Posted on 12/23/2017 5:43:26 AM PST by MarvinStinson
Taxpayer-funded 'philosopher' calls belief in God
The National Endowment for the Humanities is giving over $50,000 for a study on propaganda to a philosopher who thinks watching Fox News can brainwash liberals.
The project, "Propaganda and Belief in the Modern World," is a book-length study on the "psychology of belief formation." Eric Mandelbaum, a "philosopher and cognitive scientist" at City University of New York, received fellowship funding in the NEH's latest round of grants under the Trump administration.
Mandelbaum writes that "one can end up believing anything" in an article that concludes liberals can be brainwashed by watching Fox News.
"How can human beings, seemingly the smartest animals ever encountered, be so freaking dumb?" Mandelbaum muses on his "about me" page of his website, which he calls, "Thoughts about thoughts."
"We seem to acquire beliefs with the ease with which we catch colds, yet we also seem to learn nothing," he says.
Mandelbaum coauthored a paper in 2015, entitled, "Believing without Reason, or: Why Liberals Shouldn't Watch Fox News." In his beginning section, "Believing Badly," Mandelbaum lists believing in God as one of several "odd beliefs" Americans hold.
"[Seventy-four percent] of American adults believe in God, 72 [percent] believe in miracles, 68 [percent] believe in heaven, 57 [percent] believe in the Virgin birth," the article states. "Thus more Americans believe that Jesus was born of a virgin than that humans are part of the phylogenetic tree."
"As of May 2014, 22-28 [percent] of Americans believe that the Bible is the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally word for word," Mandelbaum emphasizes.
"People hold shockingly irrational beliefs," he writes.
The thesis of the article—why liberals should stay away from Fox News—is that the crawl news feed at the bottom of the television screen can unconsciously influence viewers.
"[I]f the evidence previously discussed is correct, then merely attending to some element of the scene (e.g., the crawl) while suppressing attention to the others will induce load and trigger an unconscious passive acceptance of whatever you read, whether or not you consider the source to be credible," Mandelbaum explains.
"The reluctant liberal Fox News viewer, then, will not merely unwillingly accept information (e.g.,) embedded in the crawl, but will integrate that information with other previously held beliefs," he continues. "And this information—these new beliefs—will not only be acquired in an evidence-less fashion, but they will be acquired from sources the viewer explicitly rejects as trustworthy sources. These beliefs will then be integrated into the subject's future decisions and attitudes, unbeknownst to her and despite her better judgment. If the Spinozan model is correct, this proliferation of belief without evidence is real and serious."
Mandelbaum adds that viewers are not safe, even if they tell themselves, "This report is not credible and I should reject it."
"[O]nce parsed and understood, the report lies ‘sleeping' in central cognition, stretching its inferential tentacles outward," he writes.
"When you combine brute-causal belief acquisition with the constant attentional and behavioral regulation that we engage in, one can end up believing anything," Mandelbaum concludes.
NEH awards are signed off on by the chairman, which currently is Jon Peede, a Trump administration appointee. Trump proposed eliminating both the NEH and National Endowment for the Arts in his budget.
"In its latest funding cycle, NEH awarded 253 grants to support humanities projects across the nation, including a book on John Locke’s influence on American political thought, digital educational materials on the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a website on New Deal art in New Mexico, a scholarly study written by a U.S. Navy Reservist and combat veteran on how military troops are depicted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and numerous conservation projects to protect the history of Jewish culture in the South, the personal library of author C. S. Lewis, and irreplaceable records of the nation’s maritime history," the Office of Communications at NEH said in a statement.
Request for comment from Mandelbaum was not immediately returned. He received $50,400 from the NEH for the fellowship on propaganda and belief.
"I just won an NEH Fellowship," he wrote on his website on Dec. 13. "So that's pretty cool."
Obviously, this applies in spades to liberals watching the establishment media.
Liberals are easily brainwashed, however, not by Fox News. Since the brainwashing has already been implemented upon them from schools at all levels they are already predisposed to reject anything Fox News might say. In other words, it would take years for them to accept any other narrative, and they would not subject themselves to another narrative for the period necessary to overcome the brainwashing they have already received. If this is tax payer funded then it is up to citizens to cry out against this travesty of abuse of tax payer funds.
Why are the taxpayers forced to fund ANY of these projects?
So, who are you going to believe, this “philosopher” or Aquinas?
This is blatant government sponsored propaganda.
This dude should be cracking jokes as a greeter at WalMart. Why am I writing him a check for $50k?
Too bad Mandelbaum never learned how to think. Yikes!
Oh, if that were only true! I'd sit my liberal friends down in front of a television tuned to Fox News for three cycles.
How does one get such a fellowship, by the way?
I would like to do a study on how CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC are brainwashing liberals with their propaganda.
Their "magic" only works on liberals. Conservatives and free thinkers see right through it.
Here's the conclusion:
Liberals are easily brainwashed. (Send the $50,000 to me. Thank you)
When need to quit electing RINOs who refuse to gut the funds for the NEH, to zero, and do the same for the rest of the federal meddling in “national cultural” nonsense.
Every bit of the “humanities” and “culture” is best left to the extreme dynamics of Liberty - private non-profit and profit making ventures - as the great animator of what is the “national culture”. Putting the “official” stamp on ANYTHING those areas that the private sector can do with Liberty on their own defies what America means, which is not what the “government” says, and as opposed to “government” it is many voices, not one.
Spot on you can’t brainwash a liberal they have nothing to wash their head is a vacuum and only have voices voices talking to them it’s why they act like the do.
The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors.
. . . The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
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