Wednesday, December 16, 2015

The Chump Factor: Krugman at the New York Times: The Inability of People to Admit Their Wrongs and Adapt Their Views Accordingly

Once people take a stance on a given issue, they are unlikely to change their minds and admit that they were in the wrong, even if it becomes clear later that they in fact had erred. Wishful thinking and saving face rather than facing reality guides their actions.

We see this particularly in the paradigms of mainstream science and in political, economic, social and religious views and affiliations. People will cling to their previously made allegiances regardless of the actual facts.

Although a certain amount of "loyalty" is surely laudable, blind allegiance is not, although the "Chump Factor" is a widespread human characteristic. We see a lot of this in disciplines such as Archaeology so that it is no surprise to find it surfacing in current politics as well.

Economist Paul Krugman has it right in principle at the New York Times in discussing the U.S. Presidential candidates at http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/the-donald-and-the-chump-factor/?emc=edit_ty_20151215&nl=opinion&nlid=14116646.

As Krugman writes:

"Nobody likes looking like a chump, and most people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that they weren't."

Krugman, however, wrongly points to Donald Trump and his supporters as an example. Regardless of one's political leanings, Trump's supporters have thus far not been proven to be "in the wrong" at all. Trump leads, and he could win.

We say that as a political centrist.

What about all those who support and sponsor a broad field of Republican Party candidates who have no chance of winning? What about all those GOP candidates who lack the common sense to drop out of the race even though they are clearly out of the running? What does it say about a political party when "everyone" out there wants to be President? We call that wishful thinking.

The Democratic Party candidates fare no better under the "Chump Factor" test.

Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State of the USA in the Obama administration from January 2009 to February 2013. That is FOUR years. Wikipedia: "She viewed "smart power" as the strategy for asserting U.S. leadership and values, by combining military power with diplomacy and American capabilities in economics, technology, and other areas." What was the result? The result is a world in chaos. Unchanged thereafter, she has committed herself to an errant foreign policy philosophy based on wishful thinking which has proven wrong.

The Democratic Party has another puzzling candidate in 74-year old Bernie Sanders looking longingly for an American version of Scandinavia in the States.  A socialist-type system that is effective primarily in the more-or-less homogeneous (uniform, unvarying) countries of northern Europe has no chance of succeeding in the heterogeneous (diverse, non-uniform) USA. It is just is not going to happen. A President can not run a nation based on wishful thinking.

Most Popular Posts of All Time

Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2:
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."


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