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The Conspiracies of Ron Paul

Election, Epistemology, Ethics, Politics, Psycho-Epistemology, Religion, Ron Paul

Feb 022012

A few weeks ago, an unknown Ron Paul’s supporter (or supporters) created a stir with a video attacking John Huntsman. Reuters reports:

Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman and members of his family expressed outrage on Friday at an advertisement targeted at his adopted daughters by a group supporting rival Ron Paul.

An online ad authored by “NHLiberty4Paul” shows footage of Huntsman with daughters Gracie, who was adopted from China, and Asha, adopted from India, when they were infants.

“American values. Or Chinese,” the ad asks to a soundtrack of Chinese music. It calls Huntsman “the Manchurian Candidate” and ends with an image of Huntsman dressed as China’s former communist leader Mao Zedong, and the words “Vote Ron Paul.”

Here’s the video, and I definitely recommend watching it:

So what is Ron Paul’s response?

Paul, a Texas congressman, disavowed the ad during an interview on Friday on CNN, but said he could not control the actions of all his supporters.

“I couldn’t even hear it, haven’t looked at it, but people do that, and they do it in all campaigns,” Paul said.

(Update: Apparently, Ron Paul’s campaign did attempt to sue to discover the author of the video, but they were rebuffed by the courts.)

Unfortunately, Ron Paul has a long history of tolerating these and other varieties of racist, homophobic, and otherwise disreputable supporters. He distances himself in tepid terms, and refuses to condemn them in anything remotely like the strong language that they deserve. That’s why he’s got problem after problem with downright frightening supporters.

Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign had such problems in spades, particularly for refusing reject donations from neo-Nazis. In this 2010 campaign, Ron Paul’s campaign welcomed the endorsement of a Christian dominionist pastor in Iowa who — consistent with his overall theology — advocates the death penalty (!!!) for homosexuality. (Please go read the whole story, because it’s quite remarkable.) The announcement on Ron Paul’s web site welcoming this fothermucker’s endorsement was deleted, but as far as I can tell, Ron Paul never repudiated the endorsement.

Moreover, Ron Paul has never adequately explained or repudiated the viciously racist and homophobic comments in his newsletters.

How should the lunatic fringe be handled in a campaign? Consider the reaction of Bob Barr’s campaign to a racist endorsement when he ran for president in 2008 on the Libertarian Party ticket:

The Barr campaign is not going to be a vehicle for every fringe and hate group to promote itself. We do not want and will not accept the support of haters. Anyone with love in their heart for our country and for every resident of our country regardless of race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation is welcome with open arms.

Tell the haters I said don’t let the door hit you on the backside on your way out!

I’m not a fan of Bob Barr, but *pow* *pow* *pow* — that’s how it’s done!

Instead of doing that — or anything like it — Ron Paul tolerates dangerous idiots, only setting them at arm’s length when exposed by the media. This pattern of actions reveals something amiss with Ron Paul’s character and judgment, I fear. He’s not a racist, I don’t think: he’s said and done too much too clearly against that. So is he just willing to tolerate and pander to dangerous nonsense in the hope of a few more votes? I don’t think that explains the pattern, not when he sticks to his guns on economics.

I suspect that a major cause of these problems is that he’s got a serious but mostly hidden penchant for conspiracy theories. This fascinating NY Times article explores that in some detail. For example:

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the “treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country.” Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded, “there’s pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true.”

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various “Rockefeller Trilateralists.” The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Wow, just wow. By all means, go watch the video for yourself. He just smooth talks right in and out of the conspiracies.

Judged by the standards of a rational epistemology, conspiracy-theorism is nearly at the bottom of the barrel. The mind of the conspiracy theorist is in complete disarray, utterly unable to evaluate evidence or stick to facts. It’s engaging in a constant process of invention, and then confusing those inventions with facts.

For that to be the basic psycho-epistemology of the US President… well, that would be frightening.

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Video: Rationality in Face of Overwhelming Emotions

Ethics, Psycho-Epistemology, Psychology, Videocast, Webcasts

Dec 212011

In Sunday’s Philosophy in Action Webcast, I discussed rationality in face of overwhelming emotions. The question was:

How can a person regain his rationality in the face of overwhelming emotions? On occasion, I find my rational judgment swamped by strong emotions like anger and anxiety. In such cases, my thinking seems distorted by my emotions. While in the grip of such emotions, what can I do to re-establish my powers of rational thought? Also, how can I prevent myself from saying or doing things that I’ll later regret?

My answer, in brief:

You need not be at the mercy of your emotions: you can take charge of own mind in friendly way. So when your emotions rage out of control, you should (1) notice them, (2) analyze them, (3) work to defuse them, and (4) later, prevent the same from happening again.

Here’s the video of my full answer:

If you enjoy the video, please “like” it on YouTube and share it with friends in e-mail and social media! You can also throw a bit of extra love in our tip jar.

All posted webcast videos can be found in the Webcast Archives and on my YouTube channel.

My Brain Versus Particulars

Epistemology, Funny, Personal, Psycho-Epistemology

Oct 142011

This Oatmeal comic segment — part of the brilliant “if my brain was an imaginary friend” strip — perfectly captures how my brain works. (Click here or on the image to view it.)

I have the same problem with all particulars, such as dates and places. When taking notes on a history lecture by Eric Daniels, I’ve had to replay what he said in my head, to get down the notes properly. I can hear it perfectly word-for-word — almost. Inevitably, it sound something like, “The soldiers were despondent after General BUUZZZZZ moved his troops to BUUZZZZZ in the year BUUZZZZZ.”

Apparently, after seven years of graduate school in philosophy, my brain decided that particulars were unimportant. Or maybe the causation runs in the other direction. Either way: DOH!

Video: The What, How, and Why of Introspection

Psycho-Epistemology, Psychology, Videocast, Webcasts

Aug 112011

In Sunday’s Rationally Selfish Webcast, I discussed introspection — particularly focused on these questions:

What is introspection?
Why should a person introspect?
What should a person introspect about — or not?
How can a person introspect effectively?

Here’s the 20-minute video, now posted to YouTube:

Moral Mistakes: Acting on Impulse

Ethics, Psycho-Epistemology

Jun 082011

In Sunday’s Rationally Selfish Webcast, my keynote question concerned the proper process for forgiveness if you’re the person who has done wrong. I was particularly enthused to answer this question, as it gave me an opportunity to discuss some of my new ideas on the varieties of moral errors and wrongs. Since I wanted to develop these ideas further and then solicit feedback, I thought I’d write them up for NoodleFood. (I’m going to aim to do this for at least one issue from the webcast each week.)

In Galt’s Speech in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand distinguished between “errors of knowledge” and “breaches of morality.” She wrote:

An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul.

That distinction between honest error and willful evasion is crucial, but not the whole story. In particular, I don’t think they’re exhaustive categories, but rather more like end-points on a continuum of culpability. (Ayn Rand never said that they were exhaustive categories as far as I know, but I’d always assumed that.)

So what kinds of moral errors or wrongs might a person commit that don’t fall into one of those two categories? Consider the following cases:

Case #1: You’re discussing some major news story with a casual acquaintance, and in the flurry of conversation, you reveal personal information about a mutual friend that you’d promised to keep private. In so doing, you’ve violated the trust of your friend. Immediately, you wish that you could take it back, but you can’t. Instead, you attempt to mitigate the damage by telling the other person that the story was supposed to be private, and asking him to keep it to himself.

You’ve done your friend wrong, perhaps seriously so. Yet it’s not an error of knowledge: you weren’t confused about whether your friend wanted the story to remain private or not. And it’s also not a breech of morality: you didn’t willfully evade the fact of your promise of secrecy, even after you’d revealed the secret.

So what happened? You were caught up in the flow of conversation. When your friend’s story occurred to you, you didn’t pause to think about your promise to keep it private. Your memory fed you the exciting story, then reminded you of your promise to keep it secret — but too late.

Case #2: On Facebook, you make a comment that seems to all the world like you condemn a friend as irrational for her stance on some controversial topic. You don’t realize that implication until your very upset friend asks you about it. Then you connect the dots, and you realize that you’ve been unjust. Immediately, you apologize and retract the comment.

Here, you’ve not erred in your knowledge, nor evaded: you knew what you were saying, and you knew your friend’s stance. The problem was that you didn’t integrate those two items of knowledge, so you didn’t realize that to make the comment that you did meant condemning your friend, who you know to be rational, even if mistaken.

Case #3: For many years, you’ve worked diligently on your fiery temper, in order to remain calm in frustrating situations. You’ve made enormous progress, but you still struggle sometimes. Toward the end of a very long day, your children begin fighting over a broken toy. You lose your temper in a flash, screaming at them to shut up and behave before you’re fully aware of what you’re doing. In a few minutes, you calm down, only to realize that you’ve failed in a major way. So you apologize to your children, discussing what you should have done instead.

As before, you’ve not made an error of knowledge, nor a breach of morality. Your emotions took charge in a particularly trying circumstance, exciting you to action before your rational judgment could have its say. Although you’re fully committed to acting by reason in a way respectful of others, you’ve not yet been able to fully automatize that. You need more time and practice to do that every time, even in the hard cases.

Case #4: You make plans with a friend for an outing, but later realize that you must cancel them. You hate to disappoint your friend, so you decide to tell her in person, so that you can properly convey your regret. However, you don’t see her as expected for many days, so by the time you inform her, your change in plans is a pretty serious hassle and disappointment for her. You apologize in short order, after reflecting on what happened.

Once again, you’ve not made an error of knowledge, nor evaded what you know. Instead, you made a good plan, but when that plan didn’t unfold as expected, you didn’t pause to rethink whether some other plan might be better. You didn’t pay sufficient attention to the implications of the change in context.

These kinds of moral errors and wrongs are quite common. In fact, I think they’re inevitable — for the simple reason that our minds are limited. We won’t always recall and integrate every fact relevant to our actions. We can’t change our deeply-held values and emotions by a command of reason. We often cannot consider every likely effect of our actions. We don’t always notice that a change in context requires different actions from us. Most of all, life speeds along, such that we can’t always deliberate long and hard before we speaking and acting, particularly in social settings. If even if we could pause, we don’t always realize that we should do so.

Our subconscious — with its vast store of knowledge, memories, values, associations, and habits — is an indispensable assistant to our rational minds in guiding our actions. We can and must rely on it to guide our thoughts and actions. Often, a person speaks or acts based on the material fed to him by his subconscious, without much (if any) rational deliberation. Usually, that works well — provided that a person has stocked his subconscious with rational principles, life-promoting values, and efficient habits. That’s why you can enjoy the easy flow of conversation with a friend, without carefully crafting every word. That’s why you can correct your misbehaving dog in an instant, without confusing delay. That’s why you don’t need to closely follow a recipe when making a dinner that you’ve made a dozen times before. And so on.

Such actions are “impulsive,” meaning “acting or done without forethought” (according to my dictionary). That doesn’t necessarily mean acting on emotion, however. Acting on emotion is just one way of acting on impulse, but not the only way. Aristotle describes such action as “on the spur of the moment” or merely voluntary action — as contrasted with chosen voluntary action, which always involves deliberation. (See Nicomachean Ethics, Book 3, Chapter 2.)

Sometimes, however, acting on impulse goes awry in small or large ways — particularly when a person is under pressure to speak or act immediately. Sometimes, our subconscious is not as “smart” as we might like — in exactly the kinds of ways seen in the cases above. Happily, we can not only apologize and make amends for these “moral mistakes,” we can learn to catch them sooner, even before they happen, then perhaps eliminate the faulty impulse entirely. To do that consistently is an important part of practicing the virtue of pride. If we don’t do that — if we just ignore these kinds of mistakes — they will become serious moral breeches over time, sustained by ever-more evasion.

So how can we prevent ourselves from making impulsive moral mistakes? We can examine the judgments underlying an unwelcome emotional response. We can brainstorm about better ways to handle a problem in future. We can practice the right actions in easier situations. We can identify and work around our own weaknesses. We can practice pausing before speaking on touchy subjects. We can keep tabs on our emotions so that we’re not suddenly drowning in them. We can develop the habit of considering the implications of some new fact on our plans. We can ask our friends to remind us when we seem to be going off-track. And much, much more.

In essence, as Jenn Casey and Kelly Elmore have taught me, we need to adopt the attitude of “Yippee Mistakes!” These kinds of impulsive moral mistakes should be regarded as an engraved invitation to personal growth and the practice of pride. By adopting that approach — rather than ignoring or evading them, thereby allowing them to fester into genuine moral wrongs — we can grow into the people that we want to be.

Philosophy and Sense of Life

Objectivism, Psycho-Epistemology, Sense of Life

Jan 292010

Back in December, Front Range Objectivism created a third FROG discussion group. 2FROG was just too large, and we’re trying to keep the FROG groups at about twelve plus/minus two people. I’ve opted to join 3FROG. Officially, that’s because I want to help steer this newer group in the right direction in my capacity as Overall FRO Leader. Honestly though, I’m not too worried about them. Mostly I’m just enthused to spend some time discussing Objectivism with some of the newer folks in FRO.

3FROG just began Ayn Rand’s anthology on aesthetics, The Romantic Manifesto. I’m pleased by that choice, as that covers a great deal of material that I’m just not terribly familiar with. More particularly, the essays often concern more psychological issues — like sense of life and emotions — that clearly bear on my own deep interest in Aristotle’s moral psychology.

On Saturday, I lead the discussion on the second essay, “Philosophy and Sense of Life.” Here are questions that I posed to the group.

What is sense of life? How is it formed? How does it function in a person’s life? How does it relate to a person’s explicit philosophic principles? How does it relate to psycho-epistemology?
How does a person identify his own sense of life? Why and how might that be difficult? What might be some clues? What is my own sense of life?
Can a person change his sense of life? Why might he want to do so? How might he do so? Why might that process be difficult or even unpleasant? How might a person psychologically retrain himself?
How can a person learn to better identify the sense of life of other people he knows and meets? Why and how might that be important?

What would you say in answer to those questions? They seem simple, but they’re actually quite involved! We discussed them for quite a while in 3FROG, and I’m happy to say that I have a better grip on the topic now than when I read the essay last week. As for my own answers, that will have to wait for some future day.

RSR: Episode #15: Cultivating Concentration

Ethics, NoodleCast, Psycho-Epistemology, Psychology

Oct 142009

Hooray! Episode #15 of Rationally Selfish Radio is done, done, done!

In this episode, I discuss methods for cultivating one’s power to concentrate.

Listen Now

26:59 minutes

Download This Episode

Enhanced M4A File (12.4 MB)
Standard MP3 File (12.8 MB)

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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Focus in the Ayn Rand Lexicon

Effective Standing Orders

Advice, Psycho-Epistemology

Jan 282008

Usually, when a person needs to remember to do something, he gives himself a standing order associated with some trigger, e.g. “check the tire pressure and wiper fluid when changing the oil on the car.” Sometimes, however, new standing orders will not stick to well-automatized actions. Case in point:

Early last spring, I bought a well-reviewed, cheap car seat heater. I’m using it regularly this winter. Unfortunately, it remains fully operational — and so drains the car battery — if left plugged into the cigarette lighter when the car is off. Predictably, I left it plugged in a few times accidentally, despite my best efforts to remember to unplug it when turning off the car. I should just be able to add it to my standard leaving-the-car checklist, I thought. That didn’t work at all, however. A few weeks ago, I finally managed to drain my car battery. (Thankfully, I did so at a convenient time, as I was home and didn’t need to go anywhere. Paul gave me a jump.) Given the inflexibility of my teaching schedule, that’s not a consequence I could afford to risk in the future.

After that, I considered buying a “battery drain guard” (like this one), but I hate to spend $20 on a silly memory problem. So I decided to try a different solution. Instead of trying to remember to unplug the heater, I plug it in in such a way that I can’t forget. I run the rather long cord over my thigh so that it’s totally out of the way — until I try to leave the car. Then I need to unplug the heater to get out of the car smoothly. So far, I’ve found it totally reliable: it’s easy to remember to plug it in via that convoluted route and impossible to forget to unplug it.

The basic reason why this new method works whereas my old method failed is that my getting-out-of-the-car routine is very thoroughly automatized. I’m not thinking of the car seat heater; I have no immediate reason to do so. That’s not true of plugging in the car seat heater; it happens whenever I notice that I’m cold. So while I’m already thinking about it, I can easily plug it in by a slightly odd route.

So I’d put the general principle as follows: If you’re trying to automatize some new action, don’t attempt to force yourself to remember ex nihilo, but instead find some way to connect to it to your natural patterns of thought.

Notably, that’s precisely what a well-managed (i.e a GTD-type) task list does. Instead of overloading your mind with the task of remembering all that you need and want to do, you only need to automatize checking and managing your task list. For people with lots to do like me, such a task list is essential not only to productivity but also to basic peace of mind.

The Conspiracies of Ron Paul

Video: Rationality in Face of Overwhelming Emotions

My Brain Versus Particulars

Video: The What, How, and Why of Introspection

Moral Mistakes: Acting on Impulse

Philosophy and Sense of Life

RSR: Episode #15: Cultivating Concentration

Effective Standing Orders

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The Conspiracies of Ron Paul

Video: Rationality in Face of Overwhelming Emotions

My Brain Versus Particulars

Video: The What, How, and Why of Introspection

Moral Mistakes: Acting on Impulse

Philosophy and Sense of Life

RSR: Episode #15: Cultivating Concentration

Effective Standing Orders

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