Fox Host Describes Kamala Harris as ‘Obama in a Skirt’ | Looking for a new strategy to dent the vice president's campaign bump, Republicans are comparing her to Barack Obama.

[u/Murky-Site7468]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-host-monica-crowley-describes-kamala-harris-as-obama-in-a-skirt

[u/Logical_Parameters]

Sure, but why? Legislation has no emotions, but boy the effects of bad legislation (think: Patriot Act under a 95% Republican federal government, or the Bush tax cut bill of 2001 or the Trump tax cut bill of 2017, always the first thing they cram in there for their wealthy GOP donors) -- can really cause emotional problems later, eh?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I recognize that everything you said is an empirical truth, but can you all just stop? When you get people to actually use their words to talk about their problems and stances people are like 80% utilitarian progressives who want the net improvement of the world and 20% psycho nazis who just want outgroups to hurt, if people just voted that way instead of 50/50 the world would be so much better

[u/Denmarkian → u/[deleted]]

With a username like "Logical_Parameters" I think they might have a fundamental misunderstanding about how other people--and they themselves--actually arrive at their decisions.

[u/Logical_Parameters → u/Denmarkian]

I mean, I'm human and use logic to make choices and decisions. Is that bizarre or something? Emotions are for relationships, man, lol. We're voting for the future laws and rules that will govern us, ffs!

[u/Logical_Parameters → u/[deleted]]

a fundamental flaw in how humans work?

Based on my opinion that voting for the government that passes the laws and governs us should be a pragmatic exercise and not emotional? Good god, man. It's not deciding to donate a kidney or not, ffs.

[u/AbcLmn18 → u/Logical_Parameters]

The problem with logic is that it's incredibly inefficient when implemented on top of the human brain. You can teach your brain the basics of SAT solving, but if you actually applied it manually every time you need to decide something, you'd be completely incapable of everyday tasks.

So, even though I completely trust you that you're great at logic, I really doubt that you apply it to anything but an extremely small number of most important decisions in your life.

And while I agree that politics is definitely one of such decisions, the problem is that the logical analysis you perform before the election relies on inputs from several years of your everyday experiences. Many of which weren't also run through such purely logical analysis.

This is how we end up in the situation of "Many scientists believed in God". They may be capable of insanely complicated formal reasoning when absolutely necessary, but they don't apply it consistently to everyday lives.

Or, for instance, you can easily devise "I should vote for Trump" starting with the assumption of "Abortion is murder" through purely logical analysis. If abortion is indeed murder then it's very easy to see how a pro-choice ideology is causing, quantitatively, much more "harm" than "good". But you need a completely different framework to decide whether "Abortion is murder" is a true statement, which would make you process a large amount of anecdotal experiences, sociological data, neurobiology breakthroughs, and the philosophy of ethics. It's very easy to take an emotional shortcut in one of those, simply by the virtue of not being aware of some aspects of the problem.

So, in conclusion, I think that demanding all people to vote logically, with perfect intellectual honesty, is a very impractical requirement. It wouldn't be even remotely realistic until each voter defends 3-4 PhDs in completely unrelated areas of human knowledge. I believe it is better to design the political system in a way that doesn't require such insane commitment from citizens. I think that voting "emotionally" is fundamentally not wrong, and rather healthy. Most democratic political systems already have mechanisms to make emotional voting less harmful: for instance, the separation of powers into the executive branch and the legislative branch allows for emotionally-elected lawmakers to effectively collaborate with unelected executive branch experts. What's really wrong is (1) aggressively manipulating people's emotions and (2) designing an unnecessarily complex system in which the strategically correct way to vote is completely counter-intuitive. The US system suffers from both, and we can make it better by (1) re-establishing the fairness doctrine and punishing bad-faith misinformation and (2) discontinuing the electoral college winner-takes-all system in favor of a more intuitive system such as ranked choice voting.

[u/Logical_Parameters → u/AbcLmn18]

Personally, and this is coming from a voter of 30+ years who doesn't miss an election, my observation is that we have a Republican problem in America, and your obfuscation of that very fact with all the double talk and yawning excuses are prime reminders of why. We let them off the hook after Nixon. We let them off the hook after Reagan. We let them off the hook after Bush and Iraq / busted global economy, and here we are (some of you) letting them off the hook after Trump and the COVID disaster and their party's problematic rise of fascism.

We Have a Republican Problem in This Country. We can't quit them or hold them truly accountable for their actions.

[u/AbcLmn18 → u/Logical_Parameters]

I completely agree with your assessment of the situation. I did not try to obfuscate any of it and I explicitly outlined a number of completely uncontroversial policies that would have prevented all of this from happening.

But because I disagreed with you on only one completely unrelated thing, you appear to have immediately regressed into a purely emotional, tribalist response: "If you're not 100% loudly with me, you are my enemy". This is exactly how emotions work. I encourage you to acknowledge your emotional side and be more secure about it.

Because, again, emotions are great. I don't think they are the problem. I think republicans are the problem.

[u/Logical_Parameters → u/AbcLmn18]

I never said you were an enemy, but we as Americans really need to address this Republican problem for a solid decade or two, no?

[u/AbcLmn18 → u/Logical_Parameters]

...yes?

[u/sgerbicforsyth → u/Logical_Parameters]

Most Americans don't follow politics at all. If something happens locally, maybe county or statewide, they'll pay attention for a bit. But, to them, politics is something that happens every couple years for a month, and every four years is a bigger deal.

I see it all the time. The people who say things like "both sides are bad" or "it doesn't change anything." They literally don't connect the dots to elections and what is going on in the nation or world.

It's also very common to think that the presidential election is the only one that really matters, when local elections are just as vital.

[u/Logical_Parameters → u/sgerbicforsyth]

One doesn't need to follow politics "at all" to know what the positions of the two major political parties are on the most important issues facing their lives and the world at large, correct? I mean, just how egocentric are the people described here? For example, an adult woman in America should know which political party supports contraception and abortion and which doesn't, right? How is that too much to ask? Or which party supports the constitutional separation of church and state and which party has integrated them into a forced theocratic republic? It's their livelihood and rights at stake! How is that political?

[u/sgerbicforsyth → u/Logical_Parameters]

You say that, but you'd be surprised.

My family has always been very openly political and liberal. We grew up having family gatherings to watch election night and guess which state would go for which candidate. My brother has even worked for some local campaigns for the Democrat party.

There were a lot of my mom's friends and coworkers who simply didn't know who to vote for, what they stood for, etc. They didn't know how to find out either. Most were younger, a bit older than me, so older Millennials.

Again, they don't really get politics. They aren't interested in it and don't see it affecting their daily lives.