Can’t they give it a rest until next year? I, for one, haven’t yet caught my breath from the last 2 years of steady coampaigning shoved down our throats.
“Can’t they give it a rest until next year?” ~ ApplegateRanch
On the value of polls:
“When I say that the Obamanauts are about to enter a world of pain, I mean that they will eventually know the dark side of the wave of fantasy upon which they are riding. ..
“...it has been estimated that fewer than ten percent of the American public are reliably in Piaget’s highest cognitive developmental stage of formal operations thinking. And even then, one cannot escape the cosmic law of bs in —> bs out. ..”
Fewer than 10% of the American puplic are reliably in the Formal operational stage:
The formal operational period is the fourth and final of the periods of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory. This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 12 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. It is characterized by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly, reason logically and draw conclusions from the information available. During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, “shades of gray”, logical proofs, and values. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_cognitive_development
One example of the behavior that reveals the cognitive development of those who fall into the 90 percent-plus catagory (of the pre-adolescent, “Concrete Operational Stage” is shown here: http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/bad_americans/cutting_through.php
...The important point is that the fantasy precedes the reality, and will look for conditions in external reality to support it, identical to the manner in which the paranoid mind operates.
According to deMause, the state of the group fantasy is what national opinion polls actually capture.
That is, they take a snapshot of the “mood of the country,” which mostly consists of “gut feelings” that have varying degrees of connection to actual conditions, and more to do with the shifting nature of the group fantasy.
Remember, the bulk of the population is not thinking logically, so it doesn’t matter how many cognitively mature individuals there are at the margins of a poll.
That the economic downturn was largely caused by Democrat regulation (the Community Reinvestment Act), that we have won the war in Iraq, and that President Bush kept us safe for seven years, are inconsequential.
In contrast, FDR was able to sustain a unifying group fantasy despite economic polices that aggravated and extended the Great Depression for years.
Likewise, job one for Obama will be to forge and sustain a unifying fantasy, not to deal with reality. This is one of the reasons the Democrats will be unable to let go of President Bush, because they desperately need him as a “poison container” in order to keep the toxins out of Obama (more on which below).
“The King is Dea... Wait, Not So Fast!” [click show original post] here:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8580258&postID=6220641917448432849
In Conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: “Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovatorsnot conformists” (Bringuier, 1980, p.132).