists. How they got to that state of mind is the harder question.

I’d best leave that question for another post, or for someone else to answer.

Update: Aaron Ross Powell posted a piece on the same day as this article, on treating history as a kind of fannish lore. This part struck me: “They enjoy feeling like the worldbuilding they’ve done is coherent, and they hate the incoherence introduced by critical examination or diverse perspectives. It’s not about veracity.” An invented world can feel more consistent than reality, because people are often inconsistent. Myths often are simple and neat, the way we wish the truth would be.