bodhi tree swaying

Sometimes a comic strip hits the truth spot on, as with today’s Stone Soup, one of my daily reads, as I was mentioning the other day:

I believe psychologists talk about “confirmation bias,” which is the tendency for us to seek out or to accept information that reinforces our existing beliefs. One of the plagues of modern politics (and the wider “culture wars”) is this very tendency. Republicans tend to watch the right-leaning Fox news, and Democrats prefer to watch left-leaning MSNBC. Thus we limit our exposure to other viewpoints and never really make the effort to appreciate them.

Then things go a stage further and we build up what are in fact mutually-exclusive alternative realities. For some people Obama is a crypto-Islamic terrorist-sympathizing Marxist. For me he’s a very decent guy — very moderate politically. I don’t think that on the left the

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There was a lot of coverage a few weeks back about research showing that people with a tendency to experience anxiety are more likely to favor right-wing political views. To put it bluntly, Republicans scare easily.

That’s amply demonstrated in a post that the excellent Mahablog links to, in which Jonah Goldberg purports to write from 2012, reporting on Obama’s failed presidency. It’s a bizarre, even hysterical, piece of writing in which, apparently, Obama’s administration will be damaged by Biden making bizarre statements:

…he told the Russian foreign minister he’d “rather punch a nun in the throat” than cooperate on an Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama administration knew they had a problem on their hands.

The strange comments and behavior kept coming: at an international summit on child poverty, he accused the Dalai Lama of issuing a “brain fart,” he phoned Supreme Court

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An interesting article on the role of negative emotions in the election campaign — although it defines negative emotions narrowly in terms of gloom and despondency rather than in the Buddhist sense that includes ill will and craving. Anyway, it suggests that demoralized McCain voters are less likely to motivate themselves to vote.

More McCain supporters also feel angry and bored, while Obama’s are likelier to say they are proud and hopeful.

All of this is a bad sign for McCain, according to George E. Marcus, a political scientist from Williams College who has studied the role emotion plays in politics. Negative feelings about a campaign can discourage voters by making them less likely to go through what can be a painful process: Voting for someone who will lose.

“If I’m getting my head handed to me by a tennis player, my brain is

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I’m proud this week to feature as a guest blogger Gail Collins of the New York Times. Oh, wait, no, I just copied her stuff because she’s a really funny woman. But it’s almost the same. I mean, this is campaign season, where you can say anything you want, whether it’s true or not, as long as it makes you look better or your opponent worse.

Oh, and in her current column she recommends meditation! Except she’s probably joking. But whatever.

Obama is going to be racing around from rally to rally over the final 96 hours — eight states in three time zones. This sort of last-minute dash around the nation is another American political tradition, which serves the dual purpose of setting a good example for the campaign workers and torturing the campaign press corps in retribution for all those months of writing down

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WoodMoor Village Zendo flags up this disgusting piece of smug McCarthyism. Sanchez (is that the name? does a fantastic job of exposing McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb’s vile trick of guilt by association, in which he claims that Obama has a “long history” of associating with anti-semites, but is unable to name a single one. I’m sure a certain segment of the extreme right, who see refusing to provide answers to questions as a badge of honor amongst their leaders, will be waving their hats in the air over this, but for any reasonable person this has to turn them away from the McCain campaign of smears and innuendo.

When I told a British friend about the email that was sent out last week from the Pennsylvania GOP, likening voting for Barack Obama to the Holocaust, and falsely alleging that Mr. Obama “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud,’” he was flabbergasted. In Britain, he pointed out, the newspapers would be all over this. In the US such outrage is reserved for $200 haircuts. The story seemed to have no traction here.

Anyway, here’s another outrageous email from a GOP leader, this time in Florida, where it’s of great concern that so many black people are coming out to vote, and that this might result in a black president. I wonder if this will get as little attention as the Pennsylvania story?

Temple Terrace, Florida – The long lines of early voters at the Temple Terrace Library have

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Just came across Barbara O’Brien’s blog, the mahablog. She has a great post today about the hysterical terror the right is experiencing at the prospect of an Obama presidency, including a prediction that “life as we know it will end if Obama is elected.” In movies the black president saves the world from the asteroid that’s about to wipe out all life on earth. In right-wing paranoid circles a black president is the asteroid that’s about to wipe out all life on earth.

Barbara writes really well. I’m jealous. I’m at the point of sending out a book proposal, making frantic last minute revisions, and experiencing doubt about whether I can write at all. It’s just Mara talking, of course, but it does drag me down a bit.

Oh, and Barbara also writes on About.com.

Well worth checking out.

I guess it’s no surprise if two mavericks don’t get along.

A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser. “She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.

“Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”

“Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was dramatic,” said another McCain source with direct knowledge of the process to prepare Palin after she was picked. The source said it was probably the “hardest” to get her “up to speed than any candidate in history.”

Palin’s ‘going rogue,’ McCain aide says – CNN.com

An interesting article on the psychology of conservatism:

“[People displaying] measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control,” the team wrote in its report, to be published in the journal Science tomorrow.

“Individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War.”

From: Conservatives Have Stronger Startle Reflexes?

This backs up other similar findings, such as those in this Psychology Today piece:

In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers

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