Income disparity. Economic inequality. Marriage inequality. Racial inequality. Wealth disparity. Climate change. Corporate welfare. Et cetera, etc, etc.

Just because the GOP denies that these issues exist, it doesn't mean that they don't understand that the issues are real. But their response is to simply deny that the issues are real. As long as they can deny the existence of a problem, they can count on an endless media debate where refusal to accept facts is given the same weight as factual evidence. This charade of denial of fact has become a GOP political strategy to ensure that problems are never seriously addressed.

And on those occasions where denial of fact becomes too politically inconvenient, the GOP argument for not addressing the problem then becomes that it will hurt job creators, the economy, the troops, the church, freedom, the sacredness of marriage, or any other convenient excuse that is based entirely on factless drivel. And then we get to play the charade of all over again.

I was feeling some trepidation about watching the show when I saw that Jonathan Haidt was featured. I wondered if I should take my HTN medication, first. I saw Haidt on Bill Moyers and Ithought him a snake oil salesman who was probably funded by the Kochs or someone like them. But it was okay. Great discussion. I loved it when Chris said centrists are just another partisan group. I suspect Chris Mooney had Haidt's number. By the way, I doubt very much that Haidt was ever a partisan liberal. Did Haidt call Stephen Colbert a Republican?

Now I will have to spend my herd earned cash for a book. Jonathan Haidt, author of "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are divided," I would love to see a full at least 1/2 hour if not an hour episode in conversation with just this one person.

I couldn't continue after the mention of poor, poor Larry Summers. That was like a black hole of smug bull@!$%#.

For more Jonathan Heidt watch him on BookTV.

No no f*** no, I don’t believe this China vs. Chen Guangcheng thing is happening NOW, COME ON? The timing is too convenient, more than one expert thinks the Chinese allowed Chen to escape just as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton makes her first trip to deal with this totalitarian nation. It took all the attention off making the Chinese accountable for taking our jobs, devaluing our dollar and pirating our technology.

Rich @$$holes like Rupert Murdoch have deep connections in China and I feel this scene was staged to make the Obama Administration look bad and to gain bargaining tools for the Communist Chinese. NEWS ALERT: FOX News has become a terrorist cell for the Saudis and Commie Chinese. (lol)

This powerful propaganda tool uses a harem full of high heeled, leggy young Ho’s (from the Clair Booth Luce/Ann Coulter Institute) to deliver the Tokyo Rose one liners for the foreign agent Rupert Murdoch, who’s working for the Commie Chinese. (Murdoch married Chinese intelligence agent and built his new mansion in China in case he had to escape prosecution from all the Western nations he screwed over.

Yet Neo-Con Republican crazies such as Rep. Allen West are as toxic as the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. I don’t know what kind of mental deficients voted this maniac into office but they need help. Like the Dow chemical poisons that are STILL killing children in India, West spreads his infectious hate speech and tilted propaganda. Like some right-wing nutcase straight out of the 50’s McCarthy Era, West is pointing fingers placing the Communist label on his fellow Americans.

This very ignorant man doesn’t even realize the Republican Party he belongs to had a huge role in selling out the American worker to the Communist Chinese just so a bunch of silver spoon trust fund babies could make more money from Asian slave labor and easy toxic waste dumping. West pays no mind to reports that the Chinese government has been working against the American dollar since the start of the War in Iraq in 2003. (See Keiser Report on the news network RT, April 13/14, 2012)

West takes pleasure in his taunting Progressives hoping they say thing like he resembles a piece of s*** with a MC Hammer haircut. (lol) But I’m going to stick to the facts.

I’m not quit sure why Republicans love the Chinese so much to have sold out the American worker. Other than slave labor camps and easy toxic dumping there isn’t much for the Republicans in China. For one thing the Chinese government isn’t afraid to prosecute it’s corrupt politicians… for much less than occurred during the Bush/Cheney Corporate Crime Wave.

Ohhh yeeeaaaa, politicians, corporate leaders and even their wife’s are not immune from the long arm of the law. Check it out they’re going down like flies Bo Xilai and his wife or maybe Shanghai party secretary Chen Lianyu who was sentenced to 18 years of hard prison labor for bribery and abuse of power.

WOW, Chinese Minister of Justice Wu Aiying has big BALLS. I wish our Justice Department would stop wasting our time and tax dollars on medical marijuana growers and focused on those greedy *****’s who almost sank our economy and committed war profiteering crimes.

The wrath of GOD will come down upon these evil Republicans before our own Justice Department has enough courage to hold politicians and corporate leaders accountable for their criminal activity. I am somebody who wants EQUAL RIGHTS & JUSTICE cyberbitchslap2.blogspot.com

Who doesn't MSNBC pay average Joes/Janes to come on their shows to explain the struggle...

Some of the above comments nicely exemplify Haidt's principle that people throw logic and evidence to the wind whenever they must in order to protect their sacred principles.

Kaneblues illogically lists income disparity, economic inequality, and wealth disparity as if they are three separate things. He then says Republicans deny that those things exist, which is false. It is especially false to say Republicans deny the problem of corporate welfare, since they were particularly critical of the bailouts.

Ellyn refuses to accept that Haidt is a reasonable and fair scholar, saying that he probably works for the Kochs or someone like them. That's a baseless and bizarre claim to constitutes a desperate attempt to dismiss Haidt's rational, empirically-supported argument.

Daverz was immediately disgusted by Haidt's defense of Larry Summers, and presumably did not bother to consider the possibility that perhaps Summer's speech about women in STEM wasn't so bad. Haidt recommended that people read the transcript. I doubt Daverz will.

Snap out of it, folks.

I think the most important point in this segment had to do with the social nature of moral/rational progress as opposed to its individual nature. But when Chris started responding with skepticism about Haidt's claims to have attained a higher level of objectivity, I couldn't help thinking he, Chris, was missing something. Sure, the political points he made are entirely true. Everyone is hampered by their membership in whatever club they belong to. But that doesn't mean individual progress isn't possible. Has Haidt made such progress? The question can only be answered by evaluating his actual arguments.

So, no, the idea that we humans reason "backwards" from emotion to logic doesn't invalidate reason as such; it simply points out the way humans tend normally to function. We all still have an unconditional responsibility not to be culpably stupid; and we'll mostly keep on failing, some more than others, but all of us quite often.

But as Chris knows, we don't make progress by becoming "centrists" or by constructing some sort of hokey personal ideology that allows us to think we stand above it all. What no one on the show said, but which needs to be said despite appearing to be obvious, is that what we all really, REALLY need to do is learn to question our own beliefs, assumptions and facts more carefully and systematically -- in dialogue with the belief systems we don't like or even despise. We need to do it, not just because we want to convince others of the truth, but because we recognize our own ignorance, prejudice and bias. And we extrapolate: if I was biased ten years ago about X, which I now understand better, what am I biased about today?

It's terribly rare to see anyone do that, certainly not in the mass media. I see Chris Hayes do it quite a lot -- or at least, he speaks as if he makes it a habit of doing it -- which is why this is the best public affairs show on tv.

But oh! Chris, Chris! God won't strike you dead if you find a way to question intelligently the climate change consensus! You of all people should know that even if climate change is a reality (as it surely is), the "consensus" is flawed. And the reason it's flawed is simply that it IS a consensus! No human group has a corner on truth, and that includes climate scientists.

There was a brief, mocking mention of Fukushima radiation fears in this segment -- but surely it's worth taking a look at Brad Jacobson's recent alternet article called "The Worst Yet to Come?" I tracked this down after my wife told me about an article (by someone so crazy I won't mention his name here) that screamed about how Fukushima could well mean the end of civilization on the planet, and I mocked the article quite viciously. Then I had to sheepishly tell her after reading Jacobson that, by golly, there apparently is a very serious situation in Fukushima, though that original end-of-the-world article was still pretty nutty.

Maybe Up could investigate and address this issue in a future program?

Psychology and politics... huge topic. If politics is defined as influence and power then politics is all about psychology (and money). The question is how does psychology impinge on politics. The forefront psychology meets politics is propaganda. Propaganda as it is in advertising. I'm talking about the techniques and strategies of propaganda. These things can be quantified and analyzed systematically. I would like to see much more of this (acknowledging that it is a soft science). This wonkish approach could really wake-up the public to how it is manipulated by propaganda, and how the culture wars are won and lost. For instance, political ads could be broken down and analyzed. News cycles and pushed issues should be analyzed for the effects on us psychologically.

The panel discussion on UP about “The Republican Mind” made my blood boil.

It was a great example of what Haidt calls a “Tribal Moral Community.” It was a mutual admiration society of like-minded individuals who share the same belief system and the same cognitive style – with virtually no voice in their midst to speak up and question their underlying presumptions and the conclusions that come from them - confirming one another’s biases about the supposed superiority of liberalism and the supposed inferiority of conservatism.

Liberals like to think that theirs is the morality of science, reason, and rational thought, that reason is for finding the truth, and that they therefore own the truth. “Reason” is a liberal sacred value.

But liberals are human, and being human they are just as susceptible to the biases and faults of reason – including confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice (the tendency to choose the option that is easiest to defend even if it’s not the best one) - as anyone else. In fact, because of the liberal faith in “reason” I believe that a very strong case can be made that liberals are even more susceptible to what Haidt calls “the rationalist delusion” than anyone.

And they write books like “The Republican Brain” which prove it.

Science is reductive. Its basic process is to reduce its subject into the smallest possible pieces, examine the pieces, and then draw conclusions about the whole subject. When it comes to applying that process to the study of human nature what gets left out of the picture is the human – humanity – which is much greater, and much more complex, than the sum of its parts. This is the fatal flaw of liberal thought.

Correlating the liberal tendency to favor openness with the mindset necessary for the execution of science is a reductivist just so story. It is a convenient arrangement of cherry picked facts arranged for the purpose of arriving at a predetermine conclusion. It demonstrates the epistemological arrogance that naturally follows from the liberal sacred value of “reason,” and which is characteristic of liberalism and the liberal cognitive process.

Using the latest findings from social psychology to describe the supposed “science” of why Republicans deny science and reality is like using basic physics to describe why the chairs slid around on the deck of the Titanic, and concluding that it was because the deck’s tilt became so great that the coefficient of friction between it and the chairs was overcome.

It is completely oblivious to the larger, infinitely more important and relevant, point.
Haidt mentioned the larger point. He did the best he could to bring it into the conversation when he said that conservatives have a better grasp of human nature than liberals do. But don’t ever expect a room full of liberals to face that reality head on. They will instead distract our attention to a different debate, and obfuscate that debate with supposed “science.” To wit, “The Republican Brain.”

If we want to get to the bottom line of what the latest scientific findings about how the human really brain works, and if we ever really want to shrink the partisan divide, then we have to face the facts about the elephant that the room members of the Up panel either refused to acknowledge, or maybe even failed to perceive.

What that research is making clearer every day, is that Hume, Smith, Burke, and the six-foundation morality of conservatism is right, and Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet, and the three-foundation morality of liberalism are wrong. (See “The Social Animal” by David Brooks.)

Or, said differently, the emperor called liberalism has no clothes.

Haidt’s work reveals that conservatism – the morality of all the moral foundations in equal balance – is the norm. If moral foundations really do come from evolution then this would make sense. Nature has placed the foundations into every human being, and every foundation is important.

Haidt’s findings also show that liberalism – the morality of only three of the moral foundations, and of those three mostly just “care” – is the anomaly that needs to be explained. This too makes sense. Why in the world would supposedly rational, reasonable people openly reject half of the natural defenses that evolution has inculcated into them?

And finally, because of this disparity in the way conservatives and liberals employ the moral foundations; Haidt has proven with his studies that conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives.

But there’s even more to it than that, because if Moral Foundations are products of evolution as Haidt describes, then they must exist in us for a reason, and that reason must be that they allow us to perceive, avoid, and deal with real life threats to our individual and collective survival and well being.

And if the liberal blind spot about conservatism is rooted in Liberalism’s partial application of the moral foundations it therefore does not follow that conservative morality and opinions are the only things that liberals don’t “see” and understand. The impairment of the liberal moral vision has to be less like a blind spot and more like color blindness. That is, it’s not selective. It does not prevent only the understanding of conservatism. It prevents the understanding of everything the moral foundations were designed to let us see, namely, the full spectrum of human behavior and social interaction and their consequences.

So it’s not just conservatives that liberals don’t fully understand. It’s human nature; it’s everything; it’s reality. If it can be argued that any morality is disconnected from reality, then the strongest, easiest case to be made is that that morality is the tree-foundation morality of liberalism which fails to recognize fully half of fundamental human nature.

This is why, as Haidt has observed, experiments in building societies solely, or even mostly, on only the “liberal” moral foundations inevitably fail, and therefore liberalism “is not sufficient as a governing philosophy.” This is why, Haidt describes “unconstrained vision” of liberal morality has as follows, (from a talk he gave entitled “When Compassion Leads to Sacrilege” at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Educate (CCARE) at Stanford University:

“The unconstrained vision, I believe, has the worst track record in the history of ideas. This is a terrible and really dangerous idea, quite frankly. In the French Revolution - I’ve been stunned to read this for the book that I’m writing - to read on the French Revolution. My beef with them is that they’re rationalists, they think that reason is a reliable way to find truth, it’s great in the natural sciences, but once you care about something, if you have passions, if it’s a moral issue, … David Hume said that “Reasoning is the slave of the passions and can pretend to no other office but to serve and obey them.”I think Hume was right. So I’m really concerned about rationalists, but what I discovered is that in one of the few places on earth where the rationalists got control of an entire country and were able to do with it what they wanted, they created a cult of reason, they banned the clergy, they killed the nobles, ah, and what we had wasn’t oh, let’s get rid of ah, let’s get rid of nations and religion and then people will be one, no what they had was most people didn’t, or a lot of people didn’t want to go along with the revolution, and of course they’re wrong because we know we’re right we have reason on our side, they called themselves the party of reason, also the party of humanity, the French Revolutionaries ended up murdering hundreds of thousands of people. The committed a genocide in the Vendee region lining people against the walls and shooting them, putting them out into boats and sinking the boats. The French Revolutionaries committed genocide. They committed, they would round people, anybody who was accused of anything, rounded up, pronounced guilty, guillotined. We don’t usually say, “Well yeah they committed genocide but other than that oh the French Revolution was great.”So the French Revolution was based on the ex, the most extreme unconstrained view, the philosophes, Condorcet, Sam Harris (gesture, admitting the joke), people like that.

Um, other research, on 19th century communes. Richard Sosis, anthropologist compared, he found the records of communes in the 19th century. Many were organized, were socialist communes based on equality and openness, many were religious communes. And he looked to see how long did they last. Answer, the religious ones tended to last two to three times longer than the liberal, than the secular ones. Because, if you bind people in, you, it turns out the active ingredient was demanding sacrifice. Making them change their names, wear funny clothes, cut all contact with the outside, give up certain foods. If you ask for sacrifice, if you constrain people, they form a community of trust, and they don’t cheat each other.
And if you say, “Welcome everyone.Constraints are bad.“ It quickly decays into a moral, into moral chaos.Again, the unconstrained vision, when it gets a chance to run things, screws it up.”

The failure of the rationalist unconstrained vision of liberalism is being proven around the world today right in front of our eyes; first in Greece and now, as a result of the latest election, probably next in France, and if the United States stays on its current path probably us after that.

Western civilization is committing slow motion suicide by “care.”

So the real question we should be asking ourselves – the question that the Up panel was apparently either oblivious of or blind to - then, is not What’s the Matter with Kansas? but rather “What’s the Matter With Massachusetts? (and for that matter, Greece and France).”

If moral foundations are products of natural selection – and therefore instrumental to our individual and collective survival and well being – then how and why do so many people openly reject half of them?

And if we really want to face the scientific facts about the human mind, then the book we are most in need of written, and in fact the much stronger scientific case to be made, is:

The Liberal Mind: The Science of Why They Deny Human Nature – And Reality.