SubscribeThe nationalisation last weekend of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest financial institutions the world has ever known, signalled the complete failure of the biggest, most dynamic, most innovative and competitive markets that have existed in the history of capitalism - the Wall Street stockmarket and the market for US bonds. Their failure has been so obvious, that even the most capitalist administration ever, in the world's most capitalist country, had decided to wipe out the private owners of its biggest and most important financial companies and replace them with state-appointed bureaucrats.And the failure of Lehman and Merrill this weekend.
"Of the project Silverstein said: "Here is my thinking. What if we could TiVo the last six-plus years and play them back - without comment -- for the American people, and let them connect the dots?"
For certain fellow-jury members seemed to have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on. Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who “got it wrong” had been mainly high RWAs (Right-Wing Authoritarian Followers). So she recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more trouble remembering details of the material they’d encountered, and they made more incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, the
authoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.
Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:
All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.
The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.” In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don’t “get it” that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test. [ Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians. Ch. 3. Pg. 76 ]
Historiography is a difficult field---and who KNOWS what's going to come to light in 30 years or 50 years or 100 years. I mean, Truman's held in high regard these days, but he pretty much slunk away in horror after his time in office.
Just a side note---you realize that you're not fair or balanced either, right? You've got "incoherent rage", you've got "all the right answers", and you don't seem to think that any information you have is in any way biased. You realize that every bit of media your fed is biased by something, right? Dig up some primary documents if you want to make an argument---pointing out stories on networks sponsored by major corporations isn't going to cut it.
(If you want accuracy and "fair.")
BTW I fear this thread is going to dissolve fast into ZOMGBUSHSUXORS and ZOMGBUSHWINZ0rs real fast, you're going to have a hard time finding an answer, any point is going to have a counterpoint.
posted by TomMelee at 6:34 PM on September 14, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]